Mayer's The Dark Side, Genesis of the Torture Memos

“Well,” the banker J.P. Morgan once said, “I don’t know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.” George Bush and Dick Cheney hired their lawyers as Morgan did. They weren’t looking for legal routes through challenging situations. They were looking for legal immunity for their lawless means. They found them through the sophistry of lawyers such as David Addington and John Yoo, the obsequiousness of yes-men like Alberto Gonzales (first a White House counsel then the attorney general) and the CIA’s George Tenet, and the unquestioning timidity of congressional leaders.

But J.P. Morgan just wanted to make money. The Bush White House, as Barton Gellman wrote in Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (Penguin Press, 2008), “shifted America’s course more than any terrorist could have done,” and while al Qaeda devastated Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon on 9/11, “decisions made in the White House, in response, had incomparably greater impact on American interests and society.”

“The greatest dangers to liberty lurks in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding,” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1928. Mayer quotes Brandeis, though by the end of the book one wonders if the “men of zeal” she wrote about were, as Brandeis’ more idealistic wishes had it, well-meaning.

Bookshelves continue to fill up, like papery echoes of mass graves and brutality, with the literature of totalitarianism, terrorism and torture: Communism before and after World War II, fascism during the Nazi years, Islamism since the 1980s. From Eli Wiesel’s books on the Holocaust to Alexander Solzhenistyn’s deconstruction of the Soviet Gulag to Terry Anderson’s account of seven years’ captivity in Hezbollah’s dungeons (one of a half dozen in the genre by Americans and Europeans held hostage in the Lebanon of the 1980s), the books amount to a literary tribunal of humankind’s inhumanity. Americans could rest relatively assured that they would be spectators, foes or victims of the brutality. Occasional transgressions aside (the Philippines, Vietnam, Hiroshima and Nagazaki), not its perpetrator. Certainly not its apologist.

No longer. Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side is part of a new literature—sadly, richly productive—for a paradigm never imagined on a scale so systematic: The United States as aggressor, the United States as torturer, the United States as destroyer of the rule of law.

Read my full review of Jane Mayer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.

See Also:

• The Dark Side: Excerpts
• Should Barack Obama have released the Torture Memos?
• Torture Memos and Accountability - Why Prosecutions Must Follow
• Torture Memos and Middle East Silence
• Guantanamo's Illegal Shame

And Elsewhere:

• Jane Mayer on Charlie Rose (video)
• Jane Mayer on Letterman