Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [327]
I knew that holding people indefinitely would become increasingly controversial, especially when indefinitely looked like forever to some people. I didn’t want our country to hold a single detainee one day longer than necessary. I knew of no good alternative, except to keep moving each individual detainee’s case toward resolution by military commission or transfer to their home nations, while examining and reexamining why we were holding them. The American people would need to understand the complexities of the problem and why neither our domestic criminal justice system nor the Uniform Code of Military Justice was adequate for the new challenges.
Our nation’s campaign against Islamist extremists would be, as I wrote to the President in a memo only days After 9/11, “a marathon, not a sprint.”5 We were under no illusions that the terrorists would surrender After a few days of bombing in Afghanistan. If the war was going to be the work of a generation, that argued for developing broad and sustainable national and congressional support through a skillful public communications effort, consultation, and a proactive legislative strategy. There was at least temporary bipartisanship at work in the immediate Aftermath of 9/11, which might have been leveraged better. Members of both parties were demanding in unison that the President take all the actions necessary to prevent another attack. Congress worked cooperatively—and reasonably quickly—with the President on wartime spending, the creation of new governmental organizations and posts, the Patriot Act, and other matters.* But on wartime detention, that was not the case—it took a series of Supreme Court decisions five years into the Bush administration to provoke interest in the issue.
As a former member of Congress, I might have been better attuned to the need for congressional buy in on such potentially difficult and controversial matters. More than a year before the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan forced the administration to go to Congress for detainee legislation, I pushed the Defense Department to reach out to Congress. In March 2005, I sent a memo to Jim Haynes and the incoming deputy secretary of defense, Gordon England—who was replacing Paul Wolfowitz, then leaving to head the World Bank. England brought with him a management background from business and as secretary of the Navy and then deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. England also had good political instincts. He believed, as I did, that our detention policies would be subject to further scrutiny and criticism absent congressional involvement. As I wrote to Haynes and England in my memo:
I wonder if we ought to consider proposing to the White House that they propose legislation to try to untangle all of these court decisions relating to unlawful combatants and detainees. It seems to me that getting the Congress involved might help put a lot of clarity into it, give them a role, and keep the confusion resulting from disparate court decisions to a minimum.6
Although Congress was not calling for a larger role, we might have sought their input and worked to pin down their support more formally. Because we did not do so, members of Congress felt free to abandon their support for administration policies when we hit bumps in the road.
Partisans in Congress, self-styled human rights advocates,