DIRTY WARS
ALSO BY JEREMY SCAHILL
Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s
Most Powerful Mercenary Army
The World Is a Battlefield
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request
The right of Jeremy Scahill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 2013 Jeremy Scahill
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published in the USA in 2013 by Nation Books, a Member of the
Perseus Books Group
First published in the UK in 2013 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
website: www.serpentstail.com
ISBN 978 1 84668 850 8
eISBN 978 1 84765 825 8
Designed by Janet Tingey
Printed by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR JOURNALISTS—
those imprisoned for doing their jobs and
those who have died in pursuit of the truth.
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are
punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the
sound of trumpets.”
—VOLTAIRE
A NOTE TO THE READER
PROLOGUE
1 “There Was Concern...That We Not Create an American Hit List”
WASHINGTON, DC, 2001–2002
2 Anwar Awlaki: An American Story
THE UNITED STATES AND YEMEN, 1971–2002
3 Find, Fix, Finish: The Rise of JSOC
WASHINGTON, DC, 1979–2001
4 The Boss: Ali Abdullah Saleh
YEMEN, 1970–2001; WASHINGTON, DC, 2001
5 The Enigma of Anwar Awlaki
THE UNITED KINGDOM, THE UNITED STATES AND YEMEN, 2002–2003
6 “We’re in a New Kind of War”
DJIBOUTI, WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, 2002
7 Special Plans
WASHINGTON, DC, 2002
8 Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape
WASHINGTON, DC, 2002–2003
9 The Troublemaker: Stanley McChrystal
THE UNITED STATES, 1974–2003; IRAQ, 2003
10 “Their Intention and Our Intention Is the Same”
SOMALIA, 1993–2004
11 “A Defeated Enemy Is Not a Vanquished One”
YEMEN, 2003–2006 130
12 “Never Trust a Nonbeliever”
THE UNITED KINGDOM, 2003
13 “You Don’t Have to Prove to Anyone That You Did Right”
IRAQ, 2003–2005
14 “No Blood, No Foul”
IRAQ, 2003–2004
15 The Death Star
IRAQ, 2004
16 “The Best Technology, the Best Weapons, the Best People—and Plenty of Money to Burn”
AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ AND PAKISTAN, 2003–2006
17 “A Lot of It Was of Questionable Legality”
SOURCE: “HUNTER”
18 The Imprisonment of Anwar Awlaki
YEMEN, 2004–2007
19 “America Knows War. They Are War Masters.”
SOMALIA, 2004–2006
20 Prison Break
YEMEN, 2006
21 Hot Pursuit
PAKISTAN, 2006–2008
22 “Every Step Taken by the US Benefited al Shabab”
SOMALIA, 2007–2009
23 “If Your Son Does Not Come to Us, He Will Be Killed by the Americans”
YEMEN, 2007–2009
24 “Obama Is Set to Continue the Course Set by Bush”
UNITED STATES, 2002–2008
25 Obama’s Signature Strikes
PAKISTAN AND WASHINGTON, DC, 2009
26 Special Ops Want to “Own This Shit Like They Did in Central America in the ’80s”
WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, 2009
27 Suicide or Martyrdom?
YEMEN, 2009
28 Obama Embraces JSOC
SOMALIA, EARLY 2009
29 “Let JSOC Off the Leash”
SAUDI ARABIA, WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, LATE 2009
30 Samir Khan: An Unlikely Foot Soldier
THE UNITED STATES AND YEMEN, 2001–2009
31 Blowback in Somalia
SOMALIA AND WASHINGTON, DC, 2009
32 “If They Kill Innocent Children and Call Them al Qaeda, Then We Are All al Qaeda”
WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, 2009
33 “The Americans Really Wanted to Kill Anwar”
YEMEN, LATE 2009-EARLY 2010
34 “Mr. Barack Obama...I Hope That You Reconsider Your Order to Kill...My Son”
WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, EARLY 2010
35 One Night in Gardez
WASHINGTON, DC, 2008–2010; AFGHANISTAN, 2009–2010
36 The Year of the Drone
YEMEN AND THE UNITED STATES, 2010
37 Driving Anwar Awlaki to Hell
YEMEN, 2010
38 The CIA’s Dating Service
DENMARK AND YEMEN, 2010
39 “The Auction of the Assassin”
WASHINGTON, DC, 2010
40 “Martyrdom Is Why We Came Here, My Brother”
YEMEN, 2009–2010
41 The Persecution of Abdulelah Haider Shaye
YEMEN, SUMMER 2010
42 The President Can Write His Own Rules
WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, LATE 2010
43 Al Qaeda’s “Foothold in Somalia Has Probably Been Facilitated”
SOMALIA, 2010
44 “Anwar Awlaki...Definitely Has a Missile in His Future”
YEMEN, 2011
45 The Curious Case of Raymond Davis: Act I
PAKISTAN, 2011
46 The Curious Case of Raymond Davis: Act II
PAKISTAN, 2011
47 The Tsunami of Change
AUSTRIA AND YEMEN, 2011
48 The Fortress in Abbottabad
WASHINGTON, DC, 2010–2011; PAKISTAN, 2011
49 “We Got Him. We Got Him.”
PAKISTAN, 2011
50 “Now They’re After My Son”
SOMALIA, WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, 2011
51 “It Was Cold-Blooded”
PAKISTAN, 2011
52 “The US Sees al Qaeda as Terrorism, and We Consider the Drones Terrorism”
YEMEN, LATE 2011
53 The Pink House
SOMALIA, 2011
54 “Total Savagery Throughout the Country”
WASHINGTON, DC, AND SOMALIA, 2011
55 Abdulrahman Vanishes
YEMEN, 2011
56 Hellfire
WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, 2011
57 Paying for the Sins of the Father
WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, 2011
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
NOTES
INDEX
THIS IS A STORY about how the United States came to embrace assassination as a central part of its national security policy. It is also a story about the consequences of that decision for people in scores of countries across the globe and for the future of American democracy. Although the 9/11 attacks dramatically altered the way the United States conducts its foreign policy, the roots of this story far predate the day the Twin Towers fell. In the post-9/11 world, there is also a tendency to see US foreign policy through a partisan lens that, on the one hand, suggests that President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was an utter disaster that led the nation into a mentality that it was in a global war and, on the other, that President Barack Obama was left to clean up the mess. In the eyes of many conservatives, President Obama has been weak in confronting terrorism. In the eyes of many liberals, he has waged a “smarter” war. The realities, however, are far more nuanced.
This book tells the story of the expansion of covert US wars, the abuse of executive privilege and state secrets, the embrace of unaccountable elite military units that answer only to the White House. Dirty Wars also reveals the continuity of a mindset that “the world is a battlefield” from Republican to Democratic administrations.
The story begins with a brief history of the US approach to terrorism and assassination prior to 9/11. From there, I weave in and out of several stories, spanning the course of Bush’s early days in office and going into Obama’s second term. We meet al Qaeda figures in Yemen, US-backed warlords in Somalia, CIA spies in Pakistan and Special Operations commandos tasked with hunting down those people deemed to be enemies of America. We meet the men who run the most secretive operations for the military and the CIA, and we hear the stories of insiders who have spent their lives in the shadows, some of whom spoke to me only on condition that their identity never be revealed.
The world now knows SEAL Team 6 and the Joint Special Operations Command as the units that killed Osama bin Laden. This book will reveal previously undisclosed or little-known missions conducted by these very forces that will never be discussed by those at the helm of power in the United States or immortalized in Hollywood films. I dig deep into the life of Anwar al Awlaki, the first US citizen known to be targeted for assassination by his own government—despite never having been charged with a crime. We also hear from those who are caught in the middle—the civilians who face drone bombings and acts of terrorism. We enter the home of Afghan civilians whose lives were destroyed by a Special Ops night raid gone wrong, transforming them from US allies to would-be suicide bombers.
Some of the stories in this book may, at first, seem to be disconnected, from people worlds apart. But taken together, they reveal a haunting vision of what our future holds in a world gripped by ever-expanding dirty wars.
—JEREMY SCAHILL
DIRTY WARS
The young teenager sat outside with his cousins as they gathered for a barbecue. He wore his hair long and messy. His mother and grandparents had repeatedly urged him to cut it. But the boy believed it had become his trademark look and he liked it. A few weeks earlier, he had run away from home, but not in some act of teenage rebellion. He was on a mission. In the note he left for his mother before he snuck out the kitchen window as the sun was just rising and headed to the bus station, he admitted that he had taken money from her purse—$40—for bus fare, and for that he apologized. He explained his mission and begged for forgiveness. He said he would be home soon.
The boy was the eldest child in his family. Not just in his immediate family, which consisted of his parents and his three siblings, but in the large house they shared with his aunts and uncles and cousins and two of his grandparents. He was his grandmother’s favorite. When guests visited, he would bring them tea and sweets. When they left, he would clean up after them. Once, his grandmother twisted her ankle and went to the hospital for treatment. When she limped out of the treatment room, the boy was there to greet her and make sure she got home safely. “You are a gentle boy,” his grandmother always told him. “Don’t ever change.”
The boy’s mission was simple: he wanted to find his father. He hadn’t seen him in years and he was afraid that if he didn’t find him, he would be left only with blurred memories: of his father teaching him to fish; to ride a horse; surprising him with an abundance of gifts on his birthday; taking him and his siblings to the beach or to the candy shop.
Finding his father would not be easy. He was a wanted man. There was a bounty on his head and he had narrowly escaped death more than a dozen times. That powerful forces in multiple countries wanted his father dead did not deter the boy. He was tired of seeing the videos of his father that painted him as a terrorist and an evil figure. He just knew him as his dad, and he wanted at least one last moment with him. But it didn’t work out that way.
Three weeks after he climbed out the kitchen window, the boy was outdoors with his cousins—teenagers like him—laying a picnic for dinner beneath the stars. It was then he would have heard the drones approaching, followed by the whiz of the missiles. It was a direct hit. The boy and his cousins were blown to pieces. All that remained of the boy was the back of his head, his flowing hair still clinging to it. The boy had turned sixteen years old a few weeks earlier and now he had been killed by his own government. He was the third US citizen to be killed in operations authorized by the president in two weeks. The first was his father.
WASHINGTON, DC, 2001–2002—It was 10:10 a.m. on June 11, 2002, nine months to the day since the September 11 attacks. The senators and representatives filed into Room S-407 of the US Capitol. All of them were members of a small, elite group in Washington and were, by law, entrusted with the most guarded national security secrets of the US government. “I hereby move that this meeting of the committee be closed to the public,” declared Republican Richard Shelby, the senior senator from Alabama, in a Southern drawl, “on the grounds that the national security of the United States might be compromised were a proceeding to become public.” The motion was quickly seconded and the secret hearing was under way.
As the members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence gathered in Washington, DC, half a world away in Afghanistan, tribal and political leaders were convening a loya jirga, a “grand council,” that was tasked with deciding who would run the country following the swift overthrow of the Taliban government by the US military. After 9/11, the US Congress had granted the Bush administration sweeping powers to pursue those responsible for the attacks. The Taliban government, which had ruled Afghanistan since 1996, was crushed, depriving al Qaeda of its sanctuary in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders were on the run. But for the Bush administration, the long war was just getting started.
At the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were deep into planning the next invasion—Iraq. They had come to power with plans to topple Saddam Hussein in hand and, despite the fact that there was no Iraqi connection to the attacks, they used 9/11 as the pretext to push their agenda. But the decisions made in that first year of the Bush administration were much bigger than Iraq, Afghanistan or even al Qaeda. The men in power at that time were intent on changing the way the United States waged its wars and, in the process, creating unprecedented powers for the White House. The days of fighting uniformed enemies and national militaries according to the rules of the Geneva Conventions were over. “The world is a battlefield” was the mantra repeated by the neoconservatives in the US national security apparatus and placed on PowerPoint slides laying out the plans for a sweeping, borderless global war. But terrorists would not be their only target. The two-hundred-year-old democratic system of checks and balances was firmly in their crosshairs.
Room S-407 was nestled in the attic of the Capitol building. It was windowless and accessible only by one elevator—or a narrow staircase. The room was classified as a secure facility and had been fitted with sophisticated counterespionage equipment to block any attempt at eavesdropping or monitoring from outside. For decades, the room had been used to house the most sensitive briefings of members of Congress by the CIA, the US military and scores of other figures and entities that inhabit the shadows of US policy. Covert actions were briefed and debriefed in the room. It was one of a handful of facilities in the United States where the nation’s most closely guarded secrets were discussed.
