Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  Bush and Cheney also authorized some detainees to be seized and turned over to allied countries like Egypt, which could apply their own interrogation techniques, a process called extraordinary rendition. Some of the most sensational allegations that Iraq had trained al-Qaeda operatives to use explosives and chemical weapons came from such an interrogation of a prisoner named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who later recanted the statements, saying he lied to stop brutal interrogations.

  The military had its own rules for interrogations at Guantánamo. By the end of the year, Donald Rumsfeld was presented with options for interrogation techniques broken down into three categories. Rumsfeld accepted the two less aggressive categories but unlike the CIA rejected the most forceful category except for “mild, non-injurious physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger, and light pushing.” No one would be waterboarded at Guantánamo.

  Rumsfeld wrote his name on the approval line. “However,” he then added by hand, “I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?”

  IN MARCH, CHENEY made his first overseas trip as vice president to round up support for a possible war against Iraq. As he boarded Air Force Two at Andrews Air Force Base, it felt like a repeat of a mission he had made to the Middle East for the president’s father. Now returning, Cheney stopped in twelve countries over the course of ten days—Britain, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Israel, and Turkey—all with the same message: Bush had not made up his mind about Iraq, but if he did go to war, the result would be decisive.

  Accompanying Cheney was Lynne, who in addition to providing companionship and counsel proved a useful decoy. Worried about security, the Secret Service concocted a ruse to allow the vice president to land safely in Yemen, the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden and one of the most dangerous destinations in the world. After meetings in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, Cheney and his wife both approached the modified Boeing 757 used as Air Force Two, but only Lynne got on board. The plane then took off for Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, and swooped over the city before climbing again and flying on to Oman. The vice president slipped aboard a less obvious C-17 and landed in Yemen after a corkscrew approach to avoid fire from the ground.

  As the exhausting trip wound down, Cheney headed to Israel to meet with America’s closest ally in the region. During the plane ride, he and his advisers debated whether to meet with Yasser Arafat. William Burns, the assistant secretary of state for the region, recommended he sit down with Arafat because meeting only with the Israelis would send a bad signal. Cheney’s own advisers, Scooter Libby, John Hannah, and Eric Edelman, objected, arguing that a meeting would reward a known terrorist. Cheney held off deciding until landing, whereupon he got into a car with General Tony Zinni, the special envoy to the region trying to set up a cease-fire. Zinni described his travails, and Cheney asked if it would be helpful to offer a meeting as an incentive to get Arafat to take steps to improve security. Zinni said yes. But in the end, Arafat never agreed to the conditions, more evidence to Cheney that the Palestinian was not serious about peace.

  In the days after Cheney’s visit, violence flared with deadly consequences. Bush was on Air Force One when he heard that a Palestinian suicide bomber had walked into a crowded hotel dining room and detonated an explosion in the middle of a Passover holiday seder dinner, killing 30 and injuring 140. Israelis sent troops into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

  Bush met with his national security team on April 1, hours after Israeli troops advanced into Bethlehem in Palestinian territory just several hundred yards from the Church of the Nativity, celebrated as the birthplace of Jesus Christ. Bush decided to send Colin Powell on an emergency trip to calm the situation, despite objections by Donald Rumsfeld.

  After the meeting, Bush pulled Powell aside and made clear he was counting on the secretary’s global standing, aware that it eclipsed his own.

  “This is going to be tough,” the president said. “You’re going to have part of your butt burned off. But you have more butt than any of the rest of us, so you can afford it.”

  Powell ended up feeling burned back in Washington. He spent ten days in the region without making much headway, and so he finally called for an international peace conference in hopes of demonstrating progress. “It was the only way I could get out of town without being lynched in Jerusalem,” Powell later recalled.

  Back in Washington, Cheney considered the peace conference the worst kind of freelancing and, after hearing Powell repeat the proposal publicly, called Condoleezza Rice from Air Force Two to suggest she rein him in. Rice called Powell and remembered telling him that the idea “was dead on arrival.” He remembered her saying that while she thought a conference was fine, Cheney “was dead set against it and persuaded this was not a good thing.” Powell told her, “I am sorry, I have to get out of town with something on my back, and the president needs something.”

  Cheney later deemed this a critical rupture souring relations with his erstwhile Gulf War partner for the remainder of their time in government together. Powell took the episode “as a personal affront,” Cheney wrote in his memoir, and the vice president said he began hearing reports about the secretary whispering disdain for administration policies around Washington. “It was as though a tie had been cut,” Cheney said. Powell later disputed that. “That is nonsense,” he said. “I don’t know why that was a watershed event.”

  But it is true that Powell was frustrated at the lack of support while he was in the field trying to make peace. When he reported to Bush, he expressed irritation.

  “It was a mess, Mr. President,” he told Bush. “Don’t ever send people off to do missions like that when they are not getting squat.”

  Worse from Powell’s point of view was Bush’s comment shortly after the secretary’s return. When the two met in the Oval Office on April 18 to discuss the situation, reporters asked the president if he considered Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel a man of peace. “I do believe Ariel Sharon is a man of peace,” Bush answered. “I’m confident he wants Israel to be able to exist at peace with its neighbors.”

