Imagine that you have been assigned a highly sensitive mission. It is August 5, 2001. Your employer, the CIA, has been accumulating evidence that suggests the immanence of a major domestic terror attack. The evidence has been pouring in from foreign intelligence services, walk-ins to embassies abroad, NSA electronic surveillance, FBI investigations. But there is a problem. The CIA cannot get the administration to take action. The first obstacle came from Donald Rumsfeld. He refused to take NSA intercepts seriously.
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.
Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined “Bin Laden Threats Are Real.”
But, there was still no action. So, ten days later Tenet decided to make a bold attempt to wake up the government.
On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black 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.
Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director.
Tenet and Black laid out the evidence for Rice.
He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment — covert, military, whatever — to thwart bin Laden.
But Rice gave them what they considered ‘the brush off’. Cofer Black would later say, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.”
Four days later the President flew to Crawford, Texas for a month long ‘working vacation’. He arrived August 4th. It was at this point that the CIA decided to bypass Rumsfeld, Rice and the rest of the foreign policy establishment and try to get the attention of the President.
They drew up a memo, entitled Bin Laden determined to strike in US. Then they assigned a CIA officer to deliver the message to the President as part of his August 6th Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB). What happened next must have been highly demoralizing.
The alarming August 6, 2001, memo from the CIA to the President — “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” — has been widely noted in the past few years.
But, also in August, CIA analysts flew to Crawford to personally brief the President — to intrude on his vacation with face-to-face alerts.
The analytical arm of the CIA was in a kind of panic mode at this point. Other intelligence services, including those from the Arab world, were sounding an alarm. The arrows were all in the red. They didn’t know the place or time of an attack, but something was coming. The President needed to know . . .
George W. Bush seems to have made the wrong choice. He looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer. “All right,” he said. “You’ve covered your ass now.” -Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine
The first sign that there was some kind of rift between the administration and the Bush administration arose when the existence of this highly sensitive document was disclosed to the press on May 16, 2002.
The obvious question is: why did someone make the decision to disclose the existence of the August 6th PDB in May 2002? If you look at a timeline of the Spring 2002, it isn’t too hard to guess. The CIA had determined that Mohammed Atta had not met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague but had been in Virginia Beach at the time of the alleged meeting. They had determined that there was no corroboration for a report of Iraq seeking uranium from Niger. The Brits had determined, in March, that the facts were being fixed around the policy of regime change.
In June, the CIA produced a report entitled “Iraq and al-Qaeda: A Murky Relationship,” which was highly skeptical of Iraq’s involvement in international terrorism.
In short, the CIA was debunking the cases for war at the very same time the Bush administration was casting about for any evidence they could find to bolster a decision that had already been made.
How do we know the decision had already been made? The President told us on April 4, 2002.
In a televised interview, US President George Bush tells Sir Trevor McDonald of Britain’s ITV television network, “I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go. That’s about all I’m willing to share with you.”
We later got further confirmation of this:
Time magazine reported that in March 2002 – a full year before the invasion – Bush outlined his real thinking to three U.S. senators, “Fuck Saddam,” Bush said. “We’re taking him out.”
Time actually didn’t report the quote exactly that way. Apparently not to offend readers who admire Bush’s moral clarity, Time printed the quote as “F— Saddam. We’re taking him out.”
Bush offered his pithy judgment after sticking his head in the door of a White House meeting between National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and three senators who had been discussing strategies for dealing with Iraq through the United Nations. The senators laughed uncomfortably at Bush’s remark, Time reported.
When scholars write the history of the Iraq War they should put especial focus on these points. The President made a decision to depose Saddam prior to developing a military or political strategy for accomplishing the task. It was then left to the various agencies of government to carry out the plan in an ad-hoc manner. The Brits were faced with a policy that had no legal analysis or developed basis. They insisted that their cooperation would be contingent on a United Nations’ approach. On March 17, 2002:
British Ambassador to the US Sir Christopher Meyer attends lunch with Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush administration officials in Washington and assures them that the British would support the use of military force against Iraq. Meyer informs Sir David Manning, Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, in a memo the following day:
“On Iraq I opened by sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice last week. We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe. The US could go it alone if it wanted to. But if it wanted to act with partners, there had to be a strategy for building support for military action against Saddam. I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UN SCRs [Security Council Resolutions] and the critical importance of the MEPP [Middle East Peace Process] as an integral part of the anti-Saddam strategy.”
