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The war on terrorism has had devastating social and
political costs, and it is the United States government — not foreign
enemies — that has caused much of the damage, says investigative
journalist Jane Mayer.
Mayer's new book is The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on
Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. In it, The New Yorker
writer contends that the policy implemented after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks promoted an agenda that sought to increase presidential power.
Further, many of the Bush administration's strategy decisions violated
the Constitution and impeded the pursuit of terrorists.
The Dark Side also exposes a secret report issued by the International
Committee of the Red Cross that described some CIA interrogation
techniques as torture, which allows the possibility of criminal
prosecution of Bush officials.
At The New Yorker, Mayer has written on the outsourcing of torture, the
treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and the search for Osama bin Laden.
Before joining The New Yorker's Washington staff in 1995, Mayer wrote
for The Wall Street Journal, where she became the newspaper's first
female White House correspondent in 1984. Mayer has also written for
publications such as The Washington Post, Time magazine and The American
Prospect.
Mayer also co-authored the books Strange Justice: The Selling of
Clarence Thomas, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for
nonfiction, and Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988.
Books
Excerpt: 'The Dark Side'
by Jane Mayer
'The Dark Side'
The Dark Side
By Jane Mayer
Chapter 1: Panic
America should go "not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. . . .
She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the
ruler of her own spirit."
—John Quincy Adams, An Address . . . Celebrating the Anniversary of
Independence, at the City of Washington on the Fourth of July 1821
If anyone in America should have been prepared to respond to the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it ought to have been Vice
President Dick Cheney. For decades before the planes hit the Pentagon
and World Trade Center, Cheney had been secretly practicing for
doomsday.
During the 1980s, while serving as a Republican congressman from Wyoming
and a rising power in the conservative leadership in Congress, Cheney
secretly participated in one of the most highly classified, top-secret
programs of the Reagan Administration, a simulation of survival
scenarios designed to ensure the smooth continuity of the U.S.
government in the event of all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Every year, usually during congressional recesses, Cheney would
disappear in the dead of the night. He left without explanation to his
wife, Lynne Vincent Cheney, who was given merely a phone number where he
could be reached in the event of emergency. Along with some four or five
dozen federal officials, Cheney would pretend for several weeks to be
chief of staff to a designated substitute "president," bivouacked in
some remote location in the United States.
As James Mann reveals in The Vulcans, his rich intellectual history of
the neoconservative brain trust that has guided Bush foreign policy, the
exercise tried to re-create some of the anticipated hardships of
surviving a nuclear holocaust. Accommodations were Spartan and cuisine
was barely adequate. Civilian communications systems were presumed
destroyed. The challenge was to ensure civil order and control over the
military in the event that the elected president and vice president, and
much of the executive branch, were decimated. The Constitution, of
course, spells out the line of succession. If the president and vice
president are indisposed, then power passes first to the Speaker of the
House, and next to the president pro tempore of the Senate. But in a
secret executive order, President Reagan, who was deeply concerned about
the Soviet threat, amended the process for speed and clarity. The secret
order established a means of re-creating the executive branch without
informing Congress that it had been sidestepped, or asking for
legislation that would have made the new "continuity-of-government" plan
legally legitimate. Cheney, a proponent of expansive presidential
powers, was evidently unperturbed by this oversight.
Mann and others have suggested that these doomsday drills were a dress
rehearsal for Cheney's calm, commanding performance on 9/11. It was not
the first time he had stared into the abyss. One eyewitness, who kept a
diary, said that inside the Presidential Emergency Operations Command,
or PEOC, a hardened command center several hundred feet under the
by-then-evacuated White House, Cheney never broke a sweat as he juggled
orders to shoot down any additional incoming hijacked planes,
coordinated efforts with other cabinet members, most particularly the
Directors of the FBI and CIA, and resolved issues such as how to avoid
charges of taking hostage two visiting foreign heads of state, from
Australia and Lithuania, after all air traffic had been shut down.
Six weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, the Bush
Administration had successfully restored calm, reassured the financial
markets, and rallied the sympathies and support of much of the world.
But once again the White House was plunged into a state of controlled
panic.
* * * * *
On October 17, 2001, a white powder that had been sent through the U.S.
mail to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office in the Capitol was
positively identified. Scientific analysis showed it to be an unusually
difficult to obtain and lethally potent form of the deadly bacterial
poison anthrax. This news followed less than ten days after the death in
Florida of a victim in another mysterious anthrax attack. The anthrax
spores in the letter to Daschle were so professionally refined, the
Central Intelligence Agency believed the powder must have been sent by
an experienced terrorist organization, most probably Al Qaeda, as a
sequel to the group's September 11 attacks. During a meeting of the
White House's National Security Council that day, Cheney, who was
sitting in for the President because Bush was traveling abroad, urged
everyone to keep this inflammatory speculation secret.
