Exceptional (17 page)

When the president had finished, I laid out the truth about all we had done. The enhanced interrogation program “was used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed.” It was legal, essential, justified, successful, honorable, and right. It saved lives, prevented attacks, and, we now know, helped lead us to Osama bin Laden. “The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists,” I said, “can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent deaths of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands,
of innocent people.”

To call enhanced interrogation a program of torture, as President Obama has so many times, is to libel the dedicated professionals who saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. On the topic of America's most sacred values, I believe strongly, as I said that day, “No moral value held dear by the American people obliges public servants ever to sacrifice innocent lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things.” Furthermore, when our nation is targeted by terrorists bent on our destruction, “Nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them.”

Ending programs that kept us safe, revealing the details about those programs to the terrorists, and spreading untruths about our policies was misguided, unjust, and highly irresponsible. It was recklessness cloaked in righteousness. It was my view then and remains so today, that President Obama, having so consistently distorted the truth about the enhanced interrogation program and the brave Americans who carried it out, is in no position to lecture anyone about American values.

ON CHRISTMAS DAY 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab smuggled a bomb in his underwear aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit. There were nearly three hundred people on board. As the plane began its descent, passengers reported hearing what sounded like firecrackers. Abdulmutallab's bomb failed to explode but it started a fire. The other passengers
overpowered him. Abdulmutallab was arrested and questioned for only fifty minutes before FBI agents read him
his Miranda warnings.

Abdulmutallab had spent four months training with al Qaeda in Yemen. He had ties to radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The National Counterterrorism Center had amassed intelligence on Abdulmutallab, none of which was used in his interrogation. None of the nation's top counterterrorism officials was consulted by the FBI leadership or the agents on the scene.

In congressional hearings on Wednesday, January 20, 2010, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair admitted that it hadn't occurred to the administration to activate the new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, the interagency office that was supposed to handle terrorist interrogation, to question Abdulmutallab:

Frankly, we were thinking more of overseas people and duh!
[
Blair slaps his forehead
]
we didn't put it then. That's what we'll do now. And so we need to make those decisions more carefully. I was not consulted and the decision was made on the scene. It seemed logical to the people there but it should have been taken using this HIG format
at a higher level.

In a clarification issued after the hearing, Blair explained that what he meant to say was that the FBI received important intelligence from Abdulmutallab and that intelligence “will be available in the HIG
once it is
fully operational.
” In other words, eleven months after President Obama had ended the enhanced interrogation program, there was no operational program to interrogate terrorists.

Three days later, when he made his first statement about the attack, President Obama seemed unaware of the intelligence linking Abdulmutallab to al Qaeda. Despite the fact that Abdulmutallab had been trained, armed, and sent by al Qaeda to down an American civilian airliner, Obama referred to him as “an isolated extremist.” This was one of many instances in which the Obama administration seemed either not to know about, or was unwilling to acknowledge, the threat we were facing.

In a briefing with the press on January 7, 2010, President Obama's counterterrorism advisor, and future director of the CIA, John Brennan, explained that he had been “surprised” that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was capable of attacking the United States. In the same briefing, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said she was surprised by al Qaeda's “determination” to attack the United States and their tactic of “using an individual to
foment the attack.”

This lack of familiarity with the threat of terror attacks on the United States by two of our top counterterrorism officials was troubling. It was part of a larger pattern—and seemed often to be by design. From its earliest days in office, the Obama administration downplayed the threat of terrorism and the strength of al Qaeda. Wars would no longer be wars; they would be “
overseas contingency operations.” Terrorist attacks would now be “
man-caused disasters.” Al Qaeda–trained terrorists weren't part of any larger network; they were “
isolated extremists” and “lone wolves.” The terrorist attack on the U.S. Army base at Fort Hood was just “
workplace violence.”

It is a fair question why a president would choose to downplay the threat of terror attacks on the nation. President Obama came into office with bold plans to transform the nation, to expand the size of
the federal government, nationalize one-sixth of the economy, and massively increase government spending on domestic programs. In order to do this, he needed to make major cuts in defense spending, which required, in part, that we stop fighting costly wars. That, in turn, required convincing the American people that the threat from al Qaeda was fading and that the nation no longer needed to be on a war footing.

After all, if al Qaeda were still a threat, how could an American president justify leaving the field of battle and diminishing our ability to defeat our enemies?

The cornerstone of President Obama's 2008 campaign for the presidency was his opposition to the Iraq War. One would be hard-pressed to find a single day during the campaign when Barack Obama did not promise to “end the war in Iraq.” He went so far as to detail how he would carry out these plans. “On my first day in office,” he repeatedly promised, “I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war responsibly and
deliberately, but decisively.” The war would have to end, he said, within the next sixteen months.

At his first National Security Council (NSC) meeting on January 21, 2009, President Obama instructed his military commanders to provide him with three options for withdrawal, at least one of which had to be along the sixteen-month timetable
on which he had campaigned.

America's ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, was getting ready to retire after more than thirty-seven years in the foreign service. He'd served as American ambassador in Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria, and
Pakistan before being posted to Iraq in 2007. He gave his final press briefing as ambassador the day after the NSC meeting on the Iraq withdrawal. In it he issued a clear warning about the danger of a “precipitous” American departure from Iraq. “Al Qaeda is incredibly tenacious,” he said. “They will have to be killed or captured, and as long as they hang on, they are looking for opportunity to regenerate.” He continued, “If we were to decide suddenly, ‘we're done,' they would certainly work to use space that opened up to do just that. I think it would encourage neighbors with less than benign intentions to carry them out, and perhaps most importantly I think it would have a
chilling effect on Iraqis.”

