Louis Bayard reviews "The Dark Side," by Jane Mayer Salon Books

Bush in the Oval Labour at the Ghastly House. The middle of summer 15, 2008 We can't claim we weren't warned. The ideal fundamental Sunday after the 9 11 attacks, Vise Head of the state Dick Cheney descended affection a cloud on "Meet the Press" to outline the Bush administration's response.

We'll keep to assignment category of the dun side, whether you will. We've got to spend date in the shadows in the intelligence world. A parcel of what needs to be done here testament chalk up to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies -- provided we are going to be successful. That's the earth these folks handle in.

And, uh, so it's going to be fundamental for us to cause any method at our disposal basically, to conclude our objectives." Enclosing the nation, one presumes, numbed heads were nodding in approval. Whatever it takes to invest in those bastards. The prerrogative globe of our Faustian bargain would not alter to undarkened until later, and possibly it needed a reporter as steely and scansorial as Jane Mayer to administer us the unabridged picture.

The Blackish Side" is approximately how the hostilities on terrorism became "a strike on American ideals," and Mayer gives this apologue all the weight and sorrow it deserves. Assorted books influence tagged with the chitchat "essential"; hers in fact is. Drink in this story? Thanks for your support.

Above all, it underscores one of the least remarked aspects of our nation's counterterrorist policy: the measure to which it has been driven not by spies or generals however by pasty men in ties.

The inaugural corporeality we do," goes that crowd-pleasing border from Shakespeare's "Henry VI," "let's chill all the lawyers." Readers of "The Dusk Side" might be moved to add: "Before they annihilate you."

Nearly from the mo America was attacked, Mayer writes, Cheney "saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the Caucasian Residence and the United States Branch of Justice, came up with legal justifications for a comprehensive expansion of the government's potentiality in waging war conflict on terror. As tool of that process, for the first off generation in history, the United States sanctioned authority officials to physically and psychologically torment U.S.-

This "extralegal counterterrorism program," contends Mayer, "presented the most dramatic, sustained, and basic protest to the law of constitution in American history." We already know, of course, that wars bestow presidents parcel of extension for overreaching.

Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War; FDR, during Creation Cold war II, interned hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans. What separates the Bush Clear Castle from its forebears, suggests Mayer, was that its "doctrine of presidential prerogative" admitted no claiming and operated, as yet as it could, outside of sight.

And even so even of it happened on our watch. Nov. 13, 2001: The Bloodless Den proclaimed a kingdom of "extraordinary emergency" and announced plans to crack "enemy combatants" before military commissions. Jan. These were not semantic distinctions because, by then, the U.S. Yoo's note into practice: a prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that promised interrogators "total isolation, complete secrecy, and total control." Nevertheless who prerrogative was growth interrogated?

That figure was sequential amended by an FBI counterterrorism expert, who argued that no added than 50 of the detainees were expenditure holding. These findings directly contradicted governance assertions that Guantánamo harboured solitary "the worst of the worst."

Not surprisingly, the control refused to column the detainees' cases, with the backwash that multiplied of them are much there, age after their initial incarceration -- and all the more without legal recourse due to they obtain never been charged with a crime. Persist the Guantánamo debacle lies a determined question: Cook suspected terrorists deserve the equivalent rights as you and I?

The reinstate for Cheney and his lawyers was an unequivocal no. And with that no, a total star of fine blossomed forth. Bush authority officials could at once shut out terror suspects in clandestine prisons called "black sites."

They could gradient up the little-used experience of "extraordinary rendition," allowing the CIA to seize dozens of suspects and extradite them to countries -- notably Egypt -- where torture could be practised with more advantageous impunity. President Bush, not fairly greedy the appearance problem, hoped to announce a running register of these kidnappings, so Americans could enjoy score from home.

CIA employer George Tenet talked him elsewhere of it. The Bush government could besides co-opt a secret programme called Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE). Originally designed to train U.S. SERE techniques were initially approved lone for al-Qaida logistics manager Abu Zubayda, on the other hand within months, they had migrated to Guantánamo, where the U.S.

Mayer writes, began "subjecting prisoners to treatment that would hog been unimaginable, and prosecutable, before Sept 11" -- hooding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, extremes of temperature, and a in clover array of ofttimes sexual humiliations.