by Dick Cheney
On April 17, 2009, President Obama attended the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. He sat silently in the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency while Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega delivered a fifty-minute diatribe about the evil America had done in the world. When it was his turn to speak, President Obama didn’t dispute the lies, or ignore them; he made a joke that affirmed them. “I’m grateful,” he said, “that President Ortega didn’t blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.”
President Obama traveled to Cairo in June 2009 for a speech “to the Muslim world.” Acknowledging a strain between the United States and the Muslim world, he explained that the tension had been “fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”
He provided his perspective on world order, saying that “human history has often been a record of nations and tribes subjugating one another to serve their own interests.” This could not continue:
In this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; progress must be shared.
These were astonishing assertions for an American president to make. In this new global order where nations do not pursue their interests, there would be no place for the United States to seek its own security. In this new global order, in which no nation is to be elevated over another, the United States, the most powerful nation in the world, would have to abdicate much of its power.
The president of the United States then proceeded to compare the attacks of 9/11 to the policies put in place afterward to keep us safe:
And finally, just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter our principles. 9/11 was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course. I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantánamo Bay closed by next year.
On that June day in the heart of the Arab world, in the city that was home to 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and al Qaeda’s future leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, President Obama suggested that the murderous, evil attacks that al Qaeda had launched on our country were in a category with the lawful actions that the United States undertook afterward in the name of protecting our country.
By September, President Obama was issuing his apology for America and his call for a coequal community of nations at the United Nations General Assembly:
No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation . . . no balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional divisions between the South and the North make no sense in an interconnected world; nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War.
His proclamation was of a piece with the new global order he had advocated in Cairo, but more detailed. Now alliances such as NATO were illegitimate.
The 2009 apology tour finally came to an end in Japan. Two months before President Obama’s November visit, the U.S. ambassador sent a cable to Washington reporting that the Japanese vice foreign minister had informed him “the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is ‘a non-starter.’ ” When the cable became public, the White House disavowed the plan. President Obama had to settle for bowing deeply to the somewhat surprised Japanese emperor, one more unprecedented act in the annals of American presidential diplomacy.
FOUR
Ending Wars
I will end this war in Iraq responsibly, and finish the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
—SENATOR BARACK OBAMA, ACCEPTANCE SPEECH, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION, AUGUST 28, 2008
You don’t end a war by withdrawing from the battlefield. You just give the ground to your enemies—IS[IS] and Iran.
—RYAN CROCKER, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ, 2007–2009
President Obama was determined to take America off its war footing. On his first full day in office, at his first National Security Council meeting, he instructed his military commanders to provide timetables for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq. Twenty-four hours later, he signed an executive order requiring the closing of the prison facility at Guantánamo Bay and a second order ending the enhanced interrogation program, thereby curtailing America’s ability to detain or interrogate terrorists effectively.
According to former CIA director General Mike Hayden, more than half of what America knew about al Qaeda in the years after 9/11 came from detainees in the enhanced interrogation program. Hayden was appointed by President Bush, but members of President Obama’s intelligence team have expressed similar views:
LEON PANETTA, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: “At bottom, we know we got important, even critical intelligence from individuals subjected to these enhanced interrogation techniques.”
JOHN BRENNAN, CIA DIRECTOR: “[I]nterrogations of detainees on whom EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives. The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al-Qa’ida and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day.”
DENNIS BLAIR, FORMER DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.”
Despite the weight of the evidence about the importance of this program to our national security, the new president canceled it on his second full day in office. Three months later, in April 2009, President Obama decided to publicly release the Justice Department memos describing the enhanced interrogation methods in detail. CIA directors going back to 1995 urged the president not to take this step. President Obama’s own CIA director, Leon Panetta, was so concerned with the damage the memo release could do to our intelligence capabilities that he rushed to the White House with the leading officers from the CIA’s Clandestine Service and Counterterrorism Center in an attempt to stop the president. Sitting in the Oval Office, every one of these individuals argued against the release of the memos. Men and women who spent their days on the front lines of the war on terror argued vehemently that making these memos public would do extensive damage to our intelligence capabilities.
