Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  “I oppose this, Mr. President,” he said. “I think this is a bad idea.” Then he gave several reasons why they should keep the selected captives incommunicado. “They might have intelligence value,” he argued. Moreover, closing the prisons would embolden critics and betray the countries that hosted them. “We will expose people who helped us.”

  Some on the other side wondered whether Cheney was so eager to keep the prisons secret because he worried about what might become public about the government’s handling of the detainees. What scandal lurked in the dank cells of Eastern Europe? Cheney and Rice went back and forth for several minutes as everyone else watched in stunned silence. Rice remembered it as “the most intense confrontation of my time in Washington.”

  Finally, Rice pulled out the trump card. “Mr. President,” she said, “don’t let this be your legacy.”

  When it was over, she could not read Bush, which was rare. Let me think about it, he said.

  Only later did he tell Hadley to inform everyone he would empty the prisons and give a speech announcing the decision. But Cheney appealed to him in a one-on-one conversation at least not to close them permanently, keeping options open for the future.

  Once he made the decision, Bush seemed oddly pumped up. Finally, after months on the defensive, he could push back against critics and explain what he had been up to. From his perspective, there was a good story to tell. They had captured men who had done grievous damage to the United States and had not simply killed them in revenge. They had not been gentle, to be sure, but their brutal tactics had been enough to extract vital, lifesaving intelligence. “He was very animated” and “extremely excited,” recalled William Burck, an aide involved in preparing the speech. “All of this information was stuff he had known and really been the most important information he knew about for three years, and he couldn’t tell anybody about it. It was only him and his hard-core, closest national security staff. And now he was able to sort of share it and tell the people, ‘Here is what we have been doing, here is what we have been doing to protect you.’ ”

  Just after lunchtime on September 6, Bush strode into the East Room to publicly acknowledge the CIA prisons for the first time and announce that he was sending the fourteen remaining “high-value detainees” to Guantánamo, where they would be made available to the International Committee of the Red Cross and given the same food, clothing, and medical care as other prisoners.

  For thirty-seven minutes, Bush defended what he had done, arguing that for a select few captives on the battlefield, the normal rules could not apply. “These are dangerous men with unparalleled knowledge about terrorist networks and their plans for new attacks,” Bush said. “The security of our nation and the lives of our citizens depend on our ability to learn what these terrorists know.” The detainees in the black-site prisons had been subjected to what he antiseptically referred to as “an alternative set of procedures” that were “tough” but “safe and lawful and necessary.” These tactics had “given us information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks here in the United States and around the world.” He named some detainees who had been held, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and described how they provided information leading to the other captures and headed off attacks on a marine camp in Djibouti, an American consulate in Pakistan, and civilian targets in London.

  What Bush did not describe was exactly what the “alternative set of procedures” were. He did not disclose that Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times and Zubaydah 83 times. Nor did he describe how Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the Saudi accused of directing the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, was waterboarded twice and threatened with a power drill and a loaded handgun in a mock execution; if Nashiri did not talk, he was told, “we could get your mother in here.” Bush did not describe other techniques, including forced nudity, slamming detainees into walls, placing them in a dark, cramped box with insects, dousing them with water as cold as forty-one degrees, and keeping them awake for up to eleven days straight. He rejected the notion that all this constituted torture. “I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world,” Bush said. “The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it, and I will not authorize it.” This reassurance, however, meant only that as long as he and his lawyers determined a tactic was not torture, then he could say he did not authorize torture, even if it was deemed torture by the rest of the world.

  Still, as he rhetorically justified his program, Bush was actually moving on. Any future questioning of suspects would be conducted under a new U.S. Army Field Manual issued that same day with more restricted methods of interrogation. And Bush was sending legislation that day to Congress to authorize the creation of new military commissions in response to the Supreme Court ruling, as well as asking lawmakers to pass a law clarifying rules for future interrogations to protect military and intelligence personnel from legal action.

  But the tone crushed Rice’s camp. What they had hoped would be a speech turning the page on controversial decisions of the past instead became a celebration of them. Marc Thiessen, the chief speechwriter, had crafted an address that gave no ground. “Basically,” thought John Bellinger, the top State Department lawyer, “we had clutched defeat from the jaws of victory.”

  THE WAR WAS driving other fissures among friends. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican whip, called Joshua Bolten to ask for a private meeting with the president.

  “Of course,” Bolten said. “Do you want to tell me what it’s about?”

  “No,” McConnell said.

  The senator arrived at the Oval Office at the appointed hour. The midterm campaign was going badly, and he viewed Bush and Iraq as anchors holding the party down.

  “Mr. President, your unpopularity is going to cost us control of the Congress,” McConnell told Bush.

  “Well, Mitch, what do you want me to do about it?” Bush asked.

  “Mr. President, bring some troops home from Iraq,” McConnell urged.

  Bush refused: “I will not withdraw troops unless military conditions warrant.”

  The desperate plea from the number-two Senate Republican underscored how nervous the party was about the upcoming elections. It also illustrated the disparity between the pro-war statements made for public consumption and the anxious sentiments expressed in private. Just the day before visiting Bush, McConnell had excoriated Democrats for wanting to pull troops out of Iraq. “Cutting and running is not a strategy for protecting the American people here in the United States,” he told reporters.

