In My Time - Dick Cheney [168]
There were plenty of people, including some in the White House, who thought we should just turn over the lists. Since there were no nefarious secrets hidden in them, they argued, all we were doing was creating a real political headache for ourselves by refusing to give them up. But I believed something larger was at stake: the power of the presidency and the ability of the president and vice president to carry out their constitutional duties.
We eventually prevailed—on the Hill when the GAO dropped their efforts to get the names and in the United States Supreme Court when the justices ruled 7 to 2 in our favor, remanding the case back to the district court. It was a major victory both for us and for the power of the executive branch. President Bush deserves tremendous credit for standing by me when a lot of people wanted us to take the easy way out. As for the energy report itself, while a number of its recommendations were eventually adopted either through legislation or executive order, our opponents continued to block a more comprehensive approach to the nation’s energy challenges.
IN EARLY MAY, A few weeks before we unveiled our national energy policy, President Bush announced another initiative he had asked me to undertake. It concerned our responses to the possibility of weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons—being used in an attack against our homeland. While we worked to deny such weapons to our enemies, we also needed to be prepared, as the president said, “to defend against the harm they can inflict.”
The problem of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the possibility that terrorists could acquire such devastating weapons had been a particular concern of mine for some time. The Defense Planning Guidance I issued as secretary of defense in 1992 listed the need to prevent such proliferation as a key objective of the United States. In April 2001, when Nick Lemann of the New Yorker magazine asked me about the nature of the threat facing the United States, I said,
I think we have to be more concerned than we ever have about so-called homeland defense, the vulnerability of our system to different kinds of attacks. Some of it homegrown, like Oklahoma City. Some inspired by terrorists external to the United States—the World Trade Towers bombing, in New York. The threat of a terrorist attack against the U.S., eventually, potentially, with weapons of mass destruction—bugs or gas, biological, or chemical agents, potentially even, someday, nuclear weapons.
Then Lemann asked me what we could do to reduce those threats. I answered, “You need to have very robust intelligence capability if you’re going to uncover threats to the U.S., and hopefully thwart them before they can be launched.” Intelligence, I said, is our “first line of defense.”
When we took office there were numerous federal agencies charged with addressing the consequences of an attack against the United States with weapons of mass destruction. The president asked that I oversee an effort that would study the current system as well as the recommendations made by a number of task forces that had already looked at the issue and suggest ways we could improve our responses.
Members of my staff, including Scooter Libby, retired Admiral Steve Abbot, and Carol Kuntz, who’d been on my Pentagon staff, went to work reviewing studies that had already been completed on this topic. Within a couple of months, they presented me a report that recommended several key steps we could take to improve U.S. preparedness and response to a WMD attack. The list included crafting and implementing a national strategy for preparedness and response; improving