Dirty Wars (4 page)

After the Watergate scandal forced Nixon's resignation, Cheney went on to serve as President Ford's chief of staff, while Rumsfeld served as the youngest defense secretary in US history. In 1975, Congress intensified its probes into the underworld of secret White House operations under the auspices of the Church Committee, named for its chair, Democratic senator Frank Church of Idaho. The committee investigated a wide range of abuses by the executive branch, including
domestic spying operations
against US citizens. The Church Committee's investigation painted a picture of lawless, secret activities conducted with no oversight whatsoever from the courts or Congress. The committee also investigated the involvement of the United States in the overthrow and eventual death of Chile's democratically elected socialist president
Salvador Allende
in 1973, though Ford invoked executive privilege and
stymied the probe
. At one point during the Church investigations, Cheney attempted to compel the FBI to investigate famed investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and to seek an indictment against him and the
New York Times
for espionage in retaliation for Hersh's exposé on illegal domestic spying by the CIA. The aim was to frighten other journalists from exposing secret controversial actions by the White House.

The
FBI rebuffed
Cheney's requests to go after Hersh. The end result of the Church investigation was a nightmare for Cheney and his executive power movement: the creation of congressional committees that would have legally mandated oversight of US intelligence operations, including covert actions. In 1980, Congress
enacted a law
that required the White House to report on all of its spy programs to the new intelligence committees. Cheney—and Rumsfeld—would spend much of the rest of their careers attempting to thwart those authorities.

By the end of the liberal Carter administration, Cheney concluded that the powers of the presidency had been “
seriously weakened
.” Throughout the years of the Reagan administration, Cheney served as a Wyoming
representative in Congress, where he was a fierce backer of Reagan's radical drive toward reempowering the White House. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Charlie Savage noted in his book,
Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy
, Reagan's Justice Department sought to end “the congressional resurgence of the 1970s,” commissioning one report that called for the White House to disregard laws that “unconstitutionally encroach upon the executive branch.” Instead, the Reagan White House could use presidential “
signing statements
” to reinterpret laws and issue presidential edicts that could be used to circumvent congressional oversight. In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration was deeply embroiled in fueling a right-wing insurgency against the leftist government of the Sandinistas in the Central American nation of Nicaragua. The centerpiece of this campaign was covert US support for the right-wing Contra death squads. Reagan also authorized the mining of the harbors around Nicaragua, bringing an
unlawful use of force
judgment against the United States at the World Court.

When the US Congress finally moved in 1984 to ban all US assistance to the Contras, passing the
Boland Amendment
, some officials within the Reagan White House, led by Colonel Oliver North, who worked on the National Security Council, began a covert plan to funnel funds to the right-wing rebels, in direct contravention of US law. The funds were generated by the illicit sale of weapons to the Iranian government, in violation of an arms embargo.
Fourteen members
of the Reagan administration, including his secretary of defense, were later indicted for their involvement. When the Iran-Contra scandal unfolded, and Congress aggressively investigated its origins, Cheney emerged as the White House's chief defender on Capitol Hill and issued a dissenting opinion defending the covert US program that most of his congressional colleagues had deemed to be illegal. Cheney's “
minority report
” defending the White House condemned the congressional investigation into Iran-Contra as “hysterical.” The report charged that history “leaves little, if any doubt that the president was expected to have the primary role of conducting the foreign policy of the United States,” concluding, “Congressional actions to limit the president in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism. If they interfere with the core presidential foreign policy functions, they should be struck down.”

President George H. W. Bush pardoned Cheney's allies convicted in connection with Iran-Contra, and Cheney went on to serve as his defense secretary during the 1991 Gulf War, where he continued building his vision of a supremely powerful executive branch. During his time as defense secretary, Cheney began planting the seeds for another program that would aid
the consolidation of executive supremacy,
commissioning a study
from the oil services giant Halliburton that laid out a plan for privatizing as much of the military bureaucracy as possible. Cheney realized early on that using private companies to wage US wars would create another barrier to oversight and could afford greater secrecy for the planning and execution of those wars, both declared and undeclared. Cheney would then go on to head Halliburton for much of the 1990s, spearheading a drive to create a corporate shadow army that would ultimately become a linchpin of his covert and overt wars when he returned to the White House in 2001. During the Clinton era, Cheney also spent time at the neoconservative
American Enterprise Institute
, developing a political and military agenda that could be implemented once his party resumed power. When President George W. Bush was inaugurated, Cheney became the most powerful vice president in history. And he wasted no time in driving to expand that power.

ON SEPTEMBER
10, 2001, a day before American Airlines Flight 77—a Boeing 757—smashed into the western wall of the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld stood in that very building to deliver one of his first major speeches as defense secretary. Two
portraits
of Rumsfeld hung inside—one of him as the youngest defense secretary in US history, the other as its oldest. September 11 had not yet occurred, yet Rumsfeld was at the podium that day to issue a declaration of war.

“The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat,
a serious threat
, to the security of the United States of America,” Rumsfeld bellowed. “This adversary is one of the world's last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans, and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.” Rumsfeld—a veteran Cold Warrior—told his new staff, “Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone: our foes are more subtle and implacable today. You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past, and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary. The adversary's closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy.” The stakes, he declared, were severe—“a matter of life and death, ultimately, every American's.” Rumsfeld told his audience, consisting of former defense industry executives turned Pentagon bureaucrats, that he intended to streamline the waging of America's wars. “Some might ask, How in the world could the Secretary of Defense attack the Pentagon in
front of its people?” Rumsfeld told his audience. “To them I reply, I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself.” It would be dubbed by Rumsfeld and his team his “
revolution in military affairs
.”

