George W. Bush: The American Presidents Series: The 43rd President, 2001-2009

by James Mann

  In those days of crisis, he sometimes fell back on his self-image as a tough-talking Texan. Referring to bin Laden, he quipped, “There’s an old poster out West, I recall, that says, ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive.’” Several of his aides warned that he shouldn’t personalize America’s response to September 11 in this way. Years later, Bush himself would reflect that those words were “a little too blunt.”

  The public response at the time, however, was overwhelmingly positive. Just before September 11, the Gallup Poll had reported that Bush’s approval rating stood at 51 percent, meaning that, just as at the time of the 2000 presidential election, the nation was almost evenly divided. Ten days after the attacks, Gallup and other polls reported that the figure had jumped to 90 percent, a level as high as that for his father at the end of the Persian Gulf War and higher than that for any other president.

  The press coverage was similarly enthusiastic. After the prayer service and the visit to Ground Zero, R. W. Apple Jr. wrote in the New York Times that Bush “began coming of age this weekend” and that “he made significant progress toward easing the doubts about his capacity for the job and the legitimacy of his election.” After the speech to Congress, the Times editorialized that “he was as strong and forthright as the nation could have wished.” The Democrats joined in the praise. “He’s done a first-rate job,” said Joseph R. Biden Jr., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Count me in on the 90 percent [who approve].”

  Amid this outpouring of support, however, Bush and his aides were quietly making fundamental policy choices and embracing themes that attracted far less attention but would set the stage for future acrimony.

  The first was the notion of an unlimited war on terror and, along with it, a continuing emphasis on the role of nation-states and their leaders. Bush’s first speech to the nation on the night of September 11 contained a vaguely worded warning to other governments. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them,” the president declared. This was not merely a speechwriter’s turn of phrase; Bush and Rice had parsed these words and had cleared them with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell. This language was undefined; Rice said it reflected simply a belief that since terrorist groups have no territory or sovereignty to lose, it is easier to issue a warning to a state.

  But to which countries did Bush’s wording apply? Everyone agreed it meant Afghanistan, whose Taliban regime had allowed bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders to take up residence, carry out operations, and run terrorist training camps for the previous five years. What about Pakistan, which was both a close friend of the United States and also the main patron of the Taliban? What about countries in the Middle East or the Persian Gulf?

  Early on the morning of September 12, less than twenty-four hours after the attacks, Tenet showed up at the White House to give the president his daily intelligence briefing. Just outside the West Wing, he ran into Richard Perle, officially the head of the advisory Defense Policy Board and unofficially a leader of the neoconservative movement that had espoused a hawkish American foreign policy both in the cold war and in its aftermath. “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility,” Perle told the CIA director. That weekend, when Bush summoned his top foreign-policy officials to Camp David to decide on military responses to the September 11 attacks, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense and another leading neoconservative, argued specifically for military action against Iraq, arguing that it was of greater strategic importance to the United States than Afghanistan.

  They and other hawks, both inside and outside the Bush administration, argued that the United States needed to go further than simply retaliating against al-Qaeda. They pointed out that previous efforts at retaliation against al-Qaeda—notably, President Clinton’s decision to fire cruise missiles at training camps in Afghanistan after the embassy bombings of 1998—had been ineffective at stopping terrorist attacks.

  Bush and Rice agreed with this point of view. “Dropping expensive weapons on sparsely populated camps would not break the Taliban’s hold on the country or destroy al-Qaeda’s sanctuary,” Bush explained in his memoir. At the time, he put this thought more pithily: he said he wanted to do more than “pound sand.”

  The second development of significance lay in the decision by Bush and most of his senior advisers that America’s response to September 11 would be essentially unilateral in nature. On the day after the attacks, the leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization did something they had never done before: they approved a resolution under Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, the provision of collective self-defense in which an armed attack on any member of the treaty is considered an attack on all of them. This action reflected the wave of sympathy for the United States in Europe; on September 12, the French newspaper Le Monde had declared on its front page: “We Are All Americans.”

  Bush, however, kept the Europeans at arm’s length. He and other administration officials were reluctant to coordinate America’s response to September 11 too closely with other countries. Military leaders recalled how time-consuming and cumbersome it had been to reach decisions within NATO for military actions in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. Moreover, America had now been hit on its own soil. Explaining the administration’s aloofness toward NATO at the time, Rice wrote ruefully a decade later, “We were single-minded, bruised, and determined to avenge 9/11 as quickly as possible. Nonetheless, I’ve always felt that we left the Alliance dressed up with nowhere to go.”

  Instead of collective action, Bush and his team came up with a different concept: they would act together with shifting, ad hoc coalitions of countries. “The mission must determine the coalition. The coalition ought not determine the mission,” Rumsfeld told Bush in a memo. This left it to the United States to decide which actions to take. Rumsfeld said he got the idea from a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister, then out of office, who warned him that acting through any formal alliance would restrict America’s flexibility. Thus was born the notion of a “coalition of the willing,” a central concept for Bush and his team as they began to move toward a military response to the September 11 attacks.

