A War of Convenience?

"I spent 23 years in the CIA. I drafted or was involved in many of the government's most senior assessments of the threats facing our country. I have devoted years to understanding and combating the jihadist threat. . . .

"We do not face a global jihadist 'movement' but a series of disparate ethnic and religious conflicts involving Muslim populations, each of which remains fundamentally regional in nature and almost all of which long predate the existence of al-Qaeda.

"Osama bin Laden and his disciples are small men and secondary threats whose shadows are made large by our fears."

(See my July 25, 2007, column, Al Qaeda's Best Publicist.)

Carle writes: "This administration has heard what it has wished to hear, pressured the intelligence community to verify preconceptions, undermined or sidetracked opposing voices, and both instituted and been victim of procedures that guaranteed that the slightest terrorist threat reporting would receive disproportionate weight -- thereby comforting the administration's preconceptions and policy inclinations."

More Reviews Are In

Louis Bayard writes for Salon: "'The Dark Side' is about how the war on terror became 'a war on American ideals,' and Mayer gives this story all the weight and sorrow it deserves. . . .

"Above all, [her book] underscores one of the least remarked aspects of our nation's counterterrorist policy: the degree to which it has been driven not by spies or generals but by pasty men in ties. . . .

"Almost from the moment 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 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 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.' . . .

"[T]he bureaucratic colossus who bestrides this narrow world is David Addington, Cheney's general counsel and a figure of Robespierrian purity. 'Tall and bespectacled,' with 'the look of an irascible sea captain,' Addington jealously guards the paper flow to Cheney and, ultimately, to Bush -- even as he shouts down all opposition. No one stands to his right, and no one challenges him without risk of career suicide. 'We're going to push and push and push,' he tells one colleague, 'until some larger force makes us stop.' . . .

"Cheney and Addington, for their part, got what they had been waiting for half their lives -- the chance to shift power back to the executive branch. By arguing that the president needed free rein to fight al-Qaida, they were able to expand domestic wiretapping, neutralize Congress, and undo many of the restraints that Watergate had put in place three decades earlier. Their ultimate goal, as Rep. Jane Harman put it, was 'restoring the Nixon presidency.'"

Tim Rutten writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Mayer does a superb job of describing how the trauma of 9/11 all but unhinged Bush and Cheney and predisposed the chief executive to embrace the ready-made unitary executive theory of presidential power, which the vice president and his chief aide, David Addington, had come to Washington prepared to promote. In the opinion of the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, 'the Bush administration's extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.'"

Craig Seligman writes for Bloomberg about how Mayer traces the nation's torture policies directly back to Cheney, Addington, former secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo.