Swiss Cheese, Mad Cow and yer little dog too!
October 1st, 2006
I used to worry that we were becoming a Prozac Nation — but I understood it. The spiritual community had warned us years prior that we would be entering what was called the Third Wave leading into the 2012 Shift of Ages, and that the amping energy of “catch up” would be so difficult for those awakening late in the game that it would create imbalances and mental disorders. The first waves — the hippy 60’s and the convergence 80’s — had produced the “new age,” and humans being what they are, while the essence of those waves had given us potent kernels of truth and enlightenment we got a lot of non-sense and wing-nut activity as well. We entered the millennium with the capacity to soar like a dove or leap off the cliff to plummet like a stone — we’re still in the process of making that choice. Which brings us to the personal stone around our collective neck — George W. Bush, poster child for the Delusional.
I’ve said before that picking on Dubby is like shooting fish in a barrel — he simply isn’t equipped to be anything but what he is. But this is [a]merica, where the president of the country is the primary pitch man for policy — he’s the voice who sells us the goods, he’s the guy who gets the heat. The Buck stops with Bush — Truman solidified that truth, and no amount of legislation is going to make it untrue, no matter how much George wishes it to go away or how often he deflects responsibility for his actions outside of himself much as Uncle Dick spreads bird shot at helpless birds and hapless friends. And it simply isn’t working any more. The absurdity of pretending there is no other course than the one we’re on has a price tag that Bush will eventually have to pay, with his Doctrine of Swiss Cheese: Swallow it down because it’s the only item I’m allowing on the menu, and if you point out those big holes then you are at best naive, at worst a traitor to your country … and specificially to ME. So just take that damn Prozac — go back to sleep, I will keep you safe or kill you all trying.
And so, the [a]merican people are subjected to rambling statements that expose Bush’s psychological limitations, like when he accused those of being behind the N.I.E. leak as ‘trying to confuse the American people about the nature of this enemy.’ It’s too sensible by a mile to point out that the N.I.E. report was OLD NEWS — or that sixteen of his OWN agencies made the assessment — or that the
[a]merican people PAY for those reports with their tax dollars and should have access to them — or that keeping them from the public is madness and fraud. No, he simply won’t have that kind of disloyalty in his company …. errrr … country.
OK, so it turns out he lied about being a Uniter and not a Divider [understatement of the millennium!] But he’s still the Decider, dammit — and he’s going to call the shots. “I will not withdraw, even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me,” Bob Woodward reports him growling, defiantly. I’m sure that those who admire Dubby consider that “committed” — just as I’m sure you join me and other concerned citizens in thinking it’s GEORGE that needs to BE committed.
Where we stand today is that the missteps of the Cabal [the real Deciders] are being exposed, one by one — the overreach and ambition of the Minions [the Congress, corporations and christocrats] has become glaring and embarrassing — and the window into the mind of George Bush has become increasingly transparent and frightening to the average Joe/Jane … with fits and starts, all of this is showing up in MSM. You have to purposely NOT think in order to gnaw on this Swiss Cheese.
The revelations continue day by day — today we hear that Colin Powell, voice of reason, was actually FIRED from the White House, rather than nudged out. We hear that Rummy has been shredding evidence and acting [even gasp! more] irrationally. We hear reports of the White House in full defense posture and this lede line — Stung by criticism, Bush calls for offensive ‘across the world’ — can’t help but make a majority of [a]mericans think … yes, mission accomplished — he’s offensive across the world, alright.
So here’s my theory for the day. The little guy IS a faux-Texan — maybe it’s Mad Cow. For you Boston Legal watchers, he DOES act a lot like cow-maddened Denny Crane, these days. They say Mad Cow makes Swiss Cheese of your brain … see? Holes, again. George has [amazingly] “tasters” for his food — but they don’t appear too sane, either. Might have been some bad barbecue. [OK, so it's not a great theory ... but it's at least as rational as are the remaining supporters willing to follow Dub and Barney over the cliff. Laura may not be willing to go -- Woodward has it that she has, perhaps twice now, tried to rid the nation of Rumsfeld but Dubby remains unbudgable ... Denny Crane!]
Reminder — watch Woodward tonight on 60 Minutes; 7pm et/pt.
Clearly — the N.I.E. Report, both the new Woodward and Powell books do not describe a rational White House. The meltdown is proceeding nicely. And we’re in process … not yet stones tumbling off a cliff, not yet doves soaring. The very danger makes it exciting … and the lessons are all for the taking, sorted out from the anger and sorrow and despair — all of this refines our notions about what was Divine about the old America and what is fiendish about the new one … it’s what is evidently required to burn away the dross to reveal the valuable … that’s what waking up is all about. We will fly … in due time.
Here’s a collection of fascinating mainstream reports on Rummy, Colin, Dubby — excerpts of the books, breaking stories, Sunday blowback. The snide, amusing and/or serious op/ed’s will wait for another post.
Jude
The Fine Art of Declassification
NYT Editorial
September 27, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/opinion/27wed1.html
It’s hard to think of a president and an administration more devoted to secrecy than President Bush and his team. Except, that is, when it suits Mr. Bush politically to give the public a glimpse of the secrets. And so, yesterday, he ordered the declassification of a fraction of a report by United States intelligence agencies on the global terrorist threat.
Mr. Bush said he wanted to release the document so voters would not be confused about terrorism or the war when they voted for Congressional candidates in November. But the three declassified pages from what is certainly a voluminous report told us what any American with a newspaper, television or Internet connection should already know. The invasion of Iraq was a cataclysmic disaster. The current situation will get worse if American forces leave. Unfortunately, neither the report nor the president provide even a glimmer of a suggestion about how to avoid that inevitable disaster.
Despite what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, have tried to make everyone believe, one of the key findings of the National Intelligence Estimate, which represents the consensus of the 16 intelligence agencies, was indeed that the war in Iraq has greatly increased the threat from terrorism by “shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”
It said Iraq has become “the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.” It listed the war in Iraq as the second most important factor in the spread of terrorism — after “entrenched grievances such as corruption, injustice and fear of Western domination.” And that was before April, when the report was completed. Since then, things have got much worse. ( The report was written before the killing in June of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The authors thought such an event would diminish the danger in Iraq. It has not.)
Mr. Bush decided to release this small, selected chunk of the report in reaction to an article on the intelligence assessment that appeared in The Times over the weekend. As a defense of his policies, it serves only to highlight the maddening circular logic that passes for a White House rationale. It goes like this: The invasion of Iraq has created an entire new army of terrorists who will be emboldened by an American withdrawal. Therefore, the United States has to stay indefinitely and keep fighting those terrorists.
By that logic, the more the United States fights, the longer the war stretches on.
It’s obvious why Mr. Bush did not want this report out, and why it is taking so long for the intelligence agencies to complete another report, solely on Iraq, that was requested by Congress in late July. It’s not credible that more time is needed to do the job. In 2002, the intelligence agencies completed a report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in less time. Mr. Bush also made selected passages of that report public to buttress his arguments for war with Iraq, most of which proved to be based on fairy tales.
Then, Mr. Bush wanted Americans to focus on how dangerous Saddam Hussein was, and not on the obvious consequences of starting a war in the Middle East. Now, he wants voters to focus on how dangerous the world is, and not on his utter lack of ideas for what to do about it. ++
Stung by criticism, Bush calls for offensive ‘across the world’
Maxim Kniazkov
Sat Sep 30
http://tinyurl.com/m3gmg
US President George W. Bush called for fighting America’s enemies “across the world” as he stepped up his counteroffensive following charges that his policies were breeding a new generation of Islamic terrorists.
The call, delivered in his weekly radio address, was aimed to counter a rash of accusations that the Bush administration had seriously mishandled the war in Iraq and created fertile political ground for Islamic extremism.
The criticism was fueled by a new National Intelligence Estimate, portions of which were declassified this past week. The document argues that the war in Iraq had spawned a new generation of Islamic radicals determined to strike against the United States.
Casting another cloud over the administration’s policy was a new book by veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, “State of Denial”, that alleges a number of policy blunders committed in Iraq, amid bitter feuding by the president and his closest aides and refusal to acknowledge reality.
The controversy may have further dimmed the public’s view of the war. The latest CNN television poll showed 61 percent of Americans now believed the war in Iraq was going either “very badly” or “moderately badly,” compared to 38 percent who thought it was going “very well” or “moderately well.”
But Bush insisted Saturday that claims that the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq was helping foster anti-American terrorism were tantamount to buying “into the enemy’s propaganda.”
“The only way to protect our citizens at home is to go on the offense against the enemy across the world,” the president said Saturday. “So we will remain on the offense until the terrorists are defeated and this fight is won.”
The Republican president, who just two days ago branded opposition Democrats “the party of cut-and-run,” argued an early withdrawal from Iraq, as suggested by some Democrats, would only embolden terrorists.
“It would help them find new recruits to carry out even more destructive attacks on our Nation, and it would give the terrorists a new sanctuary in the heart of the Middle East, with huge oil riches to fund their ambitions,” Bush stressed. “America must not allow this to happen.”
He said that for Al-Qaeda and its allies, a safe haven in Iraq “would be even more valuable than the one they lost in Afghanistan.”
However, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in an interview published Saturday, offered a different rationale for continued US military presence in Iraq, saying it was needed to counter the growing influence of neighboring Iran.
“We just have to fight tooth and nail for the victory of the Iraqis who do not want Iranian influence in their daily lives,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “We’ve got a chance to resist the Iranian push into the region, but we better get about it.”
