Decision Points

by George W. Bush

  The new techniques proved highly effective. Zubaydah revealed large amounts of information on al Qaeda’s structure and operations. He also provided leads that helped reveal the location of Ramzi bin al Shibh, the logistical planner of the 9/11 attacks. The Pakistani police picked him up on the first anniversary of 9/11.

  Zubaydah later explained to interrogators why he started answering questions again. His understanding of Islam was that he had to resist interrogation only up to a certain point. Waterboarding was the technique that allowed him to reach that threshold, fulfill his religious duty, and then cooperate. “You must do this for all the brothers,” he said.

  On March 1, 2003, George Tenet told a spy story suitable for a John le Carré novel. Information gleaned through the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al Shibh, combined with other intelligence, had helped us draw a bead on a high-ranking al Qaeda leader. Then a brave foreign agent recruited by the CIA led us to the door of an apartment complex in Pakistan. “I want my children free of these madmen who distort our religion and kill innocent people,” the agent later said.

  Pakistani forces raided the complex and hauled out their target. It was the chief operating officer of al Qaeda, the murderer of Danny Pearl, and the mastermind of 9/11: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

  I was relieved to have one of al Qaeda’s senior leaders off the battlefield. But my relief did not last long. Agents searching Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s compound discovered what one official later called a “mother lode” of valuable intelligence. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was obviously planning more attacks. It didn’t sound like he was willing to give us any information about them. “I’ll talk to you,” he said, “after I get to New York and see my lawyer.”

  George Tenet asked if he had permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I thought about my meeting with Danny Pearl’s widow, who was pregnant with his son when he was murdered. I thought about the 2,973 people stolen from their families by al Qaeda on 9/11. And I thought about my duty to protect the country from another act of terror.

  “Damn right,” I said.

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed proved difficult to break. But when he did, he gave us a lot. He disclosed plans to attack American targets with anthrax and directed us to three people involved in the al Qaeda biological weapons program. He provided information that led to the capture of Hambali, the chief of al Qaeda’s most dangerous affiliate in Southeast Asia and the architect of the Bali terrorist attack that killed 202 people. He provided further details that led agents to Hambali’s brother, who had been grooming operatives to carry out another attack inside the United States, possibly a West Coast version of 9/11 in which terrorists flew a hijacked plane into the Library Tower in Los Angeles.

  Years later, the Washington Post ran a front-page story about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s transformation. Headlined “How a Detainee Became an Asset,” it described how Mohammed “seemed to relish the opportunity, sometimes for hours on end, to discuss the inner workings of al-Qaeda and the group’s plans, ideology and operatives. … He’d even use a chalkboard at times.” The intelligence he provided, which proved vital to saving American lives, almost certainly would not have come to light without the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program.

  Of the thousands of terrorists we captured in the years after 9/11, about a hundred were placed into the CIA program. About a third of those were questioned using enhanced techniques. Three were waterboarded. The information the detainees in the CIA program revealed constituted more than half of what the CIA knew about al Qaeda. Their interrogations helped break up plots to attack American military and diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States. Experts in the intelligence community told me that without the CIA program, there would have been another attack on the United States.

  After we implemented the CIA program, we briefed a small number of lawmakers from both parties on its existence. At the time, some were concerned we weren’t pushing hard enough. But years later, once the threat seemed less urgent and the political winds had shifted, many lawmakers became fierce critics. They charged that Americans had committed unlawful torture. That was not true. I had asked the most senior legal officers in the U.S. government to review the interrogation methods, and they had assured me they did not constitute torture. To suggest that our intelligence personnel violated the law by following the legal guidance they received is insulting and wrong.

  The CIA interrogation program saved lives. Had we captured more al Qaeda operatives with significant intelligence value, I would have used the program for them as well.

  On the morning of March 10, 2004, Dick Cheney and Andy Card greeted me with a startling announcement: The Terrorist Surveillance Program would expire at the end of the day.

  “How can it possibly end?” I asked. “It’s vital to protecting the country.” Two and a half years had passed since I authorized the TSP in October 2001. In that time, the NSA had used the program to uncover key details about terrorist plots and locations. NSA Director Mike Hayden later said publicly that the program had been “successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States” and that it was his “professional judgment that we would have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States” if it had been operational before the attacks.

  Andy explained the situation. While John Ashcroft had regularly recommended the renewal of the TSP since 2001, the Justice Department had raised a legal objection to one component of the program.

  “Why didn’t I know about this?” I asked. Andy shared my disbelief. He told me he had just learned about the objection the previous night. The legal team must have thought the disagreement could be settled without presidential involvement. I told Andy to work with Ashcroft and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to solve the problem. In the meantime, I had to fly to Cleveland to deliver a speech on trade policy.

  When I got back, I checked in with Andy. Little progress had been made. The Justice Department was sticking to its objection. My lawyers weren’t budging, either. They were convinced the program was legal.

