"The idea is that if we can put our own people through something almost as bad as what they might have to go through if they were taken captive, they will inoculate themselves." -- Jane Mayer
Jane Mayer (born 1955 in New York City) is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1995. In recent years, she has written extensive articles for that publication on Dick Cheney, the bin Laden family, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the Koch family, the television series 24 and the US government's controversial policy of extraordinary rendition.
"And I think that what is of concern is that they seem to be bringing skills from the scientific world into the interrogation room in a way that begs a lot of questions about whether it's ethical.""And the program was developed in large part by behavioral scientists who were working with the military, who do everything they possibly can to measure a soldier's stress levels to see how they're doing physically and emotionally, as they go through this program.""And to me, it was interesting, some of the people I had interviewed who knew the insides to this program said that they also, to create anxiety and upset in the soldiers, they take Bibles and they trash them.""And, in fact, there is a connection, the people who designed this here program and who implement it are the same people who are overseeing and helping in the interrogations of detainees in places like Guantanamo.""But there have been many news reports that water-boarding has been used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is one of the major al Qaeda figures that we have in U.S. custody.""Ethically, I think pretty much every code of ethics for doctors suggests that they should not be in an interrogation room, particularly if there's anything coercive or abusive going on.""I mean, The New York Times actually had an interesting case recently where they described a detainee who was afraid of the dark, and so he was purposely kept very much in the dark.""I mean, the people who run Guantanamo, the military, pretty much dismiss complaints by the detainees because they say that they're all created as part of a political process to sort of fake complaints and get public support.""It was our view of the worst that could befall our people if they were taken captive. So, what was fascinating to me was that somehow it appears the techniques that we have feared most in the world would be used on our people, we are using on people in our custody.""Now that he has disavowed as outright lies many of the stories he told himself, it's hard to know what to make of those who still insist that David Brock had it right the first time.""So, it, of course, makes one wonder how many other people there might be who are completely innocent, who have been sent by the U.S. to countries where they've been interrogated, and in some instances it seems tortured.""The military is trying very hard right now to put a better face on Guantanamo, and I think they actually have tried to rid some of the extreme versions of abuse that we have read about.""The world's a small place and people are watching; and, you know, somebody disappears, the family knows and their colleagues know, and so eventually, these things do get out.""Torture is illegal, both in the U.S. and abroad. So - and that is true for the Bush administration and for any other administration.""Well, they are critics of the Bush administration generally on the human rights record of the administration, and in particular, they are very, very critical of this use of science.""Well, yes, I mean, I think that, you know, my sources suggest that there's a lot of support for the notion that there is a lot of Koran abuse and that it was very much a systematic design, not just an aberration."
Mayer is a 1973 graduate of Fieldston and a 1977 graduate of Yale University, where she was a campus stringer for Time magazine. She continued her studies at Oxford University.
Mayer began her journalistic career in Vermont, writing for two small weekly papers, The Weathersfield Weekly and The Black River Tribune, then moving on to a daily paper, The Rutland Herald. She was a metropolitan reporter for the now-defunct Washington Star, then joined The Wall Street Journal in 1982, where she worked for 12 years, during which time she was named the newspaper's first female White House correspondent, and subsequently senior writer and front page editor. She also served as a war correspondent and foreign correspondent for the Journal, where she reported on bombing of the American barracks in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the last days of Communism in the former Soviet Union. She was nominated twice by the Journal for the Pulitzer Prize for feature-writing.
Mayer has also contributed to the New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and the liberal American Prospect and co-authored two previous books—Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (1994) (written with Jill Abramson), a study of the nomination and appointment of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court, and Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984—1988 (1989) (written with Doyle McManus), an account of Ronald Reagan's second term in the White House. Strange Justice served as the basis for the Showtime television movie of the same name, starring Delroy Lindo, Mandy Patinkin and Regina Taylor.
Of the portrait painted by co-authors Abramson and Mayer of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in Strange Justice, Time said: "Its portrait of Thomas as an id suffering in the role of a Republican superego is more detailed and convincing than anything that has appeared so far." Of Landslide, New York Times Washington correspondent Steven V. Roberts, reviewing the book in The Times, said "this is clearly a reporter's book, full of rich anecdote and telling detail.... I am impressed with the amount of inside information collected here."
Mayer's third and latest nonfiction book, The Dark Side (2008), addresses the origins, legal justifications, and possible war crimes liability, of the use of interrogation techniques to break down detainees' resistance and the subsequent deaths of detainees under such interrogation as applied by the CIA. The book was a finalist for the National Book Awards. Her previous book Strange Justice was also a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1994. Both volumes were also finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In its review of The Dark Side, The New York Times noted that the book is "the most vivid and comprehensive account we have so far of how a government founded on checks and balances and respect for individual rights could have been turned against those ideals." The Times subsequently named The Dark Side one of its notable books of the year.
"Her achievement," wrote reviewer Andrew J. Bacevich in The Washington Post of Mayer's book, "lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces." The volume, wrote Bacevich, a Boston University professor, "is a very fine book."
In a story the previous day, Post reporter Joby Warrick reported that Mayer's book revealed that a Central Intelligence Agency analyst warned the Bush administration that "up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake," but that the administration ignored the warning and insisted that all were enemy combatants.
In a story appearing the same day in The New York Times, reporter Scott Shane revealed that Mayer's book disclosed that Red Cross officials had concluded in a secret report the previous year that "the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."
Said Mayer of her work on the book: "I see myself more as a reporter than as an advocate."
Author Mayer has appeared as a guest on the Charlie Rose Show, as well as on the David Letterman show on CBS. She was also a guest on the Bill Moyers Journal show on PBS in 2008, and appeared as a guest on PBS Tavis Smiley show on August 7, 2008, to discuss her book The Dark Side, which had just made the New York Times bestseller list. She appeared as a guest on the Comedy Central's Colbert Report on August 12, 2008.
On January 26, 2009, author Mayer was interviewed at Yale Law School's Law and Media lecture series by Distinguished Journalist in Residence Linda Greenhouse and Truman Capote Fellow in Creative Writing Emily Bazelon. In October 2008, Mayer participated in a panel discussion of journalists at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University devoted to the media's coverage of the Iraq War. That same month Mayer participated as a panelist in a discussion of the same subject at the Newseum in Washington, D.C..
Mayer was also interviewed on the C-SPAN Book-TV show by Washington Post reporter Dana Priest on the subject of The Dark Side. The show aired on July 19, 2008.
Mayer is currently a staff writer for The New Yorker, and works from the magazine's Washington bureau. The granddaughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Allan Nevins, and great-great-granddaughter of Emanuel Lehman, a founder of the now-defunct eponymous banking house, Mayer is married to William B. Hamilton, an editor at The Washington Post. They have one daughter, Kate.
Mayer was awarded the 2008 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism for her investigative reporter leading to her book The Dark Side. The Award, presented annually by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is given to reporters for "distinguished cumulative accomplishments." In presenting the award, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Journalism school and one of the nine members of the award committee, noted that Mayer and her fellow winner, Andrew C. Revkin, science reporter for The New York Times, "set the gold standard for journalists, and we have benefitted tremendously from their dedication and hard work." She has also won the Ridenhour Book Prize and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.
In 2008, Mayer was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in connection with her ongoing work on her third book, The Dark Side.
Mayer was a finalist in the National Magazine Awards for 2007 for her nonfiction piece in The New Yorker entitled The Black Sites, which was subsequently collected in The Best American Magazine Writing 2008, published by Columbia University Press and edited by Jacob Weisberg, then editor-in-chief of Slate.
Mayer was awarded the 2009 Hillman Prize for The Dark Side.