The dissonant messages came against the backdrop of stinging criticism from top Democrats, who have found in the intelligence estimate and the Woodward book fresh fodder for attacks on the administration ahead of the November 7 midterm congressional elections, in which they hope to win back control of the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate.
Democrats have long accused the White House of failing to foresee an Iraqi insurgency, create a viable international coalition behind the invasion, and of sending too few soldiers to do control the restive country.
Now they are also charging the president is in a state of denial.
“He doesn’t want to see the facts. He doesn’t want to acknowledge reality,” Carl Levin, the top Democrat of the Senate Armed Services Committee, insisted Friday.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean called Bush’s political counteroffensive “the product of a desperate White House with no credibility left with the American people.” ++
Falling on His Sword
Colin Powell’s most significant moment turned out to be his lowest
Sunday, October 1, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/27/AR2006092700106.html
ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2004, eight days after the president he served was elected to a second term, Secretary of State Colin Powell received a telephone call from the White House at his State Department office. The caller was not President Bush but Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and he got right to the point.
“The president would like to make a change,” Card said, using a time-honored formulation that avoided the words “resign” or “fire.” He noted briskly that there had been some discussion of having Powell remain until after Iraqi elections scheduled for the end of January, but that the president had decided to take care of all Cabinet changes sooner rather than later. Bush wanted Powell’s resignation letter dated two days hence, on Friday, November 12, Card said, although the White House expected him to stay at the State Department until his successor was confirmed by the Senate.
After four long years, Powell had anticipated the end of his service and sometimes even longed for it. He had never directly told the president but thought he had made clear to him during the summer of 2004 that he did not intend to stay into a second term.
There had been public speculation as the election drew near that the president might ask the secretary of state to reenlist, at least temporarily. Powell was still the most popular member of Bush’s team, far more popular with the public than the president himself. Senior Powell aides were convinced that the secretary anticipated an invitation to stay, and they were equally certain that he intended to accept. The approaching elections in Iraq, hints of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the rumored departure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a principal Powell nemesis, made the next six months look like a rare period of promise for diplomacy.
The president himself made no contact with Powell after Card’s call. For two days, the only person at the State Department Powell told about it was his deputy and friend of decades, Richard Armitage. Powell dropped off his resignation letter, as instructed, after typing it himself on his home computer. (The White House later pointed out a typo and sent it back to be redone.) Loath to reveal either surprise or insult, he used the letter to claim the decision to leave as his own.
“Dear Mr. President:” he wrote. “As we have discussed in recent months, I believe that now that the election is over the time has come for me to step down as Secretary of State . . . effective at your pleasure.”
He was pleased, Powell said, to “have been part of a team that launched the Global War Against Terror, liberated the Afghan and Iraqi people, brought the attention of the world to the problem of proliferation, reaffirmed our alliances, adjusted to the Post-Cold War World and undertook major initiatives to deal with the problem of poverty and disease in the developing world. In these and in so many other areas, your leadership was the driving force of our success.”
AFTER HIS DEPARTURE FROM THE STATE DEPARTMENT IN JANUARY 2005, Powell traveled the lecture circuit, making paid speeches on leadership and U.S. foreign policy to corporate boards and industry conventions. He never spoke publicly about the specific circumstances of his resignation as secretary of state except to say, when asked, that Cabinet reshuffles were normal at the end of a four-year mandate, and that his departure had been a “mutual decision” between him and the president.
He artfully brushed aside inquiries about the many published accounts of deep ideological schisms that had rent Bush’s national security team throughout the first term and the private humiliations he reportedly had endured at the hands of powerful colleagues.
Audiences often asked about his public role in promoting and defending what many now consider to be the most ill-advised act of Bush’s presidency: the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Powell usually offered a tepid defense, allowing only that he wished there had been more troops committed to the war and its aftermath, and a better plan to rebuild the country.
Powell had thrown his considerable personal and professional reputation behind the administration’s charges that Iraq possessed chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons, and posed an imminent threat to the United States. In a crucial speech to the United Nations Security Council six weeks before the invasion was launched, he had single-handedly convinced many skeptical Americans that the threat posed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was real.
But the war had gone sour almost from the moment U.S. troops rolled triumphantly into Baghdad two months later. Powell’s credibility had been seriously undermined when the weapons he cited as the main justification for invasion turned out not to exist.
No one in his legions of admirers wanted to believe that Powell had been duped by the White House — or, worse yet, that he had knowingly betrayed the nation’s trust. Many assumed that he had privately argued against such a clearly misguided adventure and been overruled.
In fact, Powell had never advised against the Iraq invasion, although he had warned Bush of the difficulties and counseled patience. He had no reason to resign over Iraq, he told questioners. But the larger mystery of his tenure as the nation’s chief diplomat, fourth in line for succession to the presidency, remained.
When Bush selected Powell as his secretary of state in December 2000, it was seen as a stroke of political genius that instantly assuaged concerns at home and abroad about the president-elect’s conspicuous lack of foreign policy experience. As national security adviser to one president and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under two more, Powell had helped guide the nation through the end of the Cold War and had brought the military to victory in the Persian Gulf War. By the time he retired from the Army as a four-star general in 1993, he was a national icon of wise leadership — the “most trusted man in America,” according to polls.
Yet Powell had constantly found himself on the losing side of regular ideological combat inside the Bush administration, particularly against Rumsfeld and the powerful vice president, Dick Cheney, over Iraq and a host of other foreign policy issues. Though Powell had scored some victories, the rumored humiliations had been real. He had been purposely cut out of major foreign policy decisions more than once, and his advice often had gone unheeded or been only grudgingly accepted by the president. Why hadn’t he resigned?
The easy answer had the virtue of truth: Soldiers didn’t quit when they disagreed with the decisions of their commanders. The fact that he had been out of uniform for nearly a decade was irrelevant to Powell; he would be a soldier until he drew his last breath.
AS TEXAS GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH BEGAN HIS CAMPAIGN FOR THE PRESIDENCY IN 1999, Powell’s initial impression was that Bush was “still getting his sea legs” on foreign policy and national security issues. Powell knew “Sonny,” as he referred to him, only in passing, and his private preference was for another Republican candidate: Arizona Sen. John McCain, a fellow military officer and Vietnam veteran.
But Powell had served in the administration of Bush’s father and considered himself part of the extended Bush family, with the personal loyalty that kinship entailed. “It wasn’t as if I was a stranger, or that anybody had to worry or could imagine that I would not be for Sonny when the time came,” he later reflected. He wrote a $1,000 check to McCain and contributed an equal amount to Bush.
Worried that Powell would outshine their candidate and suspicious of his Republican credentials, Bush’s handlers ignored him for most of the campaign — even as they regularly implied to the media that the respected general was a behind-the-scenes member of the governor’s brain trust. Once McCain was vanquished in the Republican primaries and Bush began a head-to-head battle against Democrat Al Gore, the campaign hinted that Powell would accompany Bush on fact-finding trips overseas and would become his secretary of state. But no one on the Bush team ever approached Powell about such a trip, and there was no substantive discussion of a Cabinet position.
Powell later recalled that the only conversations he and Bush had had about foreign affairs came just weeks before the election, in the back seats of cars between events on the four days they had campaigned together that fall. He had no memory of an explicit invitation from Bush to serve in his Cabinet. Once the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Florida recount officially over in early December, Powell later said, “It just sort of happened as it was assumed to happen.”
On December 16, three days after Gore conceded defeat, Powell flew to Bush’s ranch in Texas to be unveiled as his first Cabinet nominee.
Powell and Cheney stood on either side of the president-elect as he read from prepared remarks to reporters gathered in a Crawford school auditorium. Turning to Powell, Bush invoked Harry Truman’s tribute to his own iconic secretary of state, retired Army general George Marshall: ” ‘ He is a tower of strength and common sense. When you find somebody like that, you have to hang on to them.’ I have found such a man.” When reporters later asked Bush about tears they had seen in his eyes, he replied that it was an emotional moment because “I so admire Colin Powell — I love his story.”
THE SECRETARY OF STATE SAW THE PRESIDENT FREQUENTLY, THOUGH RARELY ALONE. Powell found Bush better-spoken and more thoughtful in private than his public posturing as a rough-hewn, plain-spoken Texan would indicate, although he found Bush’s fidgety impatience irritating, along with his tendency to interrupt everyone, from his Cabinet officers to visiting heads of state. While the president publicly praised the secretary’s abilities and stature, their relationship remained stiff and formal.
Powell insisted to disbelieving aides that Bush listened to, and even acted on, his advice. “The president has good instincts . . . an instinctual grasp” of issues, he often told them. But he usually followed with an acknowledgment that Bush “has got these rough edges — his cowboy, Texan rough edges — and when he gets them exposed, there are other people who know how to use them” to their advantage.
Time and time again during the administration’s bumpy first year, Powell had seen Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney intervene to nudge a willing Bush away from moderation and diplomacy, and toward a hard line on foreign policy issues from North Korea to the Middle East. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda on New York and Washington, their attention turned sharply toward Iraq, and by the following summer it was clear that the administration was headed toward war with Saddam Hussein.
Powell found little evidence to support thinly veiled White House suggestions that Hussein had had a hand in the September 11 attacks. But he saw no reason to doubt the CIA’s assessment, fervidly promoted and expanded upon by Cheney and the Defense Department, that the Iraqi leader had stockpiles of chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons, which he was ready to hand over to terrorists bent on destruction of the United States.