  “Where the hell is Ashcroft?” I asked.

  “He’s in the hospital,” Andy replied.

  That was news to me. I called John, who I discovered was recovering from emergency gallbladder surgery. I told him I was sending Andy and Al to talk to him about an urgent matter. They drove to the hospital with the TSP reauthorization order. When they got back, they told me Ashcroft hadn’t signed. The only way to allow the program to continue was to override the Justice Department’s objection. I didn’t like the idea, but I saw no other alternative. I signed an order keeping the TSP alive based on my authority as head of the executive branch.

  I went to bed irritated and had a feeling I didn’t know the full story. I intended to get it.

  “Mr. President, we’ve got a major problem,” Andy told me when I got to the Oval Office on the morning of March 12. “Jim Comey is the acting attorney general, and he’s going to resign because you extended the TSP. So are a bunch of other Justice Department officials.”

  I was stunned. Nobody had told me that Comey, John Ashcroft’s deputy, had taken over Ashcroft’s responsibilities when he went in for surgery. If I had known that, I never would have sent Andy and Al to John’s hospital room.

  I asked to speak to Comey privately after the morning FBI briefing, which he attended in John Ashcroft’s place. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with Jim, but I knew he had a distinguished record as a prosecutor in New York. I started by explaining that I had an obligation to do what was necessary to protect the country. I felt the TSP was essential to that effort. He explained his concerns about the problematic aspect of the program. “I just don’t understand why you are raising this at the last minute,” I said.

  He looked shocked. “Mr. President,” he said, “your staff has known about this for weeks.” Then he dropped another bomb. He wa
sn’t the only one planning to resign. So was FBI Director Bob Mueller. I was about to witness the largest mass resignation in modern presidential history, and we were in the middle of a war.

  I called Bob into the Oval Office. I had come to know him well over the past two and a half years. He was a good and decent man, a former Princeton hockey star who had served in the Marines and led the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco. Without hesitation, he agreed with Comey. If I continued the program over the Justice Department’s objection, he said, he couldn’t serve in my administration.

  I had to make a big decision, and fast. Some in the White House believed I should stand on my powers under Article II of the Constitution and suffer the walkout. Others counseled that I accept Justice’s objections, modify the program, and keep the administration intact.

  I was willing to defend the powers of the presidency under Article II. But not at any cost. I thought about the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, when President Richard Nixon’s firing of Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox led his attorney general and deputy attorney general to resign. That was not a historical crisis I was eager to replicate. It wouldn’t give me much satisfaction to know I was right on the legal principles while my administration imploded and our key programs in the war on terror were exposed in the media firestorm that would inevitably follow.

  I decided to accommodate the Justice Department’s concern by modifying the part of the program they found problematic, while leaving the TSP in place. Comey and Mueller dropped their resignation threats. The surveillance program continued to produce results, and that was the most important thing.

  I was relieved to have the crisis over, but I was disturbed it had happened at all. I made clear to my advisers that I never wanted to be blindsided like that again. I did not suspect bad intentions on anyone’s part. One of the toughest questions every White House faces is how to manage the president’s time and when to bring policy disputes to his desk. The standoff over the surveillance program was a case of bad judgment. There was no shortage of disagreements in the years ahead, but nothing like this ever happened again.

  One of my favorite books is the fine historian David McCullough’s biography of President Harry Truman. I admired Truman’s toughness, principle, and strategic vision. “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me,” he said when he took office suddenly in the final months of World War II. Yet the man from Missouri knew how to make a hard decision and stick by it. He did what he thought was right and didn’t care much what the critics said. When he left office in 1953, his approval ratings were in the twenties. Today he is viewed as one of America’s great presidents.

  After she became secretary of state, Condi gave me a biography of Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson. Both books reminded me how Truman’s decisions in the late 1940s and early 1950s laid the foundation for victory in the Cold War and helped shape the world I inherited as president. Truman forged the NATO alliance; signed the National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Defense Department; fought an unpopular war that enabled the rise of a democratic ally in South Korea; and pledged assistance to all countries resisting communist takeover, the Truman Doctrine.

  As in Truman’s era, we were in the early years of a long struggle. We had created a variety of tools to deal with the threats. I made it a high priority of my second term to turn those tools into institutions and laws that would be available to my successors.

  In some areas, we were off to a good start. The Department of Homeland Security, while prone to the inefficiencies of any large bureaucracy, was an improvement over twenty-two uncoordinated agencies. The FBI had created a new National Security Branch focused on preventing terrorist attacks. The Defense Department had established a new Northern Command with the sole responsibility to defend the homeland. The Treasury Department had adopted an aggressive new approach to disrupting terrorist financing. We had recruited more than ninety countries to a new Proliferation Security Initiative aimed at stopping international trafficking of materials related to weapons of mass destruction. Based in part on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, we had created a new National Counterterrorism Center and appointed a director of national intelligence—the largest reform of the intelligence community since Truman created the CIA.

