The Bush/Cheney administration's last ditch effort at justifying their actions is to hide behind 9/11. Their argument has essentially become, "well you weren't there, you don't know what it was like." Condi used it while trying to justify the use of torture to Stanford students, and in Cheney's "national security" speech, he referenced 9/11 more often than Rudy Guiliani on the campaign trail. Well Richard Clarke was there and he is having none of it, in his Washington Post article, aptly titled The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse, he smacks down that talking point, HARD. I highly recommend reading the entire article, there were several great paragraphs that I didn't quote due to not wanting to violate copyright rules.
Clarke begins by recounting his vivid memories of 9/11 from inside the White House, and then gets to the point:
I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.
The Bush administration was caught with it's pants down, but worse they compounded their problems by acting in ways that did nothing to make the country safer all while using 9/11 as an excuse. Clarke mentions the the still ongoing war in Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with al-Qaeda but was sold to the public as a response to 9/11. The creation of Guantanamo Bay and other black sites, despite the fact that U.S. court system had been working fine thus far, another ongoing mess that the Obama administration has to try to clean up. Warrantless wiretapping despite the fact that FISA allowed for the quick issuance of court orders. And of course torture, which hadn't worked, didn't work, and was illegal. So why this response to 9/11 from the Bush administration? Clarke has a theory:
I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if politics was at the forefront of the Bush administration's mind in the weeks and months after 9/11, but even discounting that possibility it's clear that revisionist excuse, 9/11 made us do it, just doesn't hold water. The steps that were taken as a "response" to 9/11 were not the logical much less the correct response to 9/11. 9/11 should have lead to a critical discussion into how to make the country safer, instead the actions of the Bush administration did the opposite. Yes, emotions were high, but we can't be expected to believe that analysis wasn't possible or that laws had to be broken.
Clarke ends brilliantly with a final rebuttal of Cheney's argument:
"I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities," Cheney said in his recent speech. But this defense does not stand up. The Bush administration's response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the Constitution, which the vice president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.