Powell’s own war to drive Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991 had been fought with half a million U.S. troops, broad foreign support and a U.N. mandate. He believed the decision to invade was Bush’s to make, but that international backing was essential for both political and military success. In August 2002, he succeeded in convincing Bush — for once, over Cheney’s objections — that there would be no multinational support unless the administration first visibly tried to tame Hussein without war.
It took five months for Powell’s efforts at the U.N. Security Council to craft a solution short of war to reach the point of collapse, caught in the crossfire of administration intransigence, international mistrust of Bush’s justification and motives, and Hussein’s perfidy. As the Pentagon’s war plans were completed and March 2003 was secretly set as the internal deadline for invasion, Bush still found himself with little foreign support and an uncertain American public.
“We’ve really got to make the case” against Hussein, Bush told Powell in an Oval Office meeting in late January, “and I want you to make it.” Only Powell had the “credibility to do this,” Bush said. “Maybe they’ll believe you.” It was a direct order from his commander in chief, and it never occurred to Powell to question it.
He was told that the case had already been put together by the White House, and he assumed that with a little tweaking he could turn it into a speech that would fit his voice and style. He was taken aback on Tuesday, January 28, when he received the bulk of the document, a 48-page, single-spaced compilation of Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction program, replete with drama, rhetorical devices and a kitchen sink full of allegations. The most extreme version of every charge the administration had made about Hussein, the document had been written, Powell concluded, under the tutelage of Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who shared all of his boss’s hard-line views and then some.
Delivery of the speech had been set for the following Wednesday, February 5. Bush planned to announce the date that very night in his State of the Union address to Congress. Acutely aware that he would be selling his own reputation as much as the specific facts, Powell picked up the telephone to tell Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, that he needed more time to get the speech into shape.
“Condi, please,” Powell implored, “let’s just tell the president that we’re going to put in the State of the Union that Secretary Powell will be going to the U.N. next week. Don’t put a date.”
“She said, ‘Right, right, of course,’ ” Powell recalled, “and she runs away to change the speech. Then runs back about five minutes later” to call him and say, ” ‘ There’s good news and bad news. The good news is we can change the speech.’ ” The bad news, she said, was that the White House had already told the media, in a preview of the State of the Union address, that Powell’s presentation would be made on February 5.
“I could have gotten two more days,” Powell later said wistfully. “Whether it would have made any difference or not, I don’t know.”
“HERE YOU GO,” POWELL SAID, as he dropped the White House document on the desk of his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson. Wilkerson quickly agreed it read more like a badly written novel than something designed to persuade the world. That afternoon, he assembled a State Department team– including speechwriter Lynne Davidson and Barry Lowenkron, a senior CIA officer before he joined Powell’s policy planning staff — to set up shop at CIA headquarters, across the Potomac River in Virginia. They would examine the evidence themselves and turn the document into what Wilkerson called “a Colin Powell speech.”
Cheney aide John Hannah and William Tobey, the counterproliferation director at the White House National Security Council, would meet them there to answer any questions.
“We were going out to the agency and live there until we got the presentation ready,” Wilkerson later said.
Their job was to make the most convincing, evidence-backed case possible. Powell had little more than a cursory knowledge of the intelligence underlying some of the most damning charges, but in recent months, as pressure built inside the administration and his frustration with the United Nations grew, Powell’s language on Iraq had become almost as loose as Cheney’s. In a speech to an international economic conference just the week before, he had made charges that his own State Department analysts questioned, mentioning allegations that Iraq had attempted to import uranium and nuclear-related equipment, as well as the presumed ties between Hussein and al-Qaeda.
But that had been only an indictment; this would have to be a complete, trial-worthy prosecution, designed to convince a skeptical jury that capital punishment, in the form of decapitating the Iraqi regime, was warranted.
In addition to proving the charges against Iraq, Wilkerson believed, they had to protect Powell’s integrity against those within the administration who had long been out to tarnish it.
There was a widespread belief among the secretary’s loyal aides — privately shared by Powell himself, although he brushed it off as meaningless political gamesmanship in conversations with them — that both White House political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney had actively plotted to undermine him for the past three years. Powell had laughed when he described to his aides how the vice president, after a discussion of the upcoming U.N. speech, had poked him jocularly in the chest and said, “You’ve got high poll ratings; you can afford to lose a few points.” Cheney’s idea of Powell’s U.N. mission, Wilkerson thought, was to “go up there and sell it, and we’ll have moved forward a peg or two. Fall on your damn sword and kill yourself, and I’ll be happy, too.”
BY THE NEXT DAY, Wilkerson and his team were huddled in the CIA director’s conference room, taking the document apart sentence by sentence. Things were not going well. Hannah had brought a clipboard with a three-inch stack of paper that he thumbed through to cite the origin of each allegation — reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, foreign intelligence, the Iraqi National Congress and even newspaper articles.
CIA Director George Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin — backed up by Robert Walpole, the chief CIA officer for nuclear programs; Lawrence Gershwin, the agency’s top adviser on “technical” intelligence; and several other specialists — were constantly dispatching aides to find the original source material.
In some instances, the “evidence” was, in fact, found in an official intelligence report, but only as unconfirmed information that did not appear in the report’s conclusions. “They had left out all the caveats, all the qualifiers,” Wilkerson recalled. In a few instances, he thought, they had even changed the meaning of the intelligence. A Senate investigation of the speechwriting process conducted after the invasion would later conclude that the Powell team had had to eliminate
“information that the White House had added . . . gathered from finished and raw intelligence,” some of which had come from only a single source with no corroboration at all.
By late afternoon, Tenet and Wilkerson agreed to put the White House draft aside and start over, basing the speech on a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that had been compiled by the CIA the previous fall.
That night, after the senior CIA and White House officials had left for the day, Wilkerson and his colleagues watched a film he had borrowed from the State Department archives of Adlai Stevenson’s historic presentation to the Security Council at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
The Soviet Union had angrily denied charges that it had deployed nuclear-armed missiles on the island 90 miles off the Florida coast. Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time, had responded with irrefutable proof in the form of 26 grainy, poster-size black-and-white photographs of missile sites shot from a U-2 reconnaissance plane, displayed on easels at the front of the council chamber for all the world to see. That “Stevenson moment,” Wilkerson told them, was the effect they were after.
Powell, Libby and Stephen Hadley, Rice’s deputy, joined the process the next day.
Cheney had called Powell to say he hoped the secretary would “take a good look at Scooter’s stuff.” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, who accompanied Powell to the CIA sessions, later recalled Libby himself appealing to Powell to look more carefully at the now-discarded White House material. “Powell said: ‘I don’t want to. I want to use what Larry’s been working on.’ ”
They settled into a routine over the next few days. The CIA turned over the office suite of the National Intelligence Council — the internal organization that coordinated with other members of the intelligence community to write National Intelligence Estimates — to Wilkerson and the others engaged in the nitty-gritty of composing the speech and providing material to the graphic designers lodged in the agency’s basement. At around 5 p.m., the writing and research team would move to Tenet’s conference room with senior officials, eventually including Rice and Armitage, to spend hours going over the new text and verifying the sourcing for Powell.
Powell insisted that they eliminate any intelligence that had come from Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile favored by the Pentagon and the vice president’s office, but widely mistrusted as a charlatan within the State Department. Powell was told by the CIA that evidence that Hussein had built mobile laboratories to conceal his biological weapons programs — one of the most damning charges — had been corroborated by four separate sources, including an Iraqi chemical engineer, a civil engineer and an Iraqi military defector. It was, Tenet said, “totally reliable information.”
They argued over how to interpret intercepted communications about Iraq’s weapons between Iraqi military officers. None seemed definitive, and Wilkerson was worried that they might not mean what the analysts said they meant. But amid the scant information the CIA officials were willing to declassify for public consumption, they said this was the best they had.
The team examined satellite imagery said to reveal prohibited items. Powell was shown, and rejected, a grainy picture of what analysts said was an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) site near Basra. It was impossible to tell where it was or even what it was, he argued. Instead, he approved a U.N. photograph of a generic Iraqi UAV, taken years earlier, to illustrate charges that Hussein was developing drones that could spray deadly weapons of mass destruction on population centers.
CIA analysts showed the team additional photographs they said conclusively revealed chemical weapons production and storage facilities, but then insisted that the pictures were too sensitive to be used in a public presentation. Those they were willing to release often appeared — at least to the uninitiated in the room — to illustrate nothing more than trucks parked beside buildings. “Don’t you have a picture of chemical weapons canisters being moved around?” Boucher later recalled asking Tenet. “Something we can point to and say: ‘That’s a chemical weapon.’ ” Tenet replied that no country had left prohibited weapons “out on the lawn” since the Cuban missile crisis. “They know we’re looking at them. So we have to go with other things that tell us what they’re doing.”
They spent hours discussing the aluminum tubes Hussein had tried to import. The Energy and State departments continued to disagree with the CIA’s assessment that the tubes were designed for nuclear enrichment. McLaughlin, who had brought one of the intercepted tubes to the table and rolled it back and forth as they argued, insisted that the CIA analysis was correct. The agency, Powell later recalled, “pulled in their experts and swore on a stack of Bibles that they’d done every analysis imaginable, and [the tubes] simply were not for rockets, but for [uranium] centrifuges.” The tubes stayed in the speech, although with a brief mention of the disagreement among U.S. government agencies as to their purpose. (U.S. investigators in Iraq after the war later concluded they were meant for rockets.)
