The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.

• Author: Harding, Bruce

THE DARK SIDE: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals

Author: Jane Mayer

Published by: Scribe Books, Melbourne, 2008, 392pp, A$35.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

With the triumphant election of Barack Obama to the US presidency on 4 November 2008, the clever and thorough author of this deeply informative book is probably joining her friend Seymour Hersch in capturing more confidences about the discredited and dying Bush II administration. Certainly Jane Meyer will surely be exulting at the end of a corrupt and deplorably cynical 43rd presidency if the dire revelations of tawdriness and rampant unconstitutionality revealed in this book are anything to measure her outrage by. One recalls Obama's 2002 statement that he opposed a 'dumb' and 'rash' war in Iraq:

What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. (1) Mayer has decisively shown that those hardships were hardest for Iraqi victims--such as waterboarding torture at the virtual command of a US President--so the election of a Harvard Law graduate, former editor of The Harvard Law Review and professor of law at Chicago must give Mayer and other strict constitutionalists great hope that the Bush II ethos, where loyalty to presidential power became the new competence, ceased at the transfer of power on 20 January 2009.

This New York Times bestseller, penned by a Washington-based staff writer for The New Yorker (and a former senior writer and first female White House correspondent for the notoriously conservative Wall Street Journal), delivers a solid punch at the neo-conservative 'panic' after 9/11, and it augments a searing 16 October 2007 PBS Frontline documentary 'Cheney's Law' on the real conservative agenda (restoring the 'imperial Presidency' and executive branch) with tactics bordering on the criminous. (2) But this is certainly not a book for conspiracy buffs. It is, rather, a calm, methodical and serious text which provides an often critical appraisal of George Tenet's at times anodyne and less than frank memoir At the Center of the Storm (2007) and also a detailed expose of the dirty secrets, greed, venality and sheer mendacity of the Bush II-Cheney du-umvirate whose abuses of power and public trust John W. Dean labelled Worse than Watergate...