This is Marine's wake up call.

War in Iraq was unnecessary. We know that now. This program effectively demonstrates that we knew it back in 2002 and 2003 as well.

Can Marine finally come to grips with these facts and with this reality?

Will he even watch the program?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/

Frontline: Bush's War
Bottom Line: Explains why the invasion can fairly be called "Bush's War."
By Barry Garron
Mar 24, 2008

9 p.m. Monday-Tuesday, March 24-25
WNET New York

The Civil War isn't called Lincoln's War and World War II isn't Franklin D. Roosevelt's War. So what gives "Frontline" and producer Michael Kirk the right to call the invasion of Iraq "Bush's War"?

The answer is soon obvious in this exhaustive two-part, four-hour special, parts of which have previously been seen on "Frontline." Practically from the moment the World Trade Center was struck, the Bush administration sought a pretext to invade Iraq. Facts that argued against an invasion were discredited or ignored and new "facts" were invented.

In dozens of interviews and with meticulous fact-gathering, "Frontline" makes a convincing case for two important aspects of the war. First, it was primarily orchestrated by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Bush was only "the decider" insofar as he signed off on their plans, often paying no heed to Secretary of State Colin Powell and others.

Second, practically every plan, idea, assumption and strategy advanced by Cheney and Rumsfeld was incorrect, once Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled. The level of incompetence uncovered by "Frontline" is stunning.

Who's going to watch this four-hour report? Probably, not many. Those who do, however, will come away with a clear understanding of what went wrong and why. And also why the invasion can fairly be called "Bush's War."

Links referenced within this article

Find this article at:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/televi...10859&imw=Y

'Frontline' retraces path of 'Bush's War'
Two-part documentary a richly told political thriller on Iraq war
COMMENTARY
By Frazier Moore
The Associated Press
updated 2:12 p.m. ET, Fri., March. 21, 2008
NEW YORK - Join "Bush's War" in marking a dismal anniversary.

This two-part "Frontline" documentary begins with the attacks of 9/11. Then, step by step, it moves toward the Bush administration's shock-and-awe response. With Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein successfully branded Public Enemy No. 1, the invasion of Iraq began five years ago this month.

But that's just the first part of "Bush's War." What "Frontline" calls a secret war — not so secret by now, but seldom exposed in such detail as in this film — airs on PBS from 9 to 11:30 p.m. EDT Monday (check local listings).

Behind the scenes, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet were battling Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Interviewed on camera, Powell says that on 9/11, "I suggested to the president and my other colleagues that this was an opportunity to begin pulling together a worldwide coalition."

But according to journalist Bob Woodward, that same night Rumsfeld said, "Part of our response maybe should be attacking Iraq. It's an opportunity."

In this fractious environment, Rumsfeld distrusted the CIA's findings, so he set up his own Pentagon information-gathering unit. One of its reports drew the all-important link between Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Although both the FBI and CIA disputed the report's supporting evidence, Cheney cited it repeatedly as justification for attacking Iraq.

Richard Clarke, then the nation's counterterrorism czar, remembers being scolded by Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, for declaring he didn't believe the report.

As Clarke recalls, "I said, 'I don't believe it, because it's not true.' And he said, 'You're wrong. You know you're wrong. ... Go back and find the rest of the reports, and find out that you're wrong.' And I understood what he was saying, which was, 'This is a report that we want to believe, and stop saying it's not true.'"

Part two of "Bush's War," airing 9 to 11 p.m. EDT Tuesday (check local listings), begins with the swift American victory in Iraq, followed within hours by looting by Baghdad citizens, to which Rumsfeld responded with a breezy, "Stuff happens."

The film lays out this drama, through the rise of the insurgency (with no ready U.S. plan to counteract), the mythical WMDs, continuing disorder and danger, the scandal of Abu Ghraib prison, the strategy of a "surge" in U.S. troop strength, up to the present day, as public support of the war erodes and the 2008 presidential race is being waged, in part, on how (and how fast) we can get out of Iraq.

Produced by veteran "Frontline" producer Michael Kirk, "Bush's War" came together rather quickly — at least, by "Frontline" production standards. The idea was conceived only last November. But along with fresh reporting and new interviews, the film draws on a "Frontline" archive of some 40 prior programs on the war on terror, and a treasury of nearly 400 interviews shot since 9/11.

Richly told, "Bush's War" is a political thriller, all the more so for unfolding in the no-nonsense "Frontline" fashion, with the series' signature narrator (Will Lyman) lending his somber off-screen presence.

"Bush's War" gives us heightened understanding of a situation whose anniversary we will almost certainly be marking again and again.

Meanwhile, the film is a pointed reminder of what "Frontline" delivers every week: an in-depth, no-glitz examination of something significant — and without commercial interruptions or pre-break teasers ("Coming up next...!").

"Frontline" this season has addressed a worldwide neglect of the genocide in Darfur, and the growing use of anti-psychotic drugs on children as young as 4. It has reported on the rise of Iraqi neighbor Iran as a challenge and threat to America, and it has looked at life and death through the eyes of Thomas Lynch, an acclaimed writer, poet — and small-town undertaker.

Many TV documentary and magazine shows could be likened to fruit-flavored soda. "Frontline," in somewhat startling contrast, tastes fresh-squeezed. A series like this wouldn't seem a good bet to have lasted a quarter-century. But here it is, in the midst of its 25th season, having thrived journalistically under David Fanning (executive producer since it began in 1983), and currently drawing an average cumulative audience of 4 million viewers each week.

It continues even in the face of politicians' annual threats to slash the budget of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where "Frontline," like most PBS shows, gets a large share of its money. (The federal tax bite for public television — plus public radio — for the average American is less than $2 per year.)


Another threat: the familiar argument that what public television offers isn't necessary in the era of cable TV's multiplicity, especially since PBS can't compete with the quantity and variety of cable's programming.

Last month a New York Times columnist wondered in print whether "the glory days of public television ... are past recapturing?" He took issue with PBS fixtures like "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" (whose 73-year-old anchor, he noted, has been in place since 1975), and with knockoffs from commercial TV like "America's Ballroom Challenge."

But in building its case that PBS is irrelevant or redundant, or both, the column made no mention of "Frontline." This was a conspicuous omission. Whatever the viewer's beef with PBS — and there's lots to complain about — "Frontline" is a series to be recognized, and valued, as unique (and a bargain at two bucks a year).

