Decision Points

by George W. Bush

  The next morning, I squeezed into a blue tent at the Ritz-Carlton with Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Andy Card, and the CIA briefer. The structure was designed to protect the national security briefing from potential eavesdroppers. We turned on a video monitor and Dick Cheney’s face popped up from New York City. He was wearing white tie and tails for his speech at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, an annual charity event organized by the Catholic archdiocese.

  As soon as I saw Dick, I could tell something was wrong. His face was as white as his tie.

  “Mr. President,” he said, “one of the bio-detectors went off at the White House. They found traces of botulinum toxin. The chances are we’ve all been exposed.”

  The CIA had briefed me on botulinum toxin. It was one of the world’s most poisonous substances. Nobody said a word. Finally, Colin asked, “What’s the time of exposure?” Was he doing the mental math, trying to figure out how long it had been since he was last in the White House?

  Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley explained that the FBI was testing the suspicious substance on mice. The next twenty-four hours would be crucial. If the mice were still scurrying around, feet down, we would be fine. But if the mice were on their backs, feet up, we were goners. Condi tried to lighten the mood. “Well,” she said, “this is one way to die for your country.”

  I went to the summit meetings and awaited the test results. The next day, Condi got a message that Steve was trying to reach her. “I guess this is the call,” she said. After a few minutes, Condi came back with the news.

  “Feet down, not feet up,” she said. It was a false alarm.

  Years later, incidents like the botulinum toxin scare can seem fanciful and far-fetched. It’s easy to chuckle at the image of America’s most senior officials praying for lab mice to stay upright. But at the time, the threats were urgent and real. Six mornings a week, George Tenet and the CIA briefed me on what they called the Threat Matrix, a summary of of potential attacks on the homeland. On Sundays, I received a written intelligence briefing. Between 9/11 and mid-2003, the CIA reported to me on an average of 400 specific threats each month. The CIA tracked more than twenty separate alleged large-scale attack plots, ranging from possible chemical and biological weapons operations in Europe to potential homeland attacks involved sleeper operatives. Some reports mentioned specific targets, including major landmarks, military bases, universities, and shopping malls. For months after 9/11, I would wake up in the middle of the night worried about what I had read.

  I peppered my briefers with questions. How credible was each threat? What had we done to follow up on a lead? Each piece of information was like a tile in a mosaic. In late September, FBI Director Bob Mueller inserted a big tile when he told me there were 331 potential al Qaeda operatives inside the United States. The overall image was unmistakable: The prospect of a second wave of terrorist attacks against America was very real.

  With the national security team in the Situation Room in late October 2001. Clockwise from me: Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Pete Pace,

  Condi Rice, George Tenet, Andy Card, and Dick Cheney. White House/Eric Draper

  Prior to 9/11, many had viewed terrorism primarily as a crime to be prosecuted, as the government had after the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. After 9/11, it was clear that the attacks on our embassies in East Africa and on the USS Cole were more than isolated crimes. They were a warm-up for September 11, part of a master plan orchestrated by Osama bin Laden, who had issued a religious edict, known as a fatwa, calling the murder of Americans “an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

  On 9/11, it was obvious the law enforcement approach to terrorism had failed. Suicidal men willing to fly passenger planes into buildings were not common criminals. They could not be deterred by the threat of prosecution. They had declared war on America. To protect the country, we had to wage war against the terrorists.

  The war would be different from any America had fought in the past. We had to uncover the terrorists’ plots. We had to track their movements and disrupt their operations. We had to cut off their money and deprive them of their safe havens. And we had to do it all under the threat of another attack. The terrorists had made our homefront a battleground. Putting America on a war footing was one of the most important decisions of my presidency.

  My authority to conduct the war on terror came from two sources. One was Article II of the Constitution, which entrusts the president with wartime powers as commander in chief. The other was a congressional war resolution passed three days after 9/11. By a vote of 98 to 0 in the Senate and 420 to 1 in the House, Congress declared:

  That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.

  In the years ahead, some in Congress would forget those words. I never did. I woke up every morning thinking about the danger we faced and the responsibilities I carried. I was also keenly aware that presidents had a history of overreaching during war. John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which banned public dissent. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans interned during World War II. When I took the oath of office, I swore to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” My most solemn duty, the calling of my presidency, was to protect America—within the authority granted to me by the Constitution.

  The immediate task after 9/11 was to harden our nation’s defenses against a second attack. The undertaking was daunting. To stop the enemy, we had to be right 100 percent of the time. To harm us, they had to succeed only once.

  We implemented a flurry of new security measures. I approved the deployment of National Guard forces to airports, put more air marshals on planes, required airlines to harden cockpit doors, and tightened procedures for granting visas and screening passengers. Working with state and local governments and the private sector, we increased security at seaports, bridges, nuclear power plants, and other vulnerable infrastructure.