Bush had referred in his State of the Union address to Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Africa — the same information the CIA had successfully argued should be excised from a speech he gave the previous October because of questionable sources. No one suggested that it be included in Powell’s presentation.
The White House document detailing Hussein’s ties to terrorism was, if anything, even more problematic than the portion on weapons of mass destruction.
Powell retreated with Tenet to the director’s private office to talk through “what we really know” about the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Powell was shown the transcript of an interrogation of a captured Osama bin Laden aide who swore that al-Qaeda operatives had received biological and chemical weapons training from Iraq, and the charge became a lengthy portion of the speech. (A year after the invasion, the agency acknowledged that the information had come from a single source who had been branded a liar by U.S. intelligence officials long before Powell’s presentation.)
Tempers began to fray as the sessions continued into the weekend. Tenet and McLaughlin became irritated with Hadley, who kept pressing to reinsert jettisoned White House language and information. Powell exploded at McLaughlin, who supplied tortured, five-minute answers to seemingly simple questions. Increasingly, the secretary looked to Tenet for reassurance.
“George would give the kind of answers the secretary liked,” Wilkerson recalled. “Whether you liked that ’slam-dunk’ language or not, George, to his credit, would say, ‘Absolutely, Mr. Secretary, I stand by that.’ ”
Powell later recalled that most of their time was spent
“trimming the garbage” of the White House’s overwrought verbiage and uncorroborated specifics from the speech. Once that was done, Wilkerson concluded long afterward, “what we were all involved in — groupthink isn’t the right word — it was a process of putting the data to points in the speech rather than challenging the data itself.” As they probed for proof of Hussein’s lies, no one thought of looking for evidence that might have raised questions about their assumptions that the weapons existed.
WHEN HE ARRIVED IN NEW YORK ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, Powell was as nervous as Wilkerson had ever seen him. He was worried that the language in the speech was still too methodical and technical to win over an audience. Powell’s best performances were modeled on what he had learned as a young instructor at Fort Benning and later at the Pentagon: Use a map or some slides, a rough outline or a few key phrases, and then speak naturally. He always knew his material cold, but it was technique that clinched a sale. This time, however, each sentence had been carefully crafted and debated ad nauseam, and he was going to have to read directly from the text.
On Tuesday night, the team had a final, full-dress rehearsal. The cafeteria on the top floor of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations had been reconfigured into a mock-up of the Security Council chamber. Powell used a stopwatch to check his timing, clicking it off every time someone interrupted with a question or comment. The speech was 75 minutes long.
When he finished, the tension of the last several days seemed to dissipate like the air escaping a balloon, leaving him calm and tired. He believed he had done everything he could do.
Departing for his room at the Waldorf, where he hoped to get a good night’s sleep, he reminded Tenet that “you’re going to be there with me tomorrow.” He expected the CIA director to sit in full view of the television cameras, just behind him at the Security Council table. Tenet replied, only half-jokingly, that he was the one who would have to face the intelligence committees in Congress if there were any mistakes. Powell told his executive assistant, Craig Kelly, and Boucher to make sure that Tenet was waiting in the side room they would pass through on their way into the Security Council chamber the next morning. Later, he changed his mind and called Tenet to tell him he would swing by the CIA director’s hotel and pick him up on the way to the United Nations, just to make sure there were no glitches.
On Wednesday, February 5, Powell entered the chamber just before 10:30 a.m., smiling and stopping to shake hands as he made his way across the floor. With war hanging in the balance, and the power and prestige of the United States on full display, it was a moment of high drama that owed as much to the player as to the play. A nationwide poll released just that morning had found that “when it comes to U.S. policy toward Iraq,” Americans trusted Powell more than Bush by 63 to 24 percent.
“I cannot tell you everything that we know,” he began after a brief introduction. “But what I can share with you, when combined with what all of us have learned over the years, is deeply troubling.” The facts and Iraq’s behavior “demonstrate that Saddam Hussein and his regime have made no effort — no effort — to disarm as required by the international community.”
“My colleagues,” Powell said, “every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
The next day, opinion polls indicated that national opinion had shifted literally overnight; most Americans surveyed said they believed an invasion was justified to protect the nation. Those closest to Powell were relieved, but worried about both him and the nation. His wife, Alma, had a sense of foreboding; her husband, she thought, was being used by the White House. Powell’s daughter Linda, who had listened to the speech on the radio, had found his performance unsettling. His voice was strained, she thought, as if he were trying to inject passion into the dry words through the sheer force of his will.
Wilkerson, who had left the United Nations immediately after the speech and returned to his hotel room to fall into a deep sleep, awoke depressed. Later, when it became clear that much of the speech on which he had worked so hard was based on lies, he would come to think of that week as “the lowest moment of my life.” Back in Washington, he ordered special plaques with Powell’s signature made up for the State Department aides who had worked so hard to make the presentation happen.
When they were handed out, Powell asked Wilkerson why he hadn’t ordered one for himself. Wilkerson replied that he didn’t want one.
AS 2004 BEGAN, U.S. TROOPS WERE HEADED TOWARD A SECOND YEAR IN THE IRAQI QUAGMIRE. No weapons of mass destruction had yet been found, and each day’s news brought fresh indications that the administration had exaggerated its case against Hussein. Powell’s own prominent role came under increasing question. It was now clear that “a lot of probables, a lot of maybes” had been left out of the assessment of Iraq’s capabilities, a reporter confronted him. Given a second chance, would he have “rephrased” his U.N. speech?
“No,” Powell replied firmly. “I knew exactly the circumstances under which I was presenting that speech . . . The whole world would be watching, and there would be those who would applaud every word, and there would be those who were going to be skeptical of every word.” Whatever doubts were now being raised, he said, the basic conclusions had been solid. “I am confident of what I presented last year. The intelligence community is confident of the material they gave me; I was representing them . . . they stand behind it.”
But on Friday, January 23, the CIA announced without explanation that David Kay, the head of its Iraq Survey Group hunting for weapons of mass destruction, was being replaced. Later that day, Kay told reporters he doubted the weapons existed. When Congress demanded answers, Kay said the same thing.
As Powell flew the next day to attend a presidential inauguration in the Republic of Georgia, journalists aboard his plane asked him to reconcile his U.N. speech with Kay’s conclusions. “You said a year ago that you thought there was between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons [in Iraq],” one reporter said. “Who’s right?”
“I think the answer to the question is I don’t know yet,” Powell replied.
“What is the open question is: how many stocks they had, if any? And if they had any, where did they go? And if they didn’t have any, then why wasn’t that known beforehand?”
Powell thought there was no sense denying the obvious questions Kay had raised. But it was the first doubt that any senior administration official had publicly expressed about the central justification for the war. The story made headlines around the world, and an agitated Condoleezza Rice called him the next morning in Georgia. Powell was not surprised; it was not the first time that the White House had blown up at him over what he considered honest comment. Rice, he later recalled, was usually the one to make the call. “She’d say, ‘Oh, we’ve got a problem, what are we going to do about this? How are we going to fix this?’ ”
On this issue, he thought, there was little to be done. “The fact of the matter is, you can’t ignore the possibility, since the guy we sent there for eight months as our guy says there’s nothing there,” he later recalled telling Rice with exasperation. “So, to say there’s got to be something there when he, who has been there for eight months, says there’s nothing there . . . You can’t do that. You’ve got to at least accept the possibility.”
The White House, he advised, should “just be quiet” for now.
ON HIS RETURN, POWELL SPENT THE WEEKEND carefully reading Kay’s congressional testimony, highlighting portions with a yellow marker and scribbling notes in the margins. With the first anniversary of his U.N. speech just days away, the Sunday newspapers and television talk shows were filled with comparisons between the charges he had made and Kay’s conclusions.
On Monday, February 2, he arrived for an interview at The Washington Post carrying a blue folder with the marked-up testimony inside. He was “absolutely convinced” that the invasion had been the right thing to do, Powell emphatically told the two dozen reporters and editors crowded around a conference table in the newspaper’s eighth-floor boardroom.
Would he still have “recommended the invasion” if Tenet had told him a year before “that there are no stockpiles?” one reporter asked.
“I don’t know, because it was the stockpiles that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world,” Powell replied. But there was no point discussing hypotheticals, he said, because
“the fact of the matter” was that the CIA, as well as intelligence agencies in Britain and elsewhere, had “suggested the stockpiles were there.”
But what if he had known they weren’t there? the reporter pressed.
“The absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus,” Powell acknowledged. “It changes the answer you get with the little formula I laid out.”
To a White House already reeling from the one-two punch of Kay’s conclusions and Powell’s comments en route to Georgia, it was another worrisome example of the secretary of state’s unwillingness to stay “on message.” When his remarks appeared in The Post the next morning, “I think the whole White House operation was mad . . . the NSC, the president — everybody was annoyed,” Powell recalled. “White Houses do not respond well to immediate problems in the morning . . . all the white corpuscles race to the source of the infection, so all the white corpuscles raced to me.”
After Rice’s inevitable irate telephone call, presidential aides quickly began contacting the media to counteract the secretary’s remarks. Annoyed but not surprised, Powell issued a White House-requested “clarification” insisting that Hussein had had the “capability and intent” to produce the weapons even if none had yet been found. Bush, he repeated, had been right to invade.
Still mulling over the situation a week later with a visitor in his dimly lit office, he criticized a persistent White House machismo that took aim at “anything . . . that suggests any weakness in the [administration's] position,” regardless of common sense. That, and what he saw as a never-ending effort to humble him personally.