Release of the memos meant al Qaeda would now know every one of our methods and the limits to which we could legally go in questioning terrorists. The president would be tying the hands of every future president by revealing techniques that would no longer be effective if needed, including in situations where thousands of American lives were on the line. Revealing this information publicly also put at risk our relationships with other intelligence services and countries that had cooperated with us in this program. Finally, in the middle of a war, releasing these memos would be devastating to the morale of the men and women in America’s intelligence community on whom we depend to keep us safe. Their work had been authorized by the president and every member of his National Security Council and approved by the Department of Justice, but now a new president was rescinding the authorization and accusing them publicly of abandoning American values.
Barack Obama was undeterred. He released the memos the next day.
On April 20, he visited the CIA in the wake of the memos’ release. “Don’t be discouraged,” he told hundreds of agency professionals gathered in the lobby. “Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge, potentially, that we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn.” One wonders exactly what lessons the men and women in our intelligence community, whose work had saved lives and prevented attacks, were supposed to learn from a commander in chief who was saying they had failed “to uphold our values and ideals” and who had just releas
ed information that made it harder to fight and win the war.
One of the authors of this book, Dick Cheney, recalls when he decided to speak out:
By May 2009, I had had enough. I fully understood the prerogative of President Obama to put his own policies in place and to change course from policies we had pursued, even though I disagreed fundamentally with the decisions he was making. It was altogether different, however, when he began spreading untruths about our programs and slandering the people who ran them. I was not going to sit by and let him attack men and women whose actions had been approved by us and had saved thousands of American lives. Nor was I going to head for the hills, as so many politicians do when a policy they once supported becomes unpopular. When Attorney General [Eric] Holder suggested he would investigate and potentially prosecute intelligence officials for doing their jobs, my view was he would have to start with those of us on the National Security Council who had approved this program in the first place. I wanted the American people to know the truth about the program.
I scheduled a speech for Thursday, May 21, 2009, at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., to set the record straight. Shortly after the day and time for my speech were announced, the White House announced the president would be making a speech that same day. The two sets of remarks set out a stark contrast between President Obama’s beliefs and my own.
Speaking from the National Archives, President Obama accused those of us in the previous administration of “walking away from the sacred principles enshrined in this building.” He said we had “failed to use our values as our compass” and had, through the establishment of Guantánamo and the use of enhanced interrogation, implemented policies that “are not who we are, and they are not America.” In a speech in which he made national security a wedge issue, challenged the patriotism of his opponents, and claimed we had abandoned America’s most sacred values, he closed by insisting we should not make national security a wedge issue.
When the president had finished, I laid out the truth about all we had done. The enhanced interrogation program “was used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed.” It was legal, essential, justified, successful, honorable, and right. It saved lives, prevented attacks, and, we now know, helped lead us to Osama bin Laden. “The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists,” I said, “can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent deaths of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.”
To call enhanced interrogation a program of torture, as President Obama has so many times, is to libel the dedicated professionals who saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. On the topic of America’s most sacred values, I believe strongly, as I said that day, “No moral value held dear by the American people obliges public servants ever to sacrifice innocent lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things.” Furthermore, when our nation is targeted by terrorists bent on our destruction, “Nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them.”
Ending programs that kept us safe, revealing the details about those programs to the terrorists, and spreading untruths about our policies was misguided, unjust, and highly irresponsible. It was recklessness cloaked in righteousness. It was my view then and remains so today, that President Obama, having so consistently distorted the truth about the enhanced interrogation program and the brave Americans who carried it out, is in no position to lecture anyone about American values.
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab smuggled a bomb in his underwear aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit. There were nearly three hundred people on board. As the plane began its descent, passengers reported hearing what sounded like firecrackers. Abdulmutallab’s bomb failed to explode but it started a fire. The other passengers overpowered him. Abdulmutallab was arrested and questioned for only fifty minutes before FBI agents read him his Miranda warnings.
Abdulmutallab had spent four months training with al Qaeda in Yemen. He had ties to radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The National Counterterrorism Center had amassed intelligence on Abdulmutallab, none of which was used in his interrogation. None of the nation’s top counterterrorism officials was consulted by the FBI leadership or the agents on the scene.
