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So did the decision to scale back the work of the Congress for the rest of 2001. The
House and Senate would meet only to keep the essential machinery of the government
running: continuing resolutions to fund the departments, a supplemental appropriation
for military operations in Afghanistan and for the new Office of Homeland Security,
and a vote to increase the debt ceiling so that the government could pay its bills.
“You know,” Majority Leader Trent Lott said, “it’s not as if anyone could seriously
vote against paying bills we already owe and risk the credit of the richest country
in the world.”

On the editorial pages of America’s newspapers, there were approving words for bipartisan
cooperation, complete with references to the British coalition government during World
War II. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote of the need for a “Grand Bargain.”
“In an age when the world is flat, any report of discord in our wounded land will
only inspire our enemies.” Similar sentiments appeared on the editorial pages of the
Washington Post,
the
Los Angeles Times,
and the
Chicago Tribune.
The tone of what was called “National Concord” was underscored by the powerful acts
of civic mourning: the interfaith service at Washington’s National Cathedral and the
Concert for America, at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where Bruce Springsteen
sang the song he had written for the occasion, “The Fallen.”

But if anyone thought the collaborative atmosphere of those first days would last,
they were seriously misreading both American history and the particular circumstances
that would soon afflict the president.

In the two decades before September 2001, powerful media voices had arisen, voices
far less committed to the instincts of older media, far more willing to speak quickly
and loudly. On September 14, Rush Limbaugh devoted a full hour of his radio broadcast
to a single theme: “What Has Al Gore Been Doing for Eight and a Half Years?”

“This is a man who has been in Washington since the 1970s!” Limbaugh thundered. “For
eight years, as vice president, he sat on the National Security Council. Every member
of his national security team has been on the job for years, some for decades. Yes,
every one of us should stand behind the president when he sends our men into battle
against the forces who attacked our country. But that should not stop the Congress—and,
yes, the liberal media, if they dare—from demanding answers to some very hard questions.”

By midafternoon the
Drudge Report
was flashing a red siren on its home page with a huge headline blaring,
NINE YEARS OF NEGLECT?
The next morning, Senator Jesse Helms, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, called for hearings to find out “how this catastrophic failure
of intelligence could have happened on the watch of a president who has spent eight
and a half years at the center of executive power. Just six months ago, he told the
Congress and the nation that the enemies of America had no place to hide. Those words
ring hollow today. They were, in fact, hiding in plain sight.” On the House side,
acting speaker Tom DeLay, who had pushed the House into impeaching President Clinton
three years earlier, proposed a select investigative committee “to probe the catastrophic
intelligence failure, wherever it may lead.”

From senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and others came dutiful denunciations
of Helms and DeLay for “playing politics at a time of national tragedy.” But the response
from most Democrats was muted. Clearly, there
had
been a disastrous intelligence failure; the fact that four commercial airliners had
been simultaneously hijacked, by men whose ties to terrorism were being quickly revealed,
was proof enough. But there was another reason many on the liberal side of the spectrum
were decidedly less eager to come to the president’s defense: the
New Yorker
article by Sy Hersh, appearing one day before September 11, that had examined in
critical detail the Predator drone attack that had killed Osama bin Laden. In the
wake of September 11, the comments and warnings of dissenting intelligence and defense
officials in that article had taken on a whole new, darker dimension. Wasn’t it a
dangerous precedent to invest a clandestine intelligence-gathering agency with this
kind of life-and-death power? Hersh had ended his story with a quote from a “veteran
intelligence operative” who had warned, “There is no more dangerous, less predictable
force than ‘blowback’—when a covert operation triggers violence against the civilian
population of the instigator. I wake up every morning in fear that we will feel the
force of that blowback right here at home.”

In the wake of September 11, that fear seemed to have been realized with devastating
consequences. On the surface, the link between the killing of Osama bin Laden and
the coordinated attacks on the United States seemed undeniable, if not obvious. And
what of the massive street demonstrations across the Arab and Muslim world, with mullahs
proclaiming, “The Sheikh is avenged!”