  Unbeknownst to the Senate, Bush’s advisers were pressing him to do the opposite as part of the strategy review he had requested. After two weeks of intense study, Meghan O’Sullivan and Brett McGurk gave Hadley a thirty-page report pressing for more troops, not fewer, warning of mass killings and a fractured Iraqi army if they did not reinforce the troops. Hadley, still not showing his hand, told them to do it again. When they objected, the typically calm lawyer snapped at them.

  “Hey, guys!” he exclaimed. “Do you get it? This is it! You want the president of the United States to send more Americans into Iraq, betting everything on it. Do you get it? You better be damn sure. I’m the one in the Oval with the recommendation. So you better be sure.”

  They had never heard Hadley use a curse word before.

  “We’re sure,” O’Sullivan said. “We understand and we’re sure.”

  “You better be damn sure,” Hadley repeated. “Go back to the table and run the analysis again.”

  Theirs was not the only review under way. General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had sensed the president’s discontent and organized a group of staff officers to examine the war effort, a group that became known as the Council of Colonels. And then there was a rump campaign for change instigated by General Jack Keane, a retired army vice chief of staff serving on the Defense Policy Board, a panel of prominent fi
gures that advised the defense secretary, and a well-respected figure with his own circle of protégés in top positions around the military. Tall, rugged, and barrel-chested, Keane was the picture of an army general, having served in Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo during thirty-seven years in the military. Although he had been Donald Rumsfeld’s choice to become army chief of staff, he retired instead at the end of 2003 to care for his sick wife. But watching from the private sector, he had concluded that the United States was on the verge of defeat in Iraq and could only turn it around with an infusion of troops.

  He went to see Rumsfeld on September 19 to urge him to change course and replace John Abizaid and George Casey. It was a radical move for a retired four-star officer to interject himself into policy making and undercut officers in the field. But the stakes were enormous.

  “We’re edging toward strategic failure,” Keane told Rumsfeld. “What’s wrong is our strategy. We never adopted a strategy to defeat the insurgency.” The Iraqis were not capable of taking over. “We put our money on that horse.”

  Rumsfeld deflected that to his commanders. “That was Casey and Abizaid’s strategy,” he said.

  Keane replied that Rumsfeld had influence too. In any case, Keane said the only way to win was to protect the population, living with the Iraqi people day and night, not the current strategy of huddling inside isolated bases. “If we don’t change it,” he said, “we will lose and we will fail.”

  Keane left thinking Rumsfeld had not really been receptive and set about finding others who would be. Rumsfeld later said he was noncommittal mainly because he had already been talking with the president about moving Abizaid and Casey out. “We were working that problem then before he suggested it, but I didn’t feel it was my place to tell him that, because he was an outsider at that stage. He was not an insider; he was not in the government,” Rumsfeld said.

  Three days later, September 22, Rumsfeld met with another adviser, Kenneth Adelman, who like Keane served on the Defense Policy Board and, more important, had been friends with Rumsfeld for three decades. Adelman had worked for Rumsfeld at three separate stops along their careers. He had stayed in Rumsfeld’s houses in Washington, Chicago, Taos, Santo Domingo, and Michigan. They had vacationed together with their families. Adelman had been a vocal proponent of the war, writing the op-ed piece predicting a “cakewalk” and sharing in the celebration at Cheney’s house after Saddam Hussein’s fall.

  But he had grown disenchanted with Rumsfeld’s handling of the war, and now was the moment of confrontation. Rumsfeld told Adelman to resign from the Defense Policy Board.

  “I wanted to call you in because you have been sounding so negative,” Rumsfeld told him.

  “Don, you are absolutely right,” Adelman replied. “I am sounding negative in the meetings because I feel negative. I feel like you have made terrible decisions.”

  “Like what?” Rumsfeld asked.

  “Well, allowing the looting, Abu Ghraib, the insurgency.”

  Rumsfeld did not agree, so Adelman ran through his criticisms. It was a travesty, he felt, to brush off the looting in the early days of the war with a dismissive “stuff happens.” And Rumsfeld had taken no responsibility, as far as Adelman was concerned, for the abuses at Abu Ghraib that so undermined American credibility. For forty-five minutes, they had it out. Adelman walked out knowing they would never talk again. Cheney’s circle was fracturing.

  Adelman was not the only one disillusioned. Rumsfeld, perhaps sensing the president’s growing impatience, gave him an opening by volunteering at a meeting in September that it might be good to have a “fresh pair of eyes.” Bush was not sure whether Rumsfeld was sending a signal, but for the first time he was preparing to act. Rumsfeld told his wife, Joyce, that if Democrats captured one or both houses of Congress in the midterm elections, he should resign because he could foresee two years of hostile hearings. He hinted at his thinking after yet another grim meeting in the Oval Office in early October.

  “The good news,” Cheney said with his trademark crooked grin, “is that there are only 794 days left until the end of the term.”

  “Dick,” Rumsfeld replied, “there are 794 days left for you. Not for me.”

