Mayer’s ‘The Dark Side,’ Or How The War On Terror Became A War On American Ideals

While it had been widely assumed that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the War on Terror began at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Bush administration long hid behind that “trickle up” explanation, it is now apparent that the origins of this dark chapter in American history — and the single most defining and insidious aspect of the Age of Bush — can be traced to Vice President Cheney.

Nevertheless, there has not been a satisfactory answer to the question of why in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the vice president and his cronies did not want to work within existing laws and systems with Congress and the courts, stubbornly objected to the creation of the 9/11 Commission and created an American gulag and rump court system that ignored constitutionally mandated niceties like habeas corpus.

Now comes Jane Mayer, a New Yorker staff writer, who answers that question in a hugely important new book being published today — The Dark Side: The Inside Story on How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.

Like the Watergate scandal of four decades earlier, the answer is that it was all about covering up, in this instance Cheney spearheading a not vast right-wing conspiracy that was predicated on scaring the crap out of Americans, hence the oft repeated mantra that “everything has changed” because of 9/11, and the use of that rationale for a descent into morally repugnant methods and actions unprecedented in modern American history.

The purpose was to cover up the administration’s failure to act on repeated warnings that Al Qaeda planned a major attack on the homeland, an attack that it now appears could have been prevented had the White House not been so caught up in its own arrogant sense of infallibility. (In Cheney’s case, this hubris is all the more amazing because he was obsessed with doomsday scenarios and had participated in many drills in previous years that simulated attacks that might destabilize the government.)

This descent included extracting false confessions through torture that became an underpinning of the bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection and WMD threat that led directly to a war now in its sixth year, and even to satisfy grievances that Mayer says the vice president had been harboring for decades.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, here for a new revelation concerning former Attorney General John Ashcroft, and here for an index with links to previous Bush torture regime-related posts.