Known and Unknown (74 page)

Although Congress was not calling for a larger role, we might have sought their input and worked to pin down their support more formally. Because we did not do so, members of Congress felt free to abandon their support for administration policies when we hit bumps in the road.

Partisans in Congress, self-styled human rights advocates, anti-Bush journalists, lawyers of suspected terrorists, and others have argued relentlessly that the war on terrorism detainees at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere should be viewed not as detainees held off the battlefield pending the end of the conflict, but rather as domestic criminal defendants presumed to be innocent and entitled to a speedy trial in civil courts or immediate release.
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Because those arguments were not countered effectively, they prevailed in the public debate. Half truths, distortions, and outright lies were too often met with little or no rebuttal. There is plenty of blame to share for the failures in communication. The responsibility was first and foremost with those of us who served as the senior officials in the administration. War is more than secret intelligence, combat, and military operations. To use a military phrase, the center of gravity in a long war shifts from battlefields overseas to the home front. In a democracy, a war can be lost in Congress and in the news media at home, even if battles are won abroad. On the important issue of communicating and formulating detainee policy, we did not confront with sufficient energy or skill the political challenge represented by those who argued for using our own courts and legal system against us.

When it came to detainee policies, it proved easy for outsiders to criticize the Bush administration's perceived mistakes, sometimes in unusually harsh terms. When Barack Obama, for example, assumed the responsibilities of commander in chief in 2009, he found that making policy was much different from making speeches. To the disappointment of some of the President's supporters, his administration has kept in place the most contentious and widely derided Bush administration policies. Terrorists are still not accorded POW status under the Geneva Conventions. Guantánamo Bay—the so-called “gulag of our times”—remains in operation as the best available facility for holding dangerous terrorists. After flirting with trying captured terrorists in civilian courts of law, and even bringing Khalid Sheikh Muhammed to a courthouse in lower Manhattan, the administration changed course in response to a growing public outcry. As a result, military commissions—patterned on those established under the Bush administration—continue to be used to try terrorists. The Army Field Manual on interrogation developed by the Bush Department of Defense in 2006 has been embraced (though unwisely imposed on the CIA). The electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists, once roundly denounced by civil libertarians and by then Senator Barack Obama, continues. Risking allegations of war crimes by international law advocates, the administration has continued UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) attacks against suspected terrorists, reportedly even targeting U.S. citizens. It is worth noting that killing these individuals by drone missile attacks affords them fewer legal rights than the military commissions President Obama opposed for years.

These decisions by the Obama administration, in my mind, are the correct ones. They undoubtedly were made After careful scrutiny, an examination of the possible alternatives, and with the sure knowledge that our country remains vulnerable to terrorist attack. There is one difference, however: President Obama had the benefit of succeeding a president who in the chaotic weeks After 9/11 had to put all these plans in place quickly, withstanding bitter partisan criticism and unpopularity for having done what he believed was best for the country. President Obama's latter-day support of these decisions is evidence that on most of the big questions regarding our enemies, George W. Bush and his administration got it right.

JULY 4, 2006

I
was expecting fireworks on Independence Day, but not at 2:30 in the afternoon and not from a despot in North Korea. The multistage Taepo-Dong 2 missile had been on its pad in the northeast corner of the ironically named Democratic People's Republic of Korea for several days. Overhead reconnaissance indicated it was being fueled and possibly prepared for ignition. Smaller, medium-range missiles were in place at other launch sites. We couldn't be sure where any of them were aimed, when they might be launched, what types of warheads they were equipped with, or exactly how far they could go. Military and intelligence officials judged Alaska and Hawaii to be almost certainly within striking distance of North Korea's long-range ballistic missiles.

The leaders of the so-called Hermit Kingdom had a penchant for rattling sabers around American holidays. In the weeks running up to July 4 there had been some speculation that the North Korean regime might fire a long-range missile. No one was certain of their intentions, but the possibilities included a simple test, a demonstration firing, or a launch to place an object in space. The North Koreans could do something even more provocative, and our allies in South Korea and Japan didn't want to be ill prepared in case missiles were aimed toward their territory. The erratic Kim Jong Il might even swing for the fences and attempt to hit our country.

