The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals

No matter what Americans believe is going on, we are in Camelot compared to the real thing~! TDS just confirms my worst fears about what goes on in the backgrounds of government, the military, and politics.

A necessary read for anyone reading about the War on Terrorism. Just be prepared for the emotions you will likely experience while reading.

I'm a veracious reader easily digesting 100-200 pages a day with most texts. But, I was putting this book down after 10-15 pages. I just couldn't avoid getting emotionally drawn into the reported events.

Congratulations to Ms. Mayer for a very consise and clearly set-out examination and explanation of the Bush Presidency and the dark motivations and the unexplicable dealings of his co-horts and cronies.
It's a condemnation, pure and simple, of the misuse power and religious fervor for political and personal agendas. Where was this 2 years ago?

It's shocking to read this book -- The overreaction of power by the Executive Branch and the dirty sad things they did will leave a dark mark on the legacy of Cheney and Bush --- All the things that Bush and his cadre of lawyers kept hidden from you is now revealed -- The truth will make you sick. This book is very well written and I'm not much of a book reader myself.

Of the many critical books about the administration this one is among the most solidly documented treatments of one Bush policy--definition of and handling of terrorist suspects. The most realistic Americans, those who understand that even good people do evil things, if they read this book will have to admit that under Bush & Co. leadership we joined the ranks of the most evil.

This book is absolutely scary. The audacity of this government to impose their neo-conservative value system on the reputation of our great country makes me shiver with the thoughts of a neo-nazi police state.

This book should be nothing less than a "Best Seller". It is one of the most important, inciteful books concerning the presidency of George W. Bush. Words fail me in trying to convince people to read it. I can just say, it is a "must read" for every concerned American.

This is a marvelous job of important investigative reporting. As a retired journalist (which means old and experienced) I am very envious of Jane Mayer's journalistic artistry. Her impeccable research shows that the Bush-Cheney administration has been turning the U.S. into a nation of duplicity and lies; that, in turn, has caused us to lose international respect and and friends and carries the danger of becoming a police state.

Great book, I will not recommend to any light hearted person!!
I closed the book many times because of torture details is so inhumane and shocking. No person living in civilized world can expect such harsh torture.

Maybe the NSA vibe has already went down because Americans have already found something else to worry about. This book is pretty strong. There is a section (with specific torture procedures) that I had to skip because I was getting extremely anxious about it. This book was an assignment as part of a class, I usually don't read such strong stories for pleasure.

It is a very interesting stories, and of course there will always be strong opinions about the subject, and I am sure many people believe this is a fiction book.

As for this particular purchase, I bought it because it was really cheap, because it was used. However, it looks to me like it's completely new. Definitely I feel I got more value for what I paid! That's always nice :)

Excellent book, well-researched and thorough. Explains in more detail than I had been aware the process by which torture became the unspoken policy of the US as against detainees in the "war on terror," calling it a war rather than treating the detainees as potential criminals, subject to the criminal justice system, and detaining and torturing to prevent future attacks rather than based on something that was done in the past, turning our criminal justice system on its head.

I often find that the researchers who are most biased often unwittingly expose the most information that is directly counter to their main thesis. Mayer clearly has a deep hatred for Bush - Cheney, but points out that most of the information that led us to Iraq came from George Tenet's CIA whom W carried over as director from Clinton. Interestingly, she points out clearly that "extreme rendition" began in '98 .... the "very early" part of the W administration I guess.

More detail here. [...]

A very important book--it should be read by every member of congress--
It is a very well researched and well written description of the illegal, and depraved acts of our government in
imprisoning and torturing detainees--

A shameful episode in our history that will never be forgiven or forgotten---

It seems like each week another book comes out reminding us of what a disastrous presidency we've lived through in the past 8 years. Meyers focusses on the abandonment of very basic civilized values in the name of "fighting the war on terror." She is particularly good at illustrating that torture does not produce useful counter-terror information, but most often produces lies because the person being tortured will say anything to have it stopped. After this long national nightmare is over this book will remind us how America stood by while its basic principles were being undermined by the Bush/Cheney usurpation. A chilling book.

Dig deep into the underbelly of the Bush/Cheney war on terror and the legal memos that gave them the green light to torture. I agree that the book seems partisan at time, but it is thoroughly researched and a great read regardless. Highly recommended.

New America Foundation's Steve Clemons interviewed Jane Mayer at Politics and Prose bookstore in DC the day "The Dark Side" was first published. I saw the interview last night on CSPAN and found it today at [...]

This book is VERY well researched in that she digs well below the "what happened" and provides plausible explanation of intent (esp of the VP). Meanwhile Bush keeps "slipping out of the picture."

As usual, my book arrived ina very timely fashion, in excellent condition, with a minimum of effort on my part. I am always amazed by the ease of buying items from the store. Your website is great and your service is unbelievable.

Every member of Congress should be assigned this book as required reading. Then after reading it, each member should comtemplate the depths to which our government has sunk since the Bush Administration took over in January 2001.
The minds of Cheney and Addington are evil to the core. And Cheney seems to have known all along just how to push Bush's buttons, proding his cowboy image of himself, to get Bush's signature on the most hellish orders imaginable.
Perhaps the most frightening bit comes in the opening pages when the author reveals a secret order of succession, bypassing the Constitution, if the president and vice president should both be killed in a national disaster. It harks back to the Royals, naming one's own successor.
Congress should look into that without delay.
In all, this is a very informative book, a very frightening book, and a book that should make every citizen of this country take heed when looking at presidential candidates.

History is supposed to teach us lessons from the past. From the Alien and Sedition Act, the "Red Scare" of 1919, the detention of thousands of Americans during World War II because of their Japanese ancestry, we were supposed to learn that even through the most dire threat to our safety, the rule of law ennobles us and protects us from tyranny. In "The Dark Side," Jane Mayer explains how easy it is for history to repeat itself in the name of security.

By September 11, 2001, the President of the United States had already spent fifty days of his first eight months in office on vacation. Despite several warnings of an impending attack from foreign intelligence sources as well as our own, the administration never quite understands the threat.

