True Faith and Allegiance

by Alberto R. Gonzales

  On March 9, I met with John Yoo about confirming our legal authorities for war. The president was ready to go, and I asked John to make sure we had all domestic and international legal authorities in place to use force in Iraq without a new UN resolution authorizing military intervention. The congressional authorization to use force provided domestic cover, but I worried that our authority under international law would be challenged without a UN resolution to use force, unless we were acting in self-defense.

  At the March 10 NSC meeting, the president was concerned about the United States’ message to the Iraqi people. “The Iraqi people must understand we trust them. The people can run their own country. We will let them know that soon there will be an interim body, but it is only a temporary institution. The Iraqi people have suffered greatly under Saddam, and they deserve to have the power once he is gone. We have to be careful, though, about empowering any specific group.”

  The following morning, I met with the president, Condi, and Andy in the Oval Office. In these small-group discussions, I sensed that President Bush was more open about his thoughts and feelings about going to war. Even in the secretive atmosphere of the Situation Room, it seemed to me the president sometimes kept his personal views in check. But that morning, with just a close circle of friends, he was more open, and visibly irritated about waiting for the UN to take a stand against Hussein. Nevertheless, he was incredibly candid and left me with a solemn warning, “We have to win quickly or that will be the end of this administration.”

  I agreed, adding, “My only fear is Saddam using WMD.”

  “Or a dirty bomb,” replied the president. He sighed slightly, then looked at me and asked, “What about my legal authorities? Are they airtight?”

  “The lawyers at Justice believe they are,” I said, “although you are likely to be challenged.”

  The president sat back in his chair and seemed to roll his eyes. He said nothing for a few moments. Finally, turning to Condi, he said, “Tell Powell to be tough today. We have to end the debate today about this new UN resolution.” The UN debate continued throughout the day.

  The next morning, the NSC met at 8:55 in the Situation Room. The president was clear about what he wanted. “It is time to get out,” he said, referring to the UN debate. “Today is the day.”

  The previous evening, President Vicente Fox had checked into a Mexican hospital without informing the United States or talking to President Bush about his plans. “He didn’t want to decide,” Bush said. “The Mexicans are afraid.”

  Powell confirmed the president’s suspicions. “Mexico is not going to be a party to this,” he said. Nor was Chile moving our way. “The French will veto anything,” Powell said, “because they see any resolution as a license to war.”

  The president shook his head. “We are through with the Latins,” he said. “Such a sad testimony to friendship.” Bush expressed great disappointment that Mexico and other Latin American countries did not step up. He didn’t expect them to offer troops or material, but he did expect their support.

  The president looked at his team. “We have to end this. The cleanest way is to go with no vote.” He suggested that we give the UN notice on Thursday afternoon. “On Saturday, we start operations and on Monday, the air war starts.”

  We pulled down our request for a resolution from the UN. We had little choice since one “no” vote from the Security Council would have stymied our plans again. Powell reported that Russia and other countries were apparently pleased they would not have to vote on a resolution concerning Iraq.

  On March 17, the NSC met at 9:00 a.m. The president said he was going to give a televised speech about the situation. “This is an ultimatum speech, not a go-to-war speech,” he said. “It will be up to Saddam to avoid military conflict by allowing peaceful entry. We have not declared war, and this can still be done peacefully, but there’s only one way.”

  President Bush gave General Tommy Franks a seventy-two-hour notice. “This is not an execute order. This order allows everyone to be ready so when the execute order is issued, we can move immediately. We will provide briefings to Congress about the speech between 5:45 p.m. and 6:15 p.m., and the speech is scheduled for 8:00 p.m.”

  That evening, President Bush offered a gracious overture, giving Saddam Hussein one last chance to avoid an invasion. “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within forty-eight hours,” the president said in a nationally televised address from the White House. “Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.”7

  The following day, Saddam appeared on television, dressed in full military regalia, along with some of his top generals. The message was clear. He had no intentions of disarming . . . but the clock was ticking.

  I was at my desk early the morning of March 18, 2003, preparing to monitor the federal execution of Louis Jones Jr., a decorated soldier who came home from the Gulf War in 1991 a changed man—and not changed for the better. According to court testimony and psychiatric reports, he drank heavily, divorced his wife, and left the army after serving twenty-two years.

  In February 1995, Jones kidnapped a nineteen-year-old woman on a military base near Lubbock, Texas, raped her, and then bludgeoned her to death with a tire iron. He was caught and convicted in federal court, despite his defense’s contention he’d suffered head trauma as a result of chemical agents encountered on the battlefield. Jones exhausted all of his appeals and was scheduled to die on March 18, 2003. This would be only the third federal execution since we’d come to Washington, the first being Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh and the second being drug lord and murderer Juan Garza, both of whom were executed in June 2001.

  The case weighed heavily on President Bush as he contemplated sending our troops into battle again in Iraq. As we had always done with every execution, the president and I reviewed the details. Jones was a convicted killer, but he was also a decorated veteran, a man who fought against Saddam Hussein for America and the world. His lawyers contended that he had been exposed to small amounts of Saddam’s lethal nerve gas when a weapons depot had been destroyed. Maybe so. But he had willfully committed a heinous crime, and there was no new evidence on which the president could in good conscience commute his sentence.

