E-mail a friendJane Mayer
airdate July 3, 2009
Currently a staff writer at The New Yorker, Jane Mayer is a political and investigative journalist who has contributed to The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. She was also The Wall Street Journal's first female White House correspondent. Her subjects include the Pentagon's secret torture policy, the bin Laden family and the TV show 24. Co-author of two best-selling books, Mayer's latest, The Dark Side, explores the decisions made by VP Dick Cheney and his secret advisors after September 11th.
Journalist weighs in on President Obama's handling of how Americans treat prisoners. (3:26)
Full interview. (11:13)
Jane Mayer
Tavis: Jane Mayer is a staff writer from The New Yorker who writes frequently about issues of national intelligence, including a recent profile of the new CIA Chief, Leon Panetta. She's also a best-selling author whose latest is now out in paperback, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. Jane, nice to have you back on the program again and congrats on the success.
Jane Mayer: Thank you so much.
Tavis: Let me start by asking what to you at least, to your mind, has been the most significant change -- I think I can guess, but I'm gonna ask you anyway -- the most significant change or shift on Iraq policy on terror since the book came out in hard cover?
Mayer: Well, for me, the most important thing is that Obama came in and, in his first week, he banished torture.
Tavis: Ding, ding, ding, ding. I got it right.
Mayer: (Laughter) Well, and he closed down the secret black prison sites that the CIA had too. I mean, he's trying to get us back on a legal footing that's kind of in keeping with American values, but it's not so easy.
Tavis: Historically, is there any shift from one administration to the next that came so swiftly, so certain and, depending on one reads it, so severe?
Mayer: Well, I think this was one of the most fantastic turnarounds that we've had. It was just a complete obliteration of the policies of George Bush. As soon as he took over, he just wiped the slate clean on some of these things, particularly on torture, and he was, of course, right to do so.
Tavis: And yet there are those who argue -- and you know the arguments -- that the president has not gone far enough on the torture question. Your thoughts about that debate?
Mayer: Yeah. I mean, I think that it's a really slippery slope that he's on still. It's interesting because, if anybody understands this, it's Barack Obama. He taught Constitutional Law, so you know that it's not that he doesn't get the arguments here.
But in dealing with the prisoners down in Guantanamo, they're really talking about possibly keeping open holding them forever, detention indefinitely without trial. If Barack Obama does that, I mean, I think he's gonna start to make some of the same mistakes Bush has then.
Tavis: Let me ask a two-part question and I'll split it up. The first part is, for those who've not been following this case as obviously you have, what is the status now of the torture issue with specific regard to Guantanamo?
Mayer: Well, torture has been abolished by Obama. We are now observing the law of the Geneva Conventions. You cannot treat anybody in a cruel or inhumane way in the United States anymore. That's been done.
But the problem is, Obama got left with this population of prisoners down in Guantanamo whose rights were so violated by the Bush administration that it's very hard now to bring them back into the courts. They've been tortured before and you can't really just put them on trial because their rights have been violated. The evidence that's against them has come from confessions from people who were tortured. Those kinds of confessions should be thrown out in any decent American court.
The problem is, the evidence is tainted, the cases are tainted by everything that Bush did before, but these are really dangerous people, some of them, so you can't just let them go free. At least, this is what Obama's dealing with now.
Tavis: So what has Obama said or what are we debating? What are the options about what ought to happen to them?
Mayer: Well, they've gone through this sorting process. First, they've tried to figure out who's innocent down there so they can let them go. Then they've tried to come up with charges against the people that they can charge in court. So they're working on that process now, but I think the issue is, is there a remaining group of people who are dangerous, who they can't bring into a court?
I think, again, if Obama decides that there are people that he thinks the United States can hold without charging them, without giving them trials, hold them maybe forever, then he's gonna start to make some of the same mistakes that George Bush did. That's the problem.
Tavis: But how could he? I'm just thinking out loud here.
Mayer: How could he?
Tavis: How could he do that? How could do that? When I say do that --
Mayer: -- legally?
Tavis: Legally, number one. And politically, what would the argument be for holding them indefinitely?
Mayer: There is an argument. I just was speaking to somebody at the White House this morning about it. The argument is -- and it's a little complicated -- but basically, right after the 9/11 attacks, Congress wrote something called the Authorization to Use Military Force. It allows the United States to call the war on terror a war.
Under the rules of war, you can hold the enemy when you've got enemy prisoners of war. You can hold them until the end of the conflict. So they can argue that this is a war, the conflict's not over because the war on terror continues, and they can hold them until the end of the war on terror. Nobody's defined what that really means, but it means they can hold them basically forever.
Tavis: Exactly -- I got tongue-tied because theoretically that's what that means, that they can never be let go. But that would fly in the face of his argument, though, about upholding American ideals.
Mayer: Well, what they're gonna say is, it's a little different from what Bush did. Bush said because he was president, he could define who was the enemy and he could hold them indefinitely. Obama's saying I'm not doing this because I'm president. I don't have those rights just because I'm president, but Congress has authorized this because they put through this legislation.