Ambassador Crocker had been indispensable in bringing about the relative stability in Iraq that greeted President Obama as he took office. In his final press conference, Crocker reflected on his tenure. “Taking a look back at when I arrived here in March 2007 and how it looked and felt then, [there's been] a really remarkable transition within Iraq itself,” he said. “Neither the Iraqis nor we can take our eye off that ball, because as we tragically have seen, there are still elements out there, particularly al Qaeda, capable of delivering
devastating attacks.” Crocker went on to note that while the Iraqi security forces had made “enormous” progress over the last two years, they still needed U.S. support.

Despite the White House focus on timetables and numbers in early 2009, American military officials in Iraq knew the challenge was much tougher. One put it this way: “It is more than just a question of how fast and how low; it includes calculating how much risk you are willing to
take in Iraq.” The risk was that a withdrawal based on U.S. political timetables instead of on conditions on the ground would leave Iraq unable to provide for her own security. Such a policy would sacrifice the gains for which so many Americans had
fought and died, and leave a vacuum that al Qaeda and Iran would rush to fill.

In response to President Obama's request for drawdown timetables, Ambassador Crocker and General Ray Odierno, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, recommended a period of twenty-three months before the formal end of
America's combat operations. This would allow the maximum number of U.S. forces to remain in Iraq through the upcoming Iraqi presidential elections and enable the United States to maintain the maximum pressure on “extremist networks” that threatened the security of Iraq. Crocker and Odierno included a list of ten reasons why the twenty-three-month time frame was the most responsible approach. Among these, it “maintains the greater security presence through the
window of greatest risk” and it provides “most effective pressure vs. AQI [al Qaeda in Iraq] and balances Iranian influence in Iraq, to best deny extremist organizations the ability to regenerate
organizational capacities.”

In addition to the twenty-three-month timetable supported by Odierno and Crocker, the president considered two other options: the Obama campaign time frame of a sixteen-month drawdown and a compromise of nineteen months
suggested by Secretary Gates, though neither of the shorter schedules had a military rationale. The president would also decide how many American troops to leave in place after the end of combat operations. General Odierno believed a residual American force of
50,000–55,000 troops would be necessary through the end of December 2011, when the existing Status of Forces Agreement expired. After that, the expectation was that a new SOFA would be negotiated to enable the United States to leave a stay-behind force in Iraq.

General Odierno and Ambassador Crocker also made the point that adopting a twenty-three-month drawdown schedule would enable the president to shift to either of the faster timetables if conditions
on the ground warranted. There was no military necessity to make announcements about timetables at this
point at all.

President Obama rejected the twenty-three-month timetable, the residual force of 50,000–55,000 through the end of 2011, and the advice that no immediate announcement on a timetable was militarily necessary.

On February 27, 2009, at Camp Lejeune, President Obama lauded the “relative peace” and substantial reduction in violence in Iraq brought about by the surge, though he did not credit the surge, likely because he had opposed it. He also said that al Qaeda had “been
dealt a serious blow.” Therefore, he announced, he would be removing all American combat brigades from Iraq over the next eighteen months. “Let me say this as plainly as I can, by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.” Having decided on a faster drawdown than the one recommended by his commander in the field, the president then announced that after the combat brigades were withdrawn, he would leave 35,000–50,000 troops in Iraq until the end of 2011. At that point, he explained, “I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.”

President Obama also announced at Camp Lejeune that he was appointing Chris Hill to be America's new ambassador to Iraq. It was a perplexing choice. In Hill's last diplomatic assignment, he had been responsible for the disastrous nuclear negotiations with North Korea, which the North Koreans used to buy time as they developed their massive uranium enrichment program. Hill had no experience working in the Middle East and no apparent understanding of the importance of actively engaging with the Iraqis to ensure a stable government would be left behind once American forces withdrew. He informed General Odierno that from here on Iraq would be treated like any other sovereign country, and America's diplomats and military leaders should not attempt to try to
shape its future. By early 2010,
things had deteriorated to the point that America's military leaders believed Hill was spending more time tracking which Iraqis the military met with than actually meeting
with Iraqis himself.

Sixteen months later Hill left Iraq. “The most merciful comment I can make,” said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the former Iraqi national security advisor, “is that Chris Hill's legacy in his time here was uneventful, from the American government's side, while Iraq was full of events. He was a traditional diplomat with no experience in the Middle East, the Islamic world
or Iraq. . . .” Hill did accomplish one thing. According to Emma Sky, a British advisor to General Odierno, Hill was reportedly determined to ensure that the U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad had grass. “Great rolls of lawn turf were brought in . . . and took root,” wrote Sky. “There was now grass on which the ambassador could
play lacrosse.”

As the Obama administration began its withdrawal and shifted its focus elsewhere, Iraqi officials expressed concern about America's dwindling commitment to Iraq. The concerns ranged from who would fill the vacuum if American forces withdrew completely, to worries that President Obama's renewed engagement with Iran would come at Iraq's expense. In May 2009, Iraqi vice president Tariq al-Hashemi told visiting U.S. diplomats that he was worried about the “
pervasive Iranian influence in both the security and political arenas” in Iraq, and he said he “hoped that the US Government was not sacrificing its interest in Iraq for its
growing interest in Iran.” Hashemi's chief of staff noted that Iraq was not yet a sovereign state, but a “collection of competing interests in a state-like environment.” He said, “Iran understands this and is in Iraq for the long-term, whereas the U.S. is only here
for the short term.”