As the senators and representatives sat in the closed-door session on Capitol Hill that morning in June 2002, they would hear a story of how the United States had crossed a threshold. The stated purpose of the hearing was to review the work and structure of US counterterrorism (CT) organizations before 9/11. At the time, there was a substantial amount of finger-pointing regarding US intelligence “failures” leading up to the attacks. In the aftermath of the most devastating terrorist strikes on US soil in history, Cheney and Rumsfeld charged that the Clinton administration had failed to adequately recognize the urgency of al Qaeda’s threat, leaving the US homeland vulnerable by the time the Bush White House took power. Democrats pushed back and pointed to their own history of combating al Qaeda in the 1990s. The appearance of Richard Clarke before the US lawmakers on this particular day was, in part, intended to send a message to the congressional elite. Clarke had been President Bill Clinton’s counterterrorism czar and chaired the Counterterrorism Security Group of the National Security Council (NSC) for the decade leading up to 9/11. He had also served on President George H. W. Bush’s National Security Council and was an assistant secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan. He was one of the most experienced counterterrorism officials in the United States and, at the time of the hearing, was on his way out of government, though he still held a post as a special adviser to President George W. Bush on cyberspace security. Clarke was a hawkish figure who had risen to prominence under a Democratic administration and was known to have pushed hard when Clinton was in power for more covert action. So it made tactical sense that the Bush administration would put him forward to make the case for a regime of military and intelligence tactics that had previously been deemed illegal, undemocratic or, simply, dangerous.
Clarke described the dialogue within the national security community under Clinton as marked by great concern over the possibility of violating a long-standing presidential ban on assassination and a deep fear of repeating scandals of the past. Clarke said he believed that “a culture” had developed at the CIA “that said when you have large scale of covert operations, they get messy, and they get out of control, and they end up splattering mud back on the Agency.”
“The history of covert operations in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s was not a happy one,” Clarke told the lawmakers. The CIA had orchestrated the overthrow of populist governments in Latin America and the Middle East, backed death squads throughout Central America, facilitated the killing of rebel leader Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and propped up military juntas and dictatorships. The spate of assassinations had become so out of control that a Republican president, Gerald Ford, felt the need to issue Executive Order 11905 in 1976, explicitly banning the United States from carrying out “political assassinations.” The CIA officers who had come of age in the shadow of that era and rose to positions of authority at the Agency during the 1990s, Clarke said, “had institutionalized [the notion that] a sense of covert action is risky and is likely to blow up in your face. And the wise guys at the White House who are pushing you to do covert action will be nowhere to be found when [the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] calls you up to explain the mess that the covert action became.”
President Jimmy Carter amended Ford’s assassination ban to make it more sweeping. He removed language that limited the ban to political assassinations and also extended the ban on participating in assassinations to US proxies or contractors. “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination,” read President Carter’s executive order. Although Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush maintained that language, no president’s executive orders actually defined what constituted an assassination. Reagan, Bush and Clinton all developed work-arounds to the ban. Reagan, for example, authorized a strike on the home of Libyan dictator Muammar el Qaddafi in 1986 in retaliation for his alleged role in a bombing of a night club in Berlin. The first President Bush authorized strikes on Saddam Hussein’s palaces during the 1991 Gulf War. Clinton did the same during Operation Desert Fox in 1998.
Clarke described for the lawmakers how, under the Clinton administration, plans were drawn up for killing and capturing al Qaeda and other terrorist leaders, including Osama bin Laden. President Clinton asserted that the ban did not apply to foreign terrorists engaged in plotting attacks against the United States. In the aftermath of the bombings of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in late 1998, Clinton authorized cruise missile attacks against alleged al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and also a strike against a factory in Sudan that the administration alleged was a chemical weapons plant. It turned out that the plant was actually a pharmaceutical factory. Although this lethal authority was granted by Clinton, it was envisioned as an option that would be rarely used and only at the direction of the president on a case-by-case basis. Rather than granting a carte blanche authority to conduct these operations, the Clinton White House required each proposed action to be thoroughly vetted. Legal structures were put in place and “lethal findings” were signed by the president, authorizing the use of deadly force in pursuit of terrorists across the globe. Yet, Clarke said, the trigger was seldom pulled.
Clarke conceded that the Clinton-era authorizations for targeted killings “looks like a very Talmudic and somewhat bizarre series of documents,” adding that they were crafted in a careful way to narrow the scope of such operations. “The administration, and particularly the Justice Department, did not want to throw out the ban on assassination in a way that threw the baby out with the bathwater. They wanted the expansion of authorities to be limited.” He added that the Clinton-era authorizations for targeted killing look like “a very narrow casting. But that, I think, is because of this desire not to throw out altogether the ban on assassinations and create an American hit list.”