The suspicion of “blowback” quickly took root on the left side of the spectrum. On
ABC’s late-night talk show
Politically Incorrect,
host Bill Maher rejected the term “cowards” to describe the 9/11 conspirators.

“
We
have been the cowards,” Maher said unapologetically, “killing men, women, and children
with a Hellfire missile controlled from thousands of miles away.
That’s
cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building—say what you want about
it; it’s not cowardly. Maybe what the right word is, is …
payback.
Evil, indefensible, but payback.” (Maher’s show was canceled two months later by
ABC, ostensibly because of weak ratings).

For counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, for Gore’s national security advisor, Leon
Fuerth, and indeed for all the members of the intelligence team, Hersh’s article presented
an agonizing dilemma. The premise of the story was wholly false; they had known for
years that Al Qaeda had been targeting the United States for a major attack. Several
had been in the United States long before bin Laden was killed. But that could not
conceal the larger issue: They had already learned that the failure of the agencies
to work with one another—the systematic concealment by the CIA of critical information,
the bureaucratic walls and widespread ignorance that had crippled the FBI—painted
a devastating picture of failure up and down the intelligence chain of command. And
every member of the Gore administration understood the political implications of that
failure.

“It would have been completely different if Bush had been in the White House on 9/11,”
one of Gore’s closest aides said bitterly as the critics’ voices grew louder. “Even
if Bush and his team had no idea what Al Qaeda was, even if they had paid no attention
to Clarke and Tenet, they would have gotten here too recently to be blamed. It’s the
ultimate irony: the president knew full well what kind of danger we were facing, he
was pounding the table again and again for every scrap of intelligence anyone could
find—but it’s all going to come down to one line:
You were there for eight and a half years—why couldn’t you stop it?
”

It was a dispirited group that gathered in the Oval Office in late December 2001.
The three months since the 9/11 attacks had, for the Gore administration, been a steady,
steep decline from a spirit of “National Concord” to public pessimism and ceaseless
rounds of political recriminations.

The special elections in November had brought an unsurprising result—four new Republican
senators, from North Dakota, South Dakota, Nevada, and Florida, giving the GOP a clear
54–46 majority. Along with their House majority, Republicans now controlled every
congressional committee, and the incoming chairs were making it painfully clear that
they intended to focus on two issues: first, the astonishing lack of preparedness
that had let the 9/11 attacks happen, and second, the administration’s inexcusable
failure to mount an effective, decisive campaign against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The Republicans were doing so, moreover, at a time when, on almost every front, the
fallout from the attacks had sent the United States into a profound sense of pessimism.

Yes, the Afghanistan campaign had gone well. The multinational operation launched
in early October had uprooted the Taliban from power within a few weeks and had met
with near universal international approval. Even Pakistan, one of the few nations
to have recognized Taliban rule (and whose powerful intelligence apparatus was widely
assumed to be sympathetic to both the Taliban and Al Qaeda), had given U.S. forces
staging areas and travel rights through and over its territory.

But on every other front, America was in a crisis—more accurately, a series of crises.

There was a rapidly worsening recession, triggered first by the collapse of the $700
billion-a-year travel-and-tourism business, with links to some ten million workers.
There was the far greater hit to the financial sector, as the same doubts that were
keeping travelers out of airplanes, hotels, and restaurants began to take root among
those looking for a safe place to save their money. A top official of the People’s
Bank of China, speaking at a private international conference in Geneva, was quoted
as saying, “It gives us pause, quite frankly, when we see the presumably most powerful
nation on the face of the earth unable to protect its most visible symbol of commerce
and its most visible symbol of government.”

Domestic confidence took a similar blow. Just as Americans stayed home in the weeks
after 9/11, they kept their money at home as well. (“What do you suggest I do?” Gore
asked an aide. “Tell America to go shopping?”) The holiday shopping season was a disaster,
with retail sales slumping by some $80 billion. That, in turn, led to layoffs, from
big-city department stores to small-town Main Street shops to the emerging world of
online commerce. The jobless rate ticked up well past 7 percent, and tax revenues
fell; the hundreds of billions of dollars in surpluses projected for the coming federal
budgets began to seem more like a fading fantasy than a rock-solid reality.