“There are people who would like to take me down,” he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the White House. “It’s been the case since I was appointed. By take down, I mean ‘keep him in his place’. . . And there are those who, whether it was me or anyone else, just love somebody getting in trouble, because it’s usually to the detriment of the person getting in trouble and to the advantage of someone else.”
The episode reinforced his already deep-seated disdain for politics and its practitioners. Political thought and decision-making were often polluted by ideology and the exigencies of the election cycle; soldiers breathed a purer, more rational air. “I was not trained as a politician or a think tank guy or anything else,” Powell insisted. “I was trained to consider all possibilities.”
“I mean, if you’re attacking and suddenly you get attacked from the flank,” he continued, using his hands to illustrate a military maneuver, “you don’t say, ‘I’m going to keep attacking straight ahead [and] ignore this new threat coming at my flank.’ ” He had been asked whether different information would have changed his assessment of the Iraq situation, and “all of my instincts and all of my background and training at that point said the answer to the question is, ‘I’d have to reconsider.’ ”
He shrugged and brought his hands to rest. “But that’s the way it goes.”
Powell’s irritation at the White House was coupled with a growing anger at the CIA. Right or wrong, at least Bush had willingly shouldered the ultimate responsibility for the decision to go to war. Powell felt he had done his own duty by privately voicing caution even as he gave the president his full support. But it was increasingly apparent that the intelligence community had been careless with the truth and hence with Powell’s most precious commodity — his credibility with the American people.
For a week after Kay’s report, the CIA had continued publicly to stand by its prewar weapons assessment. But in a hastily arranged speech at Georgetown University on February 5, Tenet finally admitted the possibility of error. His “provisional bottom line,” he said, was that the intelligence community had been “generally on target” in its warnings that Hussein was developing long-range missiles. But the CIA “may have overestimated the progress Hussein was making” on nuclear weapons.
As for biological weapons stockpiles and mobile laboratories, he said, “we are finding discrepancies in some claims made by human sources” to whom the agency “lacked direct access.”
The CIA, Tenet said, “did not ourselves penetrate the inner sanctum” of Hussein’s programs but had “access to emigres and defectors” along with high-level information from “a trusted foreign partner.” They were now in the process of “evaluating” questions such as, “Did we clearly tell policymakers what we knew, what we didn’t know, what was not clear, and identify the gaps in our knowledge?”
Although Powell had been advised in recent months of problems with some of the intelligence sourcing, Tenet’s speech was “the first time I heard that the CIA was no longer sticking behind its story” in public, he later recalled. He had been given no advance copy of the CIA director’s remarks and listened in his office to a broadcast of Tenet’s acknowledgment of “discrepancies” and uncertainties.
Powell stared silently at Wilkerson after Tenet finished speaking. “But the question is,” Wilkerson said, reaching for a joke, “are you still friends?”
“I don’t think so,” Powell replied.
As the evidence continued to unravel, some in the media suggested that Powell should apologize publicly for peddling false information that had pushed the nation toward war. “Is everyone else going to apologize?” he railed within the four walls of his office. “It’s not [just] me getting had. I’m not the only one who was using that intelligence . . . they all stood up in the Senate. The president stood up on this material. [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair stood up on this material . . . The whole global intelligence community bears responsibility.”
But there was no denying that he had been the most visible and effective salesman. He already knew that the label would follow him around forever. “I’m the guy who will always be known as the ‘Powell Briefing’ . . . I’m not being defensive, because I did it. But Powell wasn’t the only one.”
PRESENTATION WAS NEARLY AS IMPORTANT TO POWELL AS SUBSTANCE, and after his inelegant dismissal as secretary of state, he wanted at least to control the way his departure was announced. After submitting his letter on Friday, he spent the weekend putting together a plan: He would inform his inner-office staff at exactly 8:20 a.m. the following Monday, November 15. He would tell his senior aides at their regular 8:30 staff meeting. At 10:15, he would send an e-mail to his friends and extended family. He called Card and told him he expected the White House would then publicly announce his resignation.
At midmorning Monday, the White House released five separate statements under Bush’s name, reporting the resignations of the secretaries of agriculture, energy, education and state, and the head of the Republican National Committee. Each statement was three paragraphs long and titled “President Thanks [official's name].” When White House spokesman Scott McClellan briefed the media shortly after noon, all but one of the resignation questions were about Powell. Had Bush tried to persuade him to stay? Had Powell offered? If so, had the president turned him down? McClellan avoided a direct answer. “I think you saw from Secretary Powell’s letter that this is a discussion that they’ve had for some months now, or over recent months at least . . . And Secretary Powell made a decision for his own reasons that this was now the time to leave.”
The next morning, Bush nominated Rice as his new secretary of state.
Powell saw Bush regularly over the next two months, passing through the Oval Office for routine meetings that took place as if nothing had transpired. Eventually, the White House contacted his office to schedule what it described as a “farewell call” with the president. Such calls were being arranged for each departing Cabinet secretary.
When Powell saw the January 13 appointment on his calendar, his staff told him they assumed it was a goodbye photo opportunity with Bush. They suggested that perhaps he should bring his family.
“We’ve got a houseful of pictures,” Powell replied dryly. Was he supposed to talk to the president? Or was the president supposed to talk to him?
“Am I supposed to say: ‘This is what I think?’ Or what?”
He didn’t have to say anything, he was told. It was just a “farewell call.”
As the meeting approached, the White House — which had scheduled it in the first place — inexplicably called the State Department to ask for “talking points” that aides could use to brief the president.
The appointed time found Powell already in the Oval Office for a routine meeting; when it concluded, he lingered as the others left. As Powell later remembered it, Bush seemed puzzled and called after his departing chief of staff, “Where you going, Andy?”
“Mr. President, I think this is supposed to be our farewell call,” Powell prompted.
“Is that why Condi ain’t here?” he recalled the president asking.
That was probably the reason, Powell replied.
Card walked back inside, and the three men sat down. Powell had already decided to use the opportunity — likely his last as secretary of state — to unload.
The war in Iraq was going south, he said after a few moments of small talk, and the president had little time left to turn it around. The administration’s hope was that the upcoming election there would change the dynamics on the ground, and the Iraqi people would finally be ready and able to begin standing up to the insurgents on their own.
But the administration, he pointed out, had entertained such hopes before over the past two years — when it had set up a new legal framework for Iraq, when it had first turned a modicum of government power over to handpicked Iraqis and when ousted dictator Saddam Hussein had been captured — and those hopes had been dashed every time. There would be a window of about two months after the election “to start to see progress,” he told Bush. “If by the first of April this insurgency is not starting to ameliorate in some way, then I think you really have a problem.”
Elections, and talking about democracy, were unlikely to stop the insurgency, he said. Only the fledgling Iraqi army could do that, and it was unclear whether it would ever succeed. Its competence was not just a matter of training, Powell said; it was a question of whether the troops believed in what they were fighting for.
Powell warned about serious internal problems in Bush’s own administration, saying that the power he had given the Pentagon to meddle in diplomacy on issues as widespread as North Korea, Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict, along with poisoned personal relations between his State and Defense departments, were seriously undermining the president’s diplomacy. Bush dismissed his concern. It wasn’t any worse, he said, than the legendary battles between State and Defense during the Reagan administration.
The session ended with a cordial handshake, and the secretary returned to the State Department. “That was really strange,” he reported to Wilkerson. “The president didn’t know why I was there.” ++
Karen DeYoung is an associate editor of The Post. This article is excerpted from Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell, being published October 10 by Knopf.
John Harwood of the Wall Street Journal provides analysis of Powell’s admission in the following MSNBC video report:
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Video_Powell_says_he_was_fired_1001.html
The Woodward War
Another book, another political blow. How the Bush team is handling the rain of bad news on Iraq, and what it means for Secretary Rumsfeld’s future.
Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe, Newsweek - with John Barry
Oct. 9, 2006 issue
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15075326/site/newsweek/
The White House had more than an inkling of what was coming. This was Bob Woodward’s third book about the Bush administration since 9/11, and it was sure to be less friendly than the first two. In scores of interviews over many months, Woodward’s questions to senior officials had been more aggressive, more hostile.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seemed to be a particular target of the veteran Washington Post reporter, who remains, three decades after his Watergate debut, the best excavator of inside stories in the nation’s capital. White House aides did recommend that the president and the vice president not grant interviews, but it was obvious that Woodward could, and would, get just about everyone else in positions of authority to talk.
When “State of Denial” arrived at the White House Friday morning, a team of aides went to work deconstructing the 576-page volume. Some of Woodward’s revelations, like the scenes of Bush rejecting pleas for more troops in Iraq, the White House tried to dismiss as old news. Woodward’s depictions of tensions within Bush’s inner circle were played down or denied. It was not true, White House aides told reporters, that First Lady Laura Bush wanted to see Rumsfeld fired.
Harder to slough off was Woodward’s account of the role played by former chief of staff Andy Card. The White House made no serious attempt to refute Card’s campaign to unseat Rummy. (Card himself quibbled over the word “campaign,” telling reporters that the discussions about Rumsfeld’s future needed to be seen in a “broader context.”) Instead, White House spokesman Tony Snow took a dismissive, this-too-will-pass tone. Woodward’s book is like “cotton candy,” Snow said. “It kind of melts on contact.”
A truer simile might be to a loud musical instrument. An orchestra of books has raised a cacophony of doubts about the Bush administration’s handling of the war in Iraq. Coming after Bernard Trainor and Michael Gordon’s “Cobra II,” Tom Ricks’s “Fiasco,” Ron Suskind’s “The One Percent Doctrine,”
“Hubris” by NEWSWEEK’s Michael Isikoff and The Nation’s David Corn, Woodward’s “State of Denial” resounded among the administration’s growing chorus of critics like a clash of cymbals.
