Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side: Chapter 1by Eric Umansky - July 16, 2008 10:18 am EDT
PANIC
America should go “not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. . . . She
might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler
of her own spirit.”—John Quincy Adams, An Address . . . Celebrating the
Anniversary of Independence, at the City of Washington
on the Fourth of July 1821
........................
In the view of some detractors,such as Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, “Cheney was traumatized by 9/11. The poor guy became paranoid.”...................
(snippets from chapter 1)
The lesson for Bush and Cheney was that terrorists had struck at
the United States because they saw the country as soft. Bush worried
that the nation was too “materialistic, hedonistic,” and that Bin Laden
“didn’t feel threatened” by it. Confronted with a new enemy and their
own intelligence failure, he and Cheney turned to some familiar conservative
nostrums that had preoccupied the far right wing of the
Republican Party since the Watergate era.
There was too much international
law, too many civil liberties, too many constraints on the
President’s war powers, too many rights for defendants, and too many
rules against lethal covert actions. There was also too much openness
and too much meddling by Congress and the press.Cheney in particular had been chafing against the post-Watergate
curbs that had been imposed on the president’s powers since the mid-
1970s, when he had served as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff. As Vice
President, Cheney had already begun to strengthen the power of the
presidency by aggressively asserting executive privilege, most notably
on his secrecy-enshrouded energy task force. He’d told Bush, who
later repeated the line, that if nothing else they must leave the office
stronger than they found it. Now
Cheney saw the terrorist threat in
such catastrophic terms that his end, saving America from possible
extinction, justified virtually any means. As Wilkerson, Powell’s former
Chief of Staff who went on to teach National Security Affairs
at George Washington University, put it, “He had a single-minded
objective in black and white, that American security was paramount
to everything else. He thought that perfect security was achievable. I
can’t fault the man for wanting to keep America safe. But
he was willing
to corrupt the whole country to save it.”..............
But to understand the Bush Administration’s self-destructive response
to September 11, one has to look particularly to Cheney, the
doomsday expert and unapologetic advocate of expanding presidential
power. Appearing on Meet the Press on the first Sunday after the attacks,
Cheney gave a memorable description of how the administration
viewed the continuing threat and how it planned to respond.
“We’ll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will,” Cheney explained in his characteristically quiet and reassuring voice.
“We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion,using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies-if we are going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in.
And, uh, so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objectives.” the rest of chapter 1:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/propublica/assets/docs/dark_side_chap1.pdf