The attack on a clear summer morning changes that, and it changes things for worse. The subsequent invasion of Afghanistan allows the military and the C.I.A. to round up hundreds of Taliban prisoners. An offer of a $5,000 bounty for the capture of al-Qaeda and Taliban nets them hundreds more. The administration screams for actionable intelligence from these detainees, but sorting them out and interrogating them is another matter. The assumption is that "enhanced interrogation techniques" will bring more accurate results in a shorter period of time. It also has to be justified.

That comes from John Yoo, the legal counsel for the Justice Department who provides just the argument Dick Cheney and his attorney, Dick Addington are looking for. It says the president can do essentially anything he wants, and ignore Congress, if it is for the security of the country. Yoo also states that such interrogation methods are not torture unless it results in organ failure or death. Alberto Gonzalez joins in describing Afghanistan as a failed state, and their detainees as unlawful combatants. The state department is not consulted.

America's shame is just beginning.

With John Yoo's memo providing the green light, American military and C.I.A. begin to torture detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Saddam Hussein's Abu-Ghraib prison, and one in Afghanistan. The techniques they employ are standing for prolonged periods, the absence of light and irregular meal periods to enhance disorientation, water boarding, extreme cold and heat, constant loud music, humiliation, no toilet breaks, confined spaces, prolonged restraints, especially Palestinian hangings, irregular and insufficient periods of sleep, and threats. Other detainees are sent to countries for rendition, countries known for human rights abuses. Prisoners will die of exposure, heart attack, asyphixiation, or from simply being beaten to death.

While the administration claims that the techniques work, there are too many instances where the tormented harden their resolve during harsh treatment, and cooperate when treated well. Many who are tortured provide false information that sends our intelligence assets on fools' errands. The most damaging disinformation comes from Sheikh Ibn als-Libi who gives evidence against Saddam Hussein while he is being tortured. This is the justification for going to war with Iraq. He only wanted his torturers to stop.

In 2003-4, the policy begins to unravel. Charges are reduced, dropped, or changed against John Walker Lindh, Yasser Hamdi, and Jose Padilla. Since they were tortured, their charges won't stand up in court. Justice Department lawyers begin to question John Yoo's legal precedents. The CIA Inspector General begins to investigate abuses. JAG officers refuse to prosecute or serve on military tribunals. In 2005, the Abu-Ghraib scandal will break. It is later estimated that most of the detainees at "Gitmo" are people who were rounded up when they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or were turned in for the generous bounty offered. They include an eighty-year old deaf man, and a wealthy Kuwaiti businessman who will indignantly refuse to buy another Cadillac after his mistreatment. A German and a Canadian citizen will be kidnapped and tortured before they are set free. Three hundred forty of 749 detainees held in Gitmo will remain there with only a handful being charged.

In spite of a growing rebellion inside the Departments of Defense and Justice, the President refuses to remove people he promised he would hold accountable for abuses. Human Rights Watch estimates that more than 600 U.S. military and civilian personnel were involved in torture.

The true leader of this policy holds a tight rein and his resistance to change is fierce. It is Dick Cheney and his loyal lawyer, Dave Addington. Even the new attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez refuses to go toe to toe with Dave, a tall, snarling bully. Cheney takes the unprecedented step of summoning the C.I.A.'s Inspector General to his office while he is conducting his investigation. The military holds a number of investigations that limit them to looking at the lower ranks. It is also clear by 2005, that Bush is fully aware that some of his senior officials believe that Gitmo should be closed and his detention policy changed. The dissenters and naysayers are excluded from any more discussion. To this day, Bush refuses to budge.

This is a powerful story. She tells us that we must look at ourselves if we ever hope to recapture our moral greatness. Even this she concedes will take years. Her book is a good place for our national introspection to begin. It is organized and well-written. Her appeal is persuasive. It is a classic page-turner, and held my interest throughout. There were no "dry spots." Equally important are her sources and references, which are impeccable.

She concludes this powerful report with the following: "Seven years after Al Qaeda's attacks on America, as the Bush Administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be a battle for the country's soul."

"This country does not believe in torture." George W. Bush, March 16, 2005.

In the face of Americans' fear over increased exposure to terrorism, Republican presidential candidates are threatening to expand on torture, "carpet bomb" portions of the Middle East and "patrol and secure" Muslim neighborhoods in our own United States. As disconcerting as this is, what is more frightening is that pundits, establishment figures, and some of the very perpetrators and/or defenders of the violations Jane Mayer meticulously documents in her book, vehemently deny that the military would carry out such unlawful orders. Really, Michael Mukasey? Really, Michael Hayden? Really?
While Mayer's thorough and painful research shows how some fearless military and Justice Department lawyers tried to stop the horrendous abuses orchestrated by the White House, and in particular the Vice President's Office and the CIA, it is clear that the CIA and the military and other branches of government DID WHAT THEY WERE TOLD.
So when Donald Trump says the military will do what I tell them to do, and we hear a collective establishment and media gasp and protest, Mayer's book stands as a testament to the willful blindness of those who can't catch their breath for all the wrong reasons.
History is replete with examples of more of the same. Japanese internment is only one that comes easily to mind. Her book is sad, frightening, heart-rending and should be re-launched.

For those of us, who believe in the Constitution’s sanctity and liberal American values and ideals, the past fifteen years have been one bad news after another. There were the lies which led to waging war on Iraq and the killing of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis. It was followed by officially sanctioned torture of prisoners, followed by pervasive electronic surveillance of all US citizens, all of which again denied blatantly by the government at first. We have had suspects, which included some US citizens, imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for years without any charges being laid. There was the ritual abuse, humiliation and denial of due process to the detainees. To cap it all, many detainees were handed over to brutal intelligence agencies in Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Romania etc for torture. This book deals with how all these sordid affairs came about, in addition to the details of many unjust incarcerations in Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib. I have read a few books already on the happenings in Guantanamo and elsewhere. I was more interested in finding explanations as to why suddenly the US would acquiesce to the macabre idea of disobeying the Geneva Conventions in its pursuit of the Islamic extremists. After all, the US adhered strictly to the Geneva conventions in dealing with Viet Cong prisoners during the Vietnam war and later with the Iraqi prisoners in the first Gulf War of 1991, even though this commitment was sorely tested during the Vietnam war. Going even further back, the same was true during the Korean war as well as World War II. Those adversaries were formidable compared to the Al-Qaeda fighters who have no nation of their own, no sophisticated weapons, not much money and are just a few thousand in number, according the CIA’s own estimates. On the face of it, there seems no logical reason to abandon our commitment to human rights in dealing with this adversary. This book provides some interesting historical background to how we got to where we are now.