President Bush came into office vowing not to put our country at risk of blackmail by ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear, biological, chemical, or conventional warheads. Since late 2001, when America withdrew from the ABM Treaty and began installing a missile defense system, we had made solid strides in putting a developmental system in place. More than a dozen interceptors were in the ground in Alaska and California that could be launched at a moment's notice. Though critics continued to downplay the capability of our system—some said it was like “hitting a bullet with a bullet”—the program wasn't science fiction anymore.
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Tests had proven that our interceptors could locate, track, hit, and destroy incoming ballistic missiles.
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The President and I were pleased with the progress that had been made. We had overcome the legal obstacles of the ABM Treaty by withdrawing. We had overcome the diplomatic obstacles by offering assurances to allies that we were no longer developing a national missile defense system but one that could be fashioned to deter and defend them as well. We had overcome the technical obstacles and consistent assertions from critics that it couldn't be done by continuing research and development After it was installed; though it wouldn't be a perfect system, it could continue to be improved and calibrated through testing over time.

One of the more challenging obstacles was figuring out the arrangements to actually issue the order—the first in history—to launch an interceptor to destroy an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile. President Bush and I had had many discussions about the precise procedures and delegations of authority for how, when, and by whom the trigger could be pulled. We both appreciated that launching an interceptor in a real-world situation could have grave or unexpected consequences. If the interceptors missed or were launched too late or not at all, an incoming missile could destroy an American city. If the interceptor did hit an incoming missile, deadly debris could spread out over a large area. Given the short time available to make such decisions—every second would be critical After an enemy missile was launched—the President and I concluded that it made sense for him to delegate the launch authority to the secretary of defense.

I had been spending that July Fourth holiday weekend in St. Michaels, Maryland, some seventy miles outside of Washington. Joyce had wisely insisted we find a place outside the capital so I would be away from the Pentagon on some weekends, which would give the staff a respite from the grueling twelve-hours-per-day, seven-days-a-week schedule I had established After 9/11. Joyce and I—with our two miniature dachshunds, Reggie and Chester—had found the old redbrick house on a small branch off the Chesapeake Bay a welcome haven.

But it was not a haven that weekend, as the probability of a North Korean missile launch left a long shadow over the holiday. I was receiving frequent updates over a secure phone on the latest developments. I had with me a Defense Department communications officer—someone able to put me in touch over a secure line with the President and combatant commanders anywhere in the world. He was never more than yards away in times of high alert. At night a security agent with the secure line waited in a car in our driveway, prepared to sprint inside if NORTHCOM—the combatant command for missile defense for the United States—needed me to make the decision on whether to launch our interceptors.

After lunch on Sunday, July 4, Joyce and I left St. Michaels to go to a holiday party. We drove northwest along Route 50, our three-car convoy making good time toward the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Just After crossing it, we pulled over to the shoulder. The communications officer had Admiral Tim Keating at U.S. Northern Command and Marine General James “Hoss” Cartwright at U.S. Strategic Command on the line. They advised that a long-range Taepo-Dong 2 missile had just been launched from its pad. If it appeared to be on a trajectory toward the United States, I was prepared to give the order to launch our interceptors, which were on high alert. We understood that such an action could invite retaliatory moves from North Korea.

As it turned out, I didn't have to fire that day. The North Korean ballistic missile failed forty-two seconds After launch and fell back on North Korean territory. Later in the Afternoon North Korea fired a half-dozen shorter-range missiles, which splashed into the Pacific. Though I did not have to make the call to send our interceptors into space to destroy an incoming ballistic missile, the United States was the first nation in the world to have the ability to make that decision.

The uncertain situation with North Korea was one in a series of challenges that faced the Department of Defense, even as it was engaged in difficult wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of those challenges were easy to foresee, while others came with much shorter notice, such as an ominous gathering of winds off the shores of New Orleans.

T
ropical storm Katrina intensified to a category 5 hurricane on August 28, 2005, while it was still several hundred miles out in the Gulf of Mexico. Expecting landfall in the next forty-eight hours, the new NORTHCOM commander, Admiral Tim Keating, began issuing orders and alerts to military units across the United States.
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He deployed an advance headquarters to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, and created a staging area for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The Department of Defense activated a hurricane operations cell in the Pentagon to monitor developments. Search-and-rescue aircrews were alerted that they might soon be needed. Navy ships with relief capabilities were ordered to proceed to the area.
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Lieutenant General H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard, began alerting state Guard forces.

Katrina thundered into Louisiana and Mississippi just before dawn on the following day. As the storm's fiercest wind gusts—approaching 150 miles per hour—died down, Army National Guard and Coast Guard helicopters began rescue operations. Available DoD assets were pushed toward the Gulf Coast. Hundreds of active-duty troops and thousands of National Guardsmen began arriving in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Because the Department of Defense is by law a supporting department, not the lead agency in the case of a catastrophic domestic event, the U.S. military was not in charge of coordinating the federal response.
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Instead, the responsibility for managing the federal government's response rested with the massive new Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
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DHS was established with little, if any, input from anyone outside a small circle of White House aides and congressional staffers. The first I heard of the plan was in a phone call from White House Chief of Staff Andy Card in early 2002, the night before it was announced publicly.