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23745370/

Best bets tonight

Tue, March 25, 2008

By FREE PRESS NEWS SERVICES

MUST-SEE

Frontline: Bush's War conclusion, 9-11 p.m., PBS. With the quick victory in Iraq, optimism soared. "People were just in pure exhilaration," Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defence, says. Then came the bad news, starting with looting. Retired Gen. Jay Garner, temporarily in charge of post-war Iraq, says he was stunned by plans to fire the Iraqi army and all Baathists. Garner says one colleague warned: "You're going to drive 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground by nightfall." The terrorist attacks soon followed.

http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/Today/Entertai...093911-sun.html

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tvguide/356197_roush24.html

Preview: Frontline Takes on Bush's War
Monday, March 24, 2008
Last updated 6:21 a.m. PT

By MATT ROUSH
TV GUIDE

Consider this a DVR/TiVo/VCR/whatever alert for those distracted by tonight’s Britney sitcom appearance, the return of CSI: Miami or the latest round of Dancing With the Stars. For the next two nights, PBS’s greatest asset, the trenchant and enterprising news magazine Frontline, devotes 4 ½ hours to telling the stories behind the current Iraq conflict in sobering, gripping detail.

Bush’s War is lucid, engrossing, infuriating, timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the conflict and arriving on the heels of another grim day of terrible violence in the region (with sad irony, on Easter Sunday)—also the day when the U.S. death toll reached 4,000. This is the sort of program network-news divisions ought to be devoting their resources to. Which is why we should be so thankful to Frontline for being there all along the way.

Building a narrative from an archive of more than 40 Frontline reports (with updated interviews) dating back to the 9/11 attacks through the planning, selling and execution of this war, Bush’s War might more accurately be called “All the President’s Men—and Condi Rice.” Though there is war footage here, this is really the story of the political infighting that got us into this situation and why the end is not in sight. You could almost lose sight of the war against terrorists in all the scorched-earth tactics in the bureaucratic battles between agencies (CIA vs. FBI vs. Department of Defense vs. State Department) and the power-play turf wars and blame games between the (mostly) men in charge, notably Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld against Colin Powell.

It’s a scandal wrapped in a tragedy, with the first night (the build-up to war) a study in arrogance and the second night (shock and awe followed by insurgency) a chronicle of incompetence.

What’s really sad here is that this won’t be Frontline’s last word on the subject.

'Frontline' looks at the big picture and the soldier's view
Monday, March 24, 2008

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/ledger/ind....xml&coll=1

"Frontline: Bush's War" (Tonight and tomorrow at 9 p.m. on Channel 13) A two-part, four-and-a-half-hour documentary outlining the path we took to get into the war in Iraq, from 9/11 on.

"Frontline: Bad Voodoo's War" (April 1 at 9 p.m. on Channel 13) A one-hour documentary about a National Guard platoon reporting for another deployment in Iraq.

As we pass the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, "Frontline" spends the next two weeks taking both a macro and micro view of our troubled presence there.

Tonight and tomorrow, we get the big picture with "Bush's War," a four-and-a-half-hour narrative of all the steps that President Bush and his inner circle took, from Sept. 11, 2001, on, to initiate the invasion of Iraq, and all the problems that have cropped up since.

Next week, "Frontline" presents the more standard-length "Bad Voodoo's War," a portrait of a single National Guard platoon on its latest long deployment to the region.

"Bush's War" is going to get all the attention (at least, all the attention that any TV documentary, "Frontline" or otherwise, gets these days) because of its length and scope. Between fresh interviews and archival material from more than 40 other "Frontline" films about the war, it's as complete (and depressing) an accounting of how we got into this predicament as TV is capable of creating.

Few of the details presented by veteran "Frontline" producer Michael Kirk are new, but the cumulative effect is devastating. We see hand-written notes by Donald Rumsfeld on the night of 9/11 asking staffers to find a way to link the attacks to Saddam Hussein, and hear Colin Powell and other former White House insiders go into intricate detail about how Powell was deliberately kept out of the loop as the memo on secret military tribunals was being prepared. We hear Richard Clarke talk about being harangued by Scooter Libby for trying to refute Vice President Cheney's story about 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta meeting in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence official, even though the FBI had Atta in Florida at the time of the alleged meeting, and various CIA veterans discuss how George Tenet was blindsided by "the 16 words" about African uranium in a President Bush speech to justify the war.

And yet, while admiring the complexity and achievement of "Bush's War," I couldn't help but be more affected more by "Bad Voodoo's War." Admittedly, that's just the nature of the two films -- one a clinical dissection of foreign policy and inter-agency turf battles, the other an intimate, first-person look at only a handful of soldiers -- but if forced to choose one or the other as the proper fifth anniversary commemoration, I'd likely pick the latter (and not just because it's three and a half hours shorter than the other).

"Bad Voodoo's War" was directed by Deborah Scranton but largely filmed by the soldiers themselves (members of a Tennessee National Guard unit), who were given video cameras for a "virtual embed." For the most part, we focus on two men: Sgt. Toby Nunn, platoon leader and career soldier (the platoon's "Bad Voodoo" nickname comes from an incident that happened to Nunn while he was on a mission in Eastern Europe); and Jason Shaw, who volunteered to go on his third Iraq deployment even though he wasn't initially selected to go with his platoon.

Nunn is level-headed and funny. In one of the film's earliest moments, a subordinate boasts profanely about the damage they'll do to the insurgents once they're deployed, and Nunn, still trying to get his men used to having cameras around, says, "We've gotta watch our cussing. How about, 'We're going to decisively engage and destroy enemy targets and combatants'?"

Shaw, meanwhile, talks of having been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder ("which obviously a lot of people have"), and though he initially volunteers to lend his experience to the newer men who haven't been deployed before, once he arrives in Iraq, he begins calling himself "the sucker who came back."

The platoon's mission this time is convoy security -- or, as Nunn calls it, "convoy survival" -- and none of the men is especially happy to play a role where they can do little but wait to be attacked. Late in the film (but only midway through the year-long deployment), Nunn prepares his men for an especially dangerous mission by suggesting they figure out which leg will be adjacent to the Humvee door and loosely wrap their combat tourniquet around it to save valuable time in the event of an IED explosion.

The men of "Bad Voodoo" seem much less interested in the mission than each other. Shaw calls their continued presence in Iraq "totally pointless" -- "Nothing goes on here, except we blow up," he jokes to the camera at one point. "That's it." -- but thrives on the camaraderie he can't find outside of these life-or-death situations.