Author Jane Mayer weaves a picture involving three key actors - Dick Cheney, David Addington and John Yoo - in her investigation of how we came to choosing Guantanamo Bay as the destination of Al-Qaeda prisoners. Dick Cheney has had a long stint in politics. He was Secretary of Defense in the Bush Sr administration in an earlier avatar. He was also chief of staff in the Gerald Ford administration. He was scarred by what happened in the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra scandal. His experience had conditioned him to come to the conclusion that the office of the President is gradually being deprived of its rightful and legitimate power in doing its duty. When 9/11 happened, he naturally concluded that the President needed substantial powers, unhindered by the constitutional and legal restrictions because national security is paramount. David Addington was Dick Cheney’s legal counsel and was like-minded. He provided whatever legal backing that would be needed to make Cheney’s vision a reality. John Yoo was in the Justice Department and he undertook the job of providing the necessary interpretations of the law in circumventing the Constitution. The CIA also helped with its proposal and endorsement of ‘enhanced interrogation’ and transferring suspects to third countries for torture as a necessary mechanism to extract confessions from detainees. There were dissenting voices from the FBI and many experts outside this inner group, but they were all overridden by President Bush.

Once the President acquired extra-constitutional powers, it became necessary to use it to formulate a mechanism to deal with the enormous number of prisoners in the wake of 9/11. Guantanamo Bay had 775 detainees. The Pentagon admitted that they had 21000 prisoners in Iraq and the Red Cross recorded more than 10000 prisoners in Afghanistan. The author details the shady process of how we came to choosing Guantanamo as the location to keep detainees. When CIA captures a suspected Al-Qaeda terrorist, what can it do with him? He can’t be killed because it is against international law to kill someone in custody. He can’t be released because he may be too dangerous or a valuable source of information. European countries treated them as criminals and dealt with them through the regular courts. But the Bush administration believed that the civilian court system is too rule-bound to deal with them. One idea was to set up military commissions to try the suspects. By putting the Pentagon in charge, the fight against terrorism becomes War and not a law-enforcement matter. But it needed Congress approval, which was deemed undesirable. Nuremberg type trials also were contemplated, consisting of civilian and military experts, but was dismissed because of the civilian element. The CIA suggested plans of putting the detainees on a ship and keeping them perpetually sailing in international waters. That way, they never have to be put on trial. It was also eventually deemed impractical. An unspecified African country (believed to be Zambia) was asked to take the prisoners. The country initially agreed but later backed out when it figured out what sorts of prisoners were in question. Then, someone in the White House realized that Guantanamo Bay suited the purpose ideally. Guantanamo has unique legal status. Leased in perpetuity to the US by Cuba in 1903, it was arguably under US control but not under US law. So, the executive branch could hold and interrogate foreign prisoners there in any manner deemed necessary, beyond meddling from Congress and the courts. At least, this is what the Bush White House believed. So, a military commission was decided upon as the solution. This is how the US came to impose an alternative legal system, following the rules devised by the executive branch as the way to solve all the legal problems posed by the courts and the Constitution in processing the Al-Qaeda detainees. Ironically, it became the source of a whole set of new vexing legal problems.

The US is not the only nation in this episode which exhibited conduct about which it would surely be embarrassed of in future. Poland, which was known for the peaceful Solidarity movement against the Communists in the 1980s, seems to have sunk low enough to host many detainees from the US and torture them, all in return for an US carrot of NATO membership. Similarly, Romania also accepted prisoners for torture in return for the promise of NATO membership. Pakistan is even worse, rounding up some high value terrorists as well as hundreds of innocent people and shipping them off to torture centers in Afghanistan, Egypt and Guantanamo, in return for millions of dollars of cash from the CIA. Almost all the cash was likely appropriated by the Pakistani Intelligence and its Army. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9/11, was worth $25 million while Abu Zubayda was handed over for $10 million, which was used by the Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) for a swanky new headquarters. It must be said, however, that the book documents Pakistan as having helped the US a lot in capturing and handing over many Al-Qaeda targets, albeit for money.

What was the final outcome of the Guantanamo Bay incarceration? A review of 517 detainees showed that only 8% were alleged to have been associated with Al-Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee US bombs!!
All but five percent of the detainees were captured by non-US players, many of whom were bounty hunters, which inevitably means that many of them would be innocent victims of greed. The author draws a parallel with the Phoenix program of the Vietnam war era, which was known among military historians as a state-sanctioned torture and murder program. The Pentagon found later that 97% of the Viet Cong it targeted then were of negligible importance.

After reading this book and several other investigative and analytical reports in various newspapers and magazines, I get the feeling that the visual media, in spite of its round-the-clock news coverage, does not give much time for all this detail, either in analysis or in reporting. So, it is important to read books like this so that the falsifications are challenged and the record is set straight as much as possible. It is essential if we want to live in a democracy that is informed, humane and compassionate.

