Exceptional

by Dick Cheney

  At 2:45 P.M. on September 26, 2001, the first team of CIA officers arrived in Afghanistan. They flew into the Panjshir Valley through a 14,500-foot pass in the Hindu Kush mountains, on a Russian military helicopter the CIA had purchased and upgraded. They made contact with the Northern Alliance, a tribal group whose leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, had been assassinated by al Qaeda two days before the 9/11 attacks, and they began coordinating efforts to take down the Taliban.

  A few weeks later, the first twelve-man special operations team went in near Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan and another team seized the compound belonging to Mullah Omar, leader of the Afghan Taliban. Two hundred Army Rangers seized an airfield near Kandahar. Linked up with the Northern Alliance by the CIA team, the special operators began fighting side by side with them, sometimes on horseback, calling in air strikes on Taliban positions.

  Mazar-e-Sharif fell on November 9, 2001. Herat fell to the Northern Alliance on November 11, Kabul on November 13, and Jalalabad on November 14. Kandahar, the last Taliban stronghold, fell on December 7.

  Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, was selected as Afghanistan’s interim leader at a United Nations conference in December 2001, and inaugurated as chairman of the Afghan Interim Authority on December 22, 2001. In a little over three months, the United States, working with our Afghan allies, had overthrown the Taliban, liberated 25 million people, and begun the difficult work of denying al Qaeda the bases from which to train and plan attacks against us.

  In Afghanistan the United States has continued to face a deadly and determined enemy, one who is fighting to this day to take back territory and reestablish sanctuaries for our enemies. Our security depends upon ensuring that terrorists can never again establish bases in Afghanistan from which to launch attacks against America.

  The lessons of America’s involvement in Afghanistan should by now be clear. We turned our backs on the country once before, to devastating effect, after the Soviets left in the 1980s. Walking away again would be the height of recklessness.

  WHILE THE UNITED STATES was undertaking military operations in Afghanistan, work was also under way to strengthen our defenses and our intelligence capabilities. General Mike Hayden, director of the National Security Agency, explained that the NSA could do more if they could get additional authorizations from the president.

  President Bush readily agreed but imposed tight conditions to ensure that these new and necessary security programs did not violate the civil liberties or constitutional rights of citizens. One of the new conditions was that the president would personally reauthorize the program every thirty to forty-five days. His reauthorization would be based on assessments by the director of the CIA, the secretary of defense, and the U.S. attorney general that each extension was necessary, based on the most current intelligence. The president also instructed that the existence of the program be very close-hold, and he wanted to personally sign off on granting access to the program to anyone outside the NSA. It was one of the most highly sensitive and effective intelligence efforts in the history of the National Security Agency.

  The purpose of this program was to collect information on phone calls from suspicious numbers outside the United States to numbers inside the U.S. The data collected focused on the fact of a call, not the content. If a suspicious call were intercepted, there were procedures for referring the calls to the FBI and or to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court for the necessary approval to collect the content of the call.

  In 2004, despite the fact that Attorney General John Ashcroft had approved the program at least twenty-three times, his new deputy attorney general, James Comey, raised concerns. Even after General Hayden and lawyers from the NSA explained the national security importance of the program and the safeguards in place to protect civil liberties, Comey refused to authorize the twenty-fourth extension.

  When these new concerns arose, Vice President Cheney and General Hayden convened a meeting in the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing of the White House to brief an expanded group of members of Congress and to consult with them about whether, in light of the new concerns, the administration should seek additional congressional authorization for the program. The Republican and Democratic leadership from the House and Senate were in attendance, along with the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

  General Hayden briefed the lawmakers on the program and its results. Cheney then asked the leaders if they thought the program should continue. There was unanimous agreement that it should. Cheney then asked if the congressional leaders believed the administration should seek additional legislative authority for the program. Again they were unanimous. They advised that the administration not seek additional authorization, out of concern that the details and existence of this sensitive and highly effective program would be exposed.

  In 2005, the New York Times published leaked details about the program. President Bush had asked the publisher and editor of the paper not to print the information because it would damage our security, aid our enemies, and make it more difficult to prevent future attacks. The Times published it anyway.

  The next day, the president spoke about the importance of the program in his weekly radio address. He reminded the American people that the 9/11 hijackers had been in the United States communicating with terrorists overseas prior to the attacks. “Two of the terrorist hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon, Nawaf al Hamzi and Khalid al Mihdhar, communicated while they were in the United States to other members of al Qaeda who were overseas,” the president explained. “But we didn’t know they were here, until it was too late.”

  As we write this today, Congress has diminished the authorities of the NSA to track terrorist phone calls. Some members have launched campaigns to end the program entirely. Military historian Max Boot has suggested that those who advocate shutting down the NSA program would do well to tour the 9/11 Memorial & Museum at the site of the World Trade Center. It is a powerful reminder of the enemy we face and of the importance of doing all we can to stop them. The NSA program is a crucial tool in that effort. “Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11,” General Hayden has explained, “it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States and we would have identified them as such.”