  At 6:00 a.m., I spoke with Peggy Griffey at the Department of Justice. There were no appeals on Jones’s behalf pending in the courts; there was no new evidence; the execution moved forward. When asked if he wanted to make a last statement before his execution, Jones recited a verse of Scripture and then began singing an old hymn, “Near the Cross.” At 7:08 a.m., he was pronounced dead by lethal injection at the US penitentiary near Terre Haute, Indiana. When I conveyed the news to the president, he said nothing, but I sensed he was torn.

  The following morning, March 19, 2003, I stepped into the Oval Office at about 7:15 a.m. to have a conversation with the president about judicial candidates. As I concluded my analysis of a potential federal judge, President Bush seemed distracted. Without even commenting on the judgeship, he got up from his chair and spoke to me matter-of-factly. “I’m prepared to give the authority today to the commanders to go on Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

  Realizing the import of his words, I nodded and simply said, “Okay, let’s go.”

  I walked across the hall to the Roosevelt Room for a senior staff meeting at 7:30 a.m. and then met with my lawyers at 8:00 a.m. Afterward I walked down to the Situation Room and sat in my chair on the back row, along with Steve Hadley and Scooter Libby.

  This was going to be a historic day. I looked around the room and wondered who else knew what the president was about to do. The vice president, Condi, and Andy no doubt knew. Other members of the National Security team, including Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Hugh Shelton, and Richard Myers, as well as George Tenet, arrived soon after. As usual, everyone knew to be early.

  The multiple video monitors were up in the small, wood-paneled Situation Room, and General Tommy Franks appeared on the largest scr
een, with several of his commanders on other monitors. When the president arrived, he sat down at one end of the long conference table, his chair right beneath the presidential seal, placed so he could look directly at the video monitors. As always in National Security Council meetings, Vice President Cheney sat directly to the president’s right, and Colin Powell sat to Bush’s left.

  President Bush began by hearing briefly from each of the generals. Then he asked Tommy Franks for the name of the operation. “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Franks replied confidently.

  Bush spoke to Franks, but clearly the question was to all the military leaders. “Do you have everything you need to win? Are you pleased with the strategy?”

  None of the military commanders expressed any reservations. The president asked one more time, “Does everyone have everything you need?”

  General Franks replied, “Mr. President, this force is ready. D-Day, H-Hour is 2100 hours tonight Iraqi time, 1800 hours Greenwich Mean, 1300 hours East Coast time.”8 President Bush nodded to the members of the National Security team, then turned back toward Tommy Franks.

  Anticipating his next words, I turned away from the video screens and stared at my friend, the president of the United States. “Tommy,” he said, “I’ve been briefed by the secretary of defense and have now received these briefings. For the sake of peace in the world and security for our country and the rest of the free world”—he paused and everyone listened intently—“and for the freedom of the Iraqi people, I will give Secretary Rumsfeld the order . . . I hereby give the order to execute Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

  Pausing momentarily, and then speaking with great emotion, the president said, “Tommy, may God bless the troops.”

  General Franks stood and responded, “Mr. President, may God bless America.” The general saluted the commander in chief, who returned the salute.

  Then, in a rather surreal moment, the president stood and simply walked out of the Situation Room without saying another word to anyone. The room remained silent for several seconds with nobody moving. Ordinarily, when the president stands at the conclusion of a meeting, everyone in the room stands. But on this day of days, when the president saluted General Franks and left the room, nobody budged, reflecting, I believe, the historical significance of the moment. The liberation of Iraq was now in the hands of the military generals, who would act swiftly and effectively.

  I walked quietly up to my office, thinking about the many months of work and preparation in which we had engaged. I recalled Don Rumsfeld once saying that the best military plans often went out the window once the first shot was fired in a war. The first shot was soon to be fired.

  I entered my office, sat down in my chair, and looked at the neatly stacked piles of memos and paperwork on my desk. A book of US international agreements given to me by John Yoo sat on one corner above a draft of the Iraqi use of force congressional resolution. It was no longer a mere resolution; it was now a harsh reality.

  For more than a year, I had watched the intense interactions between incredibly bright, thoughtful leaders—who did not always agree on every point—as they considered any and every alternative to war in Iraq. In the years to follow, the media often portrayed the president as the Texas cowboy cavalierly stomping off to war with his naïve cabinet members following docilely behind him. Nothing could be further from the truth. The run-up to Iraq was a long, tedious process that could have turned at any point if Iraq’s dictator had ever done the right thing. But he didn’t.

  Especially after 9/11, the president was not about to risk underestimating Saddam’s WMD capabilities, as the world had done prior to Operation Desert Fox, the limited four-day bombing attack on Iraq during the Clinton administration. If he had nothing to hide, Saddam could have allowed the UN inspectors open access to his country, and a major rationale for the US invasion might have evaporated. But as has often been observed since, when it came to Saddam’s WMD and our willingness to disarm him, the Bush administration never dreamed that Saddam was bluffing and Saddam never dreamed that the United States was not.