Bush's all-star foreign policy team had come into power with an agenda to radically reorganize the US military, to end what they characterized as the Clinton-era weakening of national defenses and to reenergize the drive for
massive missile defense systems
favored by Reagan and other Cold Warriors. As Rumsfeld's deputy, Douglas Feith, recalled, “The
threat of jihadist terrorism
was on the list of U.S. government concerns at the start of the Bush administration in early 2001, but it got less attention than Russia did.” The focus on “terrorism” in the early days of the administration centered on the threats posed by nation-states—Iran, Syria, North Korea and Iraq—and enacting regime change. Cheney and Rumsfeld had spent much of the 1990s plotting out a course to redraw the maps of the Middle East, but it was not focused on the asymmetric threat al Qaeda and other terrorist groups posed. Iraq, not al Qaeda, was their obsession. “
From the start
, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country,” said former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. “And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, ‘Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'” At the new administration's second National Security Council meeting on February 1, 2001, Rumsfeld said bluntly, “What we really want to think about is going after Saddam.”

Ironically—for all of Rumsfeld's bravado about the weakness of the Clinton era, and neocon charges that the Democrats had been asleep at the wheel watching al Qaeda—Rumsfeld himself was initially dismissive of the imminence of the threat posed by the group prior to 9/11. Journalist Bob Woodward detailed a meeting that reportedly took place on July 10, 2001, two months before the 9/11 attacks. CIA director George J. Tenet met with Cofer Black, the head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC), at Langley, Virginia. The two men reviewed current US intelligence on bin Laden and al Qaeda. Black, Woodward reported, “
laid out the case
, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.” At the time, “Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all
the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.” After reviewing the intelligence with Black, Tenet called National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice from the car en route to the White House. When Black and Tenet met with Rice that day, according to Woodward, they “felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off.” Black later said, “The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.”

Then the planes piloted by the 9/11 hijackers slammed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. It didn't take long for Rumsfeld and his team to envision how the fight against terrorism didn't undermine their Iraq plans but could actually provide the rationale to carry them out. Perhaps even more important, the post-9/11 moment allowed Rumsfeld, Cheney and their cohort to realize the ambitions they had long held for an all-powerful executive branch, with the virtually unlimited right to wage wars across all borders, justified in their minds by a global national security threat. The goals and plans that they had spoken of in hushed tones at unofficial gatherings would soon become the official policy of the United States.

As President Bush's war team began planning for a response to the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld led the charge to put Iraq on the target list immediately. In advance of the September 15–16, 2001, weekend meetings Bush convened at Camp David, Feith drew up a memo for Rumsfeld that listed “the
immediate priority targets
for initial action” as: al Qaeda, the Taliban and Iraq. “
The agenda was very clear
from the night of 9/11,” General Hugh Shelton, at the time the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the most senior military adviser to President Bush, told me. He said that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz immediately began pressing for an attack on Iraq. “We need to be going into Iraq. We need to go right now,” he recalled them saying. “Although there wasn't one shred, not one iota of evidence that would say [9/11] was linked into Iraq,” Shelton said. “But yet, that drumbeat started that night. They didn't like the fact that when I came up to the office that night with some plans that we had [to respond to 9/11] that none of them included the Iraq plans.” Richard Clarke said that on September 12, President Bush told him three times to look for “
any shred
” of evidence linking Iraq to the attacks. Wolfowitz sent a strategy memo to Rumsfeld arguing that “even a
10 percent chance
that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack” meant that “maximum priority should be placed on eliminating that threat.” Joining Shelton in the anti-Iraq invasion camp was one of his predecessors, General Colin Powell, the secretary of state. A decade earlier, during the Gulf War, Powell had
clashed with Wolfowitz
—at the
time an undersecretary of defense—and the ideological civilian leaders at the Pentagon over their desire to send US troops all the way to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam. But Powell and traditional conservatives like former secretary of state James Baker and Brent Scowcroft won that debate. Now, with the 9/11 attacks fresh in everyone's minds, Wolfowitz and the ideologues were certain they could achieve their goals.

At Camp David, Shelton said, Wolfowitz continued to press for an Iraq attack even as Shelton, Powell and senior intelligence officials said there was no evidence to suggest Iraq had anything to do with the attacks. As discussion focused on Afghanistan and attacking al Qaeda's sanctuary, “True to form, Wolfowitz brought it up: ‘We need to be using this as a reason to attack Iraq,'” Shelton recalled. Dr. Emile Nakhleh, a senior CIA analyst at the time, was also briefing the president during the immediate post-9/11 period. Nakhleh had been with the Agency for a decade and had spent much of it traveling under academic cover in Muslim countries across the globe. Having started the CIA's Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program and as its scholar-in-residence on militant Islamist movements and Middle Eastern governments, he was the Agency's equivalent of a three-star general. In response to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz pushing for an invasion of Iraq in those first meetings, Nakhleh told me, he stood up at one point and said to them, “If you want to go after that son of a bitch [Saddam] to settle all scores, be my guest, but we have no information that Saddam was tied to al Qaeda or to terrorism and we
have no clear information
” about weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Nakhleh said, after the first several meetings post-9/11, “my conclusion and other analysts' conclusion was they were going to go to war. The train had left the station, regardless of the intelligence we presented.” President Bush shelved the Iraq discussions for a time, having pledged as a candidate not to engage in “nation building.” He said he wanted a “
humble” foreign policy
. But his views were rapidly evolving.