Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [324]
CHAPTER 41
The Road Not Traveled
“The only exact science known to man is hindsight,” John Reid, the British secretary of state for defense, commented in September 2005. He had a good point, though I might suggest that not even hindsight is an exact science, as demonstrated by any number of memoirs and books that explain the same events so differently. I found this myself when I started to subject my own memories to rigorous fact-checking in the process of writing this book.
Looking back, I see there are things the administration could have done differently and better with respect to wartime detention. As the administration grappled with these difficult questions, there were remarkably few interagency meetings devoted to detainee policy. In previous administrations the deputies committee, the highest subcabinet interagency forum on national security matters, regularly helped iron out differences of views among agencies. The principals committee, the members of the National Security Council, excepting the President, could then meet and prepare matters—including any unresolved interagency issues—for his consideration. I suggested without success that National Security Adviser Rice chair deputies meetings on important subjects, to give the group some heft and direction. Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz eventually encouraged a group of senior officials from across the government to hold ad hoc deputies-level meetings to address detainee-related questions outside the formal NSC system.
When principals committee meetings were held on detainee policy, little, if anything, was resolved. Instead, the meetings became opportunities to discuss the negative media coverage, such as that about Guantánamo, rather than to propose constructive alternatives and move issues up to the President for decision.1
The Defense Department was largely left to deal with the barrage of negative press on its own. With the exceptions of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, others showed scant interest in helping defend the administration detention policy. We needed assistance but received little from the White House communications team. The gap between the reality of our policies and the mythology about them yawned wider and wider in the absence of a concerted effort to confront major untruths as they were continuously repeated.
It was not until January 2005—one year After CENTCOM brought the abuses at Abu Ghraib to light, and more than three years After the President had signed his November 2001 military order assigning the detainee mission to the Defense Department—that the National Security Council staffbegan to treat the subject of detainees as an administration issue. By that time the President had been reelected and had realigned his National Security Council.
During the President’s first term, one problem that resulted from the lack of interagency policy review on this issue was that key policy makers saw detainee questions as essentially legal issues rather than policy matters. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, given my reluctance to cede control to lawyers over policies such as rules of engagement, I too was guilty of thinking that the legal questions were preeminent. From the first days of combat operations in Afghanistan, I tended to treat detainee matters as something to be sorted out among knowledgeable