Card said officials at the White House—he didn't say who—had quietly worked with key members of Congress to establish a new department and that the President would be making the announcement the next day. DHS promised to be a sizable organization and would absorb a number of components of existing departments and agencies, including, I was told, several from the Department of Defense. This would be among the most extensive reorganizations of the federal government since the National Security Act of 1947.

Card was not asking for my views. He was informing me of the plan on the eve of the announcement. I was surprised. Clearly a decision had been made to put the proposal on the fast track. Because DHS was created in secrecy and haste, there were bound to be unforeseen consequences. I knew how slowly the federal bureaucracy moved, even on a good day. A new cabinet department would need its own facilities and thousands of personnel. It would have to manage relations with labor unions, weed through a thicket of federal regulations, and incorporate a host of agencies that had long been accustomed to different rules, regulations, and modes of operation. These changes would take a long time—likely years, not weeks or months. I also knew that despite its charter, the new department would not have the resources to meet its new statutory responsibilities in the case of a truly catastrophic natural disaster. As I had written in a memo more than a year before Hurricane Katrina struck:

These would prove to be the foreseeable results of the creation of a new federal institution made up of a patchwork of existing organizations from other departments and agencies. Good intentions had abounded. Wisdom had been in shorter supply.

Many perceived the response to Katrina as a slow train wreck. Most of the blame for the shortcomings was quickly placed on Washington. The most powerful nation in the world seemed unable to cope with high winds and floodwaters. While some of the unfolding criticism was warranted, much of it was not.

 

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n the day the storm came ashore, I was in San Diego attending ceremonies commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of V-J Day, but I left before noon to return to Washington. Over the next few days, we had numerous meetings. President Bush was deeply engaged in the federal response. As usual, he peppered the relevant officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and FEMA personnel, with detailed questions. Chertoffwas a capable cabinet secretary, but it was painfully clear that his department's resources were limited. Understaffed and underequipped, DHS was heavily dependent on hiring private-sector contractors to perform urgent tasks such as restoring electricity and establishing communications. But in a disaster of this magnitude, private contractors were quickly overwhelmed.

Some state and local officials, notably in Louisiana, did not help matters. Governor Kathleen Blanco was reluctant to relinquish command of the thousands of National Guardsmen in her state, as President Bush had urged her to do. Her actions led to an unnecessary delay in the crucial early hours over the issue of who could organize and direct the Guardsmen. The U.S. military knew how to mount a humanitarian operation with precision, speed, and efficiency. It was increasingly clear that the governor of Louisiana did not.

In light of Governor Blanco's unwillingness to cede control of the National Guard, President Bush was faced with two difficult choices: first, whether to federalize the Guardsmen, which would take away Blanco's authority over them, and, second, whether to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would suspend posse comitatus—the longstanding American law that bars federal military forces from conducting law and order missions on U.S. soil. These steps had not been taken over the objections of a state governor since the civil rights movement, when federal troops were deployed to the South to restore order and enforce desegregation. Confronted with images of civil disorder and media reports depicting chaos in New Orleans, White House officials discussed whether Bush should take those steps.

As troubling as Blanco's leadership was, I was concerned that invoking the Insurrection Act and federalizing the National Guard in the Gulf states against the Governor's will could set an unfortunate precedent. The practical consequences were also worrisome. If the President invoked the Insurrection Act and ordered the Defense Department to use active-duty forces for law enforcement missions, we could have nineteen-year-old Marine lance corporals trained to fight in Iraq patrolling the streets of New Orleans as policemen. Because DHS, not DoD, was authorized by statute to deal with domestic problems, our military had not been organized, trained, or equipped to conduct law enforcement in American cities. A mistake or two could make a bad situation worse.

I sensed it was a close call for the President. He ultimately decided against invoking the act and against federalizing the National Guard. Though he was never much of a second-guesser, in the weeks and months After Katrina, he may well have wondered whether he should have taken those measures. From my vantage point, President Bush made the right call.

Without formally stripping Blanco of her authorities, the President had us send as many troops as rapidly as we could to the region to assist DHS. We sent forty-five hundred active-duty troops from the 82nd Airborne and Marines from the First and Second Marine Expeditionary Forces. General Blum effectively worked around state officials to restore order with National Guard troops. Instead of overruling the law on posse comitatus by performing law enforcement missions, thousands of active-duty troops could support the National Guard by delivering humanitarian aid and rescuing stranded victims.
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Their very presence had the effect of reducing crime and disorder.

