THE DARK SIDE
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American
Ideals
By Jane Mayer

Illustrated. 392 pages. Doubleday. $27.50

“The Dark Side,” Jane Mayer’s gripping new account of the war on terror,
is really the story of two wars: the far-flung battle against Islamic
radicalism, and the bitter, closed-doors domestic struggle over whether
the president should have limitless power to wage it. The
euphemistically named but often grisly particulars of the fight against
Al Qaeda — the “extraordinary renditions” by hooded agents in unmarked
planes, the secret “black site” prisons across the globe, the “enhanced”
interrogation techniques, the “reverse rendition” of detainees lucky
enough to be found innocent and dumped blindfolded at remote borders —
are harrowingly recounted here, complete with fresh revelations. But in
Ms. Mayer’s hands the story of bureaucratic jockeying in
well-upholstered offices and in the fine print of legal documents makes
for an equally absorbing and disturbing story. It’s a cage match between
the Constitution and a cabal of ideological extremists, and the
Constitution goes down.

The war on terror, according to Ms. Mayer, a staff writer at The New
Yorker, was a “political battle cloaked in legal strategy, an
ideological trench war” waged by a small group of true believers whose
expansive views of executive power she traces from the Nixon
administration through the Iran-contra scandal to the panicked days
after 9/11. Ms. Mayer’s prime movers and main villains are Vice
President Dick Cheney and his legal counsel (now chief of staff) David
Addington, who after the terrorist attacks moved to establish “a policy
of deliberate cruelty that would’ve been unthinkable on Sept. 10.”

As the leader of the self-styled “war council,” a group of lawyers who
took the lead in making the rules for the war on terror, Mr. Addington
startled many colleagues with the depth of his fervor and the reach of
his power. “How did this lunatic end up running the country?” an unnamed
“high ranking and very conservative” administration lawyer quoted by Ms.
Mayer recalls asking himself in meetings. “Even his admirers,” Ms. Mayer
writes, “tended to invoke metaphors involving knives.” “Cheney’s Cheney”
was known to carry a dog-eared copy of the Constitution in his pocket —
a detail that in another story might suggest a steadfast devotion but in
Ms. Mayer’s comes off as just a way of breaking it down before
swallowing it whole.

The original copy of the Geneva Conventions rests in the vaults of the
State Department, but Ms. Mayer describes how Mr. Cheney, Mr. Addington
and their allies made sure this was less a place of honor than an
oubliette. The war council settled on a “pre-emptive criminal model,” in
which suspects would be used — more or less indefinitely — to gather
evidence of future crimes rather than held accountable for previous
ones. There would be minimal oversight from Congress. The C.I.A. would
take the lead, developing aggressive new interrogation methods that
would be described as “enhanced,” “robust,” “special.” What they were
not, a series of secret memos issued by John Yoo and others at the
Office of Legal Council would attempt to certify, was “torture.”

Ms. Mayer pieces together detailed case histories for several prisoners,
beginning with “detainee 001,” the so-called American Taliban, John
Walker Lindh, whose botched prosecution led the administration to
decide, in Ms. Mayer’s words, that “open criminal trials under the
strict rules of the American legal system were not worth the risk.” But
even as such trials were largely abandoned, evidence gathering was
stepped up, using increasingly exotic means.

SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) was a program developed by
the military to train soldiers to resist torture or other rough
treatment if captured. After 9/11, as Ms. Mayer first reported in The
New Yorker, it was “reverse-engineered” into an offensive weapon. Under
the influence of James Mitchell, a former military psychologist hired to
supervise the project despite his lack of experience with either
interrogations or Islamic extremism, the black sites, Guantánamo and
eventually Abu Ghraib became a bizarro world where detainees were kept
on dog leashes, subjected to “invasion of space by female” and bombarded
with intolerable sounds, including “meows from cat-food commercials,
Yoko Ono singing and Eminem rapping about America.” Prisoners were
sometimes held in tiny coffinlike boxes or forced to stand until
overcome by the “self-inflicted pain.”

The elaborately plotted interrogations — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, accused
of being the mastermind of the 9/11 plot, was subjected to “hundreds of
different techniques in just a two-week period soon after his capture”
in 2003 — were authorized and tracked at the highest levels, with
officials in Washington, including George Tenet, at the time the
director of the C.I.A., approving any deviations from the “treatment”
plans in what one source calls “top-down quality control” and Ms. Mayer
calls a twisted version of Mother, May I? A secret Red Cross report
given to the C.I.A. last year and described to Ms. Mayer said some of
these techniques were categorically torture. (An internal C.I.A. review,
she writes, was on its way to reaching the same conclusion in 2004
before Mr. Cheney derailed it.) While waterboarding has drawn the most
public criticism, a former government official familiar with the program
told Ms. Mayer, the real brutality lay in the sheer number and duration
of the different “procedures.” “The totality is just staggering,” this
official said.

The early months of the rendition program, a C.I.A. officer told Ms.
Mayer, was the “Camelot of counterterrorism,” with volunteers turned
away. But as the harsh interrogations became “routinized,” second
thoughts — and fear of legal exposure — began to mount. As the C.I.A.
officer put it, “Do you really want to be building these skill sets?”

Meanwhile some in Washington were having doubts as well. In the last
third of the book Ms. Mayer shifts focus to the heroes of her story, the
government lawyers — often hard-line conservatives — who tried to fight
back against a program whose existence and scope they only belatedly
grasped. There is a particularly fine chapter on Alberto Mora, then the
general counsel of the Navy, who in early 2003 mounted a futile
challenge to the interrogation policy, which he feared might result in
war crimes charges. Mr. Mora reportedly warned Donald Rumsfeld’s chief
counsel, William J. Haynes, to “protect your client!” Mr. Haynes did —
by getting another secret opinion from Mr. Yoo, superseding Mr. Mora’s.
(Ms. Mayer suggests the opinion may have been hammered out during a
friendly racquetball match.)

Ms. Mayer also gives a gripping account of the now well-known standoff
between Mr. Addington and Jack Goldsmith, who after being named head of
the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 moved to revoke Mr. Yoo’s memos.
(One of Mr. Goldsmith’s successors, Steven G. Bradbury, issued another
secret memo, reinstating much of their substance.) And she recounts how
another group of administration lawyers met in secret in June 2005 to
formulate “the Big Bang,” a plan to shut down the black sites and bring
the interrogations in line with international law by doing an end run
around Mr. Cheney and going straight to President Bush, whom they
believed to be sympathetic.

In reality, Ms. Mayer writes, “there is no record that Bush ever
objected to the methods employed by the C.I.A. in its black sites or
insisted on any outside review of the C.I.A.’s claims that their
approach was working.” She vigorously argues that the approach did not
work, and in fact did tremendous damage to national security by
unleashing a flood of false and even dangerously misleading
intelligence, including some used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

“What does that mean? ‘Outrages upon human dignity’?” President Bush
said at a press conference in 2006, after the Supreme Court ruled that
the Geneva Conventions applied even to “enemy combatants.” In “The Dark
Side” Ms. Mayer provides a chilling answer, along with the most vivid
and comprehensive account we have had so far of how a government founded
on checks and balances and respect for individual rights could have been
turned against those ideals.