In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  IT HAS BEEN THE case in every major war in which the United States has been engaged that we hold enemy combatants for the duration of the conflict. This war is no different, except that the duration may be longer than any war in which we have previously been involved. As the fighting got under way in Afghanistan, we knew that there would be certain cases where we needed to try detainees. Administration lawyers relied on clear precedent to develop a system of military commissions.

  In 1942, a group of eight Nazi saboteurs landed by submarine on beaches in Florida and New York. They were captured, put on trial by a military commission at the direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and convicted. Six of the eight were executed. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the order Roosevelt issued establishing the military commissions.

  On November 13, 2001, President Bush signed an executive order, based on FDR’s order, establishing military commissions to try certain captured detainees. The detainees were foreign enemy combatants engaged in war against the United States. Military commissions were the appropriate place to try them. Our normal Article III court system was not suited for the trial of enemy combatants for a number of reasons. These courts couldn’t provide the safeguards in terms of security or protection of classified information that a military commission could. In addition, enemy combatants are not entitled to the rights granted through our civilian court system to criminal defendants. We knew that military commissions were the right place for these trials. We also knew that the model that FDR established had been upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court, and that was the model we chose to follow.

  Although the order establishing the commissions had been drafted in coordination with the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, three days before the president signed it, Attorney General Ashcroft had come to the White House to express concern that it envisioned no role for the attorney general. But as the long history of military commissions in America reflects, military commissions are an exercise of military authority over enemy combatants and not part of the law enforcement system. Indeed, the Office of Legal Counsel had emphasized that the military commissions should be authorized by the president as commander in chief in a directive to the secretary of defense for military implementation, with minimal involvement of the Department of Justice, which has no military responsibilities.

  As it turned out, we also ran into bureaucratic obstacles at the Department of Defense, and the military commissions were very slow to get started. Following a number of court cases and additional legislative action, a military commission system was established that is up and running today. I believe it provides the best forum in which to try enemy combatants of the United States, and I have been gratified to see the Obama administration come around to the same way of thinking.

  IN MARCH 2002, PAKISTANI forces raided an al Qaeda safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, and captured a terrorist named Abu Zubaydah. A lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, Zubaydah was the highest-ranking al Qaeda member we had captured to date. He had been badly wounded in the firefight that led to his capture, and the CIA officers who had been aiding the Pakistani operation arranged a special flight to bring a doctor from the United States to provide emergency care for him.

  Although defiant, Zubaydah provided useful information very early on, disclosing, for example, that the mastermind behind 9/11 had been Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM. He also provided KSM’s code name, Muktar. But then he stopped answering questions, and the CIA, convinced he had information that could potentially save thousands of lives, approached the Justice Department and the White House about what they might do to go further in interrogating him and other high-value detainees. The CIA developed a list of enhanced interrogation techniques that were based on the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape Program used to prepare our military men and women in case they should be captured, detained, or interrogated. Before using the techniques on any terrorists, the CIA wanted the Justice Department to review them and determine that they complied with the law, including international treaty obligations such as the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Out of that review process, which took several months, came legal opinions advising that the techniques were lawful. The program was approved by the president and the National Security Council.

  The techniques worked. Abu Zubaydah gave up information about Ramzi bin al Shibh, who had assisted the 9/11 hijackers, and on the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, bin al Shibh was captured after a shootout in Pakistan. At the time of his apprehension, he was plotting to use commercial airliners in suicide attacks on Heathrow Airport and other structures in London.

  Information from Abu Zubaydah and bin al Shibh led in turn to the capture of KSM, who after being questioned with enhanced techniques became a fount of information. A CIA report, declassified at my request, notes that KSM was the “preeminent source on al-Qa’ida.” According to the 2004 report, KSM had become key in the U.S. government’s understanding of al Qaeda plots and personalities:

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

  In one instance KSM provided information that led us to a terrorist cell in Karachi, Pakistan. The members of the cell were being groomed by a terrorist named Hambali, al Qaeda’s point person for Southeast Asia, for operations against the United States, probably to fly a hijacked plane into the tallest building on the West Coast.

  Despite the invaluable intelligence we were obtaining through the program of enhanced interrogation, in 2005 there was a move on Capitol Hill, led by Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to end it and require that all U.S. government interrogations be conducted under the rules of the U.S. Army Field Manual. As one of the CIA interrogators explained to me, the Field Manual is adequate for interrogating run-of-the-mill enemy soldiers. “If one guy doesn’t want to talk to you, you can say, fine, and move on to the next, until you get to one who will talk.” But a detainee such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is different. He wasn’t talking, but there was no one comparable to move on to. For the safety of the nation we needed him to talk, and that happened after we put him through the enhanced interrogation program.

