Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

Bush insisted that the language be clearer. In the final, amended version, he said the U.S. would “make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who harbor them.” Within an hour of the television appearance, he was discussing what that would mean with his war council—by now comprising Cheney, Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Tenet, Rice, Richard Clarke, FBI director Robert Mueller, Attorney General John Ashcroft, key generals, and a few others.

In Afghanistan, by contrast, Taliban foreign minister Wakil Muttawakil had been asked whether he was certain bin Laden had not been involved in the attacks. “Naturally,” he said. Were his government’s restrictions on bin Laden’s military activity on Afghan soil still in force? “Naturally,” he said, and played down the likelihood of U.S. retaliation against Afghanistan.

Seven thousand miles away, though, the talk in the Situation Room at the White House was uncompromising. The Taliban were soon to propose trying bin Laden in Afghanistan or handing him over for trial in another Muslim country, but America was to turn a deaf ear. “We’re not only going to strike the rattlesnake,” Bush said at this time. “We’re going to strike the rancher.”

The administration never even considered negotiating with the Taliban, Rice said later. Washington would eventually issue a formal ultimatum—promptly rejected—demanding that Afghanistan hand over the Saudi exile, or “share in his fate.”

The posture of Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan—with its schizophrenic mix of ties to the Taliban, dependence on Washington, and divided religious and tribal loyalties—would now be pivotal. As Secretary of State Powell would recall it, Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, “had to be told in no uncertain terms that it was time to choose sides.” The way Musharraf remembered it being reported to him, those terms included being told that “if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age.” He bent to almost all the American demands for cooperation.

There were voices in Washington raising the notion of retaliation against nations other than Afghanistan. “Need to move swiftly,” Rumsfeld’s aide Stephen Cambone, noting the defense secretary’s comments on the afternoon of 9/11, had jotted: “Near term target needs—go massive—sweep it all up … need to do so to get anything useful … thing[s] related or not.” “I know a lot,” Rumsfeld would say publicly within days, “and what I have said, as clearly as I know how, is that states are supporting these people.”

That first night at Bush’s war council, the 9/11 Commission determined, Rumsfeld had “urged the President and the principals to think broadly about who might have harbored the attackers, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, and Iran.” Though bin Laden was a Saudi and most of the hijackers Saudis, the possibility of that country’s involvement was apparently not raised.

It was then, though, that Rumsfeld jumped at what he saw as the need to “do Iraq.” “Everyone looked at him,” Richard Clarke recalled. “At least I looked at him and Powell looked at him, like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ And he said—I’ll never forget this—‘There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.’ And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

“That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld.… It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.”

President Bush kept the immediate focus on bin Laden and Afghanistan, but he did not ignore Rumsfeld. On the evening of the 12th, Clarke recalled, Bush quietly took aside his counterterrorism coordinator and a few colleagues to say, “Look … I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way … Just look. I want to know any shred.”

“Absolutely, we will look … again,” Clarke responded. “But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen.”

Bush looked irritated. He replied, “Look into Iraq, Saddam,” and walked away. Clarke’s people would report that there was no evidence of cooperation between al Qaeda and Iraq. Pressure on the President to act against Iraq, however, continued. His formal order for military action against terrorism, a week after 9/11, would include an instruction to the Defense Department to prepare a contingency plan for strikes against Iraq—and perhaps the occupation of its oilfields.

THE WEEKEND FOLLOWING the attacks, after the frenzy of the first fearful days, Bush flew his war council to the presidential retreat at Camp David. Their deliberations began, as always during his presidency, with a moment of devotion. The meeting the day before, the Friday, had opened with a prayer spoken by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. He had asked the Lord for “patience to measure our lust for action,” for resolve and patience. In the wooded peace of Camp David, nevertheless, the debate focused on the storm of violence that was coming.

Across the vast table from the President, CIA director Tenet and his counterterrorism chief Cofer Black briefed their colleagues on the Agency’s plan for “Destroying International Terrorism.” They described what they called the “Initial Hook,” an operation designed to trap al Qaeda inside Afghanistan and destroy it. It was to be achieved by a numerically small CIA paramilitary component and U.S. Special Forces, working with Afghan forces that had long been fighting the Taliban. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hugh Shelton, outlined the crucial bomb and missile strikes that would precede and support the operation. “When we’re through with them,” Black had assured Bush, the al Qaeda terrorists would “have flies walking across their eyeballs.”

The war planners dined that evening on what the President called “comfort food,” fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Afterward, Attorney General Ashcroft accompanied Condoleezza Rice on the piano as she sang “Amazing Grace.” Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill sat in an armchair in the corner perusing the briefing documents the CIA had brought along that day. He read of measures to track and cut off the flow of money to terrorists, his special interest—and of draconian measures of a different sort.

The CIA proposed the creation of Agency teams to hunt down, capture, and kill terrorists around the world. It would have the authority to “render” those captured to the United States or to other countries for interrogation—effectively establishing a secret prison system. It would also be authorized to assassinate targeted terrorists. Two days later, the President signed a secret Memorandum of Notification, empowering the Agency to take such measures without the prior approval of the White House or any other branch of the executive.

Bush was by now referring to the coming fight as a “war on terrorism.” By the following week, when he addressed a joint session of Congress, it had become the “war on terror”—the label for the conflict that was to endure until the end of his presidency.

So far as Osama bin Laden personally was concerned, the White House set the tone. “I want justice,” the President told reporters on September 17, “and there’s an old poster out West, I recall, that said, ‘WANTED—DEAD OR ALIVE.’ ” Vice President Cheney said on television that he would accept bin Laden’s “head on a platter.” If he intended this figuratively, others did not.