With the midterm elections only five weeks away, Bush and his political minions have been striving mightily to direct the attention of voters away from Iraq and toward the threat of a terrorist attack. But Iraq keeps coming back into the headlines. Before the Woodward book began landing in stores late last week, portions of a National Intelligence Estimate began leaking out, suggesting that the war in Iraq was undermining the war on terror. The leaked portions of the NIE, a document representing a consensus of the U.S. intelligence community, disclosed the somewhat unsurprising conclusion that Iraq was turning into a training ground for terrorists. Bush responded by authorizing the declassification of other portions of the NIE, suggesting that if American forces were to quit Iraq, the problem would only grow worse. But simply “staying the course” in Iraq may not satisfy American voters who can see only darkness at the end of the tunnel.
Democrats as well as a few Republicans will renew their calls for Rumsfeld’s head, but it is doubtful that Bush will dump his Defense secretary before the elections. That might be seen as a concession to the “Defeatocrats,” as the GOP likes to call the opposition. (Rumsfeld himself had no comment about Woodward’s book.)
But a senior White House official, operating under the usual cover of anonymity, gave a less than airtight guarantee of Rumsfeld’s job security. The president, normally one to rely on his inner circle, has been consulting outsiders. The official did not say which ones, but it is known that Bush speaks on occasion to Henry Kissinger and to his father’s former secretary of State, James A. Baker. The counsel of the outsiders, says this official, “so far has been that Rumsfeld should stay. But I can’t predict the future.”
The Rumsfeld portrayed by Woodward is bullying and petty. Bush himself doesn’t come off much better. The president is folksy and jocular, but incurious to the point of cluelessness. His war cabinet is deeply dysfunctional. Condoleezza Rice is almost a pathetic figure, whining to the president that she can’t get Rumsfeld to return her calls.
As you read the excerpt that follows, keep in mind some essential context. The administration was not just unlucky. It was almost willfully blind to the risks entailed in invading and occupying a large, traumatized and deeply riven Arab country.
Rumsfeld, who pushed aside Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell to take over even the planning for postwar Iraq, wanted a lean and mean force to get in and get out quickly. This was all well and good as long as American forces could turn over the job of running the country to an effective group of local Iraqis. But the planning for this was hamstrung by disputes over the postwar role of Iraqi exiles.
When Iraq began to unravel, the administration—with little debate—lurched in the other direction. The White House installed Paul Bremer as a kind of grand pooh-bah over all of Iraq, but Rumsfeld refused to give him the forces he needed for a long occupation.
Woodward writes that when Gen. Jay Garner, the man Bremer replaced in Baghdad, returned to Washington in June 2003, he told Rumsfeld that the United States had made “three terrible decisions.” Garner told the Defense secretary that Bremer had seriously blundered by purging the bureaucracy, disbanding the Army and dismissing an interim leadership group. Rumsfeld shrugged off the concerns, according to Woodward. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do, because we are where we are.”
There is always the risk in these instant histories that disgruntled former officials will cover their posteriors for posterity. One of Woodward’s more obvious and prominent sources is former CIA director George Tenet. In “State of Denial,” Tenet is deeply ambivalent about going to war in Iraq, but it does not appear that he voiced his concerns loudly or well inside the Oval Office. White House spokesmen were not just blowing smoke last week when they cautioned reporters to look for self-serving motivations behind some of the leaks.
Even so, Woodward’s book is studded with documents and memos from Bush insiders that paint a much gloomier view of the war than the president’s public statements at the time. After the first two, generally positive, volumes in his “Bush at War” series, Woodward (an object of fascination and much jealousy in the press corps) was widely derided for playing stenographer to the president and his hero-worshiping advisers. In “State of Denial,” Woodward expresses shock and disbelief in interviews with Rumsfeld at his apparent denials and equivocations. Interviewed by Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, Woodward was matter-of-fact about his new, more critical tone. “I found out new things, as is always the case when you replow old ground,” Woodward said. “The bulk of them I discovered this year. I wish I’d had some of them for the earlier books, but I didn’t.”
Woodward’s new book, like the other critical treatments of the war, is still an early draft of history. But with each new revelation, with each depiction of the chaotic events inside the White House and Pentagon in the months before and after the invasion of Iraq, the picture of Bush’s leadership becomes more refined and more disappointing. ++
President’s Advisor denies Bush in ’state of denial;’ Woodward didn’t ‘connect his own dots’
Ron Brynaert
Sunday October 1, 2006
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Presidents_Advisor_denies_Bush_in_state_1001.html
On a Sunday morning talk show, one of the president’s closest advisors, Dan Bartlett, denied that Bush was in a “state of denial,” and suggested that investigative journalist Bob Woodward “had already formulated some conclusions even before the interviewing began.”
Appearing on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Bartlett also said that he had spoken to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier that morning about a reported
“impending terrorist attack” warning she allegedly “brushed off” two months before the 9/11 attacks. Rice told Bartlett that the account by former CIA director George Tenet in Woodward’s book was a “very, grossly misaccurate characterization of the meeting they had.”
Stephanopoulos noted that Bartlett had endorsed Woodward’s previous book, Plan of Attack, then said, “I take it you’re not going to do that with State of Denial.”
“Well, George, it is a book that we participated at various levels within the administration, both in the White House and other parts of the administration and the Department of Defense, and State,” Bartlett responded. “But I must say, George, I think as we worked with Bob on this project from the very outset it was unfortunate that we felt he had already formulated some conclusions even before the interviewing began.”
“That’s a pretty stiff charge,” Stephanopoulos returned. “You’re saying he was a biased reporter on this?”
Bartlett said that he “was really struck by the fact that the central thesis of this book, the claim that the president was in a state of denial, that he was misleading the American people about what was happening in Iraq, quite frankly is not backed up with own facts of the book.”
Defending Woodward, Stephanopoulos told his guest that he was “making a pretty serious charge here.”
“You’re saying that Bob Woodward, been around Washington for an awful long time, went into this with an agenda and basically wasn’t an honest reporter,” said Stephanopoulos.
Bartlett said that he wasn’t calling Woodward’s honesty into question, and he refused to use “biased” to describe the Pulitzer-winning journalist, but insisted that he didn’t “connect his own dots” in the book.
“What he talks about in here is that there is a grim picture in Iraq that the president wasn’t sharing with the American people, but we didn’t have a strategy, when in fact he references throughout the book, time after time after time where the president was being presented with the bad information, was pushing the internal process to make sure that we were adapting to the enemy, and he was sharing this news with the American people,” said Bartlett.
“But not always,” said Stephanopoulos.
“The front page of the Washington Post this morning has an excerpt, they talk about May of this year when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a private intelligence report to the Pentagon and it said the report predicted a more violent 2007,” Stephanopoulos cited as an example.
The report said that “insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase the current level of violence through the next year.”
“The very same month, a public report goes from the Pentagon to Congress,” said Stephanopoulos. “The public report sent to Congress said, ‘The appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007.’”
“That does seem like a contradiction,” argued Stephanopoulos.
Bartlett said that that was an incorrect assessment, and that the report was just “one data point,” and what “this book shows is that there is a lot of disagreement, there’s a lot of people who are very smart, very experienced, grappling with very difficult issues, sometimes coming to opposite conclusions.”
Full transcript of Bartlett’s interview on ABC’s This Week:
#
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Good morning, everyone. Before Congress left town Friday, they gave President Bush the military tribunal legislation he demanded, but the White House and Republicans were also hit by a triple whammy of bad news late this week. A new report on Jack Abramoff, Congressman Mark Foley’s resignation, and of course, Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, also on the cover of Newsweek this morning.
Here to talk about all that is one of the president’s closest advisors, Dan Barlett. Welcome back to “This Week.”
MR. BARTLETT: Thanks, George. Nice to be with you.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Now, in 2004, Bob Woodward wrote a book, “Plan of Attack.” You went out publicly, urged people to go buy it and read it. I take it you’re not going to do that with State of Denial.
MR. BARTLETT: Well, George, it is a book that we participated at various levels within the administration, both in the White House and other parts of the administration and the Department of Defense, and State. But I must say, George, I think as we worked with Bob on this project from the very outset it was unfortunate that we felt he had already formulated some conclusions even before the interviewing began.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: That’s a pretty stiff charge. You’re saying he was a biased reporter on this?
MR. BARTLETT: Well, we’ve had a lot of experience with Bob. And I think — in the first two books, as you did mention — and what we found in those books is that he came in very much with an open mind, very much wanting the facts to lead him to a conclusion. And after reading this book over the weekend, I was really struck by the fact that the central thesis of this book, the claim that the president was in a state of denial, that he was misleading the American people about what was happening in Iraq, quite frankly is not backed up with own facts of the book.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I want to get there in one second, but before we get there, because you’re making a pretty serious charge here. You’re saying that Bob Woodward, been around Washington for an awful long time, went into this with an agenda and basically wasn’t an honest reporter.
MR. BARTLETT: I didn’t say that he wasn’t an honest reporter. Reporters come in with conclusions or some firm ideas about where they want to take a book and on certain occasions when he met with administration officials and they would come to talk to me about their meetings with him, there was just a sense that despite spending hours with him that their points weren’t getting across.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: So you found he had an agenda?