  AS BUSH PLOTTED a change, he worried most about Cheney, whose relationship with Rumsfeld remained close after nearly four decades. They had weekend houses next to each other on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and at events like Mary Cheney’s book party at the Palm the previous spring the two men were found huddled alone in a corner, talking animatedly by themselves while everyone else mingled.

  It was Rumsfeld who had given Cheney the important breaks leading to a lifetime of success in politics, and it was Rumsfeld who had refused to let his drunk-driving past get in the way. (“He stood by me, and I have never forgotten that.”) Cheney had tried to repay him again and again, suggesting Rumsfeld for defense secretary under the first president Bush, then for vice president under the second, and finally for defense secretary again. He had stood by him in all the fights with Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, persuaded him to stay after Abu Ghraib, and helped save his job after the 2004 election. “Maybe he didn’t have the best bedside manner in the world,” Cheney later wrote, “but he is one of the most competent people I’ve ever met.”

  For all of that, Cheney had begun drifting away from his friend when it came to Iraq. Rumsfeld worried about nation building run amok; Cheney worried about defeat. “If Rumsfeld saw a Kosovo on steroids, Cheney’s image was that last helicopter lifting off the roof of the Saigon embassy,” J. D. Crouch said. Cheney’s adviser John Hannah had been feeding him excerpts from Lewis Sorley’s Better War, arguing that in its later years the Vietnam War was being won on the ground and lost in Washington. He had also read a new counterinsurgency manual by Lieutenant General David Petraeus and met privately with critics of the current strategy like Colonel H. R. McMaster, whose success in applying counterinsurgency tactics in the northwestern Iraqi city of Tal Afar had become a model for a different approach. A counterinsurgency strategy would require more troops, and Cheney was amenable but largely kept quiet. “The friendship with Rumsfeld blinded the vice president to some degree to where the responsibility and accountability lay,” said one official who worked at different times for both men. “Or maybe it didn’t blind him, but it was just too painful to have to deal with it.”

  Cheney would never blame Rumsfeld. “Even though Cheney knew what the problems were,” said a White House official, “he was loyal to the end to Rumsfeld and wasn’t going to dime Rumsfeld.” In his memoir, Cheney wrote that Casey, Abizaid, and “some in the Pentagon civilian leadership” opposed increasing forces—clearly meaning Rumsfeld without naming him. Like Bush, he made a pointed reference to Rumsfeld’s favorite line by saying opponents of a new strategy “continued to argue that the solution was to ‘take our hand off the bicycle seat’ and put the Iraqis in charge as quickly as we could.” Cheney could not bring himself to identify Rumsfeld as one of those opponents. Nor did he confront Rumsfeld directly. “He didn’t say it to me,” Rumsfeld said after both left office.

  If he were to get rid of Rumsfeld, Bush wanted a replacement ready to go. He had long attributed his decisions not to remove Rumsfeld to an inability to come up with a successor. In the past, he had considered Rice, Frederick Smith, James Baker, and Joseph Lieberman, but none of them was available or the right fit. Bush stewed about it and asked advisers and close friends whom they would suggest.

  One night he had dinner in the White House with Jack Morrison, a friend from Andover and Yale he had put on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Laura was out of town, so it was just the two of them. The president was clearly wrestling with who should replace Rumsfeld.

  “I’ve got to get someone who’s confirmable and acceptable to the military,” Bush said.

  Morrison had an idea. What about Bob Gates?

  That surprised Bush. Gates had been his father’s CIA director and was now president o
f Texas A&M University.

  “How do you know Bob Gates?” Bush asked.

  “Well, I don’t really,” Morrison answered, “but I spent a day with him a couple weeks ago, and I came away very impressed.”

  “That’s interesting,” Bush said.

  BUSH HOSTED ANOTHER dinner at the White House around then that was more delicate. Joining him in the Family Dining Room on the evening of September 27 were Presidents Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. In theory, they were allies in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But this was a dinner Bush was not looking forward to.

  It had been five years almost to the day since the first CIA operatives landed in Afghanistan to insert America into the country’s long-running war and topple the Taliban government in retaliation for the attacks on New York and Washington. The quick capture of Kabul and Kandahar and the subsequent invasion of Iraq had drawn attention, resources, and energy away from Afghanistan, on the assumption that the lingering war against insurgents there was relatively in hand. But in fact the Taliban was resurgent again, operating with impunity from Pakistani tribal areas. Insurgent tactics were bleeding over from Iraq as Afghan fighters adopted suicide bombing, and casualties were at a five-year high. Some experts expressed concern about the “Iraqification” of Afghanistan.

  By the time he arrived for dinner, Musharraf had just reached an agreement with tribal leaders in the hostile and largely ungoverned border areas near Afghanistan in which he pulled troops back in exchange for cooperation. Joining the visitors and Bush around the table for dinner were Cheney and Rice. Musharraf spent thirty minutes explaining the benefits of the agreement until Karzai began hectoring him for making a deal with terrorists using Pakistan as a safe haven to launch attacks in Afghanistan. Karzai produced a piece of paper that he said proved the Taliban were not to be disturbed under the deal. Musharraf denied that he was harboring the Taliban.