At the time, no one, not even America's best-informed national security
leaders, really knew anything for sure about what sorts of threats
loomed, or from where. The only certainty shared by virtually the entire
American intelligence community in the fall of 2001 was that a second
wave of even more devastating terrorist attacks on America was imminent.
In preparation, the CIA had compiled a list of likely targets ranging
from movie studios—whose heads were warned by the Bush Administration to
take precautions—to sports arenas and corporate headquarters. Topping
the list was the White House.
The next day, the worst of these fears seemed realized. On October 18,
2001, an alarm in the White House went off. Chillingly, the warning
signal wasn't a simple fire alarm triggered by the detection of smoke.
It was a sensitive, specialized sensor, designed to alert anyone in the
vicinity that the air they were breathing had been contaminated by
potentially lethal radioactive, chemical, or biological agents. Everyone
who had entered the Situation Room that day was believed to have been
exposed, and that included Cheney. "They thought there had been a nerve
attack," a former administration official, who was sworn to secrecy
about it, later confided. "It was really, really scary. They thought
that Cheney was already lethally infected." Facing the possibility of
his own death, the Vice President nonetheless calmly reported the
emergency to the rest of the National Security Council.
Members of the National Security Council were all too well aware of the
seriousness of the peril they were facing. At Cheney's urging, they had
received a harrowing briefing just a few weeks earlier about the
possibility of biological attack. His attention had been drawn to the
subject by a war game called Dark Winter conducted in the summer before
that simulated the effects of an outbreak of smallpox in America. After
the September 11 attacks, Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, screened a video of the Dark Winter exercise for Cheney, showing
that the United States was virtually defenseless against smallpox or any
other biological attack. Cheney in particular was so stricken by the
potential for attack that he insisted that the rest of the National
Security Council undergo a gruesome briefing on it on September 20,
2001. When the White House sensor registered the presence of such
poisons less than a month later, many, including Cheney, believed a
nightmare was unfolding. "It was a really nerve-jangling time," the
former official said.
In time, the Situation Room alarm turned out to be false. But on October
22, the Secret Service reported that it had found what it believed to be
additional anthrax traces on an automated letter-opening device used on
White House mail. By then, Cheney had convinced the President to support
a $1.6 billion bioterrorism-preparedness program. Cheney argued that
every citizen in the country should be vaccinated against smallpox.
During the ten days after the Vice President's scare, threats of mortal
attack were nonetheless so frequent, and so terrifying, that on October
29 Cheney quietly insisted upon absenting himself from the White House
to what was described as "a secure, undisclosed location"— one of
several Cold War–era nuclear-hardened subterranean bunkers built during
the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, the nearest of which were
located hundreds of feet below bedrock in places such as Mount Weather,
in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, and along the Maryland-Pennsylvania
border not far from Camp David.
In a subterranean bunker crammed with communications equipment and
government-issue metal desks, Cheney and other rotating cabinet members
took turns occupying what was archly referred to as "The Commander in
Chief's Suite."
Officials who worked in the White House and other sensitive posts with
access to raw intelligence files during the fall of 2001 say it is
nearly impossible to exaggerate the sense of mortal and existential
danger that dominated the thinking of the upper rungs of the Bush
Administration during those months.
"They thought they were going to get hit again. They convinced
themselves that they were facing a ticking time bomb," recalled Roger
Cressey, who then headed what was known as the Terrorist Threats
Sub-Group of the National Security Council.
Counterterrorism experts knew that Al Qaeda's members had in the recent
past made efforts to obtain nuclear and other horrific weapons of mass
destruction in order to commit murder on an even greater scale. Unlike
earlier enemies of America, they targeted innocent civilians and fought
clandestinely with inhuman disregard for life. Other foes had been
better organized and more powerful, but none had struck as great a blow
behind the lines in America, nor spread a greater sense of vulnerability
in the population. Under the circumstances, Cressey admitted, "I firmly
expected to get hit again too. It seemed highly probable."
* * * * *
The sense of fear within the White House was understandable, but it was
intensified by what was supposed to be a valuable new intelligence tool
introduced after September 11, what came to be known as the "Top Secret
Codeword/Threat Matrix." Having underestimated Al Qaeda before the
attacks, Bush and Cheney took aggressive steps to ensure that they would
never get similarly blindsided again. In the days immediately after the
attacks, he and Cheney demanded to see all available raw intelligence
reports concerning additional possible threats to America on a daily
basis. Cheney had long been a skeptic about the CIA's skills, and was
particularly insistent on reviewing the data himself. "The mistake,"
Cressey concluded later, "was not to have proper analysis of the
intelligence before giving it to the President. There was no filter.