In the film's statement moment (and its most poignant), Nunn (who left behind two kids and a pregnant wife) recalls a comrade who died in a fire fight during a previous deployment, tearing up as he thinks of the children the man left behind:

"I couldn't help but think about these two little boys and this little girl that will never really know what their father experienced over there. And I don't mean the harshness. I mean the sweetness: how he cared for his guys, and was always good for a laugh and a great broiled salmon. These are the stories that are important: The guy that actually goes out and does what people can't imagine is just a regular guy. We are people. People forget that."

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com, or by writing him at 1 Star-Ledger Plaza, Newark, N.J. 07102-1200.

Thanks for the heads up.

I'm watching it on line now...well listening really --- not much to see...

I watched it last night. It was an excellent production. I will watch the second part today.

Agreed - I caught the last hour last night and I believe you can watch it all online now if you go to their site.

From the horror of 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq; the truth about WMD to the rise of an insurgency; the scandal of Abu Ghraib to the strategy of the surge -- for seven years, FRONTLINE has revealed the defining stories of the war on terror in meticulous detail, and the political dramas that played out at the highest levels of power and influence.

Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga unfolds in the two-part FRONTLINE special Bush's War. Veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk draws on one of the richest archives in broadcast journalism -- more than 40 FRONTLINE reports on Iraq and the war on terror. Combined with fresh reporting and new interviews, Bush's War will be the definitive documentary analysis of one of the most challenging periods in the nation's history.

"Parts of this history have been told before," Kirk says. "But no one has laid out the entire narrative to reveal in one epic story the scope and detail of how this war began and how it has been fought, both on the ground and deep inside the government."

In the fall of 2001, even as America was waging a war in Afghanistan, another hidden war was being waged inside the administration. Part 1 of Bush's War tells the story of this behind-the-scenes battle over whether Iraq would be the next target in the war on terror.

On one side, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet squared off against Vice President Dick Cheney and his longtime ally, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The battles were over policy -- whether to attack Iraq; the role of Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi; how to treat detainees; whether to seek United Nations resolutions; and the value of intelligence suggesting a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks -- but the conflict was deeply personal.

"Friendships were dashed," Powell's deputy Richard Armitage tells FRONTLINE. As the war within the administration heated up, Armitage and Powell concluded that they were being shut out of key decisions by Cheney and Rumsfeld. "The battle of ideas, you generally come up with the best solution. When somebody hijacks the system, then, just like a hijacked airplane, very often no good comes of it," Armitage adds.

Others inside the administration believe they understand the motivation behind some of the vice president's actions. "I think the vice president felt he kind of looked death in the eye on 9/11," former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke says. "Three thousand Americans died. The building that the vice president used to work in blew up, and people died there. This was a cold slap in the face. This is a different world you're living in now. And the enemy's still out there, and the enemy could come after you. That does cause you to think [about] things differently."

More than anything else, the Iraq war will be the lasting legacy of the Bush presidency. Part 2 of Bush's War examines that war -- beginning with the quick American victory in Iraq, the early mistakes that were made, and then recounting the story of how chaos, looting and violence quickly engulfed the country.

As American forces realized they were unprepared for the looting that followed the invasion, plans for a swift withdrawal of troops were put on hold. With only a few weeks' preparation, American administrator L. Paul Bremer was sent to find a political solution to a rapidly deteriorating situation. Bremer's first moves were to disband the Iraqi military and remove members of Saddam Hussein's party from the government. They were decisions that the original head of reconstruction, Gen. Jay Garner (Ret.), begged Bremer to reconsider at the time. Now they are seen by others as one of the first in a series of missteps that would lead Iraq into a full-blown insurgency.

But Bremer has his defenders: "We believed, Bremer believed, and I think the leadership in Washington believed that it was very important to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that whatever else was going to happen, Saddam and his cronies were not coming back," Walter Slocombe, the national security adviser to Bremer, tells FRONTLINE.

Garner was not the only one on the outside. As senior officials complained about inattention at the top, Gen. Tommy Franks and his deputy, Gen. Michael DeLong -- the generals who had planned the war -- found that decisions were being made without them as well.

"All the recommendations that we were making now in the Phase IV part weren't being taken -- weren't being taken by Bremer or Rumsfeld," DeLong tells FRONTLINE. "That's when Franks said, 'I'm done.' They said, 'Well, you'll be chief of staff of the Army.' He said, 'No, I'm done.'"

What followed is well documented: insurgency, sectarian strife, prisoner abuse and growing casualties. But within the administration, a new battle over strategy was being fought -- this one between a new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The clash between America's top diplomat and its chief defense official would go on for more than two years and be settled only after the Republican loss in the 2006 congressional elections. It was then that the president forced Rumsfeld out, ended his strategy of slow withdrawal and ordered a surge of troops. FRONTLINE goes behind closed doors to tell the most recent chapter in this ongoing story, and asks what Bush will leave for a new U.S. president both in Iraq and in the larger war on terror.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bu...c/synopsis.html

Chief of Staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson has been an outspoken critic of the Bush administration since leaving the State Department in January 2005. In this interview, Wilkerson maintains that Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld operate a "cabal" within the administration to bypass the traditional policy-making channels in order to push through their own agenda. He claims they "flummoxed" the decision-making processes to stifle dissent in the lead-up to war with Iraq and deliberately ignored the president's decision on setting limits to coercive methods of interrogation. This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted on Dec. 13, 2005.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/da.../wilkerson.html

[What was your view of Vice President Dick Cheney when you joined the State Department in the current Bush administration?]

... [M]y appreciation of Dick Cheney at the time was as secretary of defense while I served as special assistant to Colin Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That was a very vivid impression of a secretary of defense who was probably as good an executive as I had seen in the department in my -- at that point -- 20-plus years in the military: a man who made decisions quickly; a man who, if ... you weren't briefing him


[What was your view of Vice President Dick Cheney when you joined the State Department in the current Bush administration?]

... [M]y appreciation of Dick Cheney at the time was as secretary of defense while I served as special assistant to Colin Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That was a very vivid impression of a secretary of defense who was probably as good an executive as I had seen in the department in my -- at that point -- 20-plus years in the military: a man who made decisions quickly; a man who, if ... you weren't briefing him properly, you were gone. If he couldn't get to a decision in 20 minutes or 30 minutes, then you were gone. You weren't doing your job; you weren't preparing adequately. ...

Dick Cheney was a very effective decision maker; he was not the kind of man you want to put your arms around and hug. He evinced a sort of coldness, but he was a good decision maker, and I would have classified him as a very good secretary of defense. ...

[National Security Adviser under George H.W. Bush Brent] Scowcroft said recently in The New Yorker, "I don't recognize my friend Dick Cheney anymore." What do you say?

