The Dark Side by Jane Mayer

From doubleday.com

I just submitted my latest book review at Amazon. This time it's for the book that I've been reading lately, Jane Mayer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. I gave it 5 stars. Definitely a worthwhile read.

This is an important book that every American should read. It's angered me watching documentaries and reading books and articles about how the Bush administration has gotten away with its lawless detainment and torture policies. Who wants to read another account only to get angry again? Well, this book may be the most comprehensive account of those policies and their damaging consequences, and it is further confirmation on the need for investigations and hopefully meaningful prosecutions of the perpetrators (Bush included though hard to believe that would occur).

The book is primarily focused on the torture subject, how the policies that enabled torture were developed, who developed them, and the resulting inhumane treatment of detainees. Some detainees were important Al Queda terrorist figures, and some were people innocent of any wrongdoing. Many of the early pages are devoted to the lawyers (e.g. David Addington, John Yoo) in the Bush administration who had outsized roles in determining what the President and his executive branch should be allowed to do in this so-called war on terror. Bush is practically invisible in this account, because it is VP Cheney and his loyalists that dominated the policy making. Bush was there to basically sign off on everything.

The accounts of torture are very disturbing. Some torture resulted in death from which no one has been held to account. Many Middle Easterners were rounded up in the global dragnet. Some were indeed dangerous, but too many had nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorism at all. Yet the innocent ones still had their lives taken away from them, and they suffered great physical and emotional pain.

The book shows how these policies resulted in interrogation practices getting out of control, how interrogators became inhuman themselves, how torture became bureaucratized. There was a lot of human endeavor involved in developing and executing the torture programs.

Mayer does cover the fight that some government lawyers and personnel made against the policies, but with some exceptions, they generally failed. My one criticism of the book (and of Mayer in at least one interview) is that Mayer gives too much credit to them. One example is Alberto Mora. Yes, Mora did potentially risk his career in protesting the torture policies and was up against an array of forces, but I think he could have done more. He was entirely too naive with Jim Haynes, and he was very passive in waiting for a working group report to come out that ended up being a whitewash.

I say that this is an important book for Americans to read, because it's important to know what was done in America's name (and is why I give the book 5 stars). We as a country have essentially supported these policies by allowing them and their consequences to happen and by not holding anyone to account. Reading this book should provide further credence to any American that investigations and prosecutions are highly in order.