  In an effort to reach an agreement with Senator McCain and explain to him how damaging his proposed amendment would be, CIA Director Porter Goss and I met with him in a secure conference room at the Capitol and tried to brief him about the program and the critical intelligence we had gained. But John didn’t want to hear what we had to say. We had hardly started when he lost his temper and stormed out of the meeting. His opinion carried a good deal of weight because he had been a prisoner of war, but his view of the program was certainly not unanimous among his fellow former POWs.

  Air Force Colonel Leo Thorsness found out he had been awarded the Medal of Honor while he was a prisoner in Vietnam. The news that he had received the nation’s highest award for valor came to him through tapping on the prison wall. On Memorial Day 2009, Thorsness, who was tortured severely by the North Vietnamese, wrote that waterboarding was “harsh treatment but not torture.” Although a supporter of Senator McCain, he disagrees with him on using enhanced techniques: “I would not hesitate for a second to use enhanced interrogation, including water boarding, if it would save the lives of innocent people.”

  Medal of Honor recipient Colonel Bud Day was shot down over North Vietnam, then interrogated and tortured. He managed to escape his prison camp and made it to the Demilitarized Zone, only to be captured again and tortured again. For a time Day shared a cell with McCain, whom he admires, but asked by author Marc Thiessen if he believed waterboarding to be torture, Day replied, “I am a supporter of water boarding. It is not torture. Torture is really hurting someone
.” Asked what he would say to the CIA officer who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Day replied, “You did the right thing.”

  Since the beginning of the enhanced interrogation program, the CIA had briefed key members of Congress on the interrogations and on what they were learning. I do not recall in any of the briefings I attended a single member objecting to the program or urging that we stop using these authorized, legal methods. Nonetheless, in the fall of 2005, congressional opinion was not on our side. At one of the weekly Senate Republican policy lunches I regularly attended, I spoke about the importance of the program. I could not reveal much about it. I could not talk about the specific interrogation techniques. I could only urge my colleagues to accept how critically important the program was to our national security. The McCain Amendment passed 90–9. At the president’s request, Steve Hadley had tried to negotiate enough flexibility in the language of the amendment to allow the CIA program to continue in a pared-down way. He had secured language he thought the CIA could live with, but after the legislation passed, Porter Goss told Steve that he’d checked with those running the program, and it would have to be shut down.

  When former NSA Director Mike Hayden became head of the CIA in May 2006, he reviewed the program and determined that some version of it had to be restarted in order to protect the country. But in June 2006 the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The decision held that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits any behavior that is “humiliating and degrading” and bans “outrages upon personal dignity,” applied to the detainees. The decision seemed to ignore the plain language of Common Article 3, which makes clear that it applies to “armed conflict not of an international character.” The War on Terror could hardly be more international, having occurred across countries and continents, but once the Supreme Court handed down its decision, the CIA interrogation program clearly needed new legal underpinning to continue.

  The president decided to make aspects of the program public in order to save it. He announced he would bring the terrorists currently in CIA custody to Guantanamo for trial, and he submitted legislation that would provide congressional approval for military commissions and clarify the kinds of questioning that would be allowed under the Detainee Treatment Act.

  Congress passed the Military Commissions Act in October 2006 and several months later, in July 2007, the president signed an executive order establishing guidelines for the CIA interrogation program. In 2007 testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, General Hayden explained why it would be so damaging to limit CIA interrogations to the methods in the Army Field Manual:

  We have severely restricted our attempts to obtain timely information from HVDs [high-value detainees] who possess information that will help us save lives and disrupt operations. Limiting our interrogation tools to those detailed in the field manual will increase the probability that a determined, resilient HVD will be able to withhold critical, time-sensitive, actionable intelligence that could prevent an imminent, catastrophic attack.

  “In essence,” Hayden concluded, “we would be back to a pre-9/11 posture.”

  In October 2007 the president spoke about enhanced interrogation at the National Defense University. “This program has produced critical intelligence that has helped us stop a number of attacks,” he said, “including a plot to strike the U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, California, and a plot to fly passenger planes into Heathrow Airport and buildings in downtown London.” Then the president said that critics of the program should be asked: “Which of the attacks I have just described would they prefer we had not stopped?”