Painfully hard to read, for anyone who wants to feel that the democratic republic we all cherish could have been so easily subverted. The Information about our torture of detainees is not new, as most avid readers could have surmised that it was administration policy, if one read major papers front to back in the years after 9/11.
This text is well organized and did finally provide the names of those with the moral courage to take stands against a run away, dubious and frighteningly illegal program, that instituted torture as an American norm, and thwarted all interface with American Institutions setting up something close to a monarchical government.
I thought of the Japanese officers we executed for war crimes because soldiers under their command had egregiously tortured American and Allied troops using the same methods that this administration made standard operating procedure.
I have had friends say that I just couldn't understand how frightened we were, and how that fear had justified any and all actions that were taken.
There are no freedoms without the rule of law. Given our propensity to rationalize the subversion of the law and all moral and ethical imperatives when we are afraid does not speak well for the future we are entering.
I think of Britain in those days when bombs were falling killing thousands of civilians week after week, after weak. Their losses exceeding almost weekly a violation as terrifying as 9/11. They and their government stood tall even though it looked like the Germans would win out. Then I thinks of the fear that seemed to overwhelm our government who created policies absent the input of the most knowledgeable and experienced people in counter terrorism.
Recently the US Senate released it's Terror Report, and many Americans felt torture was just OK..... hell, look how well it works weekly on tv's '24' and in all the mega violence movies.
We are now beginning to reap what we have sown in the recruiting tools we have provided to each jihadist group. We seem to learn little from history; half the world today is in conflict over grievances of mistreatment that occurred a century or more ago. As a new country we had not carried that baggage of ethnic and nationalist struggles of years past. We were the country that stood against human rights violations, we were that beacon of freedom and the rule of law.
These policies have stopped as institutional practice, but it will take generations to reclaim our position as the hope of the world.
This book is important because once you allow the executive branch powers to operate outside the law with disregard of both the courts or congress, and have a congress that fails to uphold its obligations to us as citizens by failing their primary job of oversize over very system of government is weakened. That very few took a stand against policies that would allow the detention, and rendition of anyone including US citizens without due process, is frightening. We didn't get to a place where enemies of the government were 'disappeared', but we walked up to that edge of having a system like the STAZI, or any of the other authoritarian states with extralegal black ops systems, where the enemy is anyone the government says the enemy is.
It takes tremendous moral courage to stand up to the tenets of the our constitution and the rule of law in times of peril when agents of fear hold sway.
"Small wars are conceived in uncertainty, are conducted often with precarious responsibility and doubtful authority, under indeterminate orders lacking specific instruction." Small Wars Manual US Marine Corps, 1940.
With the expansion of jihadist networks who recruit through social networks encouraging disaffected loners and small groups to commit murder at European and American targets, we are hearing voices that are demanding 'boots on the ground'. This time we must attempt to respond to this threat from careful analysis, using the knowledge acquired from all of our mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. If our response is formed in a response driven by fear and revenge, we will fail to meet this challenge.
The British set up a system similar to the system used by the Bush Administration to deal with the IRA, sweeps of people using rendition and detention, held without charges for years in prisons as dire as those we set up, violating all basic human rights, and it resulted in a larger and more violent resurgence of ITS cells. They finally realized that this was a failed strategy, and did a course correction that lead to the tenuous peace we have in Ireland today.
Hopefully in light of the current events our elected leaders step up, and have a serious debate about future actions and pass a war powers act that insures that we act in a long term strategic manner that will not exasperate this very real threat.
This text outlines the painful mistakes we have made, hopefully we will learn from them and create a response that will be effective.

In 1788 Warren Hastings, former viceroy of India, was impeached for corruption and abuse of power by the British authorities. By all accounts Hastings was not a terrible viceroy, and a lot of his actions could be justified by the culture he found himself in. But the Whig politician and prosecutor Edmund Burke argued that it was more than just Warren Hastings who was on trial: it was Britain's liberty and republican virtues that were really on trial. If corruption and abuse of power were not checked in India then East India Company employees would become fabulously wealthy there and return to corrupt the British political establishment. Hastings was acquitted, and the British republic soon afterwards became the British empire.

In her book "The Dark Side" the veteran New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer puts on trial the chief architect of America's war on terror Dick Cheney, and charges him with incompetence and stupidity. Not only has the Vice-President failed to make America safer but by condoning and promoting torture and extraordinary rendition has tarnished America's reputation abroad. And by suspending habeas corpus and flagrantly expanding the power of the executive branch Dick Cheney has also imperiled America's liberty.

Oddly enough Jane Mayer rarely mentions Dick Cheney, and instead focuses her attention on Dick Cheney's surrogates the brilliant workaholic lawyers David Addington and John Yoo. Together the two have overrided much of the government's oversight capabilities and shamelessly and blatantly politicized the Justice Department. Those who objected were treated harshly and banished from government.

Dick Cheney's office and its supporters created a culture that produced the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. And the grotesqueness of the evil of this culture is only matched by its gross incompetence. One top CIA officer decided on a whim to rendition a German tourist, and had him tortured for months without any solid evidence because she couldn't admit she had made a mistake.

Barack Obama may have taken office but "The Dark Side" hints that this culture may be too difficult to abolish: the whisteblowers have left office, and the maliciously incompetent have been promoted too high.

There is no doubt in Jane Mayer's mind: Dick Cheney and his top lieutenants are guilty of degrading America's ability to defend itself, its reputation abroad, and its liberties at home.

The question only remains is if Dick Cheney is guilty of being stupid or being evil, and for Jane Mayer the answer is obvious. Dick Cheney has said publicly that he's making America safe, and clearly he's failed. But are Dick Cheney, David Addington, and John Yoo really that stupid and incompetent? How did they obtain so much power if they're so stupid and incompetent?

We know that Dick Cheney and his people are sharp and competent, and so how could they fail so miserably? Well, who said they failed at all?

At Guantanamo Bay, using modern science and psychology, they managed to perfect the most painful form of torture known to man. Hooded and naked in a cold dark room the detainees are deprived of identity and sense of place and time, driving some of them insane. Extraordinary rendition is also terrifying in its randomness: anyone can be at any time be made to disappear.

If your goal is to extract actionable intelligence and hunt down terrorists torture and extraordinary rendition make no sense. But if your goal is to terrorize an entire generation of Muslim men so they wouldn't dare to join a terrorist group then Dick Cheney's policie make sense -- if only in a twisted and perverted Dick Cheney sort of way.