  In other areas, we had work to do. Some of our most important tools in the war on terror, including the TSP and the CIA interrogation program, were based on the broad authority of Article II and the congressional war resolution. The best way to ensure they remained available after I left office was to work with Congress to codify those programs into law. As Justice Robert Jackson explained in a landmark opinion in 1952, a president has the most authority when he is acting with the explicit support of Congress.

  The challenge was how to present the TSP and the CIA interrogation program to Congress without exposing details to the enemy. I believed it was possible, but we would have to work closely with members of Congress to structure the debate in a way that did not reveal critical secrets. We were developing a strategy to do that. Then two events forced our hand.

  “The New York Times is on the surveillance story again,” Steve Hadley told me in December 2005. The previous year, the Times had considered running a story exposing the TSP. Condi and Mike Hayden had talked the paper out of revealing the key elements of the program.

  I asked the Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and editor, Bill Keller, to come see me on December 5, 2005. It was a rare request, and I appreciated their willingness to speak face to face. They arrived around 5:00 p.m. Steve Hadley, Andy Card, Mike Hayden, and I greeted them in the Oval Office. We sat by the fireplace beneath the portrait of George Washington. I told them the nation was still in danger, and their newspaper was on the verge of increasing that danger by revealing the TSP in a way that could tip off our enemies. Then I authorized General Hayden to walk them through the program.

  Mike is a calming personality. He is not a macho guy who tries to intimidate people with the stars on his shoulders. He talked about his long career in intelligence and his natural suspicion about any program that could result in collecting information on U.S. citizens. He outlined the safeguards in place, the numerous legal reviews, and the results the program had produced.

  Mike’s briefing lasted about thirty minutes. I watched the Times men closely. They were stone-faced. I told them they could ask Mike any question they wanted. They didn’t have many. I looked directly at Sulzberger and strongly urged that he withhold the story for national security reasons. He said he would consider my request.

  Ten days later, Bill Keller called Steve to say the Times was going forward with the story. We had no chance for a closing argument. They had posted it on their website before Keller placed the call.

  I was disappointed in the Times and angry at whoever had betrayed their country by leaking the story. The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the disclosure of classified information. As of the summer of 2010, nobody had been prosecuted.

  The left responded with hysteria. “He’s President George Bush, not King George Bush,” one senator blustered. “The Bush administration seems to believe it is above the law,” another said. One immediate effect of the leak was to derail the renewal of the PATRIOT Act, which was set to be reauthorized by Congress. “We killed the PATRIOT Act,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who had voted for the law in 2001, bragged at a political rally.

  Ultimately the PATRIOT Act was renewed, but the leak created a bigger problem. Telecommunications companies suspected of helping the government operate the TSP faced massive class-action lawsuits. That was unfair. Companies that had agreed to do their patriotic duty to help the government keep America safe deserved to be saluted, not sued. One thing was sure: Any hope of future cooperation from the telecom industry was gone unless we could provide legal immunity.

  In early 2006, I began outreach to key legislators on a bill m
odernizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The new legislation provided explicit authority for the kind of surveillance we had conducted under the TSP, as well as liability protection for telecom companies.

  The debate continued in fits and starts for two years. Fortunately, I had two persuasive advocates: Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, a clear-thinking former Navy admiral, and Attorney General Mike Mukasey, a tough-minded federal judge from New York. They spent hours on Capitol Hill explaining the need to close the gaps in our intelligence capabilities as well as the safeguards we had in place to prevent abuses.

  Finally, both houses of Congress held a vote in the summer of 2008. The House passed the bill 293 to 129. In the Senate, it received 69 votes. The legislation essentially ended the debate over the legality of our surveillance activities. Congress had shown bipartisan support for a law that provided even more flexibility than we’d had under the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

  The second event that forced our hand came in June 2006, when the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

  The decision was the culmination of more than four years of litigation involving the military tribunals I had authorized in November 2001. It had taken two and a half years for the Defense Department to work out the procedures and start the first trial. No doubt it was a complex legal and logistical undertaking. But I detected a certain lack of enthusiasm for the project. With all the pressures in Afghanistan and Iraq, it never seemed like the tribunals were a top priority.

  Lawyers advocating for the detainees moved with more urgency. In 2004, the Navy-appointed lawyer for Salim Hamdan—Osama bin Laden’s driver, who had been captured in Afghanistan—challenged the fairness of the tribunal. The appeals court upheld the validity of the tribunals as a system of wartime justice. But in June 2006, the Supreme Court overturned that ruling. The Court decided that, unlike Franklin Roosevelt and other predecessors, I needed explicit authorization from Congress to establish the tribunals.