He knows him far more intimately than I, but I don't recognize him either. He's not the secretary of defense that I saw for three years in the Pentagon. He's a different man.

What happened, sir?

9/11, I assume, and a certain degree of paranoia. I'll give you a good example. ... Carl von Clausewitz is a particular war theorist that I find very appealing and, in most cases, very accurate when he describes both the nature of war and the nature of conflict in general. One of the things that I think you would find agreement between even someone like Sun Tzu, an Asian war theorist, and Clausewitz, a German, is that you must make sure you identify the nature of the conflict you're in. You must. That's absolutely essential. If you misidentify that nature, you're not ever going to get back on the right sheet of music.

So with that as background, here we have [Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, 2001-03] John Yoo, for example, certainly total buy-in by the vice president of the United States, and I suspect total buy-in by the president of the United States also, that this conflict we are now involved in is the equivalent of the conflict we were involved in with the Soviet Union; that is to say that Al Qaeda has the capability to destroy the United States of America, its institutions, its very being, much as a 20,000-plus nuclear-tipped missile [arsenal] had the capability to had we gone to war with the Soviet Union and everyone unleashed his full panoply of weapons. This is ridiculous. This is utterly ridiculous. It begins marching you down in your decisions this road that is full of dangerous and even inept decisions, because we're not in an existential conflict with Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda doesn't even remotely have the capability to bring the United States down. ...

So it's Sunday, Sept. 16, 2001, and the vice president is on Meet the Press, and he talks about the "dark side." ... Did you happen to see that? What did you take it to mean?

No, but I certainly heard about it. And as I just indicated, this dismayed me because it meant, to me at least, as if we were misperceiving the conflict. ... [T]his is a conflict of ideas; it is not a conflict of bombs, bullets and bayonets. ...


I got a briefing as a member of the policy planning staff within a month or two of 9/11 from a very intelligent, hardworking young lady at the Central Intelligence Agency whose specialty was Al Qaeda. ... What she did was summarize everything in a chart, and she showed counterintuitively a pyramid: [At the top] they were that organization that advocated killing men, women, children, Muslims -- it didn't matter. That was their modus operandi. Through that pyramid and gradations in that pyramid, you came down to the base, the base being a billion Muslims, and in that base being a certain number of Muslims who, even though they had no truck for violence, for killing, certainly for killing innocent men, women and children, and certainly not for killing their own kind, nonetheless, as she put it in an anecdote I will never forget, "went into mosques all around the world and put shekels, dinars, dollars in the second box, knowing full well that the second box was not for charity; it was not for the mosque; it was for Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda-like organizations."

I asked her the question; I said, "How many in that billion are doing that?" And she said: "Conservative estimate, 40 million. Liberal estimate, 100 million." And the mathematician in me said: "Oh, God. Sixty or 70 million people are out there; even though they don't believe in violence necessarily, they're supporting Al Qaeda." That's the center of gravity of this war, and you don't get at the center of gravity by killing it or by killing others. You get at that center of gravity by proving to them your ideas: that democracy is the best form of government; freedom is the best human condition; and market economies, open, free trade is the best way to prosper in those systems of governance; and violence and killing people is antithetical to that. That's how you win that conflict. It's a conflict of ideas. You have to capture the hearts and minds of those people who are putting the shekels, dollars, dinars in that second box in mosques all over the world. You don't do that with bombs, bullets and bayonets.

But we weren't interested in all in that. I mean, our first reaction from those first hours was completely anger, fear and revenge.

Afghanistan was clearly understandable. We presented an ultimatum to the Taliban. We said, "Turn over Al Qaeda, or we're going to come get them." They wouldn't, and so we did. ...

Afghanistan was understandable and was a legitimate use of the military instrument to respond to the specific incidents of 9/11 and the reluctance of the Taliban, the denial of the Taliban, in terms of our demands. Iraq, totally different matter, totally different matter -- a diversion from that good start, if you will. ...

[About the decision to go to Iraq], ... I've heard that Secretary Powell basically says at some moment fairly early in the process, "I can see where this train's going, and the best we can do is slow it down, but we are never going to be able to stop it." Is that accurate?

I never heard him use those words, but again, I was working for [State Department Director of Policy Planning] Richard Haass at the time. ... Richard has said -- I believe it was in George Packer's book, The Assassins' Gate: [America in Iraq] -- that he still doesn't know why we went to war.

But he could feel it coming almost from then?

He could certainly feel it coming. ... Richard said he knew very early that the march was on, and it was unstoppable. ...

[Were there two divergent schools of thought on Iraq at that time, with one in the State Department and the other principally in the Defense Department and the vice president's office?]

... [N]ot precisely the way you define it. There is a marked difference now. Again, people are woefully ignorant of this. One of the things the 1947 [National Security] Act attempted to do -- and many would say today did far too well -- was to rectify the imbalance of power between what had become the national military establishment and the State Department. The State Department was far too powerful, and one of the reasons they set up the national military establishment that later became the Department of Defense was to clearly counteract some of the overweening power that the State Department had developed.

[What do you mean "did far too well"? What is the balance of power like today?]

Today, that's gone well beyond their wildest expectations. The Defense Department gets $400 billion-plus [a year]; the State Department gets $30 billion. There is an antipathy on the part of the rest of the government, particularly the Defense Department, towards the State Department because the State Department has no domestic constituency; it has a constituency of foreigners. ... There's a natural antipathy between the State Department and the Defense Department. ...

This is a reverse for me personally when I moved to the State Department. Remember the old axiom about "where you stand depends on where you sit"? Well, not only did I develop a great deal of respect for the foreign service and the people who worked in the State Department, ... but I also began to understand what the State Department had been dealing [with] with regards to the Defense Department, not just in the imbalance of resources, but in what I called the continuing militarization of America's foreign policy. ...

The principal diplomat in each region of the world is not the assistant secretary of state for that region; it's the combatant commander. When the combatant commander for the Pacific goes to see Prime Minister [Junichiro] Koizumi in Tokyo, he carries Marine amphibious forces, carriers, fighter wings and Army divisions with him. The assistant secretary carries nothing but his pen and briefcase. I'll give you three guesses as to who has the most influence. ...

What I came to see at the State Department was what you might call the fruition of the greatest fear perhaps America had ever had with regard to its standing military, and that was "the man on horseback," answered in a very different and ironic way than I would ever thought it would be answered. The man on horseback was not in uniform; the man on horseback was in a business suit.

[Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld?

