The Skimmer
By Andrea Sachs
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals By Jane Mayer (Doubleday; 392 pages)
Five days after 9/11, Dick Cheney famously said that to combat terrorism, "We'll have to work sort of the dark side." Mayer's new book argues that he meant what he said: "For the first time in its history," she writes, "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 author, an investigative reporter for the New Yorker, meticulously demonstrates that the Administration, fully aware that as many as a third of the detainees in Guantanamo may have had no connection to terrorism, still proceeded with medieval treatment that the Red Cross warned was "categorically" torture. Mayer's work (nearly 400 pages of sometimes graphic detail) may defeat the casual reader. But her account of secret prisons, black-hooded renditions in the middle of the night and unexplained detainee deaths is necessary reading for those who would understand how the Bush Administration came to turn away from the light.
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