  Those who oppose this program will be accountable for explaining to the American people why they fought to make it more difficult for the United States government to effectively track the communications—and therefore the plans—of terrorists inside the United States.

  THE NEED FOR A policy concerning the detention of terrorists—and a place to detain them—became clear early in the war in Afghanistan. As the United States captured enemy combatants, it was essential to ensure they did not return to the field of battle to kill more Americans. To meet this need, the Department of Defense established a detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

  The facility at Guantánamo was and remains safe, secure, humane, and necessary. Nevertheless, there have been years of attempts to close it, though doing so requires releasing the detainees. In efforts led by the State Department, some detainees were released during the George W. Bush administration. President Obama has accelerated releases, even though by the time he took office, the detainees left in Guantánamo were the worst of the worst, men whose own home countries often refused to take them back. There are now years of evidence that many of the detainees who have been released are returning to the field of battle. According to the annual report issued by the director of national intelligence in 2014, nearly one-third of those released are back in the fight.

  Today, for example, the lead recruiter for ISIS in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan is former Guantánamo detainee Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost. Two days after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself caliph of the Islamic State in June 2014, Dost pledged his allegiance. He now spends his days recruiting jihadists to send to Syria and Iraq to
fight for ISIS.

  Dost is a particularly useful reminder of the propaganda about Guantánamo and detainees that has appeared in the leftist European press. In an article in the Guardian newspaper in April 2006, Dost was described as “a softly spoken Afghan” whose only desire was that the U.S. military return to him the poetry he had written while at Guantánamo. “Those words are very precious to me,” the “Poet of Guantánamo” wrote the Guardian reporter.

  IN 2002 THE UNITED States captured Abu Zubaydah, a senior al Qaeda operations expert, in Pakistan. After his capture, he initially provided some information and then stopped cooperating. The CIA was confident he knew more, and ordinary interrogation methods, such as those described in the Army Field Manual, had proven ineffective.

  Drawing on techniques used to train our own people in the Survival, Evade, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE, program, the CIA developed a series of techniques they proposed to use on Abu Zubaydah. They sought the approval of the president, the National Security Council, and the Justice Department before proceeding. They wanted to ensure that none of the techniques was in violation of the law or any of the treaty obligations of the United States. The Justice Department provided legal opinions outlining the limits of lawful interrogation and detailing the techniques that could be used. Other safeguards were put in place, such as requiring the approval of the director of the CIA before any detainee could be questioned using these methods. The National Security Council approved the program.

  And it worked. After being subjected to the techniques, Abu Zubaydah provided information that led to Ramzi bin al-Shibh. He was captured on September 11, 2002, as he was plotting a terrorist attack on London using commercial airplanes. Information from bin al-Shibh and Abu Zubaydah led us to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11.

  In 2014, six former directors and deputy directors of the CIA wrote that, despite claims to the contrary made by the program’s opponents, the program was “invaluable in three critical ways”:

  • It led to the capture of senior al Qaeda operatives, thereby removing them from the battlefield.

  • It led to the disruption of terrorist plots and prevented mass-casualty attacks, saving American and allied lives.

  • It added enormously to what we knew about al Qaeda as an organization and therefore informed our approaches on how best to attack.

  A 2004 CIA report provided specific details about the extensive information we obtained from one of the detainees, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, after he was waterboarded. Titled “Khaled Sheikh Mohamed: Pre-Eminent Source on al Qaeda,” the report stated:

  Debriefings since his detention have yielded . . . reports that have shed light on the plots, capabilities, the identity and location of al-Qaeda operatives and affiliated terrorist organizations and networks. He has provided information on al Qaeda’s strategic doctrine, probable targets, the impact of striking each target set, and likely methods of attacks inside the United States.

  We now also know it was information from this program that led us directly to Osama bin Laden. According to Leon Panetta, director of the CIA and secretary of defense under President Obama:

  The real story was that in order to put the puzzle of intelligence together that led us to bin Laden, there were a lot of pieces out there that were a part of that puzzle. Yes, some of it came from some of the tactics that were used at that time . . . interrogation tactics that were used.

  As we pieced together intelligence about al Qaeda in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the enhanced interrogation program was one of the most effective tools we had. It saved lives and prevented attacks.

  LEAVING SADDAM HUSSEIN IN power in Iraq after 9/11, in light of the threat he posed, would have been, as former British prime minister Tony Blair has noted, an act of political cowardice. This is not to say that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. It is to observe that in the aftermath of 9/11, when thousands of Americans had been slaughtered by terrorists armed with airline tickets and box cutters, we had an obligation to do everything possible to prevent terrorists from gaining access to much worse weapons. Saddam’s Iraq was the most likely place for terrorists to gain access to and knowledge of such weapons.

