The surveillance and interrogation programs he helped implement have prevented further attacks.
BY STEPHEN F. HAYES
Wednesday, August 15, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Dick Cheney sat transfixed by the images on the small television screen in the corner of his West Wing office. Smoke poured out of a gaping hole in the World Trade Center's North Tower. John McConnell, the vice president's chief speechwriter, sat next to him and said nothing.
Then, a second plane appeared on the right-hand side of the screen, banked slightly to the left, and plunged into the South Tower. "Did you see that?" Mr. Cheney asked his aide.
A little more than an hour later, Mr. Cheney was seated below the presidential seal at a long conference table in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, better known as the bunker. When an aide told Mr. Cheney that another passenger airplane was rapidly approaching the White House, the vice president gave the order to shoot it down. The young man was so surprised at Mr. Cheney's immediate response that he asked again. Mr. Cheney reiterated the order. Thinking that Mr. Cheney must have misunderstood the question, the military aide asked him a third time.
The vice president responded evenly. "I said yes."
These early moments and all that followed from them will define Mr. Cheney's vice presidency. He was aggressive in those first moments of the war on terror and has been ever since.
Mr. Cheney flew from the White House that night to Camp David, where he stayed in the Aspen Lodge, usually reserved for the president. It was his first night in the "secure, undisclosed location" that would eventually provide fodder for late night comedians. When he woke the next morning, Mr. Cheney asked himself two questions: When is the next attack? And what can I do to prevent it?
They were the questions on the minds of many politicians immediately following 9/11. "When, not if" quickly became one of many clichés to emerge from the national trauma of that day. Democrats and Republicans alike spoke of further terrorist acts on U.S. soil with certainty.
Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat from Florida who has since retired but at the time was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, described the intelligence after a CIA briefing days after 9/11. "There is evidence that Tuesday's attack was the first phase of a multi-phase series of terrorist assaults against the United States, all under one umbrella plan," he said. "It's critical that we move with what capabilities we have today and strengthen those capabilities so that the next acts of this horrendous scheme against the people of the United States can be interdicted before it is executed."
No wonder, then, that a Time/CNN poll, taken in September 2001, found that four out of five Americans believed another attack within a year was either "somewhat likely" or "very likely."
That was nearly six years ago. To many, the threats no longer seem urgent. Critics speak of "the so-called war on terror," and accuse the administration of exaggerating the threats. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a leading indicator of Democratic conventional wisdom, recently argued that the "culture of fear" created in response to the 9/11 attacks has done more damage than the attacks themselves.
But Mr. Cheney has not moved on. He still awakens each day asking the same questions he asked on Sept. 12, 2001. Then, as he sips his morning coffee, he pores over the latest intelligence on his own before receiving an exhaustive briefing on the latest threat reports. After that, he joins his boss for the president's daily intelligence briefing. All of this happens before 9 a.m. He mentions the war on terror in virtually every speech he gives, and in a letter he wrote to his grandchildren he acknowledged that his "principal focus" as vice president has been national security.
The way that he has gone about his job has won him many critics. His approval ratings are low. A small but growing group of congressional Democrats is mobilizing to impeach him. Respected commentators from respected publications have suggested that his heart problems have left him mentally unstable. Others have called on him to resign. Some conservatives have joined this chorus of criticism, with one prominent columnist labeling the vice president "destructive" and another dismissing those who share his views as "Cheneyite nutjobs." This past Saturday, protesters near his home outside Jackson, Wyo., tore down an effigy of Mr. Cheney in much the way Iraqis famously toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein.
So President Bush should ignore Mr. Cheney's advice and the White House communications team should keep him hidden from public view, right?
Nonsense. With intelligence officials in Washington increasingly alarmed about the prospect of another major attack on the U.S. homeland, and public support for the Bush administration's anti-terror efforts reclaiming lost ground, we need more Dick Cheney.