So is Dick Cheney right? Well, he can't be proved wrong. And if there is a terrorist attack during Obama's regime then isn't he proved right? "The Dark Side" is really a lot darker than Jane Mayer or any one of us can truly imagine.

When a government kidnaps, tortures, uses indefinite incarcerations, and kills without accountability, it is a danger to its citizens. But, as The Dark Side shows, that is exactly the power the US government secretly claimed and exercised after the 9/11 attacks. The US government denied any limitations on it power to conduct - as it saw fit - the War On Terror. This book documents many scary ways the government conducts the War On Terror.

Even democratic governments assume dictatorial-like powers in wartime. But the War On Terror is different. Congress never declared a war. There is no government, or state, or nation with which we are at war. There will always be "terrorists." There always have been. There is no way to know when the War On Terror is over and has been won. So, the War On Terror will have no end. It will be perpetual. The wartime powers the government assumed will never end.

War On Terror enthusiasts rely upon the claim that due to War On Terror we have not been hit since the 9/11 attacks. There are two main responses to this mistaken notion. First, we don't know if there has ever been another credible terrorist threat comparable to 9/11. In his book, Overblown, John E. Mueller argues that there has never been and likely will never be another such terrorist threat. His book is an excellent companion book to The Dark Side. Second, many more Americans have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (over 5,000) than died in the 9/11 attacks. Those two wars have been more costly to the US than all the damage from the 9/11 attacks. War On Terror enthusiasts also ignore the estimated over 100,000 Iraqi's and Afghans killed, the over 2 million refugees just from the Iraq War, and the enormous devastation wreaked on both Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of the War On Terror. The magnitude of the US government overreaction to 9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan is staggering. The War On Terror has been much more deadly and devastating than the evil it purports to combat.

Lord Acton famously pointed out that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." With history as our guide, we know that all of the War on Terror abuses our government inflicts on foreigners it will eventually inflict on its own citizens as well. We already see evidence of that happening. Abuse always tends to escalate. Power corrupts.

The War On Terror corrodes our liberties and its proponents can't convincingly show any improvement in our security. The Dark Side provides a lot of scary information to alert us to the dangerous road we are on. This country was founded upon the right of active citizens to oppose government abuses. We can draw upon that heritage to meet today's new threats to our security and liberty. The War On Terror is indeed such a one.

*****

This book begins by making the case that al Qaeda was not on the Bush Administration's radar screen prior to 9/11, and that after the attack, Dick Cheney filled a void of leadership and greatly exaggerated the terrorist threat to the point of throwing overboard American ideals. First, he and his counsel David Addington bypassed any and all dissent by working through back channels to push through a legal authorization of military commissions. Then they proceeded to set in motion all the dire measures that resulted from what they conceived to be a full scale War on Terror. They got the President to sign off on bypassing the Geneva Conventions for al-Qaeda and the Taliban; they set up the legal authority to detain "illegal enemy combatants" indefinitely without habeas corpus rights; and they set the stage for using interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, sensory overload and deprivation, humiliation, sleep deprivation, etc - techniques that were subject to abuse and can only be called torture. Then, they threw aside the fourth amendment to enable spying on Americans.

Cheney became convinced that "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture) were absolutely necessary (a " no brainer") in eliciting information that would protect the American public from terrorist attacks. But were they really necessary? It is clear that some very prominent authorities in the military and intelligence services were convinced otherwise, but their voices were never seriously considered. The incompetence of their interrogation program was evident in the use of SERE techniques. These techniques were never meant to extract exacting information, which is what was needed. Instead, they were meant to break people down to the point of them saying anything.

As other books have shown and this book confirms, Addington on behalf of Cheney was able to exert direct control over the legal apparatus of the Bush Administration. He controlled the OLC of the Justice Department where John Yoo did his bidding. In the White House and then in Justice Department, he had no problem steamrolling Alberto Gonzalez. He used his influence over the top legal authority in the Pentagon, Jim Haynes, to run roughshod over any dissenting opinion there. Until Jack Goldsmith became head of the OLC (only because Ashcroft vetoed Yoo), there was no one that stood in the way, and Goldsmith lasted less than a year.

Of the books that I have read, this one is the most comprehensive concerning the Bush Administration's legal response to 9/11. It raises serious questions about elevating the President above the law, and cries out for accountability for all the botched cases concerning would-be terrorists. It also raises questions about whether the throwing overboard of America's ideals has been anything short of a disaster.

In 1788 Warren Hastings, former viceroy of India, was impeached for corruption and abuse of power by the British authorities. By all accounts Hastings was not a terrible viceroy, and a lot of his actions could be justified by the culture he found himself in. But the Whig politician and prosecutor Edmund Burke argued that it was more than just Warren Hastings who was on trial: it was Britain's liberty and republican virtues that were really on trial. If corruption and abuse of power were not checked in India then East India Company employees would become fabulously wealthy there and return to corrupt the British political establishment. Hastings was acquitted, and the British republic soon afterwards became the British empire.

In her book "The Dark Side" the veteran New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer puts on trial the chief architect of America's war on terror Dick Cheney, and charges him with incompetence and stupidity. Not only has the Vice-President failed to make America safer but by condoning and promoting torture and extraordinary rendition has tarnished America's reputation abroad. And by suspending habeas corpus and flagrantly expanding the power of the executive branch Dick Cheney has also imperiled America's liberty.

Oddly enough Jane Mayer rarely mentions Dick Cheney, and instead focuses her attention on Dick Cheney's surrogates the brilliant workaholic lawyers David Addington and John Yoo. Together the two have overrided much of the government's oversight capabilities and shamelessly and blatantly politicized the Justice Department. Those who objected were treated harshly and banished from government.

Dick Cheney's office and its supporters created a culture that produced the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. And the grotesqueness of the evil of this culture is only matched by its gross incompetence. One top CIA officer decided on a whim to rendition a German tourist, and had him tortured for months without any solid evidence because she couldn't admit she had made a mistake.

Barack Obama may have taken office but "The Dark Side" hints that this culture may be too difficult to abolish: the whisteblowers have left office, and the maliciously incompetent have been promoted too high.

