These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ashcroft said when he read a draft of the order. He’d expected the prosecution of people involved in planning the attacks on 9/11 to be handled criminally, by his department—as had been done successfully with earlier terrorism cases, with due process. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell only learned that Bush had signed the order when they saw it on television. In the final draft, the Department of Justice was left out of the prosecutions altogether: suspected terrorists were to be imprisoned without charge, denied knowledge of the evidence against them, and, if tried, sentenced by courts following no established rules. The order deemed “the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts” to be impractical. The means by which truth was to be established and justice secured, traditions established and refined over centuries, were deemed inconvenient. “Now, some people say, ‘Well, gee, that’s a dramatic departure from traditional jurisprudence in the United States,’” Vice President Cheney said, but “we think it guarantees that we’ll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve.”