[Infowarrior] - OpEd: The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse

[Richard Forno]

The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse

By Richard A. Clarke
Sunday, May 31, 2009

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 defense.

"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 said last month as  
she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush- 
era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national  
security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 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.  
"Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to  
forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."

I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade  
Center 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 horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter,  
Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National  
Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video  
conference from the Situation Room. 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 armored vehicles, and the skies were clear,  
except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days 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 that they want to be  
excused for the measures they authorized 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 eighty-story 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  
the decisions that Bush officials 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, even more so because the Sept. 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 from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed  
to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the  
threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in  
which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they  
authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing  
whether they were really a good idea.

I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004  
presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their  
inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly 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 Bush 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 Defense Don Rumsfeld was in  
the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the  
administration's leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have  
mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the  
convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was  
not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea.  
Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group recently revealed in  
his book, "Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq," that high- 
level U.S. officials urged him to consider waterboarding specific  
Iraqi prisoners of war so that they could provide evidence of an Iraqi  
role in the terrorist attacks -- a request Duelfer refused. (A recent  
report indicates that the suggestion came from the vice president's  
office.) Nevertheless, the lack of evidence did not deter the  
administration from eventually invading Iraq -- a move many senior  
Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.

On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. courts  
and prisons would not work. Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S.  
counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists  
and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in  
the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again  
as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response  
available. Camps were established around the world, notably in  
Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were held without being charged or  
tried. They became symbols of American overreach, held up as proof  
that al-Qaeda's anti-American propaganda was right.

Similarly, with regard to interrogation, administration officials  
conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques  
worked and which did not. 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.

Finally, on wiretapping, rather than beef up the procedures available  
under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the  
administration again moved to the extreme, listening in on  
communications here at home without legal process. FISA did need some  
modification, but it also allowed for the quick issuance of court  
orders, as when President Clinton took stepped-up defensive measures  
in late 1999 under the heightened threat of the new millennium.

Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the  
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- but it was because they had not listened.  
And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism  
techniques -- but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the  
tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they  
uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best  
available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.

"I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on  
our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect  
how you view your responsibilities," Cheney said in his recent speech.  
But this defense does not stand up. The Bush administration's response  
actually 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.

rclarke at hks.harvard.edu

Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for security and  
counterterrorism under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is  
the author of "Against All Enemies" and "Your Government Failed You."