There is no doubt in Jane Mayer's mind: Dick Cheney and his top lieutenants are guilty of degrading America's ability to defend itself, its reputation abroad, and its liberties at home.

The question only remains is if Dick Cheney is guilty of being stupid or being evil, and for Jane Mayer the answer is obvious. Dick Cheney has said publicly that he's making America safe, and clearly he's failed. But are Dick Cheney, David Addington, and John Yoo really that stupid and incompetent? How did they obtain so much power if they're so stupid and incompetent?

We know that Dick Cheney and his people are sharp and competent, and so how could they fail so miserably? Well, who said they failed at all?

At Guantanamo Bay, using modern science and psychology, they managed to perfect the most painful form of torture known to man. Hooded and naked in a cold dark room the detainees are deprived of identity and sense of place and time, driving some of them insane. Extraordinary rendition is also terrifying in its randomness: anyone can be at any time be made to disappear.

If your goal is to extract actionable intelligence and hunt down terrorists torture and extraordinary rendition make no sense. But if your goal is to terrorize an entire generation of Muslim men so they wouldn't dare to join a terrorist group then Dick Cheney's policie make sense -- if only in a twisted and perverted Dick Cheney sort of way.

So is Dick Cheney right? Well, he can't be proved wrong. And if there is a terrorist attack during Obama's regime then isn't he proved right? "The Dark Side" is really a lot darker than Jane Mayer or any one of us can truly imagine.

When a government kidnaps, tortures, uses indefinite incarcerations, and kills without accountability, it is a danger to its citizens. But, as The Dark Side shows, that is exactly the power the US government secretly claimed and exercised after the 9/11 attacks. The US government denied any limitations on it power to conduct - as it saw fit - the War On Terror. This book documents many scary ways the government conducts the War On Terror.

Even democratic governments assume dictatorial-like powers in wartime. But the War On Terror is different. Congress never declared a war. There is no government, or state, or nation with which we are at war. There will always be "terrorists." There always have been. There is no way to know when the War On Terror is over and has been won. So, the War On Terror will have no end. It will be perpetual. The wartime powers the government assumed will never end.

War On Terror enthusiasts rely upon the claim that due to War On Terror we have not been hit since the 9/11 attacks. There are two main responses to this mistaken notion. First, we don't know if there has ever been another credible terrorist threat comparable to 9/11. In his book, Overblown, John E. Mueller argues that there has never been and likely will never be another such terrorist threat. His book is an excellent companion book to The Dark Side. Second, many more Americans have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (over 5,000) than died in the 9/11 attacks. Those two wars have been more costly to the US than all the damage from the 9/11 attacks. War On Terror enthusiasts also ignore the estimated over 100,000 Iraqi's and Afghans killed, the over 2 million refugees just from the Iraq War, and the enormous devastation wreaked on both Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of the War On Terror. The magnitude of the US government overreaction to 9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan is staggering. The War On Terror has been much more deadly and devastating than the evil it purports to combat.

Lord Acton famously pointed out that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." With history as our guide, we know that all of the War on Terror abuses our government inflicts on foreigners it will eventually inflict on its own citizens as well. We already see evidence of that happening. Abuse always tends to escalate. Power corrupts.

The War On Terror corrodes our liberties and its proponents can't convincingly show any improvement in our security. The Dark Side provides a lot of scary information to alert us to the dangerous road we are on. This country was founded upon the right of active citizens to oppose government abuses. We can draw upon that heritage to meet today's new threats to our security and liberty. The War On Terror is indeed such a one.

*****

This book begins by making the case that al Qaeda was not on the Bush Administration's radar screen prior to 9/11, and that after the attack, Dick Cheney filled a void of leadership and greatly exaggerated the terrorist threat to the point of throwing overboard American ideals. First, he and his counsel David Addington bypassed any and all dissent by working through back channels to push through a legal authorization of military commissions. Then they proceeded to set in motion all the dire measures that resulted from what they conceived to be a full scale War on Terror. They got the President to sign off on bypassing the Geneva Conventions for al-Qaeda and the Taliban; they set up the legal authority to detain "illegal enemy combatants" indefinitely without habeas corpus rights; and they set the stage for using interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, sensory overload and deprivation, humiliation, sleep deprivation, etc - techniques that were subject to abuse and can only be called torture. Then, they threw aside the fourth amendment to enable spying on Americans.

Cheney became convinced that "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture) were absolutely necessary (a " no brainer") in eliciting information that would protect the American public from terrorist attacks. But were they really necessary? It is clear that some very prominent authorities in the military and intelligence services were convinced otherwise, but their voices were never seriously considered. The incompetence of their interrogation program was evident in the use of SERE techniques. These techniques were never meant to extract exacting information, which is what was needed. Instead, they were meant to break people down to the point of them saying anything.

As other books have shown and this book confirms, Addington on behalf of Cheney was able to exert direct control over the legal apparatus of the Bush Administration. He controlled the OLC of the Justice Department where John Yoo did his bidding. In the White House and then in Justice Department, he had no problem steamrolling Alberto Gonzalez. He used his influence over the top legal authority in the Pentagon, Jim Haynes, to run roughshod over any dissenting opinion there. Until Jack Goldsmith became head of the OLC (only because Ashcroft vetoed Yoo), there was no one that stood in the way, and Goldsmith lasted less than a year.

Of the books that I have read, this one is the most comprehensive concerning the Bush Administration's legal response to 9/11. It raises serious questions about elevating the President above the law, and cries out for accountability for all the botched cases concerning would-be terrorists. It also raises questions about whether the throwing overboard of America's ideals has been anything short of a disaster.

A great summation of events that somehow manages to both expand upon our understanding of how we got where we are, while also not getting too bogged down so as to be overly academic.
Prepare to come across a ton of names in every chapter though. Some you’ll know if you were old enough to watch the news back then, others will become a blur. As strange as this sounds for such a tough reading subject, it would really help if the author simply included a photograph each time they introduced a new person. (Maybe they’re in the paper versions, there is only text in the kindle version.)

