The Dark SideThe Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals

How the Bush Administration created new laws to fight a new kind of war
How do you wage a global war against a virtually unseen, unconventionally organized enemy? If you're a hardcore neoconservative president or vice president with no legal background and a pro-executive agenda, you engage lawyers to recraft the law, giving the president unprecedented power to combat suspected terrorists while steamrolling the human rights protections of the Geneva Conventions.

In The Dark Side, New Yorker writer Jane Mayer deftly traces how Bush, Cheney and administration lawyers David Addington and John Yoo created a new legal paradigm for their new kind of war. After 9/11, the CIA was authorized to expand its extraordinary rendition program to transport suspects to countries where they could be held, questioned and tortured with no charges, legal rights or legal constraints. Mayer chillingly describes the benign, bureaucratic memos that ultimately became a blueprint for the CIA's most hideous practices — among them, waterboarding and sensory deprivation. The fact that the government had no proof to its claim that torture produced information (never mind the fact that the majority of people interrogated in the name of the War on Terror were innocent) had no impact on the administration. Years after the incriminating evidence surfaced, it still stubbornly refused to change its policies.

Most interesting are Mayer's reports of resistance to these practices from the military, FBI and members of the international community. Repeated attempts to shut down Guantanamo, the CIA's secret prisons and Abu Ghraib went unheeded and were often deliberately silenced. Yet, as Mayer points out, the administration's radical legal framework remains in place today while the war criminals responsible for the torture and killing of hundreds of prisoners walk freely. Osama bin Laden, too, remains at large.