So he's saying it's not because I'm a king, it's because Congress has made this possible. So it's a slightly different argument. It's less tyrannical, for sure, but I don't know if it's gonna fly, certainly not with the human rights community.
Tavis: What we do know -- we'll come back to that. What we do know, in addition to what's changed significantly since you wrote this book in hard cover a year ago, is that Dick Cheney has started singing like he's at the opera somewhere. He's had a whole lot to say.
How can we forget a few weeks ago that dueling press day when Obama was speaking about torture, Cheney was speaking about torture, both of them being carried live on every major cable network with two diametrically different points of view on this?
How does Dick Cheney and those who believe in his argument, those who see it the way he sees it, which is to say that, if you let any of these people go and anything ever happens again, courtesy of these individuals, that Obama would never live it down? That would be the end of his presidency if something happened. If any of these persons got let go and something happened between now and his running for re-election, it would be over for him, yes?
Mayer: Well, you know, I interviewed Leon Panetta recently for The New Yorker and what he said to me was it's almost as if Cheney wants America to get attacked again. He got into trouble for saying it, but I think most people understood what he's saying. It's like Cheney is laying down a marker and saying if anything bad happens, it's gonna be Obama's fault and it's gonna be because he's not torturing people the way that we did.
Tavis: That's Cheney's argument.
Mayer: That's Cheney's argument, yeah. So he's kind of trying to put him in a box politically. I mean, it's ridiculous because, you know, if we get attacked again, and any expert will say it's always possible, it's not gonna be because we're not torturing people. It's gonna be because it's impossible to have perfect security in an open democracy like ours.
Tavis: But the argument could be made, though, that we are being attacked again -- it's just the argument I've suspected Cheney and Limbaugh and everybody else would make --
Mayer: -- they're getting ready, yeah.
Tavis: They are. They're getting ready. Back to your point. A lot of people believe, as you know, Jane, you cover this story, that it's not a matter of if but when, that there's no way you can ever be 100% certain that you're never gonna get hit again inside your borders.
So the argument that Cheney and Limbaugh and everybody else would make would be that we're getting hit again not because we didn't torture, but because we're being too soft on these terrorists.
Mayer: Right, and that is the argument that they're trying to make. I mean, I think it's a very unfair argument because the reason we were attacked in the first place had nothing to do with being soft on people. It was because there was an intelligence failure. The FBI and the CIA stopped talking to each other and they just dropped the ball.
Really, if you talk to experts about this, they will say that this issue of supposedly being tough, using these tough methods, they just hurt us more than they help us. You get bad information, you start to hurt the reputation of America around the world, you anger our enemies to the point that it radicalizes them against us, and this is what all the military leaders have said. It's what the FBI says.
Really, the only people I know who are still fighting for being able to use torture and these tough, tough methods are the people who used them before, people like Cheney. I have to wonder, is he fighting for America or is he fighting also for his own reputation here?
Tavis: A little bit of both probably?
Mayer: I think, yeah.
Tavis: To your point about intelligence, how are we doing under the Obama administration? I mean, it's only been a matter of months obviously, but to your point, was the chief failure that we didn't get the Intel right? You talked to Leon Panetta recently, in charge of the CIA. How we doing on the Intel front?
Mayer: You know, he said he's worried that we still don't have great interrogators who can do this in a legal way. So he's setting up something that sounds almost like the Manhattan Project for interrogation. They're gonna get the best homicide detectives in the country and they're gonna get people from the FBI, the CIA, the military. They're gonna get linguists who speak the languages and cultural experts.
They're trying to put together this kind of brain trust to be able to interrogate terrorist suspects in the future. So he's on it. I mean, I don't think that they've accomplished all they want to yet.
Tavis: How does this troop draw-down in Iraq impact this conversation?
Mayer: I mean, I don't have a crystal ball on that. I mean, you just hope for the best. Obviously, any failed state around the world, if Iraq becomes unstable, is a problem for terrorism.
Tavis: Another question that may require you having a crystal ball that you just said you don't have. I'm gonna ask it anyway. What then for President Obama becomes the standard for success, for mission accomplished -- I hate the phrase. What's the standard for him now on this issue?
Mayer: I mean, one of the things that he said that I particularly like is that there's not a contradiction between our security and our values. Basically, what he's saying is -- and I hope that he can prove this successfully through his term -- that by using our laws, our great justice system and our courts and our values, we're stronger. It doesn't make us weaker to use these things.
And how will we judge that? We'll see if he gets convictions in the courts, if they manage to get rid of these people in Guantanamo and treat them in a way that's just. If he can do that, I think that that will be a tremendous success.
Tavis: It's a fascinating story and Jane's been all over it for quite some time now, a great writer for The New Yorker. Her book now in paperback is called The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. Jane Mayer, nice to have you back as always.
Mayer: Thank you.
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