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• "'New Yorker' correspondent Jane Mayer on Cheney's Gang and America's Torture Policies"
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Journalist discusses the conviction of Osama Bin Laden's driver and how the conviction is a victory for the White House. (1:38)
 

Full Interview. (12:16)
 

Tavis: Jane Mayer is a staff writer for the "New Yorker" and the author of notable books, including "Landslide" and "Strange Justice." Her latest is once again a "New York Times" bestseller, debuting in the top five on the list this past Sunday.

The book is called "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals." An honor to have Jane Mayer in our studio.

Jane Mayer: Thanks, glad to be here with you.

Tavis: Glad to have you here. Let me start with the news of yesterday - Wednesday's news. So bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamden? So bin Laden's driver, in the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War II, was found guilty of one charge, basically helping bin Laden to move weapons and aiding and abetting, if you will. Guilty on that charge, as I paraphrase, of course, but found not guilty - let off on a conspiracy charge to actually engage in terrorist acts, if I can put it that way.

Mayer: Right.

Tavis: What do you make of the fact that this was at least a partial victory for the Bush administration? Because you talk about this in the book.

Mayer: Well, it has to be a partial victory. You've got to admit that they did finally convict somebody. It's the first time they've gotten anywhere with this whole alternative justice system that they set up, really. And so they got what they wanted - they got at least a one-count conviction.

I think that critics could say that the process just doesn't bear even a resemblance to real justice in the United States. (Laughs) The man was not read his rights, he was allowed to - most of the evidence that was brought against him was from his own statements and he didn't realize it could be used against him. He gave them to U.S. interrogators thinking he was going to help himself out that way.

The reason that he got convicted was because he talked, whereas his boss, who's much more important, didn't talk and was let off the hook and is actually out of Guantanamo now. So it doesn't really have the sense of fairness that we're used to in the U.S. justice system, but yeah, it's a very important case, though.

Tavis: Talk to me about Guantanamo. There are a number of things I want to throw at you in the time that I have, but since this is a case, obviously, that comes out of Gitmo, talk to me in your own words about Guantanamo, what this has meant or not meant for the U.S., our reputation. Talk to me about Guantanamo.

Mayer: Well, I went down there because I'm a reporter and I wanted to see what it was really like. I have to say that my first impression was what a mistake, what a waste of time. There's so much money and so many soldiers tied up in guarding a few hundred people, and it's given the United States such a black eye.

So partly what I wanted to do with this book was figure out how did we wind up here with a policy that is - pictures of Guantanamo have become the best recruiting tools for terrorists, and how did we end up there? And this is the story of one bad mistake after another that was made pretty much in a mood of panic inside the White House that got us there.

Tavis: To your point now, Jane, if there is - as I read the text - if there is a central figure who cannot be disconnected from how we got there or here, whatever that means, it's Dick Cheney.

Mayer: The driving force.

Tavis: Yeah, talk to me.

Mayer: He truly was. Reporters are told over and over again that the president really is the one that makes the decisions and that we're wrong to suspect that Cheney may be the power behind the throne. In my reporting, everything leads to Cheney, in the war on terror, anyway. He is the deciding factor, he was the one who set the legal policies, he has a very powerful assistant who is his lawyer, his legal counsel, Chief of Staff David Addington.

Incredibly forceful man, probably the most powerful man in America that nobody's ever heard of, who played a huge part in designing these policies, and all the controversial ones. Very, very conservative - people said of him, "Nobody stands to his right." And he's kind of a bully, so his character really imprinted everything that happened after 9/11, he and Cheney together.

Tavis: So tell me how - the obvious answer to the first question is how Cheney got so much power. Bush gave it to him, obviously put him in charge of it. But how did Cheney end up being the guy with this much power to do this much damage inside the White House, and tell me more about how Addington got the power that he got.

Mayer: Well, there's an interesting quote in here from Colin Powell, who tells a friend that he doesn't think that President Bush is dumb, but he thinks he can be easily manipulated, particularly by Cheney. That Cheney, he says, "Knew how to rub him the right way to make him do what he wanted him to do."

And in particular, they realized that Bush always wanted to be the man and do the tough thing, the hard thing, make the hard choice. So they would sort of present him with saying you could take the easy way out or you can do the hard thing. The hard thing was always the one they wanted him to do, and he would take it. So at least this is what Powell thought, that the president could be manipulated.

Also, you have to remember when Bush was elected, he didn't have any national security credentials, so he needed Cheney to kind of bolster his standing on these issues, and Cheney was supposed to be the expert. But what happened after 9/11 was that the expert that Cheney was, he was waiting for some kind of attack, he had been studying all kinds of possibilities that might be, like nuclear attack on America, but he really had dropped the ball when it came to al Qaeda.

He didn't really pay much attention to the idea that terrorists might attack America. So after 9/11, he was really kind of caught off-guard, and I think he made up for it in lost time with these policies.

Tavis: And to David Addington, a guy who has this much power, who we do not know, how do we explain that?

Mayer: Well, part of the reason we don't know him is he doesn't give interviews to the press, he doesn't even like to have his picture taken, and he -

Tavis: And he walks around with a copy of the Constitution in his pocket.

