By Steve Rhodes
“The New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, reviewed on this week’s cover, may be the most uniformly praised nonfiction title of the summer,” Dwight Garner writes in his “Inside the List” column in the New York Times Book Review. “It enters the hardcover nonfiction list this week at No. 4.”
Behind books by David Sedaris, Madonna’s brother, and Chelsea Handler.
Be that as it may, Dennis Kucinich ought to stop fooling around with his impeachment articles and just enter this work into the congressional record. If there were more time left in the terms of Bush and Cheney, if the Democrats had an ounce of courage, and if there was any justice in the world, our fearless leaders would be in the dock for war crimes before you could finish saying extraordinary rendition.
Of course, anyone who has been reading the work of Mayer and others in the New Yorker – or who has half a brain – won’t be surprised at her thoroughly reported findings. But the gathering of detailed evidence in one narrative still has the power to shock.
Alan Brinkley wrote the Times cover piece on Sunday, opening it this way:
“Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Cheney in effect took command of the national security operations of the federal government. Quickly and instinctively, he began to act in response to two longstanding beliefs: that the great dangers facing the United States justified almost any response, whether or not legal; and that the presidency needed vastly to enhance its authority, which had been unjustifiably and dangerously weakened in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years. George Bush was an eager enabler, but not often an active architect, of the government’s response to terror. His instinct was to be tough and aggressive in response to challenges, and Cheney’s belligerence fit comfortably with the president’s own inclinations.
Among the book’s revelations among Brinkley’s observations:
* “[I]t was only the picture that made Abu Ghraib an aberration. The tactics the president denounced were precisely those he had authorized and encouraged in the growing network of secret prisons around the world.”
* “But there is, Mayer persuasively argues, little available evidence that [torture works], and a great deal of evidence from numerous sources (including the United States military and the FBI) that torture is, in fact, one of the least effective methods of gathering information and a likely source of false confessions.”
* “At one point, the FBI agents collaborating with the CIA on interrogation plans were so alarmed by what they were hearing that they urged their superiors to arrest [James Mitchell, who introduced the CIA to a secret military program]. Soon after that that, they withdrew from the program altogether. ‘We don’t do that,’ one of the FBI agents said. ‘It’s what our enemies do!'”
* “There is no happy ending to this sordid and shameful story. Despite growing political pressure, despite Supreme Court decisions challenging the detainment policy, despite increasing revelations of the once-hidden program that have shocked the conscience of the world, there is little evidence that the secret camps and the torture programs have been abandoned or even much diminished.”
* “Jane Mayer’s extraordinary and invaluable book suggests that it would be difficult to find any precedent in American history for the scale, brutality and illegality of the torture and degradation inflicted on detainees over the last six years; and that it would be even harder to imagine a set of policies more likely to increase the dangers facing the United States and the world.”
Torture Nation
The cover art is worth the price of admission alone.
Black Sites
The Brinkley cover story was at least the second review in the Times. On July 22, Jennifer Schuessler wrote that the book documents “a cage match between the Constitution and a cabal of ideological extremists, and the Constitution goes down.”
The Tribune ran a Bloomberg News article on July 19 by Craig Seligman that started this way: “Torture is wrong; end of discussion. Except that the discussion has been in full swing for several years now. As soon as Americans began to debate the advisability of torturing prisoners in the war against terror, the nation had ceded the moral high ground it once occupied, or at least laid claim to.
“In Jane Mayer’s angry and important book The Dark Side, the tenacious New Yorker reporter takes us, step by step, through the process by which practices and methods we associate with tyrannies became official U.S. policy.”
Tyrannies, people. Has it sunk in yet?
*
Near as I can tell from their crappy search engine, the Sun-Times has not written about the book. And the Trib’s treatment is hardly sufficient.
This isn’t just about a book review. It’s about journalism and news. Unfortunately, you can be the most diehard newspaper reader these days and know next to nothing about the war on terror – and the war in Iraq – if you’re not reading the books (books!) that are breaking the real news.
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Posted on August 5, 2008