by Oliver Stone
Bush rushed the USA PATRIOT Act through Congress. The Senate version was sent straight to the floor without discussion, debate, or hearings. In this crisis atmosphere, only Feingold had the courage to vote against it, insisting, “It is . . . crucial that civil liberties in this country be preserved, otherwise I’m afraid that terror will win this battle without firing a shot.” It passed in the House by a vote of 337–79,25 and Bush signed it into law on October 26, 2001. The PATRIOT Act expanded government surveillance and investigative powers. In 2002, Bush empowered the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless wiretaps in violation of the legal reviews required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts and to monitor U.S. citizens’ e-mail.26
To convince the American people to accept such blatant infringement on their privacy and civil liberties, the administration barraged the public with constant alerts, heightened security, and a five-tier system of color-coded warnings that fluctuated based on each day’s danger of terrorist attack. The system was so obviously being manipulated by Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft that Bush’s secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, felt compelled to resign after one particularly egregious episode.27 The administration also began identifying points of vulnerability, listing 160 sites as potential terrorist targets. By the end of 2003, the number climbed to 1,849. One year later, it stood at 28,360. It jumped to an astounding 78,000 in 2005 and 300,000 in 2007. Even the nation’s heartland wasn’t immune. Amazingly, Indiana led all states with the most potential targets—8,591—almost three times as many as California. The national database included petting zoos, doughnut shops, popcorn stands, ice cream parlors, and the Mule Day Parade in Columbia, Tennessee.28
Bush made it clear that this was a new kind of war—a war fought not against a nation or even an ideology but against a tactic: terrorism. As retired Ambassador Ronald Spiers pointed out, framing it that way was deliberate and pernicious. Choosing the “war” metaphor, he wrote in 2004, “is neither accurate nor innocuous, implying as it does that there is an end point of either victory or defeat. . . . A ‘war on terrorism’ is a war without an end in sight, without an exit strategy, with enemies specified not by their aims but by their tactics. . . . The President has found this ‘war’ useful as an all-purpose justification for almost anything he wants or doesn’t want to do. . . . It brings to mind Big Brother’s vague and never-ending war in Orwell’s 1984.”29
It was also a new kind of war in that it would require no sacrifice from the overwhelming majority of Americans. The fighting would fall on the members of a volunteer army drawn largely from the lower ranks of society. The cost would be borne by future generations.
Whereas, at the start of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt had warned, “War costs money. . . . That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes. It means cutting luxuries and other non-essentials.”30 Bush saw things differently. He cut taxes on the wealthy and told Americans to visit “America’s great destination spots . . . and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed.”31 New York Times columnist Frank Rich captured the unreality: “No one is demanding that the rest of us pay for serious airline or bioterror security, or that we cut down on gas-guzzling to reduce our dependency on the oil of Saudi Arabia, whose other big export is terrorists. Instead we are told to go shopping, take in a show, go to Disneyland.”32
Bush asked the American people to make a hard choice: whether to visit Disney World or Disneyland. He gave the Afghan Taliban a different choice: either turn over the Al-Qaeda leaders or be bombed back to the Stone Age, which much of Afghanistan had never left. “Bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age . . .” wrote Tamim Ansary, an Afghan living in the United States for thirty-five years and a bitter foe of bin Laden and the Taliban, “that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely.”33
Other critics of the rush to war pointed out that no Afghans were among the nineteen hijackers. Fifteen were Saudis, one Lebanese, one Egyptian, and two were from the United Arab Emirates. They had lived in Hamburg and trained and took flight lessons primarily in the United States.