In congressional hearings on Wednesday, January 20, 2010, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair admitted that it hadn’t occurred to the administration to activate the new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, the interagency office that was supposed to handle terrorist interrogation, to question Abdulmutallab:
Frankly, we were thinking more of overseas people and duh! [Blair slaps his forehead] we didn’t put it then. That’s what we’ll do now. And so we need to make those decisions more carefully. I was not consulted and the decision was made on the scene. It seemed logical to the people there but it should have been taken using this HIG format at a higher level.
In a clarification issued after the hearing, Blair explained that what he meant to say was that the FBI received important intelligence from Abdulmutallab and that intelligence “will be available in the HIG once it is fully operational.” In other words, eleven months after President Obama had ended the enhanced interrogation program, there was no operational program to interrogate terrorists.
Three days later, when he made his first statement about the attack, President Obama seemed unaware of the intelligence linking Abdulmutallab to al Qaeda. Despite the fact that Abdulmutallab had been trained, armed, and sent by al Qaeda to down an American civilian airliner, Obama referred to him as “an isolated extremist.” This was one of many instances in which the Obama administration seemed either not to know about, or was unwilling to acknowledge, the threat we were facing.
In a briefing with the press on January 7, 2010, President Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, and future director of the CIA, John Brennan, explained that he had been “surprised” that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was capable of attacking the United States. In the same briefing, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said she was surprised by al Qaeda’s “determination” to attack the United States and their tactic of “using an individual to foment the attack.”
This lack of familiarity with the threat of terror attacks on the United States by two of our top counterterrorism officials was troubling. It was part of a larger pattern—and seemed often to be by design. From its earliest days in office, the Obama administration downplayed the threat of terrorism and the strength of al Qaeda. Wars would no longer be wars; they would be “overseas contingency operations.” Terrorist attacks would now be “man-caused disasters.” Al Qaeda–trained terrorists weren’t part of any larger network; they were “isolated extremists” and “lone wolves.” The terrorist attack on the U.S. Army base at Fort Hood was just “workplace violence.”
It is a fair question why a president would choose to downplay the threat of terror attacks on the nation. President Obama came into office with bold plans to transform the nation, to expand the size of the federal government, nationalize one-sixth of the economy, and massively increase government spending on domestic programs. In order to do this, he needed to make major cuts in defense spending, which required, in part, that we stop fighting costly wars. That, in turn, required convincing the American people that the threat from al Qaeda was fading and that the nation no longer needed to be on a war footing.
After all, if al Qaeda were still a threat, how could an American president justify leaving the field of battle and diminishing our ability to defeat our enemies?
IRAQ
The cornerstone of President Obama’s 2008 campaign for the presidency was his opposition to the Iraq War. One would be hard-pressed to find a single day during the campaign when Barack Obama did not promise to “end the war in Iraq.” He went so far as to detail how he would carry out these plans. “On my first day in office,” he repeatedly promised, “I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in,
and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war responsibly and deliberately, but decisively.” The war would have to end, he said, within the next sixteen months.
At his first National Security Council (NSC) meeting on January 21, 2009, President Obama instructed his military commanders to provide him with three options for withdrawal, at least one of which had to be along the sixteen-month timetable on which he had campaigned.
America’s ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, was getting ready to retire after more than thirty-seven years in the foreign service. He’d served as American ambassador in Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria, and Pakistan before being posted to Iraq in 2007. He gave his final press briefing as ambassador the day after the NSC meeting on the Iraq withdrawal. In it he issued a clear warning about the danger of a “precipitous” American departure from Iraq. “Al Qaeda is incredibly tenacious,” he said. “They will have to be killed or captured, and as long as they hang on, they are looking for opportunity to regenerate.” He continued, “If we were to decide suddenly, ‘we’re done,’ they would certainly work to use space that opened up to do just that. I think it would encourage neighbors with less than benign intentions to carry them out, and perhaps most importantly I think it would have a chilling effect on Iraqis.”
Ambassador Crocker had been indispensable in bringing about the relative stability in Iraq that greeted President Obama as he took office. In his final press conference, Crocker reflected on his tenure. “Taking a look back at when I arrived here in March 2007 and how it looked and felt then, [there’s been] a really remarkable transition within Iraq itself,” he said. “Neither the Iraqis nor we can take our eye off that ball, because as we tragically have seen, there are still elements out there, particularly al Qaeda, capable of delivering devastating attacks.” Crocker went on to note that while the Iraqi security forces had made “enormous” progress over the last two years, they still needed U.S. support.