MR. BARTLETT: I’m not going to use the word “agenda,” but we did feel like he approached this book different than he did the first two and that’s why we made the decision that the president was not going to —
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: And the vice president didn’t speak with him, either.
MR. BARTLETT: That’s correct.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: So, looking at it from the outside, it looks like, well, if Bob Woodward’s going to write a positive book, he gets cooperation, he gets praise. If it’s a negative book, well, he didn’t have an agenda, but he didn’t approve of his approach.
MR. BARTLETT: Well, I’ll make the point, though, we didn’t agree with everything he put in his second book, either. But the fact of the matter is many people in the administration, including myself, including the national security advisor, including the secretary of state, including the joint chairmen — the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of staff, including many other people who did participate in this book. But what we were struck by was the fact that time after time after time counter-evidence was provided to Bob, and we didn’t feel like our point was getting across and, you know, it’s my job to make judgments like that as to whether the president ought to participate. And you know, we made the —
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: And you don’t feel he included the counter- evidence in the book?
MR. BARTLETT: Not as much as we thought. But as I said, what’s interesting about this book is that he doesn’t connect his own dots. What he talks about in here is that there is a grim picture in Iraq that the president wasn’t sharing with the American people, but we didn’t have a strategy, when in fact he references throughout the book, time after time after time where the president was being presented with the bad information, was pushing the internal process to make sure that we were adapting to the enemy, and he was sharing this news with the American people.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: But not always. And let’s look at some of the specifics. The front page of the Washington Post this morning has an excerpt, they talk about May of this year when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a private intelligence report to the Pentagon and it said the report predicted a more violent 2007.
“Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase the current level of violence through the next year.” The very same month, a public report goes from the Pentagon to Congress. The public report sent to Congress said, “The appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007.” That does seem like a contradiction.
MR. BARTLETT: Well, no. The fact of the matter is that the reports that go to Congress, the entire intelligence community takes a look at all data points for an assessment such as like that. The one specific memorandum that he points to is one data point. All of these are taken into consideration. But the fact of the matter is he uses these daily attack charts or weekly or monthly attack charts as if this is some shocking revelation, when in fact, those very attack charts are —
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: But that’s not what I was talking about here. This is very specific. On the one hand, you have the Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence report saying insurgents and terrorists retain the capabilities to increase the level of violence and then the public report says you expect basically the appeal and motivation for the insurgents to wane in 2007.
MR. BARTLETT: And the assessment made then, and remember, you’ve got to take yourself back into the point of May and this is in the wake of the Golden Samarra mosque bombing in which sectarian violence is beginning to increase. We have a new government that is being formed. And I think the prediction by many of the people looking at this is that if you have a unity government that is fighting the forces of evil in Iraq that you are going to see better assessments.
Having said that, the president has been very clear with the American people that the difficulties of the fight in Iraq was one that’s going to take some time. We’ve had generals go before Congress and argue very forcefully that this is a very difficult fight, that it’s going to require our troops to be on the ground.
George, the politically-expedient thing for the president to do in the last two years has been let’s just pull out the troops and get out. Let’s not follow a time-table — a conditions-based approach to this. What he has done is said I’m going to listen to my commanders on the ground. I’m going to constantly adapt our tactics to meet a very important strategic objective. And what this book shows is that there is a lot of disagreement, there’s a lot of people who are very smart, very experienced, grappling with very difficult issues, sometimes coming to opposite conclusions. But at the end of the day, what we see is a process that is showing us “adapt to the enemy.” And the enemy is very good. And they have been, to our extent, more vicious and more violent than we probably originally expected and the president has talked about that with the American people.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: One of the more explosive allegations in the book goes back to before the war in Iraq. It goes back to 2001, he talks about a meeting, July 10, 2001, two months before 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, are reading intelligence, they are so caught up by what they are seeing. They see an attack coming. They call up Condi Rice for an unscheduled meeting, go to the White House, warn her of this, say that need action. But after the meeting, they both felt they were not getting through to Rice. “She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. A coherent plan for covert action against Bin Laden was in the pipeline, but it would take some time.” They believe it was a mistake not to act after that meeting.
MR. BARTLETT: Well, I must say, myself and other members, including Secretary Rice, who it alleges was in this meeting, there was a meeting –
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: You’ve spoken to her?
MR. BARTLETT: I spoke to her this morning. She believes that this is a very, grossly misaccurate (sic) characterization of the meeting they had. Look, George, the first eight months of President Bush’s presidency has been some of the most investigated eight months in any presidency because of the 9/11 attack. We had the 9/11 Commission, a bipartisan commission, look at all of it, look at all of the information that was provided to government officials. They testified before it. Now, four and a half, five years later, we’re just now hearing about these vivid accounts of meetings with Secretary Rice?
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Cofer Black says, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to Rice’s head.”
MR. BARTLETT: And Cofer Black and George Tenet and others also testified before the 9/11 Commission. Why is it now that —
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: So this didn’t happen?
MR. BARTLETT: And that’s Secretary Rice’s view that that type of urgent request to go after Bin Laden, as the book alleges, in her mind didn’t happen. But I don’t want to leave the wrong impression, George. Everybody in government felt we could have done a better job before 9/11. We had huge gaps in our intelligence-gathering capabilities. The wall between law enforcement and intel, and that’s why we’ve worked so hard in the last couple of years to reform these things so we can do a better job of protecting the American people.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally on this book, Woodward reports that not only the Chief of Staff Andy Card but also the Secretary — who wanted Rumsfeld to go — but also the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, and her deputy all recommended a new national security team after the election, that the president didn’t take that advice, he said Colin Powell has to go, Donald Rumsfeld should stay. Why?
MR. BARTLETT: Well, as you would expect a chief of staff to do at the beginning of a new term is to make an assessment of all senior staff, as well as your cabinet, and that’s exactly what Andy Card did, in fact, recommending to the president that he may want to change his chief of staff himself. And what Steve Hadley and Condi Rice and others said, “Mr. President, maybe you ought to think about just bringing in a whole new team. Do it all at once.” And the president decided that’s not the approach he wanted to take. And Andy, as a chief of staff should do, was providing options to the president in case he decided to make changes. But as everybody knows, the president decided months ago that Secretary Rumsfeld is the right person for the job —
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Except Newsweek is reporting this morning that the president is actually sounding out people, including Henry Kissinger and James Baker, about whether he should replace Rumsfeld. And it quotes a senior White House official saying, “So far, the advice has been Rumsfeld should stay, but I can’t predict the future.” Is his job secure throughout this term?
MR. BARTLETT: I can only speak for the president. The president has full confidence in Secretary Rumsfeld. Every cabinet member serves at the pleasure of the president. He’s doing an enormously difficult job, fighting a war, trying to transform our military to meet the new threats of the 21st Century. We recognize that he has his critics. We recognize that he’s made some very difficult decisions. Some people don’t like his bedside manner. But what President Bush looks to in Secretary Rumsfeld is to bring him the type of information he needs to make the right decisions in this war. And make no mistake about it, George, this has been a difficult war. The enemy we’re up against is determined to do everything they can to bring America to its knees and we have to do everything we can to fight this enemy. And he believes that Secretary Rumsfeld is the right person to help him lead that fight …
[open link for discussion of other topics]
Detainee Memo Created Divide in White House
TIM GOLDEN
October 1, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washington/01detain.html
In June 2005, two senior national security officials in the Bush administration came together to propose a sweeping new approach to the growing problems the United States was facing with the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects.
In a nine-page memorandum, the two officials, Gordon R. England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip D. Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department, urged the administration to seek Congressional approval for its detention policies.
They called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The time had come, they said, for suspects in the 9/11 plot to be taken out of their secret prison cells and tried before military tribunals.
The recommendations of the paper, which has not previously been disclosed, included several of the major policy shifts that President Bush laid out in a White House address on Sept. 6, five officials who read the document said. But the memorandum’s fate underscores the deep, long-running conflicts over detention policy that continued to divide the administration even as it pushed new legislation through Congress last week on the handling of terrorism suspects.
When the paper first circulated in the upper reaches of the administration, two of those officials said, it so angered Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded.
“It was not in step with the secretary of defense or the president,” said one Defense Department official who, like many others, would discuss the internal deliberations only on condition of anonymity. “It was clear that Rumsfeld was very unhappy.”
The internal debate over detention issues that began within weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has come to light before. But interviews show that the struggle, pitting top officials against one another, intensified behind the scenes over the last year as criticism of the administration’s approach grew in the United States and abroad. Crucial elements of that approach were struck down by the Supreme Court on June 29, forcing a resolution of disputes that had gone on for months.
On one side of the fight were officials, often led by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said the terrorism threat required that the president have wide power to decide who could be held and how they should be treated. On the other side were officials, primarily in the State Department and the Pentagon, who portrayed their disagreement as pragmatic. They said the administration had claimed more authority than it needed, drawing widespread criticism and challenges in the courts.
Those officials initially hailed the president’s Sept. 6 announcement. Mr. Bush publicly discussed the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret detention program for the first time, saying he had ordered its remaining 14 prisoners sent to Guantánamo and tried before military tribunals. The same day, Pentagon officials presented new directives that effectively renounced military use of highly coercive interrogation methods.
But even as the White House negotiated with Congress in recent weeks, administration forces led by the vice president’s office reasserted themselves. Officials said Mr. Cheney’s staff and its bureaucratic allies — having agreed reluctantly to the disclosure of the C.I.A. operation and other changes — were closely involved in guiding the talks with Republican senators. Their adversaries in the administration, meanwhile, had to scramble just to keep up with details of the bargaining.