  WITHIN TWO DAYS OF his inauguration, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that limited interrogations to the Army Field Manual, thus putting us back into the pre-9/11 mode. That decision could be reversed, but within three months of taking office, President Obama also released publicly the legal memos detailing the techniques that had been used in the enhanced interrogation program, meaning that if it ever were reinstated, its effectiveness would be diminished by our having told the world—including our enemies—methods we were likely to use. He released the memos over the objection of his current CIA director and the four previous CIA directors. He also did so despite apparently having been told directly by members of the CIA’s clandestine service that the release of this information could endanger our CIA operatives.

  President Obama claimed that he wasn’t reducing America’s tools in fighting the War on Terror because he was setting up a replacement interrogation program: the “High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group,” or “HIG.” When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was apprehended on Christmas Day of 2009 while trying to ignite a bomb he had carried in his underwear onto Northwest Airlines Flight 253, Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence, was asked whether Abdulmutallab had been questioned by the HIG. It turned out he hadn’t. Eleven months after the president had shut down the enhanced interrogation program and revealed the techniques in the program publicly, the replacement did not exist. Abdulmutallab was read a Miranda warning.

  While the administration moved slowly to establish an interrogation program for terrorists, they were quick to reopen an investigation of the CIA personnel who carried out our enhanced interrogation program. Despite the fact that these officers had already been investigated and cleared by career Justice Department lawyers, Attorney General Eric Holder began threatening them with prosecution. In May 2011, after the U.S. located and killed Osama bin Laden, we learned that intelligence gained by these interrogators through the enhanced interrogation program had helped lead us to him.

  AS WE FACED A new kind of enemy in the first war of the twenty-first century, the Bush administration put in place programs that were critical to securing the nation. We went after terrorists in safe havens in Afghanistan and took down the Taliban regime that had sponsored them. We enhanced our ability to intercept terrorist communications and track the money that financed them. And we developed a program to gain intelligence from detained terrorists that saved lives and prevented future attacks. As time passed after the 9/11 attacks and the threat of another attack seemed to recede in people’s minds, criticism of what we had done mounted, and no program was more bitterly condemned than the CIA’s procedures for interrogating high-value detainees. Amid the heated rhetoric some basic points tended to be ignored. The program was safe, legal, and effective. It provided intelligence that enabled us to prevent attacks and save American lives. Above all else, it was part of a broad effort that enabled us, for seven and a half years, to prevent any further mass casualty attacks against the United States.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Liberating Iraq

  Saddam Hussein’s willingness to use weapons of mass destruction was well-known to the world. He had used chemical weapons not only against his enemies, but against his own people. In 1988 during the Iran-Iraq War, he attacked the Kurdish town of Halabja with mustard gas and nerve gas, killing thousands of innocents. Villagers died as they were going about their daily tasks. Mothers died, holding their children.

  Saddam was determined to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, and after the 1991 Gulf War, we learned that his program to develop them was far more advanced than we had thought. The judgment of an International Atomic Energy Agency report was that Saddam could have had a nuclear device by late 1992, had his efforts not been derailed by Desert Storm.

  After the Gulf War the United Nations Security Council demanded that Iraq declare and give up the components of its nuclear program as well as chemical and biological weapons and the capacity to produce them. UN Resolution 687 further required that Saddam destroy any ballistic missiles with a range greater than one hundred fifty miles and permit a regime of on-site inspections aimed at making sure he carried through. It also extended a program of tough and comprehensive sanctions.

 
But Security Council resolutions had little impact on Saddam. A 1993 National Intelligence Estimate assessed that international support for sanctions was eroding, but judged that even if they remained in place, Saddam Hussein would “continue reconstituting Iraq’s conventional military forces” and “will take steps to reestablish Iraq’s WMD programs.” In a 1994 Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee report, the intelligence community agreed “that the Iraqi government is determined to covertly reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.”

  In 1995 Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel al-Majid, his brother Saddam, and their families defected to Jordan. Hussein Kamel had been in charge of portions of Iraq’s WMD programs, and the revelations that followed his defection led inspectors to realize that Saddam was deceiving them, particularly when it came to his biological and nuclear efforts. Saddam lured Hussein Kamel, his brother, and their families back to Iraq and then had Kamel and his brother murdered, along with their father, their sister, and her children, not long after their return.

  In 1998 Saddam Hussein insisted that international weapons inspectors stop work and leave Iraq. In response, Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act, making regime change in Iraq the policy of the United States government and approving nearly $100 million to fund Iraqi opposition groups working for Saddam’s ouster.

  That December, President Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox, a four-day air strike campaign meant to diminish Saddam’s weapons capabilities. “If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future,” Clinton said. “Mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.”