Yes, the man who came to wield that $400 billion instrument. ... Not only did Rumsfeld further ... the militarization of American foreign policy; he moved the military instrument in ways that led policy and moved the military instrument in ways that, in my view, were detrimental to the very democratic fabric that makes this country what it is, makes this country great.

How much of that is personal, Powell versus Rumsfeld?

I don't think it was personal. I don't think Colin Powell had a hate on for Donald Rumsfeld. What we were doing at the State Department was trying to insist that the diplomatic instrument should be a leading instrument, not a secondary instrument; that the diplomatic instrument could be an effective instrument if it were used properly; and that it could be not only an effective instrument, but a much less expensive instrument, both in terms of real cost -- that is to say dollars expended -- and in terms of ... lives and in terms of credibility around the world. ... And if you're involved in a conflict that is basically a war of ideas, you are degrading your capability to win that conflict considerably.

Meanwhile we have this broad war powers authorization; the "torture memo," the Bybee memo; the Geneva arguments. How do you characterize what was happening there, a slippery slope?

Absolutely a slippery slope. When you take the armed forces of the United States off the gold standard, when you take them off their code of conduct, off the law of war, off their field manual, and at the same time put enormous pressure on them to deliver, you're on worse than a slippery slope; you're starting an avalanche, an avalanche that produces this argument about "torture-lite" and "torture-heavy." [This] is nonsensical to me. Death is "torture-heavy."

When I left the State Department, more than 70 detainees had died while in detention. It's now up to 100. Of that 100, some 27 have been declared officially homicides. The first two I came across were in Bagram [north of Kabul, Afghanistan] in December 2002. The Army coroner declared them homicides; the Army declared them death by natural cause. ...

This is not an isolated bunch of privates doing some things that they shouldn't be doing at Abu Ghraib, as Secretary Rumsfeld has intimated on a number of occasions. This is widespread. It's in Afghanistan; it's in Iraq; it was in Guantanamo. And it all got started by the two things I described: the loosening of the reins, so to speak, the constraints, and the pressure to produce. "I must have intelligence. I must have intelligence." When you do that, you are asking for Pandora's box to open, and you're asking for all kinds of problems, and that's exactly what we got. ...

When you get around to assigning blame, how much do you lay on Rumsfeld and Cheney for this?

... When you see those sorts of things happening, you understand that this is blessed from the highest levels; it's blessed by the vice president of the United States. When you see him lobbying the Congress not to adopt the McCain amendment [prohibiting the torture of prisoners and detainees], you just have to be appalled.

I'm an American citizen, and my vice president is advocating terror. And to hide under this blanket of "No, we're actually just seeking to maintain the privilege of the executive branch" is nonsense. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution says the Congress has the power to make rules and regulations governing the land and naval forces of the United States.

But this is a war, isn't it?

Yes, this is a war that is as bad or worse than the war we were in for many years with the Soviet Union where we faced imminent destruction every day. ... That truly was a threat to our very existence. We didn't torture people then; we didn't torture Russian agents. Well, why are we doing it now in a conflict that is far, far less than the Cold War? ... Because the vice president of the United States wants us to do it.

How powerful is Dick Cheney?

How powerful is the vice president? The most powerful vice president in the history of our country.

And the implications of that?

... I think some of the decisions that have led us to the greatest challenges we now confront -- post-invasion planning for Iraq, for example, which was inept, incompetent; and this decision about deviating from our obligations under international and domestic law with regard to interrogation -- they're colossal failures. So when someone is powerful in the administration and makes decisions with the president witting or not witting, and those decisions turn out to be colossal failures, then people want to know why. ...

I haven't seen this administration do anything except batten down the hatches, man the torpedoes, full speed ahead, and replace [former Cheney Chief of Staff] Scooter Libby with David Addington, who is a Scooter Libby lookalike. That's not fresh blood; that's not new people; that's "I'm right; you're wrong, damn you." ...

Give me a sense of either alliances or orientations of central characters like [former National Security Adviser and current Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice. What were her views in those earliest days post-9/11?

We had a one-word description of the National Security Council, ... and that one word was "dysfunctional." ....

I asked myself many times: "How that could be? How could a woman as competent as Dr. Rice seemed to be -- indeed, Secretary Powell had told me she was a sort of a protégé of his -- [head up an organization that] could be so dysfunctional?" ... If I were making a comment about Condi, I'd say simply she had her eye on the prize, and the prize was a Cabinet position -- and a particular Cabinet position, secretary of state -- and as national security adviser, one works one's ambitions to achieve that position.

I'm not saying that in a pejorative sense. That's the way people work, more by establishing an intimacy with the president than by bringing discipline and balance to a decision-making process, because when you bring discipline and balance to a decision-making process, you oftentimes have to make an enemy of people -- of the vice president, for example; you have to make an enemy of the secretary of defense; and on occasion you may even have to speak truth to power with regard to the president of the United States.

If your main goal is building intimacy with that president and with other members who have major influence on you, ... you don't want to make any of those people angry with you. So when it comes time to discipline the process, when it comes time to make the process work, when it comes time to tolerate dissent and allow balance into the discussions, you don't always side for that discipline and that balance, but you get your job.

What is your view of [former Director of Central Intelligence] George Tenet?

A mystery to me. I spent some of the most intimate hours of my life with George Tenet and John McLaughlin, his DDCI [deputy director of central intelligence]. ... [It's] a mystery to me in the sense that he could be so bamboozled by his own intelligence community and by foreign intelligence communities with whom he was dealing.

I have to go back and look at the record of the agency over which he presided. Let's face it: We missed the fall of the Soviet Union. We missed the 1998 nuclear test in India. We missed the five-year preparation cycle for 9/11. We bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. The CIA has not got a stellar record in the last decade or two. ... But George Tenet presided over this organization for quite a long time, and I sat in the room looking into his eyes, as did the secretary of state, and heard with the firmness that only George could give it -- and I don't mean terminology like "slam dunk," although he was a basketball aficionado and used that kind of terminology a lot, but I mean eyeball-to-eyeball contact between two of the most powerful [men] in the administration, Colin Powell and George Tenet -- and George Tenet assuring Colin Powell that the information he was presenting at the U.N. was ironclad, only to have that same individual call the secretary on more than one occasion in the ensuing months after the presentation and tell him that central pillars of his presentation were indeed false.

Now, do I believe George Tenet knew they were false when he told him that? Absolutely not. I just don't believe it. I refuse to believe it. How did we get to that point? How did our intelligence community get us to that point? How did [Undersecretary of Defense for Policy] Douglas Feith, who clearly politicized intelligence, clearly cherry-picked intelligence, clearly provided some of that cherry-picked intelligence to the vice president of the United States -- how did we combine all of that, plus a good dose of psychological groupthink, to come up with such an abysmal failure in regards to WMD in Iraq? It's a mystery to me, and I will never know the answer.

