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From:Jane Mayer , Doubleday ,
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User Rating: Amazon Sales Rank:#829 |
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5 of 7 customers found the following review helpful:
 How the Bush Administration has made us into terrorists, 2008-08-01
I have not trusted the current President since before he took office, but still, as an American, I always felt it comforting to assume that while I might disagree on policies and the country's direction, in the end our government really was looking out for the American way. This heavily sourced history of the ongoing attack on our national values of decency, fairness and justice is a frightening and disturbing look at how our trust in the father-figure of the President could end our system of liberties.
Mayer documents the current administration's willingness to use secrecy, deception and the familiar catchphrase "national security" to undermine treaties, the constitutional balance of powers, and the civil liberties we hold sacred. It's natural that there will occasionally be corrupt and despotic leaders who will try to seize a country's government, and I actually think Bush himself may be simple and trusting enough to think his people are bringing him all the information he needs to make decisions. But in the end, he's been like a little kid, letting his caretakers feed him the facts he needs to fit the decisions he wants to make, and not doing the most basic research himself. When you're the president, that's not leadership, it's criminal, at the least: he is an adult, after all. (You see, even now I can't quite admit that the father-figure would deliberately try to undermine us.) His caretakers, however, are another story. It's clear that our laws have been broken in many, many ways to send this country in an extremist direction, and the people who have done this, including the VP and the political appointees who work for him, have committed what could be considered treason. The fact that many of the new policies are based on justifications which no one is allowed to know (not even the people who have a legal right, such as superiors or Congress) is an indication of how well aware these people are that what they are doing would be condemned by the average American and would not stand up to scrutiny.
Becoming the enemy, becoming a country which practices rendition, kidnapping and torture, has secret laws, and makes war on innocent countries - is this how we want to be? And while I'm at it, let me ask this: Bush claims to be a Christian. Does he really think this is what Jesus would do?
Hopefully, the country will make it through to January and the damage can be undone. It won't bring back the dead, or salve the wounds of the many injured by the current administration, but it might save us, if the next president is willing to look closely and repair the damage.
8 of 11 customers found the following review helpful:
Very important book, 2008-08-01
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---
16 of 17 customers found the following review helpful:
The Scariest Book of the 21st Century, 2008-07-31
Jane Mayer's The Dark Side is "eye-opening" in the same way that walking into a bedroom to find someone sexually assaulting a minor is "eye-opening": it is shocking, dismaying, anger-provoking, and saddening all at the same time.
With abundance evidence, most of it gathered from the most "inside" of sources, Mayer lays out the case against the Bush Administration and how its war on terror became in so many appalling ways a series of wars on other things--human rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law among them. The callous disregard exhibited by the so-called "War Council" for everything from basic human rights to the checks and balances established by the Constitution is appalling.
This book is not a polemic, nor a jeremaiad. Though sometimes Mayer inserts comments or facts that serve only to gild the lily, most of the book is a straightforward accounting of the events and decision-making behind a number of different areas, some well known (Abu Ghraid, rendition, etc.) and some less so. She also chronicles the courageous--but almost always unsuccessful attempts of a number of people within the military and the Pentagon, within the FBI, within the Justice Department and sometimes elsewhere to stop or slow down or mitigate the endless series of abuses, often at the expense of their careers.
This is especially, above and beyond everything else, a book about lawyers, and I think this is a fact that Jane Mayer herself perhaps did not fully consciously realize. Many, perhaps most, of the actors in this book are attorneys--usually counsels, those who provide legal advice and guidance for government agencies. Some of those attorneys used their skills to try to subvert the law, while others were motivated by their love of and respect for the law (as well as by a basic sense of humanity) to try to end the abuses. It would be an amazing book to use in a law school legal ethics class.
I highly recommend this book. It is disturbing, depressing, and damning, and you need to read it.
6 of 7 customers found the following review helpful:
This book is the definitive treatment so far of Bush lawlessness, 2008-07-30
I'm in agreement with most of the 5 star commenters on Jane Mayer's new book--it is thoroughly-researched, copiously end-noted, and written in the lucid, compelling style that Mrs. Mayer is known for. I also note that the three one star commenters' views are incomprehensible to me--commenter Naz states that the book is "far too dry"--he couldn't have read the book and said that. Of the other two, K McMurray is of the view popular in totalitarian states that torture is fine for suspected terrorists, and James Felix also has no problem with torturing suspected terrorists, and in addition wants us to understand that anyone who opposes this medieval view must be a crazed lefty propagandist. The only response to McMurray and Felix is, if you think torture is a worthy weapon in the war on terror, then yes, you probably will find the tone of the book objectionable, though you will still learn much about how easily a determined Executive branch can circumvent the so called checks and balances of our Constitutional system.