“Basically, they were left to get back whatever they could from Congress,” one senior administration official said of the Cheney group. “And they did.”
In the end, the White House pressed Republican senators to accept a broad definition of “unlawful enemy combatants” whom the government can hold indefinitely, to maintain some of the president’s control over C.I.A. interrogation methods and to allow the government to present some evidence in military tribunals that is based on hearsay or has been coerced from witnesses.
The administration did concede to the senators on some rules for military commissions, as the tribunals are called. It also backed off its effort to limit its obligations under the Geneva Conventions, but fought to ensure that government personnel would be immunized from prosecution for any treatment of detainees before the end of 2005 that was cruel, inhuman or degrading.
Still, several officials said privately that the detainee legislation might fail to meet a primary goal of those inside the administration who had advocated change: quelling domestic and international criticism and moving past the federal lawsuits that have tied up parts of the detention apparatus since 2002.
“There have been so many times when we thought we had broken through and turned things around, and then the forces on the other side kept charging back,” said one administration lawyer who has supported such changes. Now, the official added, “even after what was supposed to be this major legislation to resolve these issues, we are going to be back at it.”
At the time the England-Zelikow memorandum was written, in mid-June 2005, several officials said they saw little enthusiasm for reconsidering the detention system that had been set up after 9/11, primarily by a small group of lawyers in the White House, the Justice Department and the Defense Department.
That system had begun to come under increasing attack. An erroneous item in Newsweek magazine, about a Koran being flushed down a toilet at Guantánamo, led to violent demonstrations overseas. Criticism of the detention camp grew sharper in Europe. Some influential Republicans in Congress began to voice complaints as well.
Mr. Zelikow, who served as staff director for the national commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks, joined the State Department in early 2005 with strong views on the detention issue, other officials said. Early on, he began to push the idea that high-level C.I.A. captives held in connection with the 9/11 attacks should be brought to justice, these officials said.
Mr. England took over as Mr. Rumsfeld’s acting deputy in April 2005 while continuing to serve as secretary of the Navy. (He was confirmed as deputy secretary in April 2006.) He, too, had experience with the detainee issue, having spent months working to overhaul what many military officers saw as a flawed screening process for prisoners at Guantánamo.
Two other officials who had worked extensively on detention issues during Mr. Bush’s first term also participated in the drafting of the memorandum, officials said. One of them, Matthew C. Waxman, was Mr. Rumsfeld’s chief aide for detainee issues. The other, John B. Bellinger III, was the State Department’s legal counsel.
The proposals in the paper were not entirely new. But what was different, one administration official said, was an effort at “a big-bang solution,” to persuade senior officials or the president himself to adopt a comprehensive new approach to the detention problems of the policy. Failing that, officials said, the authors hoped to foster new debate about how to shape a strategy that would be more sustainable diplomatically, politically and in the federal courts.
Three years after Mr. Bush had determined he would not apply the Geneva Conventions in fighting terrorists, the memorandum urged a return to the conventions’ minimum standards, including the ban on “humiliating and degrading treatment” contained in the provision known as Common Article 3. The authors advocated that move not because they believed it was required by international law, officials said, but to win broader support from American allies and make court intervention less likely.
The paper did not advocate abandoning the covert interrogation program, but restricting it to the shorter-term questioning of more important suspects, officials said. After repatriating many of the Guantánamo detainees, the authors argued, the detention center could be shut down and the remaining prisoners transferred to a long-term detention facility in the United States. They did not specify what kind of facility it should be, two of the officials who read the paper said.
In a passage that underscored the views of Mr. Zelikow, one official said, the paper argued that efforts to bring to justice the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks must produce more than the chaotic trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-born militant who remains the only person to have been charged in an American court with involvement in the attacks.
The paper specifically called for taking Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others held by the C.I.A. before military commissions, officials said, arguing that much of the information that would be disclosed by their trials was already widely known.
Officials said the memorandum was well received by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who forwarded it to senior officials at the National Security Council. But the hope that it would lead to a broader discussion of options within the administration was quashed by Mr. Rumsfeld, they said.
Some of the defense secretary’s ire over the paper appeared to be substantive, several Pentagon officials said. At various times, Mr. Rumsfeld raised objections to taking over responsibility for the C.I.A. detainees, and he was reluctant to consider closing Guantánamo without a viable alternative in sight, the officials said.
Most important, they said, Mr. Rumsfeld was angered that his new deputy, Mr. England, had worked on the memorandum with officials outside the Pentagon without his authorization.
“England’s wings got clipped after that,” one Defense Department aide said.
A spokesman for the department, Col. Gary L. Keck, said it would not discuss its deliberations on detainee policy or any “predecisional documents.” But he denied that Mr. Rumsfeld was ever angered by those deliberations or instructed anyone to destroy documents.
“This is a difficult and complex issue that has profound operational, diplomatic, legal and political implications not only for the Department of Defense, but for many other executive agencies,” Colonel Keck said in a statement. “In any discussion on such an important topic there will be differences of opinion — this is to be expected.”
In early August 2005, after a long internal debate, new rules for the Guantánamo military tribunals were published which did not include changes that many military lawyers had advocated. Officials said David S. Addington, who was then Mr. Cheney’s counsel and is now his chief of staff, was prominent among those who opposed modifications like an explicit ban on evidence obtained by torture, contending that it would wrongly hint that the government had sanctioned torture at all.
At the Pentagon, Mr. England continued to pursue the idea of adopting Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions in a directive that would set guidelines for prisoner treatment and interrogations. In late August, he called a meeting with some of the vice chiefs of staff of the armed forces and senior uniformed and civilian lawyers to consider the matter.
According to officials who attended the meeting, several of those present spoke in favor of the Geneva provision, including the senior Army lawyer, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Romig. In an unusual move, Mr. England called for a show of hands. All but two of those present endorsed the provision. But those two officials were among the most influential in the room: the department’s under secretary for intelligence, Stephen A. Cambone, and its general counsel, William J. Haynes II.
Their concerns, which were later echoed by aides to Mr. Cheney, started with the fact that the president had explicitly rejected the Geneva standard in February 2002. They also disputed the idea that Article 3 would necessarily give clear guidance to soldiers, citing what they called its vague prohibition on “outrages upon personal dignity.”
Debate over both the proposed prisoner-treatment directive and an Army field manual for interrogations would go on for another year. For the time being, though, the idea of adopting Common Article 3 directly as the standard of treatment went no further.
There was little high-level discussion of alternatives to Guantánamo, several officials said. But the C.I.A.’s secret prisons had been a subject of rising concern since at least 2004, when unease over the open-ended detentions became evident within the agency and the Supreme Court ruled that detainees held by the United States at Guantánamo — and, by implication, elsewhere around the world — could challenge their detention in American courts.
By late 2005, as reports in The Washington Post and other news media about the secret prisons raised a storm of complaints among foreign governments, the C.I.A. began to move more quickly to transfer some captives to the custody of their own and other foreign governments, officials familiar with the program said.
By the end of 2005, military lawyers also began to review the C.I.A.’s evidentiary files on the high-value detainees to consider their possible prosecution by the military commissions at Guantánamo. Ultimately, military officials concluded that they could make solid cases against the C.I.A. prisoners without unduly exposing the agency’s covert program or even having to depend heavily on statements that had been obtained during highly coercive interrogations, several officials said.
There was also new pressure for action from within the C.I.A. Intelligence officers involved in detention and interrogations were increasingly worried about the legal implications of the program, officials said. Some foreign governments had declined to house covert detention centers, and the furor over those sites created friction with other intelligence agencies, the officials said.
Still, some senior figures in the administration, including Mr. Cheney and his chief of staff, Mr. Addington, remained unconvinced that the C.I.A. program could be made public and its prisoners taken before military commissions while continuing to protect what they saw as a vital intelligence asset, several officials said.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, Lea Anne McBride, said his office would have no comment on its role in policy deliberations, as did spokesmen for the State Department and the National Security Council.
“The problem fell for some period of time into the too-hard category,” one senior administration official said. “It fell so far into the too-hard category that it was lost from view.”
Interagency meetings on the detention issue with officials just below the cabinet level went around and around for months, officials said. In the late spring, they added, the president’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, began pushing senior officials to agree on options they could present to the president.
Many officials said the most important factor in forcing a new approach was the Supreme Court’s ruling in June that the military commissions set up by the administration could not proceed. That decision, which also upheld the minimum Geneva standards of prisoner treatment as binding law, led the administration to seek Congressional authorization for new tribunals and, some officials said, left the C.I.A.’s interrogation program on even more tenuous ground.
In late July, two officials said, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides dropped their longstanding concerns about taking custody of the C.I.A. detainees, and Mr. Hadley moved to approve the arrangements for their transfer to Guantánamo.
The two officials said that Mr. Cheney was never entirely persuaded of the wisdom of emptying the C.I.A.’s detention sites and making its interrogation program public, but supported the move when Mr. Bush decided in late August to go ahead.
“The vice president knows the president has made the right decisions to make Americans safer and support the men and women on the front lines in the war on terror who are fighting this brutal enemy,” Mr. Cheney’s spokeswoman, Ms. McBride, said.
The element of the new legislation that raised the sharpest criticism among legal scholars and human rights advocates last week was the scaling back of the habeas corpus right of terrorism suspects to challenge their detention in the federal courts. But in dozens of high-level meetings on detention policy, officials said, that provision was scarcely even discussed. ++
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
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