The laws of war.

• Author: Bonner, Raymond
• Position: Book reviews - Book review

Matthew Alexander and John Bruning, How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq (New York: Free Press, 2008), 304 pp., $26.00.

David Cole, Justice at War: The Men and Ideas that Shaped America's War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), 176 pp., $14.95.

Karen Greenberg, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 288 pp., $27.95.

Eric Lichtblau, Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 384 pp., $26.95.

Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 400 pp., $27.50.

With an order to close Guantanamo, the Obama administration has acted quickly to move away from the Bush administration's policies in what it called the "war on terror." But much more needs to be done to undo the damage to America's reputation abroad--not just in the Muslim world--and to lessen the chances of starting another chapter in the erosion of America's civil liberties. And not all measures will be difficult. For starters, President Barack Obama should follow the lead of Britain's Gordon Brown, who, upon becoming prime minister, stopped using the phrase "war on terror."

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The concept of a "war on terror," was "misleading and mistaken," the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, wrote in the Guardian recently. Calling for a "war on terror," he went on, "implied that the correct response was primarily military.... We must respond to terrorism by championing the rule of law, not subordinating it...."

The Bush administration's simplistic jargon did suborn the rule of law and allowed for abuses--extraordinary rendition, torture, indefinite detention, wholesale FBI interviews of Arabs and Muslims in America, "preventive detention." What will be difficult is to truly rehabilitate America. It will be a long, slow, arduous healing process.

To understand the atrocities and what it might take to redeem ourselves, one must first understand how they came about, who the players were, and what schemes and legal circumlocution laid the groundwork for the misdeeds to follow. The "war on terror" begat a "war council," self-described and self-selected. It was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, a former CLA lawyer, who, along with his boss, believed that the presidency had been severely weakened by the reforms following Watergate and Vietnam. The others were

Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel, and then attorney general; Timothy Flanigan, a lawyer on the White House counsel's staff who had been part of the team that probed Bill Clinton's sexual escapades; William Haynes, Pentagon general counsel; and John Yoo, the erudite graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School who served in the Justice Department as a legal adviser to the administration. After the deluge of books that have recounted in detail the abuses by the Bush administration in its "war on terror," The Dark Side by Jane Mayer is the best account of how this elite cabal pulled it off. (1) They were "like a high-school clique," Mayer writes--an archconservative elite, playing squash and racquetball together and going on clandestine trips. They operated in extreme secrecy, hiding their work and thoughts from any other officials they thought might disagree with them, on the law or policy.

Fourteen days after 9/11, Yoo and Addington concluded that since the country was at "war," President Bush, as commander in chief, could do virtually whatever he deemed necessary. And so it all began. As Mayer recounts, Yoo was at one point asked whether any law existed that could stop the president from "crushing the testicles of [a] person's child" to get the parent to talk. "No treaty" could do so, Yoo responded, with careful legalese. He became increasingly obtuse when pressed to make a definitive judgment on whether any law could stop the president.

Relying heavily on Yoo's legal analysis, and Cheney/Addington's political views and clout, the Bush administration would abandon treaties to which America had long adhered, and which provided legitimacy and weight to its moral voice in the world. Under President Ronald Reagan, for instance, the United States had led in the drafting and ratification of the treaty against torture, formally called the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Under George W. Bush, the United States ignored it, redefining torture and using the euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques." More disturbingly, the Bush administration jettisoned the Geneva Conventions, an international undertaking to mitigate the barbarity of war. The treaty has numerous provisions regulating the treatment and interrogation of prisoners. The administration wanted no-holds-barred interrogations. Yoo argued that the United States could ignore the treaty.

"It will take fifty years ... to undo the damage that he did to the place," a senior Justice Department lawyer told New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau about Yoo.

In response to Yoo's memoranda on the Geneva Conventions, the State Department's legal counsel, William Howard Taft IV, a moderate Republican, argued that Yoo's reasoning was "seriously flawed." Taft added in a memo to Yoo, "In previous conflicts, the United States has dealt with tens of thousands of detainees without repudiating its obligations under the Conventions." Fearing that it would be "toxic to our foreign policy" if countries knew that the United States exempted itself from the treaty, Taft wanted Yoo's memo...