It's not as though we hadn't been adequately warned. Some of the greatest minds in the judicial and political history of the U.S. warned of the lasting harm that could be done to a democracy if it abandoned its ideals of justice and the rule of law during times of fear and panic. Accordingly, Jane Mayer begins most of the chapters of her excellent but horrifying book with short quotations from those who had the foresight to warn us away from choosing the dark side in dark times:

"America should go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. "¦ She might become the dictatress of the world: She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit'" (John Quincy Adams.)

"The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are as important as ends" (The 1976 Church Committee Report.)

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding" (Justice Louis Brandeis.)

Jane Mayer refers to herself as a writer of narrative non-fiction, and, indeed, she brilliantly displays her narrative talent in the way she begins her book with a meticulous recreation of the panic that held the most powerful people in this country in its grip just after 9/11. Key decisions about how to deal with continuing terrorist threats, how to strengthen national security, how to apply the rule of law to these matters, and whether (or how) to expand the powers of the Presidency -- decisions that continue to affect us to this day -- were reached in a condition of chaos and panic. Nevertheless, Mayer demonstrates, key figures in the White House -- Vice President Dick Cheney and his adviser David Addington -- seized on this opportunity to act on their long-held agenda "to enhance presidential powers to a degree never known in U.S. history and obliterate constitutional protections that define the very essence of the American experiment."

The terrible consequences of those acts, just as Adams, Church and Brandeis warned, will further darken the reputation of the most despised and denigrated presidency in American history. The title of Mayer's book ("The Dark Side") is actually a Faustian quotation from Cheney. On the Sunday after 9/11 during a "Meet the Press" interview, he described how the administration planned to respond to the continuing terrorist threat: "We'll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will." He went on to say, "We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies -- if we are going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in. And, uh, so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objectives."

Those means eventually included subverting the Constitution, abandoning the protocols of the Geneva Convention, denying habeas corpus, approving barbaric acts of torture, carrying out extraordinary rendition on innocent people and destroying the credibility of the United States as a champion of human rights. It has yet to be shown that those "sources and methods" produced any useful intelligence or made this country in any way safer than it would have been if the rule of law had been allowed to operate.

Mayer does an excellent -- if horrific -- job of documenting the years of torture and hopeless imprisonment suffered by hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of innocent people as Cheney with President Bush's approval abandoned American ideals for the unchartered dark side. What will be the lasting effects on the 600 or so soldiers who were agents of torture in Abu Ghraib? How many other lawyers have or will fall victim to their own hubris the way the incorrigible John Yoo of Berkeley did in justifying both presidential and penal excesses?

But Mayer's narrative is not all dark. She ends it with a tribute to those in the Bush administration who refused to be as lacking in principle and constitutional resolve as he:

"By the last year of the Bush presidency, growing numbers of former administration insiders had abandoned the government with the conviction that in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way. Many had fought valiantly to right what they saw as a dangerously wrong turn. With Bush, Cheney and Addington still firmly in power, it was hard to declare their efforts a success. Still, with change in the air, there was a sense that history might be on their side." She mentions by name Jack Goldsmith, Matthew Waxman, Alberto Mora and Phillip Zelikow. Zelikow had warned that the Bush Administration's descent into torture would be seen in the same light as Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. He put it this way, "Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools."

n Michael Payne writes and lectures on literature and critical theory. He lives in Lewisburg. E-mail him at payne@bucknell.edu.