On bad guys

[bloodygranuaile]

Because I apparently wish to be angry and miserable this February, for the political book club I pitched Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. I have uhh opinions about the subtitle, because as a leftist I am minimally familiar with the history of the CIA (although not as familiar as I should be), but it’s Jane Mayer, one of the best investigative reporters working today, so I figured I could suck up a little bit of institutionalist liberal framing. 

 

I was a youngish teen when most of this was going down--the 9/11 attacks occurred a week into eighth grade, and the invasion of Iraq in the spring semester of my freshman year in high school. So while I was generally aware of these things that happened--when the news broke about them, not while they were necessarily going on--my understanding was a bit scattered and underdeveloped, as I was just starting to read grown-up news on a regular basis, and I would periodically get distracted from following the news for big chunks of time by the general drama of being a teenager. So while I remember big moments like the Abu Ghraib photos being leaked, I wouldn’t have recognized names like John Yoo and David Addington at the time (I knew my more public-facing ghouls, like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld).

 

Reading a more orderly, well-researched accounting of the whole debacle really does a lot to highlight just how incredibly fucked up it was--on every level. There are reactions I had to some of this stuff that come from experiences I had that I hadn’t had when I was a teen, like “having a job,” let alone stuff like “doing community safety work,” that I couldn’t help but have color my reactions to some of the office politics, bureaucratization of evil, and general incompetence I was reading about, not to mention stupid shit like everyone’s obsession with “24.” Reading about the Bin Laden Unit’s general failures of investigative work, data management, and basic communications was more frustrating to read than I’d have thought, because it occurs at the point where even the CIA’s general purpose and legacy of horrible violence and suppression reduces down to “All we do is work on documents, that’s all anyone does anymore,” and it just seemed… infuriatingly dumb? Like, if you’re in the kind of job where failing to file a memo means 9/11 happens, then maybe you should have people who can file a fucking memo? It’s not that hard, the entire rest of the white-collar workforce can do it. Idunno, like many stories of our country’s shitty, violent, and unaccountable elites, it can be hard not to take it weirdly personally if you’ve ever worked in a job where you have been held to any kind of performance standard whatsoever.

 

The book being a large part office drama is actually very effective, I think, because it allows for drawing some pretty disturbingly sharp contrasts between the petty yammering among well-educated white guys in suits and the stuff that actually happened as a result of all these meetings and memos. This makes the petty yammering even more infuriating when you go back to it--all these lawyers and politicos and military guys just casually wrecking people’s lives from on high while they write bad action movies starring themselves in their brains, having tantrums in the office and writing unhinged screeds about the divine right of kings dressed up as legal advisories, and not being held even the slightest bit accountable for any of it, ensuring that even when major scandals broke--kidnapping completely random people, beating folks to death--all punishments were directed as far down the ladder as possible. 

 

One thing that’s really on bright display in this book is the conservative mindset that everything not forbidden is mandatory. Much of the book revolves around the lawyers and their hangers-on coming up with legal justifications for torture, and then those legal justifications are carefully hidden away so the absolute minimum possibly number of people ever read them, which seems weird for, you know, law? But the Bush administration seemed to use legal justifications almost instead of policy proposals. I don’t know if this was just to prop up their mental images of themselves as law-and-order types or what, but instead of writing illegal policies that were like “we’re gonna do X” where X is illegal, they decided to write themselves illegal legal memos that were like “it’s legal to do X” where it is clearly not legal to do X, and then they did X because they had told themselves it was legal. And then instead of secret policies, we wind up with secret law. 

 

In addition to throwbacks from all the folks we hated in the Bush years we also get a number of (often self-serving) cameos from various Republican Daddies of the more modern era, like James Comey and Robert Mueller, often playing similar roles of pretending to be dispassionately principled defenders of democracy and kind of getting away with it when standing next to one-dimensional ghouls like David Addington, who, to be perfectly clear, is one of a very small number of people in the world that I believe actually does deserve to be waterboarded. 

 

The weakest part of the book is undoubtedly the end, where the beginning of the Obama era is painted as a major turning point because some of the worst legal writings were retracted, but we all know how that went: Nobody in the Bush administration was held accountable, and Gitmo is still open. 

 

Anyway, America is the bad guy, stop trying to rehabilitate George W. Bush.