The first Sunday after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press and described how the Bush administration would respond: "We'll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies." He wasn't kidding. In the panic and paranoia that engulfed the Bush administration after the September 11 attacks, Cheney decided that the end of national security justified any and all means.

Jane Mayer reconstructs in meticulous detail how Cheney and his closest aides legalized torture as American public policy. There were noble administration people who demurred and dissented, but virtually all of them were marginalized. A small "War Council" acted in secrecy to actively exclude all naysayers and normal processes of checks and balances -- David Addington, John Yoo, Tim Flanigan, Alberto Gonzales ("an empty suit"), and Jim Haynes. These highly partisan ideologues, a weak president, and interagency rivalry and dysfunction created the "perfect storm." According to Human Rights Watch, "more than 600 U.S. military and civilian personnel were involved in abusing more than 460 detainees." What the public has seen and heard about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are only the tip of the iceberg.

The Bush administration boasts that its torture program has been worth the intelligence it gathered, but that's far from clear. Furthermore, "seven years after the attacks of September 11, not a single terror suspect held outside of the U.S. criminal court system has been tried." This is a tragedy in itself because, let's be clear, many of these detainees deserved to be punished. But such prosecutions become impossible when evidence was gathered by torture. And so now America holds hundreds of detainees that it can't prosecute, can't very well release, and can't reasonably hold forever without charges.

In spurning "the last nearly universal moral taboo" of torture, America's reputation among its allies has been badly sullied. Canada, for example, placed the United States on its list of rogue nations that torture (332-333). Our enemies have been enraged and emboldened. Our own military personnel can expect similar treatment. Cheney was careful to pass legislation that granted himself and his colleagues retroactive legal immunity, which is an explicit acknowledgement of what nations around the world have already concluded-- that our highest government officials are liable for "prosecutable war crimes" (244). Such prosecution will not happen at home, but as Phillipe Sands has argued in his own book, Torture Team (2008), those responsible for legalizing torture ought to be very careful about traveling overseas. As I write, Mayer's book has been named as a finalist for a National Book Award.

Part of the problem with reading The Dark Side in the middle of 2009 is that much that it contains is now old news. The author, Jane Mayer, had a hand in reporting much of this news when it was fresh, and such reporting was a critical service, so it seems unfair to criticize the book on the grounds of "heard much of this before," particularly as I waited until now to read it, but the truth is that is one of the reactions I had.

Taking the book as a piece of the historical record, rather than as newsbreaking also leaves the experience wanting. There were four themes in the book: Torture produces nothing of value, torture produces something of value but, as a practical matter, its costs outweigh its benefits, torture is wrong (legally and morally) regardless of questions of value, and U.S. torture practices were incompetent. The book not only offers fact, but opinion, from dozens and dozens of sources, and their views on these four themes litter the book in indiscriminate fashion, without apparent recognition of the inconsistency that may arise between them. As a result, the factual questions about the consequences of torture were muddled.

Much less muddled, though, was the story that harsh interrogation treatments that involved significant pain and suffering became a part of U.S. policy through the direction of certain members of the Executive Branch. The reader does see how this could, and did, happen. Particularly with the compelling way this story is told, it makes the book a worthwhile read.

Jane Mayer has written a brilliant and well documented book about the abuses and immoral behavior of the Vice President Richard Cheney and his staff of lawyers. At no time in American history have we seen an abuse of power so blatant and so shocking as to leave the reader shaking with disbelief, shame and anger. Ms. Mayer documents the slide of American laws and constitution into the gutter by those who not only misinterpreted the law, but perverted the law, which ultimately resulted in the torture and death of the alleged and the innocent. The reader will quickly realized while reading the book that those responsible for this travesty of justice will ultimately go free, or will never face a day in court for their criminal behavior.

Ms. Mayer's exhaustive documentation implicates VP Cheney and his lawyers Addington and Yoo for spearheading the most immoral information gathering program in American history. There are others, such as the office of the Sec. Def who pressed subordinates to ratchet up torture, then denied any and all involvement when the media discovered the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The CIA Director also turned a blind eye to his agents as they tortured and murdered those suspected of terrorism, whether justified or not.

This book is a must read. It should be part of law classes throughout the US as an example of what not to do, and should be a warning to law administrators everywhere that ethics is more than a one semester class.

A very well-written book, based on research and interviews that backup Mayer's stories. I found the lack of a chronological continuum a bit confusing at first, but as the book progressed, that was less disconcerting.

The book presents a picture of the Bush administration in a time of crisis and how it reacted to that crisis. While history will probably praise some elements of the Bush team's reaction to 9/11, I fear it will be less laudatory of the ensuing torture debacle. This book presents a picture of Pres. Bush being out of the loop, WH Counsel (later AG)Gonzalez being out of his league, and VP Cheney (and his team) being out of control - a sad state of affairs that seems to have led to abuses that should never have happened. Whether you agree with Mayer's research or not, it does paint a less-than-rosey picture of the Bush Administration's use of executive power.

But the real story the book tells is of the heroic efforts of other members of the administration who took exception to the practices and argued against them, oftentimes at great risk to their careers and even their persons. These stalwart believers in the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions fought until the Courts, Congress, the press, and the American public finally saw the true events and through the light of public scrutiny held them up as practices that tarnished the image of America at home and abroad.

Whether a Bush-hugger or a Bush-basher, the reader must see the fight to stop the illegal treatment of detainees as evidence that there are still true heroes in the federal government.

The reason why our forefathers set up our government the way they did was because they knew what Lord Acton knew when he said, "Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it." When Bush Jr's power was limited by the regulations created by our constituiton and by the Geneva Conventions, his lawyers simply created legal arguments to nullify these standards and civil rights. This book is a clear description of the corruption of power...those who sought to save our country at any cost only wound up being the ones who destroyed everything it stands for. Citizens are so used to having "the news" spoon-fed to them in sound bites that it becomes nearly impossible to assimilate all the data and form a concise conclusion. Ms Mayer lies out all the facts, all the players, all the actions, and all the consequences thereof in a concise way that is astounding in its simplicity. As a citizen one can hardle avoid being shocked that this happened, that this is not a fiction, and outraged that the men who perpetrated this disingenious attack on the priciples we hold dear have not been held accounatble. Being voted out of office is meaningless compared to what the administration took from innocent prisoners. The truth is the only thing that can set us free, don't let yourself be kept ignorant of what the government is doing in your name.