What Mrs. Mayer has done is pull together the known facts of the Bush policy toward treatment of detainees since 9/11, and ferreted out many shocking new ones from Administration insiders at many levels within the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA and the Armed Services. The picture that emerges is a stunning indictment, not just of the Bush Administration, but of the twisted form of Government that has emerged under Bush. Mayer's sympathies are clear, but she is not a polemicist--like an able prosecutor, she lays out fact after fact after damning fact and lets them speak for themselves. I found myself at many points in the book in jaw-dropping amazement, wondering how can THAT have possibly happened? In this day and age?
One especially excruciating example: in Chapter 9 "The Memo", Mayer describes the path that led to Assistant Attorney General John Yoo's operative Justice Dept. Office of Legal Counsel memorandum of law, in which Yoo declares that the President has the authority to "gouge out eyes", or use "scalding water" or "caustic acid" on human beings, among other medieval torture methods, if the President thought it necessary to protect the nation. This evidently was told to Mayer by former General Counsel of the Navy, Alberto J. Mora, who read the memorandum, which has so far not been publicly released by the Justice Department. How could this kind of twisted and perverse legal conclusion have become the law of the land? For all we know, George W. Bush still may think this is the law of the land. Though it shocked the conscience of Mora and most of the senior JAG (legal) officers of the armed services, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, Veep Dick Cheney and of course Bush, were all nonetheless perfectly comfortable with such a perverse "policy" and so it became the operative legal underpinning of the Administration's "enhanced" prisoner interrogation procedures. John Yoo, by the way, a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, is now a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, presumably passing on his repulsive notions about presidential prerogatives to a new generation of young lawyers.
I don't think most Americans are aware of how over the edge the Bush zealots have gone and perhaps this book may force readers to confront the thick layer of perversion and lawlessness that now enshrouds the Executive branch of our government. It is truly an ugly, frightening tale, but if it can arouse outrage in people who can do something about it, then Mayer has done a great service to our nation. We'll see.
56 of 65 customers found the following review helpful:
l'etat, c'est moi!, 2008-07-28
This is a singularly depressing work, and the worst of the worst is when a study concluded that only 8% of the Guantanamo detainees were alleged to have any association with Al Qaeda. Only 5% were captured by US forces (the other 95% by Pakistanis and bounty hunters, etc, mostly for hefty fees). 55% were not implicated in any hostile act against the US, and for many of the rest, "hostile acts" included fleeing US bombs. The book describes how Bellinger took the study to the White House--and was confronted by Addington and Gonzales. Addington told Bellinger that there would be no discussion of the matter: President Bush had decided that every single one of the detainees was an enemy combatant and that was the final word.
The Magna Carta bound kings to follow certain legal procedures and is the basis for governance in English and American jurisprudence: habeas corpus and other legal matters were codified. It's the forerunner of the US Constitution. It has remained in force in England from 1215 to the present day and was the basis for the US (Louisiana state law is founded on the Napoleonic Code) until 2001. Much of our legal system is intact, but in 2001 the Bush Administration decided that the law was whatever the President and his advisors said it was. Habeas corpus delenda est. The Dark Side shows that the law, when inconvenient, was routinely broken. Normal chains of authority were destroyed, legal decisions were made by people who were not lawyers--such as Cheney--and people who wanted the President to have--literally--life and death firmly in his hands, unrestrained. The Geneva Convention's restrictions on torture was, in Gonzales' words, "quaint". Objections by Powell and legal experts (inside the military and out), were ignored: the objectors were considered not to be team players and "soft on terrorism". Euphemisms and weasel words such as "robust interrogations" became the norm. The Dark Side notes that the TV series "24" in which the hero tortures people to prevent terrorist acts was immensely popular with the CIA, and the Guantanamo forces. I've never seen it myself--but I wonder if Jack Bauer ever makes mistakes? Does he torture innocents who don't have any information? As Dark Side and other sources make abundantly clear, the vast majority of information you get during torture is useless.
As the book shows, there are plenty of those who say "We must treat terror suspects harshly. Why should they have any legal rights?" The Dark Side recounts many tales of where mistakes were made, and people without any connection to terrorism were arrested, tortured (or robustly interrogated if you prefer), rendered to Egypt, Syria, etc. (Clive Smith's The Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side focusses on one such poor soul at Guantanamo.) The book shows that for altogether too many of these people, the harsh treatment continued long after it became readily apparent that they had no connection to terrorists. Under Stalin, being a suspect was a crime in and by itself--you had no legal rights at all. Plus la change, plus la meme chose, as they say. The final sentence in the book is a quote from Phillip Zelikow speaking of the internment of Japanse-Americans in WW II: "Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools".
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