  Shortly after 9/11, I appointed Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania to a new senior White House position overseeing our homeland security effort. Tom brought valuable management experience, but by early 2002, it had become clear that the task was too large to be coordinated out of a small White House office. Dozens of different federal agencies shared responsibility for securing the homeland. The patchwork approach was inefficient, and there was too much risk that something would slip through the seams. One egregious example came in March 2002, when the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) mailed a letter notifying a Florida flight school that it had granted student visas to Mohamed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi. The person opening the letter must have been shocked. Those were the two pilots who had flown airplanes into the Twin Towers on 9/11.

  I was shocked, too. As I told the press at the time, “I could barely get my coffee down.” The sloppy error exemplified the need for broader reform. INS, a branch of the Justice Department, wasn’t the only agency struggling with its new homeland security responsibilities. The Customs Service, reporting to the Treasury Department, faced the enormous task of securing the nation’s ports. They shared that responsibility with the Coast Guard, which was part of the Transportation Department.

  Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut had been making the strong case for creating a new federal department that unified our homeland security efforts. I liked and respected Joe. He was a solid legislator who had put the bitterness of the 2000 election behind him and understood the urgency of the war on terror. Initially I was wary of his idea for a new department. A big bureaucracy would be cumbersome. I was also anxious about a massive reorgani
zation in the midst of crisis. As J.D. Crouch, later my deputy national security adviser, put it: “When you are in the process of beating swords into plowshares, you can’t fight and you can’t plow.”

  Over time, I changed my mind. I recognized that having one department focused on homeland security would align authority and responsibility. With the agencies accountable for protecting the country under one roof, there would be fewer gaps and less redundancy. I also knew there was a successful precedent for restructuring the government in wartime. At the dawn of the Cold War in 1947, President Harry Truman had consolidated the Navy and War departments into a new Department of Defense. His reforms strengthened the military for decades to come.

  I decided the reorganization was worth the risk. In June 2002, I addressed the nation from the White House to call on Congress to create a new Department of Homeland Security.

  Despite support from many lawmakers, the bill faced rough sledding. Democrats held up the legislation by insisting that the new department grant its employees extensive collective bargaining rights that did not apply in any other government agency. I was frustrated that Democrats would delay an urgent security measure to placate labor unions.

  Republican candidates took the issue to the voters in the 2002 midterm elections, and I joined them. On election day, our party picked up six seats in the House and two in the Senate. Karl Rove reminded me that the only other president to pick up seats in both the House and Senate in his first midterm election was Franklin Roosevelt.

  Within weeks of the election, the homeland security bill passed. I didn’t have to search long for my first secretary of the new department. I nominated Tom Ridge.

  With Tom Ridge. White House/Paul Morse

  On October 2, 2001, a tabloid photo editor named Bob Stevens was admitted to a Florida hospital with a high fever and vomiting. When doctors examined him, they discovered that he had inhaled a lethal bacteria, anthrax. Three days later, he was dead.

  More employees at the tabloid turned up sick, along with people who opened the mail at NBC, ABC, and CBS News. Envelopes laced with white powder arrived at the Senate office of Tom Daschle. Several Capitol Hill staffers and postal workers got sick. So did a New York City hospital worker and a ninety-four-year-old woman in Connecticut. Ultimately, seventeen people were infected. Tragically, five died.

  One of the letters containing anthrax read:

  09-11-01

  YOU CAN NOT STOP US.

  WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.

  YOU DIE NOW.

  ARE YOU AFRAID?

  DEATH TO AMERICA.

  DEATH TO ISRAEL.

  ALLAH IS GREAT.

  I was struck by a sickening thought: Was this the second wave, a biological attack?

  I had been briefed on the horrifying consequences of a bioweapons attack. One assessment concluded that a “well-executed smallpox attack by a state actor on the New York City metropolitan area” could infect 630,000 people immediately and 2 to 3 million people before the outbreak was contained. Another scenario contemplated the release of bioweapons on subway lines in four major cities during rush hour. Some 200,000 could be infected initially, with 1 million victims overall. The economic costs could “range from $60 billion to several hundred billion or more, depending on the circumstances of the attack.”

  As the anthrax news broke, panic spread across the country. Millions of Americans were afraid to open their mailboxes. Office mailrooms shut down. Mothers rushed to the hospital to order anthrax tests for children suffering from a common cold. Deranged hoaxsters mailed packages laced with talcum powder or flour, which exacerbated people’s fears.

  The Postal Service tested samples of mail for anthrax at more than two hundred sites across the country. Mail at the White House was re-routed and irradiated for the rest of my presidency. Thousands of government personnel, including Laura and me, were advised to take Cipro, a powerful antibiotic.

  The biggest question during the anthrax attack was where it was coming from. One of the best intelligence services in Europe told us it suspected Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s regime was one of few in the world with a record of using weapons of mass destruction, and it had acknowledged possession of anthrax in 1995. Others suspected that al Qaeda was involved. Frustratingly, we had no concrete evidence and few good leads.*

  One month after 9/11, I held a primetime televised press conference from the White House. Earlier that day, we had raised the terror alert level in response to reports about a senior Taliban official warning of another major attack on America.