The policies he has advocated have been controversial. But they have also been effective. Consider the procedures put in place to extract information from hardcore terrorists. Mr. Cheney did not dream up these interrogation methods, but when intelligence officials insisted that they would work, the vice president championed them in internal White House debates and on Capitol Hill. Former CIA Director George Tenet--a Clinton-era appointee and certainly no Cheney fan--was asked about the value of those interrogation programs in a recent television appearance. His response, ignored by virtually everyone in the media, was extraordinary.
"Here's what I would say to you, to the Congress, to the American people, to the president of the United States: I know that this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. . . . I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together, have been able to tell us."
And what about the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program? Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush instructed his top intelligence officials to be aggressive in their efforts to track terrorists and disrupt their plots. Michael Hayden, NSA director at the time, took that opportunity to propose changes to the ways his agency monitored terrorist communications. A little more than a year before the 9/11 attacks, while Bill Clinton was still president, Mr. Hayden dramatized the NSA's dilemma in congressional testimony.
"If, as we are speaking here this afternoon, Osama bin Laden is walking . . . from Niagara Falls, Ontario, to Niagara Falls, New York, as he gets to the New York side, he is an 'American person.' And my agency must respect his rights against unreasonable search and seizure as provided by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution."
Once President Bush took office, Messrs. Hayden and Tenet took the problem to Dick Cheney. The vice president walked them in to see Mr. Bush and in short order the changes were implemented. The results were almost immediate. The New York Times article that exposed the surveillance program in December 2005 also reported that "the eavesdropping program had helped uncover a plot by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker and naturalized citizen who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting Al Qaeda by planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches. What appeared to be another Qaeda plot, involving fertilizer bomb attacks on British pubs and train stations, was exposed last year in part through the program."
In the most recent battle over reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Mr. Cheney did not spend much time on Capitol Hill seeking support for the White House-backed changes as he had during the debates over detainee interrogations and earlier versions of the NSA programs. Instead, Mr. Cheney pushed and prodded inside the White House, insisting that the legislative affairs team approach the issue with the same urgency Mr. Cheney feels.
As the White House enters a critical domestic phases of the war on terror--with a heightened threat environment and the coming report from Gen. David Petraeus on progress in Iraq--Mr. Cheney may be called on to play a more public role. That may seem counterintuitive. If Mr. Cheney's approval ratings are so abysmal, why increase his visibility? The answer is simple: because his low poll numbers are the result of his low profile.
Mr. Cheney likes to work in the background and he does not care much about being loved. "Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?" Mr. Cheney said in 2004. "It's a nice way to operate, actually." But this reticence has a price. Where there is an information vacuum, people move to fill it, particularly in Washington, a town that operates on appearances.
More important, Mr. Cheney understands these issues as well as anyone in the Bush administration. "He really does get it," says former Iraq Administrator L. Paul Bremer, no Cheney acolyte. "From his time in Congress on the Intel Committee, to his time as secretary of defense--I saw him every now and then in the '90s when we were both out of government--he really is a student a international security matters."
Before he accepted his current position, Michael McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, was critical of Mr. Cheney's use of intelligence. But he nonetheless argued that the vice president was underutilized as a spokesman. "He has such a way of making it simple and compelling."
Mr. McConnell is right. Mr. Cheney can be a very effective communicator. That doesn't mean he never makes mistakes. He does. (His prediction in 2005 that the insurgency in Iraq was in its "last throes" comes to mind.) But recall his impressive outings in debates against Joseph Lieberman in 2000 and John Edwards four years later, or his appearance on "Meet the Press" shortly after 9/11--an interview that even the New York Times called "a command performance."
Mr. Cheney has given some thought to the Bush administration's difficulties communicating on the war. "The notion that somehow we've got to get across to people is they just cannot think of this as a conventional war," he says. "This is not Desert Storm. It's not Korea. It's not World War II. This is a struggle that's going to go on in that part of the world for decades. I don't know that you're going to be involved for Iraq for decades; I don't want to say that. But just think about it. We just have to have people understand that and understand that the alternative is not peace. The alternative is not [that] we go back to the way the world was before 9/11. You can't turn back the clock."
Mr. Hayes, of The Weekly Standard, is the author of "Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President" (HarperCollins, 2007), which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
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