"Zealots, Fools and Monogrammed Towels: News on The Dark Side"
By Lauren Coletta
Posted on Tue Jul 15, 2008 at 05:52:12 PM EST
Special thanks to Common Cause intern Grace Campion for attending an important event at the New America Foundation for me this morning on the release of an interesting book by Jane Mayer. Grace is a rising senior at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Here is her take on the event and the book below.
"Zealots, Fools and Monogrammed Towels: News on The Dark Side"
With The Dark Side, Jane Mayer adds to the growing number of independent investigative reports into the shadowy seven years of the Bush-Cheney Administration. She focused her reporting on the oft overlooked figure of David Addington, legal counsel to the Office of the Vice President. Back in July of 2006 Mayer wrote an article for the New Yorker entitled "The Hidden Power: The Legal Mind Behind the White House's War on Terror" which consequently led her, with this book, to delve deeper into the White House chain of command and flesh out the role that Addington played. She found that Addington meticulously maintained a low profile while becoming "one of the most powerful unelected officials in the government - `Cheney's Cheney.'" Addington is the new face of unelected American politics and a soon-to-be-household name.
Moderator Steve Clemons, from The New America Foundation, began the morning's discussion by reading the final sentence of Mayer's book. Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission and former Counselor of the US State Department, responds to Mayer's question regarding the historical legacy of the United States' new stance on torture. He likens it to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and sums up the past seven years with one sentence, "Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools."
Who are these zealots? According to the book, Vice President Cheney is a prime suspect. Already skeptical of the CIA's abilities and upset with their obvious failure regarding 9/11, Cheney required that all raw intelligence be made available to him. Accordingly, each morning Cheney and Bush would listen and read "Top Secret Codeword/Threat Matrix" reports aka unfiltered, unscreened, un-corroborated CIA intelligence records with their morning coffee. Life in the fast lane. This experience was likened to "being stuck in a room listening to Led Zepplin music" by Jim Baker, former head of the Counsel in the Department of Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. Cheney was soon overtaken by a paranoia triggered by nothing less than this morning dose of sensory overload. Mayer contends that national security soon became a private obsession for our newly elected Vice President. As for the self-proclaimed "Decider," George W. Bush, a witness to Mayer relates that his "attention span was strikingly different from that of Cheney"... "he was distracted."
Mayer paints Addington as one man sure to be no man's fool and as one who stepped into this nebulous sphere of uncertainty and fear with a plan and with authority. He was one of a handful of lawyers involved in making "inner-circle" decisions. Mayer noted that within a few months of 9/11, his office was the last stop for everything before it reached the President's desk. This was no fool.
Where to go from here? First, I would suggest committing yourself to entering the Dark Side. In addition to unsettling power-plays and explanations of "enhanced interrogation technique," this may be the perfect crash course in amassing governmental power without ever running for election. It doubles as a dummy's guide to making personal political aspirations come true. I have always suspected that the newly styled monogrammed government has been bending to the wishes of the Executive Branch, but what we were told was a cursive "W" was really an "A" all along. Time to change those hand towels!
On a personal note, I asked Jane Mayer to sign the copy of the book I had been given. When I mentioned that I was from Common Cause she noted that she had seen our "Democracy in Distress" ad. She was excited to see that the pledge included torture as one of the issues in the Recapture the Flag Campaign.
Tags: international, recapture the flag (all tags)
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