Summary of Jane Mayer's The Dark Side

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Vice President Dick Cheney had been practicing for doomsday scenarios for years before 9/11. In the 1980s, while serving as a Republican congressman from Wyoming and a rising power in the conservative leadership in Congress, he participated in one of the most highly classified, top-secret programs of the Reagan Administration.

#2 On October 17, 2001, a white powder that had been sent through the mail to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s office in the Capitol was positively identified. It was an unusually difficult to obtain and lethally potent form of the bacterial poison anthrax.

#3 During this time, threats of deadly attack were constant in the White House. On October 29, Cheney insisted on going to a secure undisclosed location to avoid being hit by the anthrax.

#4 The sense of fear within the White House was understandable, as the administration had failed to predict the attacks, and had introduced a new intelligence tool that was supposed to help them understand threats, the Top Secret Codeword/Threat Matrix. But Al Qaeda’s attacks exposed a gaping shortcoming in the Vice President’s thinking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822520332

IRB Media

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Insights on Jane Mayer's The Dark Side

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 13

Insights from Chapter 14

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Vice President Dick Cheney had been practicing for doomsday scenarios for years before 9/11. In the 1980s, while serving as a Republican congressman from Wyoming and a rising power in the conservative leadership in Congress, he participated in one of the most highly classified, top-secret programs of the Reagan Administration.

#2

On October 17, 2001, a white powder that had been sent through the mail to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s office in the Capitol was positively identified. It was an unusually difficult to obtain and lethally potent form of the bacterial poison anthrax.

#3

During this time, threats of deadly attack were constant in the White House. On October 29, Cheney insisted on going to a secure undisclosed location to avoid being hit by the anthrax.

#4

The sense of fear within the White House was understandable, as the administration had failed to predict the attacks, and had introduced a new intelligence tool that was supposed to help them understand threats, the Top Secret Codeword/Threat Matrix. But Al Qaeda’s attacks exposed a gaping shortcoming in the Vice President’s thinking.

#5

When Al Qaeda struck, Cheney and the other hardliners who had spent their careers advocating for a more aggressive foreign policy were caught off guard. They had overlooked threats posed not by great armed nation-states, but by small, lithe rogue groups waging asymmetric warfare.

#6

The Bush Administration authorized torture, which was previously illegal, to fight terrorism. The most dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.

#7

America became the first country to legalize violations of the Geneva Conventions, which set an absolute minimum standard of humane treatment for all prisoners taken in international conflicts.

Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The CIA had been tracking Osama Bin Laden for at least five years, and had warned that something terrible was going to happen. Yet they failed to piece together the many fragments of the September 11 puzzle that reached them.

#2

The FBI had arrested a Saudi suspect in the Nairobi embassy bombing in Kenya in 1999, and he had given them a phone number that belonged to Ahmed al-Hada, a jihadi. The number was a rare landline in Yemen, and it proved to be a key piece of intelligence that helped track Al Qaeda.

#3

Mihdhar and his friend Nawaf al-Hazmi were two of the 9/11 hijackers. They had applied for visas to the United States after another close friend had martyred himself in the 1998 suicide bombing of the U. S. embassy in Kenya.

#4

The 9/11 Commission found that although the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and its Bin Laden Unit were informed that Hazmi, a suspected Al Qaeda operative, had infiltrated the United States fully a year and a half before the attacks, they shared this information with no one else.

#5

The CIA had failed to inform the FBI of the two Al Qaeda suspects before September 11, when they could have been captured.