Representative Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress at the time, admonished her colleagues in the closed chamber not to publicly discuss any of the highly classified memoranda that authorized the use of lethal force. The memoranda, she said, “were held to the most restricted form of notification at the highest level in the Congress. It is extraordinary...that this information is being shared here today.” She warned against any leaks to the media and added: “There is no way that we can confirm, deny, stipulate to, acknowledge knowledge of the memoranda.” Clarke was asked whether he thought the United States should lift its policy banning assassinations. “I think you have to be very careful about how broadly you authorize the use of lethal force,” he responded. “I don’t think the Israeli experience of having a broad hit list has been terribly successful. It doesn’t—certainly hasn’t stopped terrorism or stopped the organizations where they have assassinated people.” Clarke said that when he and his colleagues in the Clinton administration issued authorizations for targeted killing operations, they were intended for very surgical and rare cases. “We didn’t want to create a broad precedent that would allow intelligence officials in the future to have hit lists and routinely engage in something that approximated assassination.... There was concern in both the Justice Department and in some elements of the White House and some elements of the CIA that we not create an American hit list that would become an ongoing institution that we could just keep adding names to and have hit teams go out and assassinate people.”
Even so, Clarke was part of a small group of officials in the counter-terrorism community under the Clinton administration who agitated for the CIA to be more aggressive in using that lethal authority and pushed the envelope of the assassination ban within the limits he outlined. “In the wake of 9/11,” Clarke declared, “almost everything we proposed prior to 9/11 is being done.”
It would soon be everything and more.
RUMSFELD AND CHENEY HAD PADDED the administration with leading neoconservatives who had spent the Clinton era effectively operating a shadow government—working in right-wing think tanks and for major defense and intelligence contractors, plotting their return to power. Among them were Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, David Addington, Stephen Cambone, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams. Many of them had cut their teeth in the Reagan and Bush White Houses. Some, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, went back to the Nixon era. Several were key players in building up a policy vision under the umbrella of the ultra-nationalist Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Despite Clinton’s decisions to use force in Yugoslavia and Iraq and to conduct a series of air strikes in other nations, they viewed the Clinton administration as an almost pacifist force that had weakened the hand of US dominance and left the country vulnerable. They believed the 1990s had been a “decade of defense neglect.” The neoconservatives had long advocated a posture that, in the wake of the Cold War, the United States was the lone superpower and should exert its weight aggressively around the globe, redrawing maps and expanding empire. At the center of their vision was a radical increase in US military spending, plans for which were drawn up by Cheney and his aides when he was defense secretary in 1992. The Cheney draft Defense Planning Guidance, the neocons asserted in PNAC’s founding document, “provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” Wolfowitz and Libby were the key authors of Cheney’s defense manifesto, which argued that the United States must be the sole superpower and take all necessary actions to deter “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
Their plan, however, was scrapped by more powerful forces within the first Bush administration, namely, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. The final draft, much to Cheney’s and the neocons’ frustration, was greatly toned down in its imperialist language.
A decade later, even before 9/11, the neoconservatives—restored to power by the Bush administration—pulled those plans out of the dustbin of history and set about implementing them. Expanding US force projection would be central, as would building up streamlined, elite special ops units. “Our forces in the next century must be agile, lethal, readily deployable, and require a minimum of logistical support,” George W. Bush had declared in a speech on the campaign trail in 1999 that was crafted by Wolfowitz and other neocons. “We must be able to project our power over long distances, in days or weeks, rather than months. On land, our heavy forces must be lighter. Our light forces must be more lethal. All must be easier to deploy.”
