The Dark Side

The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, First posted Friday August 1
Jane Mayer of The New Yorker has written the latest book to lay out the Bush Administration's march away from the accepted tenets of American law. "The Dark Side." She argues that Vice President Dick Cheney had been taking part in disaster planning for years. After 9/11, Cheney and other cabinet members would hunker down in a bunker and take turns running the government in post-disaster scenarios. Mayer says that a sense of real fear, even paranoia, drives the Vice President. The fear, combined with a lack of reflection in the administration following the intelligence failures that led to 9/11, created an atmosphere where new powers were taken on with little internal debate and a brash dismissal of the potential consequences.