The Dark Side, that name conjures up many images from the Bush presidency. Unlike many books that dealt with this subject, this one seems largely free of political bias and presents information in a clear, neutral way. From the very beginning, when 9/11 happened, you get the sense that something bad was about to happen, and indeed it does. The political disaster that was going to grip Washington, and the United States, was a kind of perfect storm that The Dark Side examines. Not only did the administration throw away core ideals that have existed since the Revolution, but it seems as though many of the players involved were just waiting for an opportunity to instituate an imperial presidency. While reading this book, I experienced anger, sadness, and shock at what our leaders were willing to do. For all of this to happen, many pieces had to co-exist at the same time, such as a national disaster that led to reactionary, not rational, decisions, cronyism, incompetence, lawyers that argued on behalf of their client and not the law, an easily manipulated president, a Congress with powers similar to that of the Byzantine Senate, and high-ranking government officials who wanted a monarchical executive. This is a must read for anyone interested in post 9/11 politics.

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.

While Mayer has a definite and critical opinion of the Bush Administration's treatment of terrorist suspects, she does an excellent and judicious job of weighing the evidence to support her opinion. She is convincing in showing that there is very little empirical support for the claim that extreme measures produced any new reliable information that would not have been better produced by conventional methods. Indeed, the historical purpose of these methods is to produce false confessions at show trials. The high profile cases that have been routinely cited by Bush supporters to justify the methods all tend to support the opposite conclusion: that the reliable information was obtained by the FBI or others using conventional methods before the CIA "hard ball" interrogators showed up.

Mayer is also excellent in analyzing the legal arguments provided by Bush's lawyers to support the new methods. In truth and fact, ever since Washington, the American way of war has been to treat prisoners humanely, not out of lack of any lack of zeal but in recognition of the enlightened self interst served by demonstrating the benefits of the American way. The Bush lawyers rendered extraordinary secret opinions that granted amnesty to interrogators in advance of any misconduct. The opinions are unsupported by any fair reading of the limits of Presidential powers and make no sense from the perspective of the Geneva Convention. The essential premise is that the terrorist detainees were nonpersons wholly uncovered by either the Geneva Convention or domestic law. This is nonsense. Even spies and saboteurs are covered by international law.

As Mayer points out, lawyers need to be able to tell clients what they don't want to hear. In this sense, Bush was ill-served by the likes of Addington and Yoo and Gonzalez. Indeed, Mayer demonstrates that the lawyers simply came up with, and then implemented, the most aggressive interpretation possible for the expanse of Presidential power. There was no serious policy discussion of whether the President -- as a matter of good policy -- should exercise all of that power. Mayer does concede that the Administration may have been understandably concerned with an imminent second wave of attacks and was acting from the exigencies of the moment. But Mayer proves that for that last few years of the life of the Administration, this extreme circumstance was removed, and the Administration was doing little more than engaging in a great cover up.

Ultimately, Cheney's power is what explains the misguided course taken after 9/11. In ordinary times, nerds like Yoo and Addington would have been short circuited by review and input from senior lawyers at State, Defense, and Justice. But Cheney was pushing for these extraordinary powers and the nerds were able to cite his directives to prevent any questioning from elsewhere in the Administration. Bush's failings as a leader can be seen in his inability to appreciate the radical break from precedent and his inability to foresee that in the long run, beating false confessions out of detainees was not going to sell well.

What is insufficiently explored by Mayer is the mechanisms at work that allowed Bush to get away with it for his entire Presidency and that now impede Obama from resolving the detainee problem. For me, the true dark side is that of the American people. While we have on the whole promoted humane treatment of citizens and foreign nationals, we have also always struggled to control our violent nature and weakness for racism. We don't want to admit that we torture, but we sure wanted to get tough in the rageful times after 2001. The way to have your cake and eat it too is simply to deny that we are "torturing" and then allow "torture" to be defined not by the effect on the detainee but on the interrogators' motives. There is no question that a CIA interrogator has far better motives and justification for "harsh" methods than did Joseph Mengele at Auschwitz. And of course, with a few very disturbing exceptions, we did not beat detainees to death. But just because we are not as bad as the Nazis doesn't mean what we did was right. It just means it was less wrong than what the Nazis did.

Thus, if we deny we are torturing, if the detainees are all part of an unpopular racial/ethnic group, if we use euphemisms, and if we repeat with false certainty that we actually got useful information out of the new methods, Americans are more than willing to accept it. We want to be deluded, at least in the short run. Ultimately, Bush's greatest mistake was to fail to moderate the rage and panic that came after 9/11 and to appeal to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.

It's unfortunate that the CIA destroyed all of the interrogation videotapes. A few minutes of watching waterboarding, sexual humiliation, hanging by the arms, and heads being knocked into walls would be enough to shock all of us out of our complacency.

As a loyal American who loves the ideals this country was founded on, the behavior described in this book makes me ill. It is revolting. It is disgusting. It is deeply depressing that our fellow Americans, singing the same patriotic songs as the rest of us and knowing the same stories of Washington, Jefferson, Adams - and what they stood for, could engage in behavior that is the polar opposite of what our founders' intended. Anyone with a brain and a heart remembers the horror of 9/11 and of course we want to protect our beloved country from her enemies (internal and external). But the memory of that horror does not justify this new set of horrors done in the name of protection. The wise British intelligence agent in the beginning of the book warned about the temptation of aggressive interrogation. To paraphrase: "The intelligence is not reliable. You become the bad guys. And the people you interrogate will be released when they finally appear in a court of law." My prayer is that the people responsible for these atrocities and for sullying the name of our country here and abroad will be brought to justice. And I dearly pray that the next president, whomever that might be, takes immediate measures to restore our honor.