The neocons also envisioned further asserting US dominance over natural resources globally and directly confronting nation-states that stood in the way. Regime change in multiple countries would be actively contemplated, particularly in oil-rich Iraq. “Ardent supporters of U.S. military intervention, few neo-cons have served in the armed forces; fewer still have ever been elected to public office,” noted Jim Lobe, a journalist who tracked the rise of the neoconservative movement for a decade leading up to 9/11. They have a “ceaseless quest for global military dominance and contempt for the United Nations and multilateralism more generally.” Lobe added: “In the neo-conservatives’ view, the United States is a force for good in the world; it has a moral responsibility to exert that force; its military power should be dominant; it should be engaged globally but never be constrained by multilateral commitments from taking unilateral action in pursuit of its interests and values; and it should have a strategic alliance with Israel. Saddam must go, they argue, because he is a threat to Israel, and also Saudi Arabia, and because he has hoarded—and used—weapons of mass destruction.” The PNAC crowd had concluded that the “United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” Within weeks of taking office, Rumsfeld and Cheney pressed to reverse President Clinton’s signing, at the very end of his time in office, of the Rome Statute, which recognized the legitimacy of an international criminal court. They would not stand for US forces being subjected to potential prosecution for their actions around the world. Soon after becoming defense secretary, Rumsfeld wrote that he wanted his legal staff—and those of other US government agencies—to immediately determine “how we get out of it and undo the Clinton signature.”
Even among the GOP foreign policy community of elders, these figures were viewed as extremists. “When we saw these people coming back in town, all of us who were around in those days said, ‘Oh my God, the crazies are back’—’the crazies’—that’s how we referred to these people,” recalled Ray McGovern, who served for twenty-seven years at the CIA and was a national security briefer to George H. W. Bush when he was vice president and served under him when he was the director of the Agency in the late 1970s. McGovern said that once they were in power, the neoconservatives resurrected ideas that had been tossed in “the circular file” in previous GOP administrations by veteran Republican foreign policy leaders, adding that those extremist ideas would soon “arise out of the ashes and be implemented.” These officials believed, “We’ve got a lot of weight to throw around, we should throw it around. We should assert ourselves in critical areas, like the Middle East,” McGovern said.
For decades, Cheney and Rumsfeld had been key leaders of a militant movement outside of government and, during Republican administrations, from within the White House itself. Its mission was to give the executive branch of the US government unprecedented powers to wage secret wars, conduct covert operations with no oversight and to spy on US citizens. In their view, Congress had no business overseeing such operations but should only fund the agencies that would carry them out. To them, the presidency was to be a national security dictatorship, accountable only to its own concepts of what was best for the country. The two men first worked together in the Nixon White House in 1969 when Rumsfeld hired Cheney, then a graduate student, to be his aide at the Office of Economic Opportunity. It kicked off a career for Cheney in the power chambers of the Republican elite and a lifetime project to further empower the executive branch. As scandal rocked the Nixon White House in the 1970s—with the secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia, revelations of a domestic “enemies” list and the infamous break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel—the US Congress began attacking the executive privileges and extreme secrecy that permeated the administration. Congress condemned the Laos and Cambodia bombings and overrode an attempt by Nixon to veto the War Powers Act of 1973, which limited the powers of the president to authorize military action. It mandated that the president “consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.” In the absence of a formal declaration of war, the president would be required to inform Congress, in writing, within forty-eight hours, of any military action of “the circumstances necessitating the introduction of United States Armed Forces; the constitutional and legislative authority under which such introduction took place; and the estimated scope and duration of the hostilities or involvement.” Cheney viewed the War Powers Act as unconstitutional and an encroachment on the rights of the president as commander in chief. He termed this era the “low point” in American presidential authority.
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.
It would take some time—and more than a dozen visits to the CIA by Cheney and his chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby—to produce enough “evidence” of an active Iraqi WMD program to pull off their plans for an Iraq invasion. But, in the meantime, they had a war against government oversight and accountability to wage. The CIA and Special Forces campaign in Afghanistan was, in the beginning, a rout. While the Afghanistan war was producing spectacular headlines trumpeting the swiftness and decisiveness of the US military campaign against the weak Taliban government, Cheney and Rumsfeld and their neoconservative deputies were busy plotting a global war. This war would extend to the home front with warrantless wiretapping, mass arrests of Arabs, Pakistanis and other Muslim immigrants and a prodigious rollback of the civil liberties of American citizens. To wage it, they would have to dismantle and manipulate a bureaucracy of oversight and legal review that had been built up over successive administrations. All this would open the door for an array of tactics that had been used before but could now be deployed on an unprecedented scale: covert action, black ops, secret prisons, snatch operations and what amounted to a blanket rebranding of assassinations as “High Value Targeting.”
COMING OUT OF THE REAGAN-BUSH ERA, in which the institution of covert action was marred by the Iran-Contra scandal, President Clinton put in place more oversight mechanisms and created a rigorous legal