BOOK REVIEW The ashes of American morality The Dark Side by Jane Mayer
Reviewed by Alexander Casella
Has the George W Bush administration's "war on terror" been turned into a war
on America's ideals of justice and the respect of basic human rights? For
author Jane Mayer the answer is an unqualified yes.
Indeed, the author makes a convincing case to the effect that the cumulative
legislation and executive decision taken by Washington's governing
establishment have seriously eroded some of the basic protections enjoyed by
the American citizen. Increased surveillance, wiretapping and domestic spying
have increasingly resulted from executive decisions rather than from
the court system thus giving the government an unprecedented, and often
uncontrolled leeway to interfere with the daily activities of the average
American.
More seriously, the author documents cases in which American citizens, outside
the United States have been subjected to detention and interrogation by their
own government while being denied any due process. The deduction drawn by the
author is that the United States under the Bush administration has seen many of
its core values as defined by the constitution systematically eroded to the
point of endangering the very principal of government on which the American
society is allegedly based.
To substantiate this claim the author draws both on the chain of events that
led to the September 11 attack and to its aftermath.
The depiction that the author gives of the buildup to September 11 and on the
total unpreparedness to deal with an attack that was looming on the horizon is
convincing. September 11 was not an isolated event but rather the last stage of
a series of attacks that included the bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen
and the attack on the US Embassy in Nairobi. The evidence gathered by the
author makes it clear that the attack could certainly have been foreseen and
perhaps even thwarted had the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI)done their job.
That they failed to do so was due neither to a lack of intelligence nor to
technical shortcomings. While the writing was on the wall, there was no one to
read it and even more to draw the right conclusions. Granted, isolated figures
both within the FBI and the CIA were aware of the existence of Bin Laden and of
the threat he represented but the political mindset be it the Clinton or the
subsequent Bush administration proved simply incapable of conceptually foresee
the unexpected. This conjectural deficiency extended to the operational
frontlines.
On August 16, 2001, the FBI arrested a French citizen of Moroccan descent,
Zacarias Moussaoui, who while attending flight school in Minnesota insisted on
being taught only how to fly an aircraft and not how to take off and land.
However, neither the FBI nor the CIA mustered the necessary clearances to open
Moussaoui's hard drive and without them no one was willing to face the risk of
doing so. Had the hard disk been accesses it is well possible that at least
part of the September 11 attack could have been pre-empted.
This lack of mental adjustment to the simple possibility that the US might one
day be the target of a terrorist attack probably explains in part why America
reacted as it did to what objectively was barely a pinprick of no substantive
consequence. While Mayer does not address this issue, the damage done by the
September 11 attack was essentially psychological. The US that day lost four
civilian aircraft, had two major buildings destroyed and some others partially
damaged for a total loss of some 3,000 civilians. Neither the American state as
such, the security of the nation or the functioning of the economy was ever put
in danger.
In contrast, there were some 30,000 dead in one morning when the Germans bombed
the defenseless city of Amsterdam. While the cosmetics of the attack played a
major role in amplifying its impact on American society, if one reads through
the lines of Mayer's book it is clear that America's reaction - not to say
over-reaction - to the September 11 attack was inversely proportional to the
nation's psychological unpreparedness to the assault.
What emerges is an American society that is prone to operate in a climate of
extremes. Slow, painstaking, cautious undertakings, day after day and year
after year are not part of the American way of doing thing things. Complacency
and unpreparedness followed by overreaction are, hence the "war on terror", the
world's most powerful nation mobilized to come to terms with a small terrorist
group which at the cost of 19 dead and half a million dollars has succeed in
inflicting on America a psychological and institutional trauma unequalled since
Vietnam.
The core of Mayer's book is a dissection of the Bush administration reaction to
the attack, hence the so-called "war on terror"; a war which she describes in
all its sordid details. Rendition, the secret transporting of suspects to
countries where they can be held in indefinite detention and submitted to
interrogation with no restriction; waterboarding, consisting basically of
drowning a suspect but only to the point in which he can be revived for further
questioning; administrative detention by administrative decree outside the
framework of any legal restrictions.
The description she gives of this process is compelling and so are some of the
questions she raises, the main one being whether torture actually works. In her
view, it is a risky undertaking with the victim prone to say anything he
believes his tormentors want to hear in order to alleviate the pain. More to
the point, with many of al-Qaeda moved by faith rather than gain, a more
differentiated approach might work where brute force will not. One of the cases
she refers to is the one of Al Libi, one of al-Qaeda's main commanders.
Captured by the Pakistanis and handed over to the FBI who interrogated him at
Bagram air base in Afghanistan, he provided invaluable intelligence after his
American interrogator, Russell Fincher, himself a devote Christian succeeded in
establishing a personal rapport with him. All came to an end when the CIA
literally kidnapped Al Libi from the FBI and on which he disappeared never to
be heard again.
If Jane Mayer's description of how the Bush administration created a new
ill-defined setting for its "war on terror" outside any conventional legal
norms, impervious to outside scrutiny and subject to no oversight is
convincing, the perspective in which she views it is less so. Had she delved a
bit deeper in America's recent past she would have found not so much an
aberration but a trend.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, in 1941, by executive order 9066 some 110,000
Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast of the US, 62% of whom were
actually American citizens, were put in detention camps for the duration of the
war. It was only in 1988 that congress passed a resolution apologizing for the
outrage that it recognized as resulting of "Race prejudice and hysteria".
In Vietnam, torture and arbitrary detention were the rule rather the exception.
In 1967, a three-man study team, which included Craig Johnstone, currently UN
Deputy High |commission for Refugees, undertook an exhaustive study which
included references to "interrogation methods". While most of the torturing was
done by the South Vietnamese police, or by the so-called PRU teams working
directly for the CIA, it was American-funded, supported and endorsed.
And while waterboarding had not yet become part of the current vocabulary,
former Liberation Front justice minister Tang, who, confronted by the excesses
of the Hanoi regime later defected, gave a vivid description of what it felt to
being submitted to it in a Saigon jail.
Mayer is also on weak grounds when she states that in Vietnam - in her view
probably as opposed to the "war on terror" - the "US gave the Vietcong the
protection of the third Geneva Convention". Actually, it was all a sham with
the North Vietnamese, who had signed the Convention, refusing to apply it to
shot down American pilots, who by any stretch of imagination were
unquestionably POW's, and the Americans using a more contorted mechanism which
enabled them to deny its benefits to whichever Vietnamese of their choosing.
The Dark Side is a book to be read but with two caveats. First, whenever
necessity, real or imagined, demanded it, the United States has sidelined the
vaulted principals it invokes so liberally in setting itself aside and above
the other nations of the world.
Second, it is doubtful that the shortcuts that the "war on terror" is taking
with justice, basic human rights and the rule of law will have a direct impact
on the doings of mainstream America. Nor are they liable to erode whatever
moral leadership the US clan laid claim to. That is long since dead and buried.
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on
American Ideals by Jane Mayer. Doubleday July 2008. ISBN:
978-0-385-52639-5 (0-385-52639-3). Price US$27.50, 400 pages.
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More seriously, the author documents cases in which American citizens, outside
the United States have been subjected to detention and interrogation by their
own government while being denied any due process. The deduction drawn by the
author is that the United States under the Bush administration has seen many of
its core values as defined by the constitution systematically eroded to the
point of endangering the very principal of government on which the American
society is allegedly based.