Most of it was garbage. None of it had been corroborated or screened.
But it went directly to the President and his advisers, who are not
intelligence experts. That's when mistakes got made." Others who saw the
same intelligence reports found the experience mind-altering. It was
"like being stuck in a room listening to Led Zeppelin music," said Jim
Baker, former head of the Counsel in the Department of Justice's Office
of Intelligence Policy and Review. Readers suffered "sensory overload"
and became "paranoid." Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey
believed that the cumulative effect turned national security concerns
into "an obsession."
A sense of constant danger followed Cheney everywhere. When he commuted
to his White House office from the vice presidential residence, he was
chauffeured in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil
possible attackers. On the backseat behind Cheney rested a duffel bag
stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit. Rarely did he
travel without a medical doctor in tow.
Cheney managed to make light of these macabre arrangements, joking about
evading "The Jackal" by varying his routines, and teasing an old friend
that, alas, he had too little survival equipment to be able to share
his. Some of those around Cheney wondered if the attacks, perhaps in
combination with his medical problems, had exacerbated his natural
pessimism. An old family friend found him changed after September 11,
"more steely, as if he was preoccupied by terrible things he couldn't
talk about." Brent Scowcroft, a lifelong acquaintance, told The New
Yorker, "I don't know him anymore." In the view of some detractors, such
as Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to former Secretary of State
Colin Powell, "Cheney was traumatized by 9/11. The poor guy became
paranoid."
* * * * *
From the start of the administration, Cheney had confidently assumed the
national security portfolio for a president with virtually no experience
in the area. But Al Qaeda's attacks exposed a gaping shortcoming in the
Vice President's thinking. The Soviet Union, whose threat had
preoccupied Cheney and other doomsday planners in the 1980s, was gone.
In its place another, more intangible danger had arisen. No one in the
Bush Administration, including Cheney, had had the foresight or
imagination to see Bin Laden's plot unfolding.
With the notable exception of Richard Clarke, the long-serving head of
counterterrorism at the National Security Council, and a few
counterterrorism experts at the CIA and FBI, terrorism hadn't ranked
anywhere near the top of the new administration's national security
concerns. Later, a number of top officials, including CIA Director
George Tenet, would offer evidence that they had been keenly focused on
the threat from Bin Laden before the attacks. If so, none succeeded in
getting the President and Vice President's attention.
When Al Qaeda struck, Cheney and the other hardliners who had spent
decades militating for a more martial and aggressive foreign policy were
caught off guard. Frozen in a Cold War–era mind-set, they overlooked
threats posed not by great armed nation-states, but by small, lithe
rogue groups waging "asymmetric" warfare.
The Bush White House could have demanded an instant review of how they
had been so badly surprised, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did after the
attack on Pearl Harbor, and the results would not have been flattering.
But instead of trying to learn from what had essentially been a colossal
bureaucratic failure, combined with inattention and a lack of political
will at the top, the Bush White House deferred the focus elsewhere.
The lesson for Bush and Cheney was that terrorists had struck at the
United States because they saw the country as soft. Bush worried that
the nation was too "materialistic, hedonistic," and that Bin Laden
"didn't feel threatened" by it. Confronted with a new enemy and their
own intelligence failure, he and Cheney turned to some familiar
conservative nostrums that had preoccupied the far right wing of the
Republican Party since the Watergate era. There was too much
international law, too many civil liberties, too many constraints on the
President's war powers, too many rights for defendants, and too many
rules against lethal covert actions. There was also too much openness
and too much meddling by Congress and the press.
Cheney in particular had been chafing against the post-Watergate curbs
that had been imposed on the president's powers since the mid-1970s,
when he had served as Gerald Ford's chief of staff. As Vice President,
Cheney had already begun to strengthen the power of the presidency by
aggressively asserting executive privilege, most notably on his
secrecy-enshrouded energy task force. He'd told Bush, who later repeated
the line, that if nothing else they must leave the office stronger than
they found it. Now Cheney saw the terrorist threat in such catastrophic
terms that his end, saving America from possible extinction, justified
virtually any means. As Wilkerson, Powell's former Chief of Staff who
went on to teach National Security Affairs at George Washington
University, put it, "He had a single-minded objective in black and
white, that American security was paramount to everything else. He
thought that perfect security was achievable. I can't fault the man for
wanting to keep America safe. But he was willing to corrupt the whole
country to save it."
* * * * *
Whether the White House fears were rational will long be debated. But it
was in this feverish atmosphere that a new system of law was devised to
vanquish what Bush described as a new kind of enemy in "a war unlike any
other."
Beginning almost immediately after September 11, 2001, Cheney saw to it
that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country,
working in secret in the White House and the United States Department of
Justice, came up with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the
government's power in waging war on terror.
As part of that process, for the first time in its history, the United
States sanctioned government officials to physically and psychologically
torment U.S.-held captives, making torture the official law of the land
in all but name.
The lawyers also authorized other previously illegal practices,
including the secret capture and indefinite detention of suspects
without charges. Simply by designating the suspects "enemy combatants,"
the President could suspend the ancient writ of habeas corpus that
guarantees a person the right to challenge his imprisonment in front of
a fair and independent authority. Once in U.S. custody, the President's
lawyers said, these suspects could be held incommunicado, hidden from
their families and international monitors such as the Red Cross, and
subjected to unending abuse, so long as it didn't meet the lawyers' own
definition of torture. And they could be held for the duration of the
war against terrorism, a struggle in which victory had never been
clearly defined.
Few would argue against safeguarding the nation. But in the judgment of
at least one of the country's most distinguished presidential scholars,
the legal steps taken by the Bush Administration in its war against
terrorism were a quantum leap beyond earlier blots on the country's
history and traditions: more significant than John Adams's Alien and
Sedition Acts, than Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the
Civil War, than the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent during
World War II. Collectively, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued, the Bush
Administration's extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most
dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule of law in
American history.
Over a lunch at a genteel Upper East Side French restaurant in Manhattan
in 2006, the year before he died, Schlesinger, a liberal Democrat but
also an admirer of muscular foreign policy, chose his words slowly and
carefully. When asked what he thought of President Bush's policy on
torture, he peered over his glasses and paused. Schlesinger's The
Imperial Presidency had described Richard Nixon as pushing the outer
limits of abuse of presidential power. Later, his book The Cycles of
American History had placed these excesses in a continuum of pendulum
swings. With his trademark bow tie askew, Schlesinger considered, and
finally said, "No position taken has done more damage to the American
reputation in the world—ever."
While there was nothing new about torture, its authorization by Bush
Administration lawyers represented a dramatic break with the past. As
early as the Revolutionary War, General George Washington vowed that,
unlike the British, who tortured enemy captives, this new country in the
New World would distinguish itself by its humanity. In fighting to
liberate the world from Communism, Fascism, and Nazism, and working to
ameliorate global ignorance and poverty, America had done more than any
nation on earth to abolish torture and other violations of human rights.
Yet, almost precisely on the sixtieth anniversary of the famous war
crimes tribunal's judgment in Nuremberg, which established what seemed
like an immutable principle, that legalisms and technicalities could not
substitute for individual moral choice and conscience, America became
the first nation ever to authorize violations of the Geneva Conventions.
These international treaties, many of which were hammered out by
American lawyers in the wake of the harrowing Nazi atrocities of World
War II, set an absolute, minimum baseline for the humane treatment of
all categories of prisoners taken in almost all manner of international
conflicts. Rather than lining prisoners up in front of ditches and
executing them, or exterminating them in gas chambers, or subjecting
them to grueling physical hardships, all enemy prisoners—even spies and
saboteurs—were from then on to be accorded some basic value simply
because they were human. America had long played a special role as the
world's most ardent champion of these fundamental rights; it was not
just a signatory but also the custodian of the Geneva Conventions, the
original signed copies of which resided in a vault at the State
Department.
Any fair telling of how America came to sacrifice so many cherished
values in its fight against terrorism has to acknowledge that the enemy
that the Bush Administration faced on September 11, and which the
country faces still, is both real and terrifying. Often, those in power
have felt they simply had no good choices. But this country has in the
past faced other mortal enemies, equally if not more threatening,
without endangering its moral authority by resorting to state-sanctioned
torture. Other democratic nations, meanwhile, have grappled with similar
if not greater threats from terrorism without undercutting their values
and laws.
But to understand the Bush Administration's self-destructive response to
September 11, one has to look particularly to Cheney, the doomsday
expert and unapologetic advocate of expanding presidential power.
Appearing on Meet the Press on the first Sunday after the attacks,
Cheney gave a memorable description of how the administration viewed the
continuing threat and how it planned to respond.
"We'll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will," Cheney
explained in his characteristically quiet and reassuring voice. "We've
got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of
what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any
discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our
intelligence agencies—if we are going to be successful. That's the world
these folks operate in. And, uh, so it's going to be vital for us to use
any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objectives."
Soon afterward, Cheney disappeared from public view. But his influence
had already begun to shape all that followed.
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