From a military standpoint, the response to Katrina was considerably swifter than any previous response to a hurricane, and probably to any natural disaster in American history. During the Hurricane Andrew disaster in 1992, for example, it had taken five days to deploy roughly sixty-eight hundred troops. But within five days of Katrina's landfall, more than thirty-four thousand ground forces from the Guard and active-duty were assisting in rescue efforts.
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At the peak of our operations, we had some forty-six thousand National Guard troops—citizen soldiers who in many cases were policemen, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, engineers, and municipal workers in their civilian jobs—on the scene.
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An additional twenty thousand active-duty forces were there as well. There were 350 helicopters and 21 ships conducting round-the-clock operations.
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Men and women in uniform were rescuing and evacuating thousands of displaced residents and assisting FEMA in reestablishing order in the hurricane's Aftermath.
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They helped to evacuate eighty-eight thousand Gulf Coast residents and rescued another fifteen thousand. Hundreds of Coast Guard helicopter and boat rescue teams provided critical assistance in the effort.

From a headquarters in the New Orleans Superdome, the National Guard launched what amounted to the biggest rescue operation in American history. An active-duty Army three-star officer and gruff Cajun with ties to the region, Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, took charge of the active-duty forces in the region, bringing leadership, discipline, efficiency, and confidence to the effort.

Back at the Pentagon, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense Paul McHale, a former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania and a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserves, skillfully coordinated DoD's response from the outset, working closely with DHS, FEMA, and the White House.
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Because of DHS' lack of resources, McHale anticipated the DoD assets DHS would need and helped their officials prepare the necessary requests for support. McHale had me approve these requests even before DHS had submitted them to expedite the process.

On September 4, 2005, I visited New Orleans. The devastation was terrible. Water had risen to the heights of roofs. Whole neighborhoods were underwater. U.S. military and Coast Guard helicopters were rescuing people stranded on top of their houses. We flew over the Seventeenth Street Canal levee that had been topped, allowing the swollen waters of Lake Pontchartrain to flood one of America's great cities.

As the federal government mobilized to assist Katrina victims, its performance was overshadowed by media coverage of the wrenching drama that had unfolded on the ground. Along with more than eighteen hundred lives, the storm had torn away the veneer of civilization in some places. The state and local governments that had kept a lid on anarchy, crime, and violence had dissolved. There were reports of murder and gang rapes. Reflecting the panic on the ground, some reporters and their anchors in the studios became advocates, sharing in the harsh condemnation of the emergency aid workers, the federal government, state and local leaders, in fact, anyone who might bear any responsibility. This chain reaction in the media left a damaging impression that the officials coping with the disaster didn't care and that our government was incapable of mounting an effective response.
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E
ight months After Katrina I wrote a memo to the President: “The charge of ‘incompetence' against the U.S. Government should be easy to rebut, were people to understand the extent to which the current system of government makes competence next to impossible.”
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After five years back in government, wrestling with natural and man-made disasters as well as two wars, it became clear to me that our government institutions were proving inadequate to the challenges of the twenty-first century and the information age. Efforts After 9/11 to refashion and create institutions such as DHS and the director of national intelligence (DNI) had led to suboptimal results: new layers of bureaucracy with the underlying challenges not well addressed.
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We needed to refashion our government institutions and develop new capabilities to respond to the challenge posed by terrorism and other non-conventional threats. For example, we were losing, or at least not winning, the battle of ideas against Islamist extremists. The State Department and other departments and agencies were not fulfilling their promises of political and economic support for reconstruction in places like Iraq and Afghanistan for a variety of reasons, including a lack of both funds and deployable personnel. The threads of national power—military, financial, intelligence, civic, communications—were sometimes working at cross-purposes, much as the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force had in the era before the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in 1986 mandated the creation of a joint force.
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The idea that our government might not be up to the new challenges had preoccupied my thoughts for some time.
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Just what to do about it occurred to me in an unlikely place from an unlikely source: a Democrat who had inherited the U.S. presidency in 1945.

In the spring of 2006, I visited the Harry S. Truman presidential library outside St. Louis, Missouri, to deliver a speech comparing our struggle against violent extremists to the decades-long challenges of the Cold War.
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Before my remarks, I spent some time touring the library. It was a treasured opportunity for someone who admired the blunt, no-nonsense midwesterner. I was taken into his private office, which was largely untouched since his death. Inside I glimpsed a wall of books, many of which he'd received from friends and contemporaries, including Winston Churchill. Hanging not far from his office was a large copy of an invitation to his inauguration. The invitation had inadvertently been extended to the President himself. Scrawled at the bottom was Truman's RSVP: “Weather permitting, I hope to attend. HST.”