The Dark Side: Jane Mayer on How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals

As much as any other reporter, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has helped expose the post-9/11 system of detention, rendition and abuse of 'enemy combatants.' Her book out today, The Dark Side, significantly expands on her reporting. We talked to Mayer about how the move to the system started with bureaucratic bungling and the curiously passive role of President Bush, who kept "disappearing from the frame."

Editor's Note: Umansky's reporting is briefly cited in the book.

Before you even get to torture, you suggest that the move to a more aggressive war paradigm was ill-considered. A lot of the mistakes before 9/11 weren't about being insufficiently aggressive you suggest but were just the result of bureaucratic bungling.

One of the things that struck me in talking from interviewing lots of people involved in the war on terror is that we weren't hit by al-Qaida on September 11, 2001 because we had been unable to torture people before. That wasn't the problem. When you look closely at the record, it wasn't that the laws were inadequate. In fact, the U.S. did amazingly well prosecuting terrorists as criminals. And the FBI did pretty well in keeping on top of the expanding al-Qaida's operations.

What went wrong was both simple and complex: First, there was ordinary incompetence. Most importantly, the CIA forgot to tell the FBI that two al-Qaida suspects had entered America more than a year before 9/11. They just dropped the ball.

And complicating things was a lack of political will. At the White House, arguments went round and round about whether to use lethal force against al-Qaida. Nobody really wanted to step up to it and so nobody really did.

One thing that has always struck me -- putting aside for a moment the treatment of enemy combatants -- was the near-total lack of process in deciding who was one.

That was huge. Some of these things were just amateur mistakes. And it sprang from when they threw out the Geneva Conventions, which includes a process for screening POWs, so you can figure out who's truly an enemy and who's just an innocent bystander. When they got rid of the Geneva Conventions they threw out the screening process -- Article 5 hearings. And when they stopped screening, inevitably, they made a lot of mistakes.

You pointed to the irony that the administration was focused on expanding presidential power when in fact a lot of these decisions weren't emanating from there…

It is an irony. The big argument being made by the vice president, his lawyer, David Addington, and the Justice Department was that the commander-and-chief needed almost unfettered powers to win the war on terror. And yet when you really examine the record, it's frequently not the president who's making many of these calls; it's the vice president.

The president, it's funny, I asked a lot of questions about him when I was doing interviews, and he keeps disappearing from the frame of the picture. He is described as distracted by one of the people who briefed him. Colin Powell tells a friend who I interviewed he sees the president not as being stupid but as being too easily manipulated by Cheney, who knew how to push him around.

You write that after the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision in 2006 -- which said detainees were covered by portions of the Geneva Conventions -- the president initially appeared to be against proposing legislation to overturn the decision.

Yes, he actually makes the call against Cheney and Addington at that point -- after having been lobbied Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes. In this case , when he did get all the facts, he decided against Cheney and Addington. And that was pretty unusual from what I could see.

And yet, then the Military Commissions Act happened -- Congress did overturn the Court's decision.

Yes, then the MCA happens. Also, when the president gives his speech about closing down the CIA's black sites, rather than it becoming a means of criticizing those policies [as Mayer writes an initial draft reflected], the vice president finds a way to convince him to keep the black sites open at least in theory.

Talk a bit about the challenges of doing all this reporting when there have been so few prosecutions and such little congressional inquiry.

That's true, though there are beginning to finally be stirrings in Congress. Carl Levin's office did an 18-month investigation that released some really interesting documents recently. Without a subpoena reporters are left to beg. I've done a lot of begging over the last few years.