  “You talk about the general threat toward Americans,” Ann Compton of ABC News said. “… What are Americans supposed to look for?”

  A CIA briefing on the threat of terrorists spraying anthrax over a city from a small plane was fresh in my mind. “Ann,” I said, “if you find a person that you’ve never seen before getting in a crop duster that doesn’t belong to [him], report it.”

  My line got a laugh, but behind the humor was a maddening reality: We believed more attacks were coming, but we didn’t know when, where, or from whom. Striking the right balance between alerting and alarming the public remained a challenge for the rest of the administration. As time passed, some critics charged that we inflated the threat or manipulated alert levels for political benefit. They were flat wrong. We took the intelligence seriously and did the best we could to keep the American people informed and safe.

  “This is the worst we’ve seen since 9/11,” George Tenet said in a grave voice as he pulled out his half-chewed cigar at a late October intelligence briefing. He cited a highly reliable source warning that there would be an attack on either October 30 or 31 that was bigger than the World Trade Center attack.

  After several false alarms, we believed this could be the real deal. Dick Cheney and I agreed that he should move to a safe place outside Washington—the famous undisclosed location—to ensure continuity of government. The Secret Service recommended that I leave, too. I told them I was staying put. Maybe this was a little bravado on my part. Mostly it was fatalism. I had made my peace. If it was God’s will that I die in the White House, I would accept it. Laura felt the same way. We were confident the government would survive an attack, even if we didn’t.

  I did have one good reason to leave Washington for a few hours. The New York Yankees had invited me to throw out the first pitch at Game Three of the World Series. Seven weeks after 9/11, it would send a powerful signal for the president to show up in Yankee Stadium. I hoped my visit would help lift the spirits of New Yorkers.

  We flew to New York on Air Force One and choppered into a field next to the ballpark. I went to a batting cage to loosen up my arm. A Secret Service agent strapped a bulletproof vest to my chest. After a few warm-up pitches, the great Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter dropped in to take some swings. We talked a little. Then he asked, “Hey President, are you going to throw from the mound or from in front of it?”

  I asked what he thought. “Throw from the mound,” Derek said. “Or else they’ll boo you.” I agreed to do it. On his way out, he looked over his shoulder and said, “But don’t bounce it. They’ll boo you.”

  Nine months into the presidency, I was used to being introduced to a crowd. But I’d never had a feeling like I did when Bob Sheppard, the Yankees legendary public address announcer, belted out, “Please welcome the president of the United States.” I climbed the mound, gave a wave and a thumbs-up, and peered in at the catcher, Todd Greene. He looked a lot farther away than sixty feet, six inches. My adrenaline was surging. The ball felt like a shot put. I wound up and let it fly.

  Opening Game Three of the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium. White House/Eric Draper

  The noise in the stadium was like a sonic boom. “USA, USA, USA!” I thought back to the workers at Ground Zero. I shook hands with Todd Greene, posed for a photo with the managers, Joe Torre of the Yankees and Bob Brenly of the Arizona Diamondbacks, and made my way to George Steinbrenner’s box. I was the definition of a relieved pitcher
. I was thrilled to see Laura and our daughter Barbara. She gave me a big hug and said, “Dad, you threw a strike!”

  We flew back to Washington late that night and waited out the next day. October 31 passed without an attack.

  Putting the country on a war footing required more than just tightening our physical defenses. We needed better legal, financial, and intelligence tools to find the terrorists and stop them before it was too late.

  One major gap in our counterterrorism capabilities was what many called “the wall.” Over time, the government had adopted a set of procedures that prevented law enforcement and intelligence personnel from sharing key information.

  “How can we possibly assure our citizens we are protecting them if our own people can’t even talk to each other?” I said in one meeting shortly after the attacks. “We’ve got to fix the problem.”

  Attorney General John Ashcroft took the lead in writing a legislative proposal. The result was the USA PATRIOT Act.** The bill eliminated the wall and allowed law enforcement and intelligence personnel to share information. It modernized our counterterrorism capabilities by giving investigators access to tools like roving wiretaps, which allowed them to track suspects who changed cell phone numbers—an authority that had long been used to catch drug traffickers and mob bosses. It authorized aggressive financial measures to freeze terrorist assets. And it included judicial and congressional oversight to protect civil liberties.

  One provision created a little discomfort at home. The PATRIOT Act allowed the government to seek warrants to examine the business records of suspected terrorists, such as credit card receipts, apartment leases, and library records. As a former librarian, Laura didn’t like the idea of federal agents snooping around libraries. I didn’t, either. But the intelligence community had serious concerns about terrorists using library computers to communicate. Library records had played a role in several high-profile cases, such as the Zodiac gunman murders in California. The last thing I wanted was to allow the freedom and access to information provided by American libraries to be utilized against us by al Qaeda.