-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
"I knew full well that if we could rally the American people behind a long and difficult chore, that our job would be easier," he recalled in the interview. "I am a product of the Vietnam era. I remember presidents trying to wage wars that were very unpopular, and the nation split." Bush pointed to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln that hangs in the Oval Office. "He's on the wall, because the job of the president is to unite the nation. That's the job of the president. And I felt like, that I had the job of making sure the American people understood. They understood the severity of the attack. But I wasn't sure if they understood how long it was going to take and what a difficult process this would be." We're going to be entering missions where U.S. military personnel will be at risk, Bush told his advisers. We need to be careful. He told Hughes she would be in charge of the communication effort. He wanted Defense and State and other agencies all operating from the same plan. Make sure the left hand knows what the right hand is doing, he said. For nearly an hour, Bush talked about what he expected from his communications team. His advisers remember it as a mostly one-way conversation. Bush stressed the unconventional aspects of the war – the role of law enforcement, of intelligence-sharing, of disrupting the terrorists' financial network, the role of the CIA and the fact that much of the war would be invisible. He said there would be parts of the campaign that they could not talk about. He wanted the advisers to think of ways to showcase all elements of the war they could talk about, particularly the financial piece and not just the visible portion of the military action. This would not be a rerun of the Gulf War, he told his advisers, despite what many Americans might be expecting. As a result, a more innovative communications strategy was needed. He asked his advisers to think unconventionally about how to explain the mission, the risks and the time it might take to complete the tasks ahead. We cannot tolerate leaks, he said insistently. Lives will be at stake. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon would talk about operations; White House officials would not. We will not be able to confirm some actions or operations. Your jobs will not be easy. "I was very clear off the beginning," Bush said in the later interview. "This is one area of communications where I knew exactly what I needed to say. And I wanted them to understand, because their job is to be a part of the dissemination process. And that this was this: We're in for a difficult struggle; it is a new kind of war; we're facing an enemy we never faced before; it is a two-front war, initially, Afghanistan and at home. America had never been attacked before. We had to describe to the American people that we were under attack and we're going to do something about it." "I also had the responsibility to show resolve. I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win. No yielding. No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death, that we're after 'em. And that was not only for domestic, for the people at home to see. It was also vitally important for the rest of the world to watch. These guys were watching my every move. And it's very important for them to come in this Oval Office, which they did, on a regular basis, and me look them in the eye and say, 'You're either with us or you're against us.'" Twice during the meeting with his communications team, Bush was interrupted for calls with foreign leaders, including one with Mexican President Vicente Fox, whose ranch he had visited shortly after taking office. As the two ranchers spoke, Bush slipped into the vernacular of the Old West to reveal his feelings about finding and capturing bin Laden. "Wanted dead or alive. That's how I feel," Bush said. ____________ When Bush finished meeting with the members of his communications team, he excused them and turned to Rice and asked her to stay behind. "I know what I want to do and I'm going to do it tomorrow at the NSC," he told her when they were alone. He then outlined the orders he wanted to issue. There was no real discussion as the two sat in the Treaty Room, just Bush dictating a list of actions he would order the next morning. Before the meeting ended, Bush made one other point to Rice, which encapsulated the tension they all had been dealing with since the attacks. The American people will give us time, he told her. They will be patient enough. Still, he knew patience had its limits. He could not go on indefinitely issuing brave warnings to the terrorists and then not act. He told Rice he needed to know how long it might take before they could go to war; he had to prepare the public for what was coming. The president said he was caught between his determination to show people that he was going to do something, and avoiding something premature that would make the United States look ineffectual. Above all, he did not want the response to appear weak. Rice jotted his orders down, and returned to her office to draw up a one-page summary of 11 items. It was a war plan on a single sheet of paper. Monday, September 17 The President Meets the Troops, Sounds the Call for bin Laden After meeting with his war cabinet, the president went to the Pentagon. He had been scheduled to visit Fort Bragg, home of the Special Forces and the Delta teams, to watch a demonstration of commando tactics. But the trip to North Carolina had been canceled because it could signal the direction his war plans were taking. Rumsfeld still wanted the president to have a detailed briefing. Special operations were going to be enormously important, he was sure, so a two-star general was sent from the Special Operations Command to brief the president. Rice and Frank Miller, the senior NSC staffer for defense, went with the president to the Pentagon. Before the briefing, Miller reviewed the classified slide presentation prepared for Bush and got a big surprise. One slide about special operations in Afghanistan said: Thinking Outside the Box – Poisoning Food Supply. Miller was shocked and showed it to Rice. The United States doesn't know how to do this, Miller reminded her, and we're not allowed. It would effectively be a chemical or biological attack – clearly banned by treaties that the United States had signed, including the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Rice took the slide to Rumsfeld. "This slide is not going to be shown to the president of the United States," she said. Rumsfeld agreed. "You're right," he said. Pentagon officials said later that their own internal review had caught the offending slide and that it never would have been shown to the president or to Rumsfeld. At the briefing, Pentagon officials outlined for Bush how the Special Forces teams were organized, what they did and how quickly they could move. They also explained the special units of the various services, such as the Navy SEAL teams. Afterward, the president went to the entrance to the Joint Staff corridor of the Pentagon to address some reservists, some of the 35,000 who were being called up, and answered questions from reporters. "Do you want bin Laden dead?" one asked. "There's an old poster out West," the president said, recalling what he had told the Mexican president privately in their phone conversation the day before, "as I recall, that said, 'Wanted Dead or Alive.'‚" The president said in December he used the expression to let the public know where he was heading. He knew that later in the day he was to sign a document authorizing covert and overt action designed to capture or kill bin Laden. "A lot of times you get out here and you know something is going to happen or you're thinking about something. And you get asked a question and it just, it pops out. I'm not very guarded in that sense sometimes. . . . It was a little bit of bravado, but it was also an understanding that in self-defense of America, that I had made that decision in self-defense of America that 'Dead or Alive,' that it's legal." ____________ Later in the afternoon at the White House, the president was presented with two documents to sign. One was a Memorandum of Notification modifying a finding that President Ronald Reagan had signed on May 12, 1986 authorizing counterterrorist operations. The memorandum was about 10 pages long with two appendices, and it authorized all the steps proposed by Tenet at Camp David to destroy bin Laden and his network. The CIA was now empowered to disrupt the al Qaeda network and other global terrorist networks on a worldwide scale, using lethal covert action to try to keep the role of the United States hidden. The finding also authorized the CIA to operate freely and fully in Afghanistan with its own paramilitary teams, case officers and the newly armed Predator, an unmanned airborne drone that could provide rich video surveillance and fire missiles if necessary. The Hellfire missiles were the latest covert action tool. The second document, 2½ pages long, consisted of the orders and action steps to the war cabinet and agencies that Bush had presented earlier that morning. The orders called for actions including financial pressure, diplomatic action, military planning and covert action. It was classified TOP SECRET. In the middle of the third page the president scribbled in his distinctive longhand, "George W. Bush." Staff researcher Jeff Himmelman contributed to this report. © 2002 *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? Write at [EMAIL PROTECTED] for a menu of our lists! Write to same address to be off lists! <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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