“We have to work sort of the dark side, if you will,” Vice- President Dick Cheney famously said to Tim Russert on Meet the Press, less than a week after the 9-11 attacks. “We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.”

Largely without discussion the government, in the process of pursuing an aggressive strategy of securing America which was widely supported also began, largely in secret, pursuing extra-legal tactics including torture and detention without charge or trial, the full extent of which have only very slowly moved into public awareness.

In her new book The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, investigative reporter at The New Yorker who has played a pivotal role in bringing some of these “Dark Side” tactics into public view, attempts in these waning days of the Bush administration to take stock of the long-term implications of the use of torture and extra-legal detainment of terrorist suspects for US policy makers, and all US citizens, going forward.

“Seven years after al-Qaeda's attacks on America, as the Bush administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country's soul,” Mayer writes in “The Battle for a Country's Soul” an essay based on the book published in the current NY Review of Books. Click here to see full essay

In retrospect the remarkable thing about the descent into the dark side, Mayer believes, is how quickly and deeply entrenched policies which radically depart from historic norms became in such a short time and how seemingly locked-in they remain.

“The Bush administration,’ she writes, “ invoked the fear flowing from the attacks on September 11 to institute a policy of deliberate cruelty that would have been unthinkable on September 10. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and a small handful of trusted advisers sought and obtained dubious legal opinions enabling them to circumvent American laws and traditions. In the name of protecting national security, the executive branch sanctioned coerced confessions, extrajudicial detention, and other violations of individuals' liberties that had been prohibited since the country's founding. They turned the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel into a political instrument, which they used to expand their own executive power at the expense of long-standing checks and balances.”

“Such extreme measures,” she adds, “ were perhaps understandable in the panic-filled days and weeks immediately after September 11, falling into place among other historic infringements of civil liberties during times of dire national security crisis. Yet seven years later, the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies remained largely unchanged. There had been some alterations and improvements. But the legal framework survives despite nearly universal bipartisan acceptance outside of the Bush administration that Guantánamo should be shut down, that the military commission process was hopelessly flawed, and that the human rights violations at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were not the work of a few "rotten apples" on the bottom, but rather the result of irresponsible leadership at the top. In fact torture, which was reviled as a depraved vestige of primitive cultures before September 11, seems in danger of becoming normalized.”

Although in this year’s presidential both parties' presidential nominees have taken strong, principled stands against torture, promising to close loopholes that secretly sanction it, and to bring the country's detention and interrogation policies back in line with its core constitutional values, neither candidate has yet put forward a coherent alternative. Indeed, says Mayer, “ The Bush administration's "New Paradigm" remains intact, allowing the administration to claim all of the powers that flow from war, while allowing detainees almost none of the rights that either the military or criminal justice system confers.”

What’s also been remarkable is how little objective scrutiny the actual effects of such extreme measures and tactics have received. Seven years after, 9-11 there has yet to be another major terror incident in the US, Mayer says, yet “it is hard to know if the Bush administration's success represents the vanquishing of new credible threats, or rather the absence of any. As former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld himself acknowledged in 2003, ‘Today we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror.’ During the Bush years, it's been almost impossible to tell. In the absence of government transparency and independent analysis, the public has been asked to simply take the President's word on faith that inhumane treatment has been necessary to stop attacks and save lives.”

Mayer notes, however, that although the New Paradigm remains without focused political, a revisionist perspective is beginning to emerge, albeit in very piecemeal fashion. “Increasingly,” she writes, “those with access to the inner workings of the Bush administration's counterterrorism program have begun to question the efficacy of torture” as an instrument of counter-terrorism.

In March 2008, for instance, after President Bush announced his intention to veto legislation requiring the CIA to abide by the same interrogation rules as the military, Senator Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, challenged the administration's entire rationale. As Mayer recounts it, “Rockefeller asserted that the Bush administration's approach was not only unnecessary, it was also undermining the security that it claimed to safeguard. "The CIA's program damages our national security by weakening our legal and moral authority, and by providing al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups a recruiting and motivational tool," he said. ‘By continuing this interrogation program, the President is sacrificing our strategic advantage for questionable tactical gain."

