Dark side

John Adams famously described the American government as one of "laws, not of men." In eight years, the Bush Administration has reacted to the attacks of September 11, 2001, by turning that dictum on its head in their zeal to ensure that another attack does not occur on their watch. In particular, the President's confidence that he is a "good man," has led him to embrace the advice of a ruthless cabal within the United States government whose first article of faith is that there are no limitations on presidential power in a "time of war."

Jane Mayer's excellent book on the prosecution of the so-called "War on Terror" is a "must read" not primarily because it reveals new information: many of the facts have already been exposed in the nation's media, including in some of Mayer's own articles for the New Yorker. Rather, this book adds two essential dimensions to the national debate on the government's actions. First, it describes the political and legal decisions of the White House, the Vice President's Office, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and the Attorney General to reinterpret, and subvert, the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and the criminal statutes of the United States with horrific consequences. Second, in describing those consequences, it paints a far more vivid picture of the gruesome consequences of the torture policy than the press's usual glib invocation of "water boarding."

As the book describes, Vice President Dick Cheney's unprecedented ability to control the flow and content of information to the president, coupled with the weight his advice has been given, put him in a unique position to guide the direction of the Administration's policy toward "enemy combatants" captured on the battlefield or subsequently abducted. With Cheney's aide David Addington as the architect in chief, the administration concluded, under the cover of John Yoo's memoranda from the Justice Department, that any limits on the president's power to order torture — whether law or treaty — could be set aside on the grounds that they were subordinate to the president's constitutional powers as Commander in Chief. On the basis of a superficially plausible theory, generally rejected by expert opinion, that the most effective way to obtain information is to inflict a maximum of pain, the Administration provided the C.I.A. with authorized methods of torture, many of which had hitherto been acknowledged in the United States and elsewhere to constitute war crimes. To the extent these failed to achieve results, the Administration pushed for the infliction of more pain. To the extent its actions were opposed or questioned, the Administration made demonstrably false claims about the effectiveness of its illegal methods in obtaining actionable intelligence. To the extent that military lawyers in the Judge Advocate General's office and other lawyers risked their careers to restore the rule of law, the seasoned bureaucratic infighters in the Vice President's office, particularly Addington, fought back ferociously.

Mayer is no less thorough in describing the hair-raising consequences of the Administration's legal decisions. In constructing their refined programs of systematic cruelty, the C.I.A. and the military drew upon the military's training programs developed to counter Chinese Communist "brainwashing" and the C.I.A.'s massive experiments on the effects of prolonged sensory deprivation during the Vietnam War. Impressed by the ability of the Communist regimes to force false confessions from prisoners at show trials in the 50's, the military had researched Communist torture programs in depth in order to train its soldiers to resist as much as possible through its Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program. In a diabolical twist, the C.I.A. and the military used the lessons of the SERE program to devise an affirmative program of torture designed to extract information from detainees. The fact that torture techniques had proved useful in the past primarily for forcing false confessions does not seem to have given the C.I.A. much pause. Combined with the C.I.A.'s own research into the effectiveness of sensory deprivation in creating total mental breakdown and introducing a schizophrenic state, these techniques were used to inflict a maximum of pain on detainees in the expressed hope of extracting information and (usually unexpressed) hope of exacting revenge. In reading the book, one gets a full sense of the brutal consequences of these techniques in combination, and the savagery with which our government's interrogators redoubled the pain they inflicted when they did not get the results they wanted. To the extent there were any limits on the suffering our intelligence service imposed, those limits were cast aside when the C.I.A. delivered detainees through "extraordinary rendition" to the secret police of Arab dictatorships such as Egypt and Syria.

Jane Mayer's compelling work thus documents not only how vital, and how fragile, is the rule of law, but also reminds us of the terrible consequences that ensue when it breaks down.