Down Cheney's 9-11 Rabbit Hole

Richard Clarke appears today in the Washington Post with an op-ed "The Trauma of 9/11 is No Excuse". Clarke was the national co-ordinator for security and counterterrorism under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and was at the White House on that fateful day of September 11. In the realm of the ever-moving bottom-line to justify the Cheney torture policy,both Condi Rice and Dick Cheney have invoked the trauma they experienced during that day. Dick Cheney called it "a defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second (my emphasis) look " at the threats to America. This is the more sophisticated version of George Tenet's memorable words," I hope to God they aren't the men from the pilot training schools."

Clarke slams both Rice and Cheney for the trauma argument, saying that the decisions they made in the following months and years--on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping--were simply not appropriate. Panic and impulse replaced careful analysis. Cheney's reass the threats statement underscored 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-Qeada attack. Remember the FBI had already interviewed the Millenium Bomber, who revealed the details of the plot months before it happened.

Concerned about the 2004 presidential elections if there was another attack, Bush officials authorized the most extreme measures available without any assessment whether they would do any good. Clarke argues the first response proposed, even as the Pentagon was still burning, was Don Rumsfeld arguing for an attack against Baghdad. Bush officials somehow could not believe that al Qaeda could have mounted such an attack themselves so they fell to the Iraqi explanation. Even though he was told there was no such connection, Cheney himself later ordered the waterboarding of Iraqi prisoners of war so they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks.

Clarke argues that the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. Courts,even though they had a 100% conviction rate against Al Qaeda terrorists, would not work. So the American system of justice was abandoned for the establishment around the world of secret prisons and Guatanamo Bay, where prisoners were and are still held without being charged or tried.

Similarly, as we all have heard over the past month from military officials and interrogators, the administration conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques of interrogation worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, the Bush Administration jumped right to the extreme measures.

Finally, on wiretapping, they moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. The FISA court system had been a fairly reliable procedure in the past and could have been corrected. The Bush adinistration dumped a Reagan appointed judge ,who had only denied 15 warrants out of 18,000 requests.

As Clarke concludes,Condi Rice and Dick Cheney were surprised by 9/11 because they had not listened. And this shock led to the adoption of extreme counterterrorism techniques ,which proved to be unnecessary and unproductive. According to Clarke, 9/11 may have changed many things but it did not change the Constitution, which even the Vice President had pledged to protect and preserve.