Compounding President Gore’s woes was an increasingly critical media tone. In October,
The Weekly Standard,
one of the most influential conservative magazines, devoted its cover to a lengthy
article charging that “two successive administrations stand guilty of near-criminal
negligence in failing the first, essential duty of every government: the protection
of the populace.” Fox News produced a one-hour prime-time special,
Asleep at the Wheel?,
featuring interviews with present and former CIA and NSA agents who charged that
the Clinton administration had “tied our hands” by imposing “endless legal roadblocks
on the sharing of information that could have led to the unraveling of the 9/11 plot.”
MSNBC produced its own special, relying heavily on the Seymour Hersh
New Yorker
article to suggest that the killing of bin Laden had been “a recklessly provocative”
act. And
Nightline
aired a weeklong series with the title “The First Duty—How Washington Failed to Protect
Us.”

On the outer fringes, a different assertion began to appear on websites and blogs:
that President Gore knew an attack on the United States was imminent, and he did nothing
to stop it. Why, asked ExecutiveTerror.com, had the president conveniently opened
the air corridors to commercial flights? To ensure that the hijacked planes could
effect a coordinated strike? (“Had any of those planes been delayed,” the website
asserted, “the passengers might well have been alerted that this was no mere hijacking,
and one of the Twin Towers—or perhaps even the Capitol—might well have been saved.”)
And why exactly would President Gore want the Capitol destroyed? “What better excuse
to assert broad, even dictatorial executive action against ‘enemies foreign and domestic.’
The flames in New York and Washington might well come to be seen as America’s version
of the Reichstag fires that helped cement Nazi totalitarianism nearly seventy years
ago.”

That argument never reached beyond the various wingnut communities. But among a much
more respectable, much more influential segment of the media, a different assertion
was rapidly gaining credence: that the Gore administration was ignoring the
real
source of the attacks—a threat located not in the caves of Afghanistan or a hideaway
in Pakistan but in Baghdad. It was an assertion that the president and his national
security team unanimously rejected—and would lead to one of the most astonishing twists
in America’s political history.

“Whatever happened to ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’?” asked White House Communications
Director Chris Lehane during a meeting of the president’s inner circle in the Oval
Office in late January of 2002.

Gore responded with a mirthless smile.

“You mean like when the Republicans railed against FDR’s ‘failures’ a year after Pearl
Harbor? Or when they went after Truman for not winning the war in Korea? Or when the
Democrats cut off funding for South Vietnam or exposed the CIA’s darkest secrets or
almost impeached Reagan when he tried to get money to the contras? And do you really
think Clinton wanted to sign that ‘Iraqi Freedom Act’? God knows how many millions
Chalabi will be dishing out to his friends.”

Elaine Kamarck, Domestic Policy Council Chair, shook her head. “Those damn anthrax
stories sure didn’t help.”

“Well,” President Gore said, “our friends in the press didn’t exactly let a complete
and total lack of facts get in the way of a great story.”

In the very first days after 9/11, with voices in Congress and the media already beginning
to raise the specter of an “Iraqi Connection,” envelopes with anthrax spores were
found in the district offices of senators Trent Lott and Pat Leahy and in the offices
of NBC News, the
Washington Post,
and other news outlets. With their crude messages—“09-11-01” … “THIS IS NEXT” … “TAKE
PENACILIN NOW” … “DEATH TO AMERICA” … “DEATH TO ISRAEL” … “ALLAH IS GREAT”—it seemed
obvious at first that the anthrax mailings were linked to the attacks; almost immediately,
some stories linked the anthrax to Iraq. ABC’s Brian Ross reported on October 26 that
the anthrax was laced with bentonite. “The potent additive is known to have been used
by only one country in producing biochemical weapons: Iraq. … It is a trademark of
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program.” The
Wall Street Journal
and the
Guardian
carried the same allegations. When later information disproved these stories, the
allegations simply disappeared but left millions of Americans with the clear impression
that Iraq had tried to poison American politicians and journalists as part of its
terrorist assault on the United States.