Mayer also cites examples of how doubt has begun to emerge from within the administration itself too. “In 2006,” she says, “ a scientific advisory group to the US intelligence agencies produced an exhaustive report on interrogation called "Educing Information," which concluded that there was no scientific proof whatsoever that harsh techniques worked. In fact, several of the experts involved in the study described the infliction of physical and psychological cruelty as outmoded, amateurish, and unreliable.” Further, says Mayer, “In confidential interviews, several of those with inside information about the NSA's controversial Terrorist Surveillance Program have expressed similar disenchantment. As one of these former officials says of the ultra secret program so furiously defended by David Addington, chief of staff and former counsel to Vice President Cheney, "It's produced nothing."

Mayer also quotes one former official who traveled extensively through the Middle East as saying that no subject was described by Muslims he spoke with as more deeply disturbing than America's abuse of the detainees. “ Eric Haseltine, the former top adviser on science and technology to the Director of National Intelligence, worries that prisoner abuse has profoundly hurt what he defines as the most important battle in the war on terror— the struggle to win the support of the next generation of Arab youth.

"I came away from my many visits to the Middle East,” Haseltine told Mayer, “convinced there is a widespread belief that if America abuses prisoners then there can be no true freedom for anyone. It seemed to me that our greatest sin in the eyes of Muslims was not invading the Middle East, or even our support of Israel: our greatest sin was robbing Muslims of hope."

Another casualty of the embrace of extralegal tactics, according to Mayer, has been America's reputation as a lead defender of democracy and human rights. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, in June 2006 public opinion in two countries in the world supported the US war on terror—India and Russia. Meanwhile, corrupt and repressive states, including Egypt, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, have all justified their own brutality by citing America's example.

“Even the most dependable of US allies,” says Mayer, “ including Germany, Denmark, and the European Union, by 2008 had all accused the US of violating internationally accepted standards for humane treatment and due process. Canada went so far as to place America on its official list of rogue countries that use torture.”

The Bush administration's controversial antiterrorism program has, Mayer believes, also undermined the legitimacy of evidence obtained against terror suspects..” Seven years after the attacks of September 11,” she writes, “ not a single terror suspect held outside of the US criminal court system had been tried. Of the 759 detainees acknowledged to have been held in Guantánamo, approximately 270 remained there, only a handful of whom had been charged. Among these, not a single "enemy combatant" had yet had the opportunity to cross-examine the government or see the evidence on which he was being held.”

Mayer cites as an example the Pentagon’s May 2008 announcement that it was dismissing charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, the Saudi suspected of having been the "twentieth hijacker," apparently because the inhumane treatment to which he had been subjected during his long interrogation in Guantánamo had destroyed the credibility of his confession, hopelessly tainting the case.

The taint of torture, according to Mayer, also loomed over the prosecutions the Bush administration announced in February of this year to bring capital murder charges against six detainees it said were linked to the September 11 attacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.. Notably missing from the list of the accused, Mayer notes, was Abu Zubaydah, one of the detainees whose waterboarding sessions had been videotaped by the CIA. “The CIA's destruction of the videotapes, which was under criminal investigation by an outside counsel by May 2008,” Mayer declares, “ clearly jeopardized any future prosecution of these two figures, whom the administration had previously described as key al-Qaeda leaders.”

Mayer finally notes that growing numbers of former administration insiders have now left the government with the conviction that in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way and several are beginning to publically air their own judgments on what they’ve concluded was a dangerously wrong turn.

Mayer cites such now public critics as Jack Goldsmith, the assistant attorney general who objected to the Justice Department memo allowing torture who now teaches law at Harvard, Matthew Waxman who, as deputy assistant secretary of defense fought unsuccessfully to uphold the Geneva Conventions who now has a platform as a law professor at Columbia university and Alberto Mora, who as general counsel of the US Navy had campaigned within the Pentagon to end the coercive methods used at Guantánamo. Mora left the administration as a pariah in the eyes of some Pentagon colleagues but was given the John F. Kennedy Foundation's Profiles in Courage Award in 2006 for speaking out.

As these and other perspectives of former insiders are made public a revisionist narrative of lessons learned post 9-11 may be emerging.

Mayer fairly clearly sides with these critics. Like them she advances the position that the extra-legal tactics of the Bush administration, in addition to having sullied America’s global image in a way that will take years, if not decades to rectify misdirected US counter-terror efforts, has ultimately made us less safe. Of course she, and they, may be wrong. It’s possible that like the Truman administration, once highly unpopular, the tactics and strategy of the Bush administration will be vindicated by history.

In either case the first rough draft of history Mayer provides is a necessary and useful starting point for any honest discussion of how America should conduct a counter-terror project destined to last far beyond next January.