On October 7, 2001, less than a month after the terrorist attacks, the United States and its allies launched Operation Enduring Freedom. The Taliban leaders quickly got the message and scrambled to negotiate. On October 15, Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, whom the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad considered to be very close to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, offered to turn bin Laden over to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) for trial. Evidence suggests that Omar had been trying to rein in bin Laden for some time and that relations between the Afghans and Al-Qaeda had been frayed. U.S. representatives had actually had more than twenty meetings with Taliban officials during the previous three years to discuss their turning bin Laden over for trial. U.S. officials concluded that the Taliban were stalling. Milton Bearden, the former CIA station chief who oversaw the 1980s covert war in Afghanistan from his Pakistani base, disagreed, blaming U.S. obtuseness and inflexibility. “We never heard what they were trying to say,” he told the Washington Post. “We had no common language. Ours was ‘give up bin Laden.’ They were saying ‘do something to help us give him up.’ ” U.S. State Department and Embassy officials met with Taliban security chief Hameed Rasoli as late as August 2001. “I have no doubts they wanted to get rid of him,” Bearden said in October 2001. But the United States never offered the face-saving measures the Taliban needed.34
Rumsfeld’s high-tech warfare succeeded in sharply limiting U.S. casualties, but the lack of U.S. boots on the ground allowed bin Laden, Omar, and many of their supporters to slip away when the United States had them trapped at Tora Bora in December 2001. Afghan civilians didn’t fare as well, suffering approximately four thousand deaths, according to University of New Hampshire Professor Marc Herold—more than the number killed at the World Trade Center and Pentagon combined.35 Perhaps five times that number would die from disease and starvation in the months to follow.
Although Bush quickly lost interest in Afghanistan and turned his attention to Iraq, the war dragged on for the remainder of his presidency. Hamid Karzai ruled through brutal warlords and corrupt functionaries who turned Afghanistan into the world’s biggest supplier of opium. By 2004, Afghanistan was supplying 87 percent of the world total.36 In 2009, the country ranked second only to Somalia on the global corruption index.37 Fed up with corruption and exhausted by war, many Afghans welcomed back the Taliban, despite their earlier disgust with repressive Taliban policies.
Though the 9/11 plotters slipped easily through their fingers, the CIA and military did round up thousands of others in Afghanistan and beyond. Their treatment would signal just how dark Bush and Cheney were willing to go in the name of the United States—a country that had always considered its humane treatment of prisoners a sign of its moral superiority. Bush branded the detainees “unlawful enemy combatants,” not prisoners of war whose rights had to be respected, and threw them into the U.S. naval station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or into the CIA’s “black-site” prisons, where they could be held indefinitely. The least fortunate were delivered for even worse abuse by allied governments known for their cruelty, like Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Bush waived the battlefield hearings required by the Geneva Convention to determine whether captives were civilians or combatants. As a result, many prisoners who had no connection to Al-Qaeda or the Taliban were rounded up by unscrupulous Iraqis and Afghans seeking U.S. cash bounties. Innocent prisoners had no means of appeal. On the advice of White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales, Bush declared that the Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which the Unite
d States ratified in 1955, did not apply to suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda members.38 Among those outraged by Bush’s abrogation of the Geneva Conventions was Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Richard Myers.
The CIA was instructed to employ ten enhanced interrogation methods, the product of five decades of research into psychological torture. The techniques were spelled out in the CIA’s 1963 Kubark: Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual and honed by U.S. allies in Asia and Latin America in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Such psychological torture had been abandoned at the end of the Cold War and repudiated in 1994, when the United States signed the UN Convention Against Torture. It was back in force after 9/11 and often went beyond the strictly “psychological.”39
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., told journalist Jane Mayer that he considered the new torture policy, as Mayer put it, “the most dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.”40 The CIA outlined the procedures in detail. Upon arrest, the suspect would be “deprived of sight and sound” with blindfold and earmuffs. If the detainee proved uncooperative, he would be stripped naked, flooded with constant bright light and high-volume noise up to 79 decibels, and kept awake for up to 180 hours. Once the prisoner was convinced that he had no control, serious interrogation would begin. After guards shackled the prisoner’s arms and legs, placed a collar around his neck, and removed the hood covering his head, interrogators would slap him across the face, sometimes repeatedly, and, using the collar as a handle, slam his head into the wall up to thirty times. Subsequent methods included dousing the prisoner with water, denying him the use of toilet facilities, forcing him to wear dirty diapers, chaining him to ceilings, and requiring him to stand or kneel in painful positions for prolonged periods of time.41 The International Committee of the Red Cross reported that prisoners at Guantánamo were told that they were being taken “to the verge of death and back.”42
Waterboarding was employed in special cases—and sometimes repeatedly, despite the fact that the United States had prosecuted Japanese military interrogators for use of waterboarding against U.S. prisoners during World War II. The process was described by Malcolm Nance, an interrogation expert who had been an instructor with the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program to train U.S. soldiers to withstand interrogation:
Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word. Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject.43
High-tech warfare during the first stage of Operation Enduring Freedom succeeded in sharply limiting U.S. casualties. The Afghans were not so lucky. And the lack of U.S. boots on the ground allowed Osama bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders to easily slip away. A U.S. Navy F-14D Tomcat prepares to refuel for a bombing mission over Afghanistan. A U.S. Air Force B-1 Lancer bomber takes off for Afghanistan from the U.S. base on the island of Diego Garcia.
Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded in Bangkok at least eighty-three times over a four- or five-day period in August 2002, even though interrogators were convinced he was telling the truth. Still, CIA officials at the Counterterrorism Center at Langley demanded that the procedure be continued for a month, backing down only when the interrogators threatened to quit. Upon Zubaydah’s capture, Bush identified him as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations.”44 In reality, though, Zubaydah turned out to be a minor operative—not even an official member of Al-Qaeda—who may very well have been mentally ill. The Washington Post reported in 2009, “The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads. In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations.” And, the Post acknowledged, whatever information investigators extracted that might have had any marginal utility had come out before the waterboarding began. The waterboarding did yield an abundance of information, according to the Post: “Abu Zubaida began unspooling the details of various al-Qaeda plots, including plans to unleash weapons of mass destruction. Abu Zubaida’s revelations triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms.” One former intelligence official admitted, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”45
Purported 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times, as if he were going to disclose something on the 183rd time that he hadn’t divulged in the previous 182.46 Psychologists helped refine techniques, exploiting prisoners’ phobias. Interrogators also exploited Arabs’ cultural sensitivities by subjecting prisoners to public nudity and snarling dogs.47
In February 2004, Major General Antonio Taguba reported that his investigation had turned up numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses”48 at Abu Ghraib detention center, including rape of both male and female prisoners. Only four months earlier, Bush had announced, a bit prematurely perhaps, that “Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers.”49
After the Abu Ghraib exposé created an international uproar in 2004, the Justice Department withdrew the legal memo authorizing torture. The damage done to the United States’ international reputation was incalculable. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., confided, “No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world—ever”50 than Bush’s torture policy. However, the CIA subsequently captured another Al-Qaeda suspect and again sought permission to employ brutal interrogation methods. Rice responded, “This is your baby. Go do it.”51
Journalist Patrick Cockburn interviewed the senior U.S. interrogator in Iraq who had elicited the information that led to the capture of Iraqi Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He told Cockburn that torture not only produces no useful information, but its use in Iraq “has proved so counterproductive that it may have led to the death of as many U.S. soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11.”52
Although officials tried to pin the blame on a few “bad apples”—sadistic rogue interrogators who took matters into their own hands—torture was approved by top administration officials. Members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee—Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet, and Ashcroft—met repeatedly to specify which methods would be used on which prisoners. Ashcroft interrupted one NSC discussion and asked, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”53 General Barry McCaffrey agreed: “We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.”54 For years, the 770-plus prisoners at Guantánamo and thousands more in Iraq and Afghanistan were denied legal counsel and the right to call witnesses to defend themselves. As of late 2008, charges had been brought against only twenty-three. Over five hundred had been released without being charged, often after years of harsh and humiliating treatment.55 One FBI counterterrorism expert testified that of the Guantánamo detainees, fifty at most were worth holding.56 Major General Taguba said, “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”57
A protest poster compares waterboarding during the Spanish Inquisition to its modern-day practice by the United States at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, under the Bush administration.
The legal groundwork, which dated back to the 1990
s, was provided by Justice Department lawyers. In one particularly outrageous memo, John Yoo and Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee defined torture as pain “equivalent in intensity to . . . organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death”58 and then only if inflicting the pain was the deliberate purpose of the interrogation.
In 2004, when the Supreme Court ruled that detainees had the right to challenge the legality of their detention in the federal courts, Bush established the Combat Status Review Tribunal and an Annual Review Board to sidestep the ruling. Finally, in June 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees had a right to federal court review of the basis for their detention.59
Americans’ rights were often trampled on as well. In an effort to preempt protests, federal and local authorities conducted sweeping arrests of legal protesters on numerous occasions, including at the Republican conventions in both 2004 and 2008.
Bush did his best to avoid the protests that did occur. On the rare occasions when he ventured out in public, the Secret Service would quarantine critics in protest zones so far away that neither Bush nor the media could see them. Those holding protest signs outside the designated areas were subject to arrest. London’s Evening Standard reported that when Bush visited London in 2003, the White House demanded that the British impose a “virtual three-day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by antiwar protesters.”60