Mayer: He does walk around with a copy of the Constitution in his pocket, and he's very secretive in a very secretive administration. Part of what I was trying to tell here was the story of how these major decisions that were made about how America presented itself and acted in the world were made mostly in secret, not with Congress and not with the American people.

Nobody ever said, "Should we torture people?" There was never a public debate about this. These decisions were made in private, by a tiny clique of people in the White House - a handful of people. And I've got a quote from one lawyer at one point who was in the White House who he's looking at these people and he was saying, "How did these lunatics ever get to run the country?" And he's a conservative lawyer, the person who said this. I can't name him. But it was a tiny group that really ruled.

Tavis: Contextualize for me - you do this in the book, but in short form in this conversation, contextualize for me, Jane, how we got here. I want to go back to where we started. When I say now and I ask now how we got here, I mean to ask historically, we have shifted, we have moved in how we talk to the world about how to treat prisoners of war and how we, in fact, treat prisoners of war. Talk to me about that journey that we've been on.

Mayer: Well, this is why I think it's become a war, as I say, on American values or American ideals. This country has tried - it hasn't always managed but it's tried to take the high road in how you treat prisoners, prisoners of war in particular. When George Washington was capturing the British, he said, "We're not going to be like them. We're not going to brutalize these prisoners. We're a new country in a new world. We believe in values of the enlightenment, which is that all people have inalienable rights."

And as we know, they didn't think all people did at that point, but they included the Blacks, the women, later. But that was the idea, and that you don't use cruelty on purpose. And this was a value that this country was founded on, and it was a value in the Civil War also, where America created the first code for how to treat prisoners of war in the Civil War.

And America really wrote most of the Geneva Conventions and ran the Nuremberg trials against the Nazis. We have said that there are civilized ways to fight wars, and dishonorable ways and we've always tried to take the civilized way. But after 9/11 that changed, and I think people didn't really realize it, and we're just beginning to grasp how far we went in a different course.

Tavis: To your point now, Jane, about the Geneva Conventions, you make the point in the book that Cheney and Addington notwithstanding, there were voices - and the manipulation of the president notwithstanding - there were voices inside the administration who fought against that. Cheney and Addington weren't the only voices. Wolfowitz, for that matter, and Rumsfeld came along with them, but they weren't the only voices. There were folk, to the president's credit - his administration's credit - inside the White House who argued against that.

Mayer: Definitely. Colin Powell. And you know who else argued really hard for this? And sometimes people think well, only liberals and wusses who think we should coddle detainees and not torture them. That is so not the real story. The real story is that the United States military were the first people to stand up and say, "We don't do this. This is what our enemies do, and we don't want to be involved in this program."

But they didn't rule the day, it's interesting. Basically what happened was Cheney's people, when there was dissent, they'd take the dissenters and cut them out of the conversation, keep them out of the meetings. So the decisions were made, again, by this tiny group. And they didn't listen to the United States military.

There's some real heroes, I have to say, who stood up for a better idea of America. One of them was a military lawyer, the top lawyer in the Navy, Alberto Mora, a Cuban immigrant to America. And there were people down in Guantanamo, the FBI - some of the FBI agents were magnificent. They just basically said they took oaths to the Constitution, and those include giving people basic rights.

Tavis: Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz I mentioned earlier are gone now. Condoleezza Rice is still there. Where was Secretary Rice? Of course, not secretary at the time; national security adviser. Where was she at in this debate?

Mayer: She's kind of an enigma in this, I have to say. I feel that - even after all this time, I feel I don't really know her. She seemed to shift. In the beginning, I think she was, right after 9/11, siding with doing whatever it took, no matter how bad it was, to fight al Qaeda. And I think she was with the country in that in many ways, and she was sort of serving what the president wanted.

In the end, she starts fighting for bringing those prisoners out of the black sites that the CIA had, and trying to bring the country back inside the rule of law.

Tavis: So finally, then, is the damage - that you so detail in this book brilliantly - is the damage irreparable, and whether it is or isn't, what do we do at this point?

Mayer: I think the damage to America's moral authority is pretty great. I quote a historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who I got to talk to him before he died, and he said he didn't think anything has hurt America's image in the world more than this torture issue - ever.

And I think it's been a very serious blot on American history, but what do we do now? As a reporter, I want to open up the books. I want to know what happened in this thing. Did we have to torture people? Do we need to? There's more and more evidence that we didn't even need to do any of this stuff anyway.

Tavis: I got 30 seconds to go. Tell me, then, how you see this particular issue of how we treat prisoners around the world and the damage done to our reputation? How do you see this getting traction, playing out or not in these debates between these two candidates for the White House?

Mayer: Well, both of them have said they're strongly against torture, and McCain was tortured himself, so I think he feels it strongly. And Obama was a Constitutional law professor. The question is whether they'll have the guts to stand up to the fear and terror that happens if there's another hit, and it's very hard. History shows us when people are scared, they make the wrong choices.

Tavis: Perennial bestselling author, Jane Mayer. The book is called "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals," sitting, as we speak, on "The New York Times" bestseller list. Jane, nice to have you here.

Mayer: Thanks. So great to be with you.

Tavis: Glad to have you.