Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

Just after lunchtime on September 6, Bush strode into the East Room to publicly acknowledge the CIA prisons for the first time and announce that he was sending the fourteen remaining “high-value detainees” to Guantánamo, where they would be made available to the International Committee of the Red Cross and given the same food, clothing, and medical care as other prisoners. For thirty-seven minutes, Bush defended what he had done, arguing that for a select few captives on the battlefield, the normal rules could not apply. “These are dangerous men with unparalleled knowledge about terrorist networks and their plans for new attacks,” Bush said. “The security of our nation and the lives of our citizens depend on our ability to learn what these terrorists know.” The detainees in the black-site prisons had been subjected to what he antiseptically referred to as “an alternative set of procedures” that were “tough” but “safe and lawful and necessary.” These tactics had “given us information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks here in the United States and around the world.” He named some detainees who had been held, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and described how they provided information leading to the other captures and headed off attacks on a marine camp in Djibouti, an American consulate in Pakistan, and civilian targets in London. What Bush did not describe was exactly what the “alternative set of procedures” ...