  At the meeting with his war cabinet at Camp David the weekend after September 11, Bush was presented with three different military options: to strike al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan with cruise missiles, as Clinton had done; to attack with both missiles and bombers, hitting a wider range of targets; or, finally, to mount a full invasion with American troops to dislodge the Taliban. Bush chose the third option. “This time, we would put boots on the ground, and keep them there until the Taliban and al-Qaeda were driven out and a free society could emerge,” he concluded.

  At the same time, Bush rejected Wolfowitz’s proposal for immediate military action against Iraq. Powell had argued strenuously against moving on Iraq on grounds that it would fracture the international support that had been forming for action against the Taliban. Tenet was also strongly opposed, on grounds that the administration ought to focus on al-Qaeda. Both Cheney and Rice agreed that, for the time being, acting against Iraq would be a distraction.

  Bush agreed, and the question of attacking Iraq was set aside, not rejected but deferred. The administration would first concentrate on Afghanistan, he decided. He announced the plans in his speech to Congress. In doing so, he set forth another theme that would become a hallmark of the early Bush years. “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make,” Bush said. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

  * * *

  Soon after September 11, Bush began to approve a far-reaching set of changes on the home front. His actions would come to affect everything from daily life and travel throughout the United States to the operations of the federal government, the legal authority of the presidency, and the powers of America’s intelligence and national security agencies. Some of Bush’s actions were adopted openly; others were mad
e on “the dark side,” in the phrase made famous by Cheney.

  Almost instantly, American air travel was transformed. All air traffic had come to a halt on the morning of September 11. When it resumed, travelers were subject to the extensive searches that became a permanent feature of air travel. For a time, National Guard units were assigned to airports, and air marshals were placed on many commercial flights. Bush quickly appointed Tom Ridge, the governor of Pennsylvania, to a new post, initially as the White House official in charge of homeland security and eventually as the secretary of a new cabinet agency, the Department of Homeland Security. DHS took charge of immigration, customs, border patrol, and the newly created Transportation Security Agency.

  Bush went to Congress for legislation that would strengthen the authority of the Justice Department and the FBI. Within six weeks, Congress approved the bill, which was called the USA Patriot Act, a name that came from Congress and that Bush later claimed he regretted for its implication that its opponents were unpatriotic. “I should have pushed Congress to change the name of the bill before I signed it,” he wrote after leaving office. The law removed the wall of separation between intelligence collection and law enforcement, permitting extensive new sharing of information. It authorized new kinds of roving wiretaps. It also opened the way for the government to examine credit card bills, leases, and even the library records of those suspected of terrorist activity; the last provision, which became a rallying cry for privacy experts, was unpopular even with Laura Bush, a former librarian.

  The first actions on “the dark side” also began within weeks after September 11. Bush had been surprised to discover that al-Qaeda not only had infiltrated its agents into the United States without detection but also had communicated with them from Afghanistan. His and his aides’ anxieties were further compounded by the anthrax scare, in which letters with anthrax spores were sent to various news media outlets and to members of Congress. The Bush team worried that a second attack might be coming soon, perhaps from additional “sleeper cells” of al-Qaeda agents in the United States.

  Bush’s response was to authorize the highly classified program in which the National Security Agency conducted electronic surveillance of communications into and out of the United States without a warrant. This measure, later called the Terrorist Surveillance Program, would eventually spawn more than a decade of controversy, at first inside the Bush administration and then with the public under both Bush and Barack Obama. The extensive NSA surveillance activities made public by Edward J. Snowden in 2013 are an updated version of the program Bush approved the month after the September 11 attacks.

  This surveillance program had two characteristics that would set the pattern for other Bush actions on the “dark side.” One was that Bush’s primary role was not as initiator, but to give his imprimatur to actions drawn up by those working under him, especially Cheney. The vice president was the driving force on the surveillance program, at first asking intelligence officials what new authority they needed to broaden the scope of their monitoring of al-Qaeda and then meeting with Michael Hayden, the NSA director, and with Tenet to work out the details of the new program.

  The other characteristic, paradoxically, is that although Bush had a minimal role in devising the secretive programs, his approval of them served to expand the power of the presidency. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 required U.S. officials to go to a secret court for a warrant before spying on foreign agents inside the United States, which meant that Bush needed some explanation for why the NSA did not have to obtain a warrant from the secret court to approve its expanded surveillance. Cheney worked with his aide David Addington, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, and John Yoo of the Justice Department to come up with legal justification. Their analysis relied mainly on the fact that the nation was at war and that American presidents, including Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, had historically assumed additional constitutional powers in wartime. Furthermore, in the week after September 11, Congress had passed a resolution, called the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, with expansive language that the government lawyers maintained could justify the NSA surveillance. Bush signed the order for the new NSA program on October 4, requiring that the program be reauthorized every forty-five days. For nearly three years, those authorizations were routine.

