Yoda was right. The dark side is easier and more seductive, but it is not stronger. It’s easier to torture a man into telling you what you want to hear than it is to sit down with him and just keep talking until he reveals the truth. It’s sexier to declare someone evil and feel your oats by dominating him than it is to see him as a human being whose actions, however reprehensible, were motivated by something. When Dick Cheney memorably said, “We’ll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will.” he was committing America on a course of action as counterproductive as it is destructive.
Well into The Dark Side, Jane Mayer’s superlative account of the torture policies of Bush the Younger, we learn about a hideous concept known as “learned helplessness“. Apparently, if you subject a dog to enough random electrical shocks it will eventually stop jumping to relieve the pain, it will even cease crying or yelping; torment it enough and it will just lie there, passive and broken. Doing that to a dog is morally questionable, to say the least. It should go without saying that the idea of breaking a person like that should never even be considered, especially not by a country like the United States of America which, until this decade, had a long and commendable tradition of treating prisoners with the utmost humanity and all possible generosity. George Washington started that tradition; George Bush ended it.
As a direct result of his orders and the torture conducted by agents of our government enormous and unknown amounts of time and money were squandered. Innocent men were tortured, sometimes to death, and guilty men, men with blood (American and otherwise) on their hands, can now be seen as victims. Justly punishing them has become more difficult (because “evidence” gained by illegal means is not admissible) and it is very likely that no lives were saved. Welcome to the dark side.
Mayer has been writing on this subject for The New Yorker for years and the depth of her knowledge is displayed on every page. It’s a small tragedy, amidst many greater ones, that anyone should ever need an easy and confident grasp of such stomach turning crimes, and yet much remains unknown. As far as we know the Bush Administration didn’t use random electrical shocks on its prisoners. But there is still a shroud of mystery over the secret prisons known as “black sites” and at this point would it surprise anyone if it came out that they had been connecting men’s testicles to the wall outlet? That’s the depth to which we have sunk, nothing can be reasonably ruled out any longer.
The chief villains of The Dark Side are Vice-President Dick Cheney and his ideologue sidekick David Addington. The 11 September attacks seem to have fundamentally changed both men from mere conservatives into ideological zealots as fanatical as any suicidal hijacker. Cheney, Addington and a few others (most notably “torture memo” author John Yoo) genuinely believed in the “they hate us for our freedoms” canard and once a fallacy so absolute became their article of faith there was no dissuading them. They saw the detainees under their control as agents of a movement which possessed the power to destroy America and the motivation to do so. Looked at in that light their actions are understandable even though they can never - under any circumstances - be condoned.
The book isn’t a complete downer though. Throughout there are tales of reasoned resistance, mostly from conservative Republicans within the Administration and the Defense Department. The “few bad apples” theory which was used to exculpate everyone above the rank of toilet attendant of the Abu Ghraib crimes appears to hold water. It’s just that the few bad apples tended to be evenly distributed up and down the chain of command. There were vicious, inhuman interrogators on the front lines but there were also vicious, inhuman supervisors and vicious, inhuman bosses behind them. Ashcroft, and especially Gonzales, were weak willed and disinterested, both were repeatedly subverted, ignored or steamrolled by Cheney and Addington over anything of consequence. Rumsfeld simply didn’t care.
The Dark Side is a slog to read, no doubt about that. But it’s not the screams of tortured men echoing off every page that makes it tough, though there is some of that; it’s the plodding bureaucratic progression of American torture that makes it so hard to stomach. The birth of an unconscionable monstrosity is documented step by step, memo by memo. Bad ideas which began as little more than thoughts on the computer screens of high ranking officials end up caging men like dogs and torturing them to death. The undeniable sense of revulsion and nausea at the illegal and immoral acts being approved and practiced is almost matched by the creepy Brazil-1984 logical contortions used to justify them. Suffice it to say that things have gone badly awry once a top White House lawyer is reduced to looking up the words “severe” and “pain” in the dictionary.
These men knew that what they were doing was illegal and while they plainly didn’t give a shit they couldn’t simply ignore the law for fear of ending up behind bars themselves. That laws against torture exist for exactly this reason, to forbid and prevent this behavior even in the most trying of times, seems never to have occurred to them. In their arrogance they fell back on illogical justifications and comforting euphemisms. Those men were not prisoners; they were detainees. They were not being tortured; they were subjected to enhanced interrogation. Etcetera etcetera etcetera.
The actions and policies of our government detailed in The Dark Side are physically and morally disgusting but since their direct effects have largely fallen on non-Americans they are amongst the most neglected of Bush the Younger’s many crimes. That man is responsible for so much damage, so many deaths, so much loss, that the public has come to its own learned helplessness moment. At this point what’s one more scandal? One more impeachable offense? One more waste of life and money?
As a start though one of things an ordinary person can do in the face of this kind of inhuman behavior is to simply use the proper words. Those who torture other human beings cannot be allowed to hide their crimes in a fog of language. “Torture” is a hard word, “murder” is a hard word; they are especially hard when connected with offices and institutions which in better times we rightly respect and revere. But “torture”, “murder”, and the like are the only words that can be honestly applied here and one should not flinch from using them.
It is always aggravating when someone tells you that a book is so important that you just have to read it. This is especially true of books like The Dark Side, which are serious, political and downright sad. So I’ll close by simply saying this, you don’t need to read the whole thing but at least take a stab at the first chapter. Entitled “Panic”, it’s eleven pages long and is the most condensed and coherent explanation of how the Bush Administration went from being the amusingly incompetent bunch we knew in the summer of 2001 to the monstrously destructive cabal we know today. Responsibility ultimately rests with Bush the Younger, but the blame can be justly fixed on Cheney, Addington and a few others who lost it in a crisis and dishonored themselves, their offices and the United States of America.
If, sometime in the next few months (Christmas is coming), you find yourself in a bookstore, or even just at a mini-mall which happens to have a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, spend fifteen minutes with the first chapter of The Dark Side. If you’re not a bookstore fan you can read it on-line at Barnes & Noble’s site. Just click the “See Inside” link on the left hand side; you don’t even need an account with them.
Pretending these bad things didn’t happen won’t make them go away, and ignoring them does a disservice to the people who fought against and exposed them. They are the true patriots and when America stands to reclaim her honor it is they who will be celebrated as heroes.