  Powell, sitting in the chair to Bush’s right, was flabbergasted. Sharon had effectively ignored American pleas to pull back his forces. Powell said nothing with cameras in the room but approached Rice afterward to vent.

  “Do you have any idea how this plays on Arab TV?” he asked. “The Israelis are just thumbing their noses at the president. Why is he giving Sharon a pass?”

  He was not the only one who wanted to know. Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, was livid and flew to America to make his anger known directly to Bush. The president agreed to host him along with Cheney, Powell, and Rice at the Crawford ranch on April 25. Abdullah wanted Bush to pressure Sharon to withdraw from the Palestinian headquarters.

  “When will the pig leave Ramallah?” Abdullah asked Bush.

  He had tried to persuade him, Bush answered, but Sharon refused.

  Abdullah gave Bush a videotape and a book of photographs showing harsh Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

  Cheney tried to talk about Iraq, but Abdullah was single-minded and presented an eight-point plan to solve the Palestinian crisis.

  “I can’t go back empty-handed,” the crown prince said.

  Abdullah asked to talk privately with his advisers, and Bush and his team stepped out. Suddenly the longtime American translator Gamal Helal rushed in. “Mr. President, I think the Saudis are getting ready to leave,” he exclaimed. Evidently, Helal said, Abdullah had expected Bush to force the Israelis out of Ramallah before the visit and wanted him to call Sharon right then. The threatened walkout had been secretly pre-scripted by the Saudis to get Bush’s attention.

  Bush was annoyed at the showy brinkmanship. He would not be blackmailed.

  “Does it matter if they leave?” he asked out loud.

  Yes, Rice said. “It would be a disaster.”

  Powell a
greed.

  Bush told him to speak with the Saudis. “Go and fix it,” Bush said.

  Powell found Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States, and tore into him angrily. “What the hell did you do?” Powell demanded. “How did you let it get to this?” The two began shouting loudly enough that Bush came to investigate.

  However irritated he was, Bush understood a walkout by America’s closest Arab allies would set back his agenda for the region. He went into the living room and asked to see Abdullah alone. Then he tried to interest the crown prince in a discussion of religion, hoping to break the ice as he had with Vladimir Putin a year earlier. But Abdullah sat stone-faced as Bush talked about his faith.

  Bush played his last card. “Before you leave, may I show you my ranch?”

  He ushered the crown prince outside into his white Ford pickup truck, then zoomed off for a tour of the trees and wildlife around his home. Only when a turkey hen appeared in the road did Abdullah express any interest.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  Bush told him and mentioned that Benjamin Franklin had wanted to make the turkey the national bird.

  “My brother,” Abdullah said suddenly, grabbing Bush’s arm. “It is a sign from Allah. This is a good omen.”

  With that, the two returned to the ranch and proceeded with the meeting. After five hours, Abdullah hugged and kissed Bush.

  “I love you like a son,” Abdullah declared.

  Bush never understood why a turkey hen would be taken as such an important sign, but its appearance avoided a foreign policy debacle.

  With Israeli tanks still besieging the Church of the Nativity, where Palestinian militants had taken refuge, it took more than a week for negotiators to craft a deal to ease the offensive in exchange for sending certain Palestinians into exile. As the agreement came together, Bush met at the White House on May 8 with another Abdullah, the king of Jordan. Like his counterpart, this Abdullah pressed the president for the withdrawal of Israeli troops. But Bush made clear he had no hope of working with Arafat. “I don’t know who else can emerge,” the president said. A new generation untainted by terror and corruption had to come forward, he argued.

  “I can imagine how Sharon feels when he starts his meeting with me with the news of a suicide bombing,” Bush told the king.

  Abdullah was struck by how much September 11 had brought the American president closer to Israel, and worried that it meant he did not clearly see the suffering of the Palestinians.

  “BUSH KNEW,” BLARED the headline on the New York Post on the morning of May 16. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York marched to the Senate floor and held up the newspaper. “The president knew what?” she demanded. “My constituents would like to know the answer to that and many other questions.”

  Nine months later, word was finally leaking out about the “Bin Ladin Determined” intelligence report presented to Bush at his ranch before the attacks. CBS News first reported that the CIA had briefed him on an al-Qaeda threat, leading to the splashy New York Post front page that Clinton was now displaying. The news organizations still did not have the document itself, so Americans had no idea just how sketchy it was, but just like that the politics of September 11 were upended.

  Calls for investigation multiplied by the hour. Bush aides were angry at Clinton and other Democrats for insinuating that he had advance warning of the attack. “It didn’t rattle him like it rattled a lot of us,” Ari Fleischer said. But Bush later admitted, “It bothered me.” At a closed lunch with Republican senators that day, Bush declared that had he known, he would have “used the whole force and fury of the United States to stop them.” His words quickly leaked, as he knew they would. Then, speaking by phone, Bush agreed to let Cheney push back at a New York fund-raiser that night. “An investigation must not interfere with the ongoing efforts to prevent the next attack,” Cheney warned, “because without a doubt, a very real threat of another, perhaps more devastating attack still exists.”