  Was it a mistake to invade Iraq based on the information we had at the time? If so, the mistake was in the intelligence, not the decision to defend America, to disarm Hussein and punish him for disobeying multiple UN resolutions. I question the fitness of anyone to serve as commander in chief who—when confronted with the same information after the attacks of 9/11—would have made a different decision.

  The Bush administration, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, our allies around the world, and even some Arab nations all concurred that Saddam Hussein either had or was developing weapons of mass destruction. In hindsight, of course, the obvious question is how could so many have been so wrong? But at the time, the overwhelming consensus view was that Saddam posed an imminent threat through his WMD program. Subsequent accusations that “Bush lied” about WMD and our reasons for going into Iraq—which undermined our credibility and efforts in the region—are simply false, and Bush’s political opponents, who incessantly and effectively pounded that idea into the national psyche, knew it.

  The president was deeply frustrated over Saddam’s failure to comply with repeated United Nations resolutions, UN weapons inspections, and Iraq’s frequent misrepresentations of its weaponry. For more than a year, the president and his cabinet debated the options.

  In laying the groundwork for attacking Saddam and liberating the Iraqi people, President Bush struggled with the need to build an international coalition. He believed that if we hoped to succeed in Iraq and in the war on terror, we needed the cooperation of our allies, but he refused to allow the safety and fate of the United States to lie in the hands of an international organization such as the United Nations or any other international body. He understood that he was the president, that his top priority was to do what was right and in the best interests of the United States. He was more than willing to work with our friends and allies, but not at the expense of our nation’s security.

  Iraq was an almost daily topic of discussion for many months. President Bush certainly did not go to war hastily or unadvisedly. My activities during this time were focused primarily in two areas: affirming the legality of the United States going into Iraq on the basis of self-defense; and preparing to help the Iraqi leadership develop their own constitution and rule of law framework, once the allied coalition toppled Hussein from power.

  As the president made final preparations to speak to the nation that night, I walked down to the Oval Office, where, as they did for every speech from that location, workmen moved furniture to make room for the television cameras and microphones. The technicians moved respectfully as I stepped into the waiting area just outside the Oval Office. Then at 10:00 p.m., I walked inside the Oval Office and the doors closed behind me.

  At 10:10 p.m., the president came out of his study. He looked to be in a confident mood. I glanced around and saw Karen Hughes, Condi, Andy, Ari Fleischer, Dan Bartlett, and Mike Gerson, who had no doubt been helping the president refine his speech.

  We watched quietly as the president began his remarks at 10:16 p.m. He spoke slowly but deliberately, giving a short speech, straight to the point, that lasted less than five minutes. It was vintage Bush.

  Immediately afterward, photographers came in and took pictures of the president sitting resolutely at his desk. He then grabbed some moisturized cloths to wipe the television makeup from his face. As he left for the residence, he looked at those of us standing in the Oval Office. “Go home and get some sleep,” he said kindly.

  Most of us didn’t.

  I worked for several more hours, talking with other administration lawyers, reexamining the legal memos and related issues. Just prior to going home, I thought of my sons. Soon sons and daughters would be moving into harm’s way because of what happened earlier. I prayed they would be all right.

  The president had done what he thought was right, based on the information given to him by the best intelligence sources in the world
. The United States had patiently waited since 1991 before taking action to disarm Saddam Hussein. Now Hussein’s fate was in our hands, and the legacy of the Bush presidency would be determined in part by the outcome.

  CHAPTER 25

  LISTENING TO THE ENEMY

  While rescue workers continued combing through the rubble at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and investigators still searched through the forest in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, hoping to find fragments of United flight 93, on October 4, 2001, the president authorized an enhanced form of electronic spying to help track down terrorists and prevent future attacks. The code name for this top secret surveillance program was Stellar Wind. One of the most secretive activities in which the Bush administration ever became involved, the surveillance program was operated under the direction of the National Security Agency (NSA). It was designed to engage in multiple intelligence activities, including the secret monitoring of international communications between suspected terrorists associated with al-Qaeda—especially communications between terrorists and someone already within the United States. This program was in addition to what other US intelligence agencies—we had several—were already doing at the State Department, the FBI, the CIA, and in lesser known groups, and expanded the NSA’s authorization to collect information electronically by collecting and examining data secured from phone calls and e-mails.

  In 2005 and 2006, the New York Times published unauthorized articles revealing information about classified surveillance activities—revelations for which numerous people within the administration believed the newspaper, its editors, and the reporters involved should have been prosecuted under Section 798 of Title 18 of the US Code, which prohibits the publishing of classified information. Added to that were the revelations of “domestic surveillance” in classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden,1 a contractor for NSA, published in the British newspaper The Guardian, on June 5, 2013. Consequently, questions, controversies, and allegations have swirled about the surveillance program authorized by the president. Many Americans have assumed that the NSA is listening in on every phone call they make and that somebody from the government is reading every e-mail they send or receive. I have no reason to believe that is happening today, and it was definitely not the case or the intent of the programs authorized by President Bush in 2001. Indeed, the programs were not designed or intended as domestic spying in the least, unless someone inside the United States had links to al-Qaeda and was a party to an international communication.