  Two days later, Bush ordered the start of military action in Afghanistan, with the aim of overthrowing the Taliban regime. Here Bush played an entirely different role: he was not merely the ratifier of his subordinates’ decisions but the initiator: an impatient, hands-on president who pressed and cajoled those under him to move in the direction he wanted. When the Pentagon moved slowly to develop a war plan for Afghanistan, Bush called Rice out of an afternoon meeting at the CIA and demanded: “I want a plan tomorrow. Call Don [Rumsfeld], and make sure I have one.” Weeks later, when the war started and America’s Afghan allies the Northern Alliance hesitated to engage the Taliban, Bush was similarly impatient. “They just need to move,” he said.

  There were a few days in late October when the war seemed to bog down, and commentators began to worry about a “quagmire.” But this turned out to be a short military campaign that seemed, at the time, to end in an overwhelming victory. The Taliban fled from Kabul on November 15 and from its last stronghold in Kandahar on December 7. Fifteen days later, with strong support from the United States, Hamid Karzai was inaugurated as president of a new Afghan government. However, the sense of triumph was incomplete: Osama bin Laden had fled into the mountainous caves of Tora Bora and escaped.

  * * *

  The end of the Afghanistan campaign opened a new set of issues for Bush and resulted in a flurry of new actions, many of them made in secret, that would prove at least as controversial as the NSA surveillance. In the course of the war, American forces and their Afghan allies began to capture many Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners. The Bush administration needed to decide where to put them and what rules should govern their detention.

  Bush, together with Cheney, made the first decision just before the fall of Kabul: those who were taken captive could be held indefinitely and then subjected to special military tribunals similar to those set up by Franklin Roosevelt for Nazi saboteurs in World War II. The detainees would not be tried in U.S. courts or by any international body. Within the U.S. government, an interagency group headed by a State Department official had been assigned to resolve the complex legal issues surrounding detention, but before it could finish its work it was preempted. Addington, Cheney’s legal adviser, drafted an order setting up the new system of tribunals; Cheney took it to Bush over lunch, and Bush signed it later that day. Some of Bush’s top aides, including Rice and Attorney General John Ashcroft, objected to this hurried and secretive process but to no avail.

  Next, the administration needed a place to hold those whom it captured. Tommy Franks, the U.S. military commander in charge of the war, made clear that he did not want to keep prisoners inside Afghanistan. The issue took on heightened urgency after the first American death in the war: CIA operative Johnny Spann was killed in a riot in an Afghan jail where he had gone to interrogate those detained there. For reasons of security, bringing prisoners back to the United States was out of the question. But if not in Afghanistan or the United States, where would the prisoners go?

  Cheney again took the lead. “The Vice President was, as I remember it, the one who suggested that we find an ‘offshore’ facility,” recalled Rice. A solution was soon found: detainees were taken to Guantánamo Bay, the U.S. naval base on the southern coast of Cuba. Guantánamo was isolated, making it impossible for prisoners to escape. Bush believed that Guantánamo offered a unique benefit that set it apart from U.S. bases in other remote locations or islands his aides had briefly considered, such as Guam. Because of its unusual legal status (the United States operates Guantánamo under a long-term lease dating back to the Spanish-American War), it is not considered American territory. As a result, the detainees hel
d at Guantánamo would have no access to the U.S. court system and no constitutional protections, such as the right to remain silent.

  The next question to be decided was whether the detainees were entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, which require humane treatment of prisoners of war. In early 2002, this issue engendered intense disagreement among Bush’s advisers. A proposal drafted by Justice Department lawyers held that the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to any of the detainees; it argued that al-Qaeda was a stateless entity with no rights at all under international law and that Afghanistan was a failed state whose Taliban regime was recognized by only a handful of governments, so that Taliban prisoners had no rights, either.

  The ensuing debate produced the first signs of tension among Bush’s advisers between those who had served in the military and those who had not, causing divisions that would reemerge, with considerably more acrimony, in the debate over Iraq. Military leaders have long been schooled in the importance of the Geneva Conventions, not merely for their own sake but for the protection they provide to captured American soldiers. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was so incensed that the U.S. government was trying to “weasel out” of applying the Geneva Conventions that he stormed into Rumsfeld’s office to object.

  Bush initially decided that the Geneva Conventions simply didn’t apply. Then Powell, himself a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, weighed in, arguing strenuously that the Geneva Conventions should cover all the detainees. By early 2002, pictures of hooded prisoners arriving at Guantánamo were appearing around the world, and the secretary of state was beginning to get protests from America’s European allies about improper treatment.

  Powell asked for a National Security Council meeting to examine the issue. Bush was annoyed, because he thought he had already made his decision, but he held the session anyway. After a few days, in a nod to Powell, he modified his earlier decision slightly, deciding that while the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda, they did apply at least in theory to the war in Afghanistan and thus to soldiers of the Taliban regime. But the Taliban detainees were still held to be unlawful combatants, not prisoners of war who would be entitled to the full protections of Geneva. In a written memo, Bush promised that as a matter of policy the U.S. armed forces would continue to treat detainees “humanely” and in a way consistent with the Geneva Conventions, “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity,” qualifications that limited the extent of protection under the conventions. (Later on, the Supreme Court would decide that the detainees were entitled to greater protection under the Geneva Conventions than Bush had given them.)