  Aides to Bush and Cheney knew an investigation would uncover more warnings, the “blinking red lights” George Tenet referred to, and few would spare the president for the vagueness of the information. The next day, May 17, Bush took on critics directly, using a Rose Garden appearance with the U.S. Air Force Academy’s championship football team to repeat what he had told the senators.

  “Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people,” he said forcefully. “We will use the might of America to protect the American people.”

  The counterattack succeeded in dousing some of the partisan fire. Clinton backed off, saying she was not “looking to point fingers or place blame on anybody.” But demands would only grow by Democrats, families of victims, and some Republicans for a comprehensive investigation into how September 11 happened.

  AS SPRING ARRIVED, Bush headed to Moscow to cement improving relations with Russia. The nuclear treaty he had agreed to negotiate with Putin had been finished and encompassed just 475 words, the shortest in the history of Russian-American arms control and less than a third as long as the story about it in the Washington Post. It committed each side to shrinking its arsenal to between seventeen hundred and twenty-two hundred warheads by the end of 2012, a dramatic reduction from previous limits. The treaty allowed each side to simply store the weapons rather than destroy them, but it extended mutual inspections that began during the Cold War, and its larger point was symbolic.

  Bush went along knowing it was important for Putin to mollify hard-core elements in Moscow—“Putin is at huge risk and he needs to fight off his troglodytes,” Bush told advisers at one point—and he hoped it would keep Russia on board as the United States moved toward confrontation with Iraq. He flew to Moscow and entered the gilded St. Andrew’s Hall in the Kremlin on May 24, sat down at a table with Putin, and signed the Moscow Treaty, also known as the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. Bush was effusive. “This treaty liquidates the Cold War legacy of nuclear hostility between our countries,” he said.

  Behind closed doors, though, it did not seem so. Russia had retaliated against Bush’s steel tariff by cutting off imports of American chicken drumsticks known as “Bush legs.” As they discussed the impasse privately, Putin asserted that the Americans deliberately sent bad poultry to Russia.

  “I know you have separate plants for chickens for America and chickens for Russia,” Putin told Bush.

  Bush was astonished. “Vladimir, you’re wrong.”

  Putin refused to believe him. “My people have told me this is true.”

  Bush was struck by the old-school Russian paranoia. Putin had surrounded himself with KGB veterans still steeped in the worst suspicions of the Cold War. But if Bush was willing to blame the advisers rather than Putin, it suggested a fundamental misunderstanding of the Russian leader. It was not just his advisers who saw America through the old lens; it was Putin himself.

  The meeting was a reminder of how hard it was to shake the past. Bush was trying to redefine national security in an era when Russia was no longer the enemy. The real threats, as he saw them, were stateless extremist groups and the nations that supported them, and he was now putting on paper a fleshed-out version of the doctrine he had begun articulating the night the World Trade Center fell. The United States had always reserved the right to strike first against an enemy gathering to attack, but Bush now wanted to take it a step further. In the post–September 11 world, Bush believed it was not enough to wait until an adversary was on the verge of striking. Instead, the United States would seek out potential threats, what the writer Jacob Weisberg called “Dick Cheney’s notion of prophylactic aggression.”

  Bush unveiled this new strategy during a commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best,” he told the first class to graduate since September 11. “We cannot put our faith in
the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systematically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”

  He added that “our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.”

  The approach came to be commonly called preemptive war. Scholars and international legal experts said that confused two concepts. Preemptive war refers to striking first when an enemy is about to attack you, much as the Israelis did during the Six-Day War in 1967. What Bush was talking about was preventive war, when a country attacks without imminent danger. Some administration officials later argued that Iraq did not qualify as either because it was actually a resumption of a war that started in 1991 and was temporarily halted by a cease-fire whose terms Iraq had been violating. Either way, Bush was not interested in parsing. “He didn’t get dragged into the legalistic or theological debate,” said Steve Biegun, a senior National Security Council official. “It was ultimately just the clarity of his words, which were we can’t stand idly by when we’re operating at the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. It’s unacceptable for us.”

  THAT WAS OFFENSE. On defense, Bush decided to reorganize the government to better guard against attacks. For the president, this was a reversal. Democrats like Senator Joseph Lieberman had been proposing a new cabinet department focused on homeland security for months, but the White House especially had opposed it, seeing it as a bureaucratic nightmare in the making. As pressure kept building, Bush saw the prospect of Congress approving a new department without him and made a strategic retreat. “Finally, they buckled because it was clear that this was gaining favor,” Lieberman said later.

  Once Bush had decided to move, his advisers had to figure out how to accomplish the largest bureaucratic restructuring of the American government since the National Security Act at the dawn of the Cold War. Bush believed the more he involved all the agencies, the slower things moved, and the more excuses were found for inaction. Bypassing the endless interagency process would be the only way to accomplish something this complicated. Andy Card quietly tapped five staff members, swore them to secrecy, and sent them to craft a plan in the emergency bunker where Cheney had managed September 11.