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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The Dark
Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American
Ideals by Jane Mayer |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Decisions The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer presents a new book
titled, The
Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on
American Ideals, filled with 400 pages of description and perspective of
the decisions made by the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11. Mayer
lays out details of the actions by individuals that will chill most readers
in that American policies have devolved into practices that are closer to
those of a rogue state than to the principles of our democracy. pp. 110-112: Almost from the start, the Bush
Administration's aggressive use of "extraordinary renditions"
stirred fierce internal resistance, much of it coming from surprising
quarters not just human rights activists but rather hard-line law-and-order
stalwarts in the criminal justice system with years of experience fighting
terrorism. Their concerns were as much practical as ideological. Firsthand
experience in interrogation led most to doubt the effectiveness of physical
coercion as a means of extracting reliable information. They also warned the
Bush Administration that once it took prisoners outside the realm of the
law, it would have trouble bringing them back in. By holding detainees
indefinitely, without counsel, without charges of wrongdoing, and under
circumstances that could, in legal parlance, "shock the conscience"
of a court, the administration, they warned, would jeopardize its chances of
convicting hundreds of suspected terrorists, or even of using them as
witnesses in almost any court in the world. "It's a big problem,"
said Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general and a member
of the 9/11 Commission. "In criminal justice, you either prosecute the
suspects or let them go. But if you've treated them in ways that won't allow
you to prosecute them you're in this no-man's-land. What do you do with these
people?" The
criminal prosecution of terrorist suspects, of course, was not a priority for
the Bush Administration in the immediate aftermath of September 11. But even
some who had led the fight against Al Qaeda in the administration worried
about the unintended consequences of the White House's radical legal
measures. Surprisingly, among these critics was Michael Scheuer, the
Jeremiah-like former head of the Bin Laden Unit at the CIA who helped
establish the practice of rendition in the first place. "It
was begun in desperation," he later explained. During the 1990s, under
the Clinton Administration, the stated mission of his job had been to
"detect, disrupt, and dismantle" terrorist operations. His unit
spent much of 1996
studying how Al Qaeda operated; by the next year, Scheuer said,
they had determined the need to try to capture Bin Laden and his associates.
The problem, in his view, was that Clinton's reluctance to authorize lethal
operations against Bin Laden put the CIA in a bind. He recalled, "We
went to the White House and they said, ‘Do it.’ He added that
Richard Clarke, who was in charge of counterterrorism for the National
Security Council at the time, offered no advice. "He told me, 'Figure it
out by yourselves,"' Scheuer said. (Clarke did not respond to a request
for comment about Scheuer.) Scheuer sought the counsel of Mary Jo White,
then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who, along with
a small group of FBI agents in New York, was pursuing the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing case. In 1998, White's team obtained an indictment against
Bin Laden authorizing U.S. agents to bring him and his associates to the
United States to stand trial. This formally established that Bin Laden was a
wanted fugitive who could be legally rendered to stand trial in the United
States. From the start, though, the CIA was wary of granting terrorism
suspects the due process afforded by American law. The agency did not want to
divulge secrets about its intelligence sources and methods, and American
courts demanded transparency. Even establishing the chain of custody of key
evidence—such as a laptop computer—could easily pose a significant problem:
foreign governments, fearing retaliation from their Muslim populations,
might refuse to testify
in U.S. courts about how they had obtained the evidence, for fear
of having their secret cooperation exposed. The provenance of a laptop
computer had in fact been the center of an extraordinarily bitter tussle
between the CIA and the FBI. Filled with details of Al Qaeda's structure, it
was considered the Rosetta Stone of counterterrorism in the pre-9/1 1 period.
But the CIA had refused to share it with the FBI for months, because of the
Agency's fears that the computer's foreign sourcing would leak out. The CIA also felt that other
agencies sometimes stood in its way. In 1996, for example, the State
Department stymied a joint effort by the CIA and the FBI to question one of Bin
Laden's cousins in America because he had a diplomatic passport, which
protects the holder from U.S. law enforcement. An FBI agent arrived in the
Falls Church, Virginia, office of the cousin, Abdullah Mohammed Bin Laden, demanding
to question him. But he suavely said that he would be "more than
happy" to talk, except for this: he produced a diplomatic passport. He
was not a diplomat, he was working for a suspicious nongovernmental
organization. But the Saudi government had accredited him to the embassy as
an "attache." Describing the CIA's frustration, Scheuer said,
"We were turning into voyeurs. We knew where these people were, but we
couldn't capture them." And even if they could, he noted, "we had
nowhere to take them." The Agency realized that "we had to come up
with a third party." The obvious choice, Scheuer
said, was Egypt. The largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel,
Egypt was a key strategic ally, and its secret police force, the Mukhabarat,
had a reputation for brutality. Egypt had been frequently cited by the State
Department for torture of prisoners. According to a 2002 report, detainees
were "stripped and blindfolded; suspended from a ceiling or doorframe
with feet just touching the floor; beaten with fists, whips, metal rods, or
other objects; subjected to electrical shocks; and doused with cold water
[and] sexually assaulted." Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's leader, who came to office
in 1981 after President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamist extremists,
was determined to crack down on terrorism. His prime political enemies were
radical Islamists, hundreds of whom had fled the country and joined Al Qaeda.
Among this radical Islamic diaspora was Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Cairo
physician who after having been brutally tortured in Egyptian prisons went on
to Afghanistan, where he eventually became Bin Laden's top deputy. Most
readers are likely to be shocked and disturbed by The Dark
Side. Knowing that, read The Dark
Side anyway. Steve
Hopkins, November 20, 2008 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Dark Side.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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