I am somewhat concerned now. To this point I have maintained that no one in the upper echelons of the leadership of this country spun the intelligence in a way that I would find clearly disturbing as a citizen of this country. I believe they believed what they were saying, that they were fooled, just as I was, just as Colin Powell was.

But I've heard some things lately that are disturbing to me. One of those things is this business about Sheikh al-Libi, who was an Al Qaeda operative in Afghanistan, who was rendered to another country and whose confession [was] then obtained under methods that were certainly not Geneva Convention-blessed methods. [He] gave some information about Baghdad providing chemical and biological training to Al Qaeda operatives that was later recanted, but was at the time [a major piece of evidence in the case for war against Iraq].

Roughly at the time the information was gained, a major dissent was rendered by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Well, I had a DIA representative with me at the CIA, and DIA was plugged into everything we were doing at the CIA, and no one ever, ever, ever mentioned that dissent to me.

Second: [Iraqi defector] Curveball. I am now reading that there was major dissent on Curveball -- Curveball being the source for the biological mobile laboratory which Mr. Tenet presented to the secretary of state as being absolutely firm. If this dissent existed in German intelligence [and] within the American intelligence community, why was it not surfaced during our preparation for the presentation to the U.N.? It was not. I never heard a single word of dissent on that either.

Now, let me tell you what might have happened if we had heard some dissent. Secretary Powell was not reluctant at all to throw things out completely. We threw the meeting between [9/11 hijacker] Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence operatives in Prague out --

Despite the fact that that was Scooter Libby's favorite item?

They tried to get it back in when we threw it out.

When? How?

On more than one occasion. The last occasion I remember vividly was the last rehearsal out at the agency before we relocated to New York [to give the presentation at the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 6, 2003]. [Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs] Steve Hadley ... said, "What happened to the meeting about Mohamed Atta in Prague?" And Secretary [Powell] said: "We took that out, Steve. Don't you remember?" And Steve rather sheepishly hung his head, slid back in his chair and said, "Yes, Mr. Secretary, I do remember."

But we did have qualifying information about the aluminum tubes that were supposed to be centrifuges for a new uranium enhancement program. And when we presented this to Secretary Powell, he became uneasy about it. I tried to explain to him all the different ingredients to this problem that were out there: For example, there were different laboratories that had evaluated the tubes. One laboratory at the Department of Energy had not spun the tubes to sufficient rpm [revolutions per minute] to verify that they could be centrifuges, so obviously, DOE's position was going to be, "Hey, they can't possibly be centrifuges. They must be just shielding for rockets," or whatever.

Over here you had another lab, and they spun it to rpm sufficient to be centrifuges. ... So there were all manner of, shall we say, "different perspectives" on the aluminum tubes. Secretary Powell said, "Fine, I'll qualify it." And check his presentation -- he did. He went with Mr. Tenet's general conclusion that they were -- at least some of them were -- for a nuclear program, and that Saddam was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program with centrifuges. But he said, "I realized there is debate about this out there," and he did qualify that particular part of his argument.

Would we have done that with Curveball? Would we have done that with the connection between Al Qaeda and Baghdad? I can't say, but we never had the opportunity to decide, because we never were presented with those dissents.

How does it happen that the director of central intelligence gets it so wrong?

... My best estimate right now is, one, we did a lot of linear projection. We lost all contact in 1998 after we bombed [targets in Iraq]. We had no one on the ground, ... so we had no visibility. This linear projection would say he had this much anthrax at the end of the inspections, so we just projected and said, "OK, if he had this, he's got this now." Without questioning it, we just linearly projected.

Second, I actually believe now that Saddam Hussein was much smarter in this sort of counterintelligence sense than we gave him credit for. I think he was actually putting disinformation out. First of all, having studied him in the first Gulf War, I knew that his number one concern was purging Iran. His number two concern was his own people. ... In order to deter the Iranians and keep his own people in line, he could not admit he did not have WMDs, so he spoofed us. He knew when the satellite would be over, so he ran out stuff that we could photograph that looked like he still had special weapons.

I looked at the photographs at the CIA with the best analysts the United States has and with the best resolution on those photographs. I looked at photographs, for example, that showed me all the signs of special weapons at a certain day. ... Now, was that just a fabrication, or was Saddam actually trying to use our own satellites to send us signals that he still had WMD? ...

The other thing I mentioned earlier is this groupthink, where even if you dissent, your dissent is a footnote down in small 8 [point] font at the bottom of the page [or] the back of the text. INR [Bureau of Intelligence and Research] at the State Department, for example, had objected and said, "We don't believe that he's reconstituting his nuclear program." They did sign up for the chemical and biological analysis, but they dissented from the nuclear. Well, how many times did that get presented? ...

There was not this clash of ideas; there was not this competition in the intelligence community. There was a mole, and the mole came down and said, "You will believe, and this is the truth, and this is what the DCI [director of central intelligence] is going to present."

Let me give you a really good example, and this comes from one of the analysts at the CIA whom I learned to trust the most because of his professionalism and his expertise. ... He told me a story about how the Iraqis had wanted to buy something from a foreign country, and they had this elaborate network of front companies that did purchasing for them so they could bust sanctions. This was almost anything conventional: artillery rounds, mortar rounds, whatever. So they're out buying something from this country through one of these front companies. Well, the company they're buying it from in this country decides that it will advertise to them that there's something else that they ought to be buying, and this happened to be a software mapping program for the Eastern United States. The Iraqis say: "Nah, we don't want that. We just want what we ordered." So they get what they ordered.

Well, it came back to our intelligence community that the Iraqis were seeking to acquire mapping software of the Eastern United States. Light bulbs go off. Intelligence community says: "Whoa, man. They're talking about UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] that could carry munitions, biological or chemical munitions, for example, and they're looking for mapping software of the Eastern United States. Conclusion: Let's draw the dots together. They're going to put a UAV on a ship or something, sail it up close to the United States, fly the UAV over the United States using that mapping software, and drop chemical or biological munitions on the United States. Whoa." Off they go and brief the vice president on that.

I said to this analyst, "'Well, when the information came in that it wasn't the Iraqis that were even seeking this, [that] it was the company advertising to the Iraqis and the Iraqis didn't want it, was that taken back to the White House?"

"No," he said.

Why not?

