Q. You begin the book by describing the panic and confusion at the upper reaches of the Bush administration on 9/11, with the main focus on Dick Cheney. Why?
A. There was panic in the White House, and I think a level of panic that people don’t really realize, and it lasted beyond 9/11 into the weeks afterwards, particularly when the anthrax letters reached the Hill. That completely freaked out Cheney in particular. There was a while there when Cheney thought that he may have personally been exposed to chemical, biological, or radioactive weapons, and that he might die. And so the threat from al-Quaeda was not just political, it was personal for Cheney. He felt personally targeted, and he has acted ever since in a way that some people think shows a real change in his personality.
Q. So let’s talk about how that reaction played out. Cheney and his deputy, David Addington, began to put in place essentially a new system of law – what they called a “New Paradigm” – under the banner of the War on Terror. What was the New Paradigm?
A. One of the most important quotes in this book is uttered by Phillip Zelikow, who was counsel to Condoleeza Rice, where he says that this whole period as he sees it was “fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.” Sept. 11 and the fear and anxiety it provoked allowed Cheney and a man many people have never heard of before, David Addington, his lawyer, to implement policies that would never have been possible the day before 9/11. Many of them were ideas that they had been longing to put into place really since the Watergate era, and they would never have been able to do it because the political ideas were so extreme, and really so undemocratic. Their notion was that the President needed more power, and as they rewrote the laws and reinterpreted the constitution they gave the President the power to do pretty much anything he wanted, including torturing people, which was a complete break with U.S. history and tradition.
Q. And part of the story of the New Paradigm is how they managed to get this, these changes pushed through in, to say the least, a very undemocratic way.
A. Think about the Bush administration, the two most powerful figures were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. And they’d both been cabinet officers before, they had watched how Washington worked for decades. They truly understood how to push the levers, and they were joined, again, by David Addington who is a fanatical lawyer, and a very, very bright, a tireless worker, who understood that the most important thing was to control what choices reached the President. And so they pretty much had a strangle-hold on the paperwork that reached Bush, who really had very little experience in National Security. So they took control of the government in many ways, at least in the war on terror—a tiny little clique of people, just five men [David Addington, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, Jim Haynes, and Tim Flanagan:]. They called themselves “The War Council,” and they met in secret and kept out anybody who disagreed with them.
The Dark Side
discussion
A. There was panic in the White House, and I think a level of panic that people don’t really realize, and it lasted beyond 9/11 into the weeks afterwards, particularly when the anthrax letters reached the Hill. That completely freaked out Cheney in particular. There was a while there when Cheney thought that he may have personally been exposed to chemical, biological, or radioactive weapons, and that he might die. And so the threat from al-Quaeda was not just political, it was personal for Cheney. He felt personally targeted, and he has acted ever since in a way that some people think shows a real change in his personality.
Q. So let’s talk about how that reaction played out. Cheney and his deputy, David Addington, began to put in place essentially a new system of law – what they called a “New Paradigm” – under the banner of the War on Terror. What was the New Paradigm?
A. One of the most important quotes in this book is uttered by Phillip Zelikow, who was counsel to Condoleeza Rice, where he says that this whole period as he sees it was “fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.” Sept. 11 and the fear and anxiety it provoked allowed Cheney and a man many people have never heard of before, David Addington, his lawyer, to implement policies that would never have been possible the day before 9/11. Many of them were ideas that they had been longing to put into place really since the Watergate era, and they would never have been able to do it because the political ideas were so extreme, and really so undemocratic. Their notion was that the President needed more power, and as they rewrote the laws and reinterpreted the constitution they gave the President the power to do pretty much anything he wanted, including torturing people, which was a complete break with U.S. history and tradition.
Q. And part of the story of the New Paradigm is how they managed to get this, these changes pushed through in, to say the least, a very undemocratic way.
A. Think about the Bush administration, the two most powerful figures were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. And they’d both been cabinet officers before, they had watched how Washington worked for decades. They truly understood how to push the levers, and they were joined, again, by David Addington who is a fanatical lawyer, and a very, very bright, a tireless worker, who understood that the most important thing was to control what choices reached the President. And so they pretty much had a strangle-hold on the paperwork that reached Bush, who really had very little experience in National Security. So they took control of the government in many ways, at least in the war on terror—a tiny little clique of people, just five men [David Addington, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, Jim Haynes, and Tim Flanagan:]. They called themselves “The War Council,” and they met in secret and kept out anybody who disagreed with them.
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