  On October 10, 2002, the House of Representatives passed the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq by a vote of 296–113, forty-six more votes in favor than had been the case for Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Shortly after midnight the Senate approved the resolution 77–23, a much larger margin than for the Gulf War.

  The United Nations Security Council, on November 8, 2002, unanimously approved Security Council resolution 1441. It gave Iraq a final opportunity to disarm, demanded immediate and unrestricted access for UN inspectors, and required that Iraq provide a “complete declaration of all aspects” of its weapons of mass destruction programs and delivery systems. Iraq failed to comply. On March 17, 2003, President Bush addressed the nation and gave Saddam Hussein forty-eight hours to leave Iraq. Two days later President Bush gave the order launching Operation Iraqi Freedom.

  Our forces performed magnificently, and within weeks Saddam Hussein had fallen and we had taken Baghdad. As U.S. troops swept through Iraqi cities, they were, in fact, greeted as liberators. The headline in the Washington Post on April 9, for example, reported, “U.S. Forces Move Triumphantly Through Capital Streets, Cheered by Crowds Jubilant at End of Repressive Regime.” Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya visited the White House that night. Makiya’s books Republic of Fear and Cruelty and Silence documented the atrocities Saddam had committed for years against his own people. Coming at the end of the day that Saddam’s regime had been toppled, it was an emotional meeting. “Thank you,” Makiya said, “for our liberation.”

  As we now know, Saddam did not have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. However, it requires a willing suspension of disbelief and a desire to put politics above safety to assert that the absence of stockpiles meant the absence of a threat to the United States. David Kay, who led the international Iraq Survey Group, tasked with finding Saddam’s stockpiles, said, “I actually think that what we learned during the inspections made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than in fact we had thought before the war.” Kay and his successor Charles Duelfer made clear that Saddam retained the intent, knowledge, and dual-purpose infrastructure to restart WMD programs once the international sanctions regime collapsed. Citing Iraqi diplomat Tariq Aziz, Duelfer wrote that Saddam would likely have restarted his nuclear program first. He had purposely kept at hand the men and women with the skill and knowledge to do so.

  Between 2003 and 2006, coalition forces in Iraq, led by the United States, accomplished a great deal. They deposed a horrific dictator with ties to terrorists and plans to reconstitute his WMD program. They provided security for the Iraqi people as they went to the polls in the first truly democratic elections in their history. They liberated the country and handed responsibility for the government back to the Iraqis.

  But al Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was determined to sow destruction. We know from correspondence captured by American troops that Zarqawi was intent on fomenting a sectarian war inside Iraq. For more than two years, despite horrific attacks by Sunni terrorists, the Shi’a largely resisted being drawn in, but on February 6, 2006, Zarqawi’s terrorists blew up one of the holiest Shi’ite sites—the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra. Shi’a militias, in many instances backed by Iran, took up the task of killing Sunnis.

  As the violence increased, there were some who argued we should walk away and “leave Iraq to the Iraqis.” But America’s security depended then, as it does now, on ensuring that Iraq does not become a safe haven for terrorists. President Bush rightly decided we could not abandon Iraq.

  On January 10, 2007, the president announced that he was committing five additional brigades—more than twenty thousand additional troops—to the war in Iraq. The additional troops, he said, would be accompanied by a new strategy, a counterinsurgency effort to provide security for local populations, particula
rly in Baghdad. He faced significant opposition from Republicans and Democrats, including Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Secretary Clinton later admitted, according to former secretary of defense Robert Gates, that her opposition to the surge in troops was political since she was, at that time, competing against Senator Obama in the Iowa caucuses.

  President Bush did the right and courageous thing. The surge and the adoption of a new counterinsurgency strategy worked. With the additional troops and the new strategy, we were able to provide security for the Iraqis and demonstrate that we were not going to abandon them. A Sunni force, the Sons of Iraq, rose up to fight the insurgency and al Qaeda with us. Together, we largely defeated al Qaeda and the Shi’ite militia groups and enabled the Iraqis to begin to build a new country.

  HISTORY WILL BE THE ultimate judge of our decision to liberate Iraq. It will be debated long after we are gone, and it is important for future decision makers that those debates be based on fact.

  Those who say the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a mistake are essentially saying we would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power. That’s a difficult position to sustain. Saddam had deep, long-standing, far-reaching relationships with terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda and its affiliates. These relationships have been repeatedly confirmed in documents captured after the war. Saddam’s Iraq was a state based on terror, overseeing a coordinated program to support global jihadist terrorist organizations. Ansar al Islam, an al Qaeda–linked organization, operated training camps in northern Iraq before the invasion. Zarqawi, the future leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, funneled weapons and fighters into these camps, before the invasion, from his location in Baghdad. We also know, again confirmed in documents captured after the war, that Saddam provided funding, training, and other support to numerous terrorist organizations and individuals over decades, including to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man who leads al Qaeda today.