I suggest you ask Mr. Tenet that question.

I've talked to people who say he got too close to the president, that they had a personal relationship and that it's hard to bring the bad news to the client.

That's as good an explanation as any I've heard. Maybe that's the reason, for example, President Clinton decided not to have the daily briefings from the DCI. You're committed, and every day that you go, you're committed more. The tendency to be spun yourself without even realizing you're being spun suddenly becomes more pronounced, I would imagine. ...

When I teach this, I'm not going to teach this as a terrible aberration. I'm going to teach this as a decision-making process, set up by the Congress of the United States in conjunction with the president of the United States, ... signed as the National Security Act [of 1947] and amended by other presidents and other congresses as we went forward. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't work. In most cases that it doesn't work, it's when the president decides to do something different than what the law suggests. It's not illegal. Our founding fathers left wide gaps ... between legislative, judicial, executive. But when it leads to failure, presidents have to pay the piper. ...

[What was Dick Cheney's ideological role in the run-up to the war in Iraq?]

It's difficult for me to say. ... Dick Cheney is genuinely concerned about the security of this country; there's no question in my mind about that. He's paranoid about it, I think. And you can say, "Well, the vice president of the United States and the president of the United States should be paranoid about my security," and I probably wouldn't argue it until it starts causing me to do things that violate my own code of conduct, ethics and so forth. Then I'm going to object.

So how did they come to ally themselves [with] these Jacobins who are, above all else, intent on a messianic spread of the American way around the world at the point of the bayonet? And [how did] these ultranationalists, who during the campaign, for example, decried nation building, [start] going about the world slaying monsters and spending billions to do it? How did they come to form this unholy alliance, these Jacobins and these ultranationalists? ...

Right now, I think it was an alliance of convenience, desperation and power -- and the latter being the aphrodisiac. If you can stay in power only by allying yourself with a group that has got the attention of the American public and of the body politic at the moment, then you're going to do that. Then you're going to ride that tiger into whatever conclusion comes about. I think that's essentially what the president did with Iraq, and all of a sudden, he's the most nation-building president in our history.

He's got us in a physical situation which I don't know how we're going to extract ourselves from. We're spending billions of dollars on things that don't bring better education, better health care and other sorely needed things to the American public. He's embarked on probably the largest expansion of the federal bureaucracy of certainly any Republican president and probably any president since FDR, just with the Homeland Security Department. It's clearly questionable whether or not that has really fixed anything, as Katrina so vividly demonstrated. In fact, it may have exacerbated the problems. There's utterly no evidence yet that it has fixed the intelligence community, that it has done anything to stop that string of intelligence failures that [I] elucidated before. So it is a strange alliance indeed, and yet they're all riding it now because it's all they have to ride. ...

[Will we ever know if the administration's intelligence leading to war in Iraq was "stovepiped" up?]

[Did] we ever do get to the bottom of the Tonkin Gulf [incident]? Have we indeed gotten to the bottom of whether or not Mohamed Atta met [with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague]? There are still people who advocate that that meeting took place. ...

But if you are going to make a reasonable attempt to do so, I think you'd have to look at the connections between the people in the CIA who were, shall we say, more of a mind with the vice president, people in the agency, people in the Feith office and people in other areas of the government who were networked, who created this self-generating, self-regulating circle of information flow that nipped through the vice president's office so that when he needed something for a speech or he needed something for a convincing argument in the Oval Office in a one-on-one, he had it.

Well, whether it was accurate or not didn't really seem to matter to the people in the circuit. Now, I have to assume that the vice president, when he latched on to a particular piece of information -- principally through Scooter Libby -- thought it was accurate. Otherwise, I'd have to significantly re-evaluate the vice president. I have to believe he had a predisposition to believe and was seeking information to support that predisposition. People fed that information to him, and he believed the information he was getting was accurate.

[Tell me about Cheney's network. How far does his reach extend?]

His network is positioned almost everywhere in the government that's important. It was marvelous to watch his network work. ... In the levels of meetings that were in the statutory process -- policy-coordinating committee meetings, ... and then the principals' meeting where only the secretary attended, or sometimes a plus-one, like on the detainee-abuse issues or the Geneva [Convention] issues -- so if you look at those processes, Cheney attended them all through his surrogates. ...

His people attended, and rarely did they ever say anything; [they] just took good notes so that they could take it back and flummox the process wherever the vice president elected to flummox the process. ... Their modus operandi most of the time was to just be quiet, gather information and go back and tell the big guy. Then the big guy weighed in with the even bigger guy -- the president -- and generally speaking, got what he wanted.

When they had a policy -- for example, like Iran, where we couldn't even produce a presidential decision directive over the entire four years that I was in the State Department -- that was the vice president's desire. No bilateral relations with Iran, no negotiations, no talks, and oh, by the way, no support for the EU-3 [Britain, France and Germany] or any European or other activity that's going to talk to Tehran -- that was the vice president's position. So in this case, all he had to do was use that dysfunctional statutory process to mask the fact that the decision had already been made. It was a decision by default. You couldn't make a decision in the statutory process because everybody was always fighting, and so you got what [he] wanted, which was no decision.

This is what you meant when you called them a "cabal"?

Yes, because it uses the statutory process in which the entire bureaucracy has a voice to camouflage the real decision-making process, wherein the decisions are being made by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for certain key issues -- most often with the knowledge of the president, which is fine. The president discards the bureaucracy and has his two buds make his decisions for him. That's fine if the president wants to do it that way.

But when the president is not witting of that alternative process, I have problems with it, and it's my critique of those two decisions: the post-invasion planning for Iraq and the decision to allow the military to participate in this other-than-Geneva interrogation methods. I am not at all sure the president was witting of -- in fact, I am quite confident that he was not witting of -- through his own neglect or through nefariousness, I don't know. But nonetheless, the decisions got executed, and they have been abject failures, and that's why I'm focused on them.

The relationship between Cheney and Rumsfeld -- assess it for me.

The way I look at it, they are a symbiotic pair, and they've been together for a long time, and sometimes the one is the mentor and the other is the mentee, sometimes vice versa. ...

It's interesting to watch Rumsfeld as he attempts to distance himself from a lot of the decision making that actually occurred on his and Dick Cheney's initiative. Interesting to see Donald Rumsfeld in 2002 speaking to an issue and then Donald Rumsfeld today speaking to an issue. You want to ask yourself: "My God, can't the American people see? Don't they understand the dissembling that's going on here, the outright lying that's going on here? 'It's not an insurgency'; 'No, it is an insurgency.' 'They're not guerrillas'; 'Oh, they are guerrillas.'" It's quite palpable, and you wonder sometimes if our 24/7 news cycle, nine-second soundbite, doesn't inure us to any kind of real introspection and analysis of what's actually going on. We believe the second we hear it, and it's gone, and no one ever goes back to check what was said before, what was done before.

