The Present Participle: May 2009

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Bush officials' defence won't cut it - Richard Clarke

While Obama continues to prevaricate on making Bush officials accountable for their role in post-9/11 policies, former national co-ordinator for security and counter-terrorism under US presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush, Richard Clarke, has drawn his pen and yelled a veritable ‘on guard’ in this piece for the Washington Post.

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defence.

"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice recently said. Last month, Dick Cheney called the morning of September 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued.

I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Centre tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice-president's office and remember glimpsing the day's horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while National Security Council staff co-ordinated the government response. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive.

I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armoured vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems they want to be excused for the measures they authorised after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of 80-storey buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But decisions made in the following months and years - on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping - were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules. The September 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings to pre-empt a major al-Qaeda attack.

When Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock. Fearful of new attacks, they authorised the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were a good idea.

This zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared their inaction prior to the attacks would be detailed before the next vote - which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission - and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.

The first response they discussed was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defence Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea.

On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that US courts and prisons would not work, despite the fact that the US counter-terrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others and had a 100 per cent conviction rate in the US justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available.

The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures - such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times - would be the most effective.

The Bush administration's response undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the constitution, which the vice-president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.