For example, the Pentagon is trying to beat McCain to his [anti-torture] initiative. The Pentagon is trying to get the new Army field manual out before McCain gets his legislation done. If you're an optimist, you can say Donald Rumsfeld realizes the tragic mistake he made in authorizing some of these things and he's trying to correct them. If you're the realist like I am, you realize that this is a premier bureaucratic infighter who's trying to cover his ass.

Just like his memo, his memo which he cites now, saying, "I was not really asked about this war. I mean, the president and the vice president knew my views, but I never really was asked about it" -- he's distancing himself even from the fact that we went to war in Iraq. And then he talks about the memo: "I drew up a memo with all manner of points about how this --" Well, he drew up a memo on everything. He could pull a memo out of his ass to cover any contingency. ... This is the supreme bureaucrat writing dozens of memos that he can pull out at any particular time and cite as his objection to what turned out to be a failure. This man is the "quintessential bureaucratic entrepreneur," to use Richard Haass' felicitous phrase.

Do you ever feel that it's Dick Cheney's invisible hand that is weighing in on the issues of coercive interrogation and torture?

Absolutely. Absolutely. From my perspective, in looking at all the documentation by the secretary's order I put together following the Abu Ghraib revelations, the debate boiled down to, on the one side, the Yoos, the Addingtons, the [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzaleses, the [White House Counsel Timothy] Flanigans, the Cheneys. The president of the United States had ultimate authority, period. He could do in a national emergency anything that he needed to do, and that what he needed to do was take the gloves off and go on the "dark side."

On the other side was Colin Powell; at times Dr. Rice; Will Taft, Colin Powell's lawyer; the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and later, as they discovered what was going on, the military lawyers, the JAGs and so forth. What they saw the president do in the formal process, the statutory process, confronted with this passionate debate, was make a compromise as so many presidents have done throughout our history. He decided: "Yes, it was a new kind of conflict; yes, the Taliban and Al Qaeda were the new kind of detainee. But the Geneva Convention and American political and cultural values would still be adhered to in the treatment of all detainees."

Now, what that turned out to be in execution was that guys over on the extreme right side of the debate said, "Well, we heard the president say that, but we're going to go and implement what we were going to do anyway."

Now, many of my critics have said, "No, the president knew they were going to do that; that's the reason he put that conditional clause in there -- 'consistent with military necessity' -- when he published the memorandum that codified that decision." "Consistent with military necessity" doesn't mean that you can go out and torture people. He would have said "consistent with national security, consistent with the needs of the global war on terror," or something like that.

Military necessity means that if I'm detaining you, and you threaten me or my buddies, I can [pistol-whip] you; I can even shoot you. I'm not going to kill you, but I can. It doesn't mean that I can hang you by your shackles in a dungeon in Bagram [Air Base in Afghanistan], subject you to 50-degree temperature day after day after day, fail to feed you except the bare minimum to live, introduce your body to hypothermia and then beat the crap out of you and kill you, which clearly happened on Dec. 10, 2002, in Bagram to two detainees and apparently has happened to a number of others. That's not what that means.

So I answer my critics by saying, "Well, then the president really didn't know what he was doing, because these guys went out and implemented not a compromise, but what they had argued for in the first place." And the CIA renditions and the CIA treatment and use of torture and so forth -- it just amplifies my feeling 100 percent. If the president thought that his memorandum covered that sort of activity anyway, why would he sign a [presidential] finding to cover the CIA's ass? If the memorandum that he published covered everybody, why would he feel like he needed a separate one for the CIA? ...

Why did Secretary Powell participate in the U.N. presentation? Why did he put his the hard-won career capital on the line?

Best ask him that question.

But you must have a guess.

No, I don't. I wish I did. I suppose for the same reason that I took his orders and went over to the agency and cloistered myself away and got him ready for it and ultimately, as I've said before, creating the lowest point in my professional career: loyalty.

Let me put it this way. There were times in this administration where I felt with regard to the national security establishment that Colin Powell was the only sane member of the administration. Under those kinds of circumstances, you don't want leave. ... You want to stay and do damage control.

I wrote a memo to the secretary either late '03 or early '04, and I said, "Mr. Secretary, your legacy is going to be damage control."

What do you mean?

"You were the one who reached underneath the U.S.-German relationship to [German Foreign Minister] Joschka Fischer when [Chancellor Gerhard] Schroder and Bush couldn't even talk to each other hardly, and you kept the relationship alive," ... a situation that saw Joschka Fischer and Colin Powell, who clearly understood the importance of this relationship, doing everything in their power -- telephone calls every day, meetings -- to keep the relationship solid, even though at the top it looked like it was falling apart.

Damage control with the French when Donald Rumsfeld was doing everything in his power to punish the French, like prohibiting the commandant of the Marine Corps from going to a meeting with his contemporary in France, a meeting that had been attended for years, simply to stick his finger in the eye of the French. ... The most effective multidimensional counterterrorism center is in France, and here we have the secretary of defense sticking his finger at every opportunity in the eye of the French, and here we have the secretary of state keeping the relationship solid so that we can use that relationship to fight terror, the real problem.

Our relations with the Europeans would be significantly more frayed than even they are now if it hadn't been for Colin Powell working behind the scenes to keep those relations on at least a workable level, fairly stable.

When Tenet and others begin to call and say, "You know what? The al-Libi information was coerced," how do you take the bad news?

Well, the secretary would come through my door at least once a day, sometimes five or six times a day. Sometimes he'd sit down; sometimes he wouldn't. Sometimes he'd just unburden himself, and other times we'd actually talk seriously about an issue. I remember these scenes where he would come through my door, and he would say, "Well, George just called and took another pillar out; another substantial aspect of my presentation is gone."

How did he feel about that?

Well, he took it like a soldier, ... but it was a blow to me. I wrote out my resignation. I put it in my center drawer, typed it myself. I wouldn't even make my staff assistant type it. "Dear President Bush, I've come to the point in my service where I no longer can serve, given the nature of your foreign policy and so forth. Therefore, I respectfully submit my resignation." Once a week or so, I would take it out and look at it, fold it back up carefully and put it back in my center drawer, never having the intestinal fortitude to submit it. I won't speak for Colin Powell, but I'll tell you it really affected me. ...