The Bush Doctrine &
The 9/11 Commission Report:
Both Authored by
Philip Zelikow
By David Ray
Griffin
04/10/08 "ICH
"
-- - Thanks to the interview of Sarah Palin by Charles
Gibson of ABC News on September 11, the “Bush Doctrine” has
become part of American political discourse much more fully
than it was before. Thanks to that interview and the
commentary that followed, Governor Palin and millions of
other Americans learned of the existence and meaning of this
fateful doctrine---fateful because, as New York Times
reporter Philip Shenon has pointed out, it was used to
“justify a preemptive strike on Iraq.”
Thus far, however, the
commentary following that interview has not brought out the
fact that the document in which the Bush Doctrine was first
fully articulated---the 2002 version of
The
National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS
2002) [pdf]---was written by the same person who was primarily
responsible for the 9/11 Commission’s report: its executive
director, Philip Zelikow.
This fact constituted
an enormous conflict of interest that should, at the very
least, keep Americans from referring to the 9/11 Commission
as a model to be emulated---as did John McCain this
September 15 in suggesting that “a 9/11-type commission”
should be set up to study the causes of the recent financial
crisis. As Shenon shows in his 2008 book, The Commission:
The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation,
Zelikow’s authorship of NSS 2002, in conjunction with his
close relationship to the Bush White House that this
authorship illustrated, means that when the 9/11 Commission
was formed in 2003, he should never have been chosen to be
its executive director.
In the first part of
this essay, I discuss the Bush Doctrine as articulated in
NSS 2002. In the second part, I discuss Zelikow’s authorship
of this document. In the third part, I discuss how he, in
spite of this authorship, became the Commission’s executive
director, and why this was problematic for the credibility
of The 9/11 Commission Report.
The Bush Doctrine
According to
international law as reflected in the charter of the United
Nations, a preemptive war is legal in only one situation: if
a country has certain knowledge that an attack by another
country is imminent---too imminent for the matter to be
taken to the UN Security Council.
Preemptive war,
thus defined, is to be distinguished from “preventive war,”
in which a country, fearing that another country may some
time in the future become strong enough to attack it,
attacks that country in order to prevent that possibility.
Such wars are illegal under international law. Preventive
wars, in fact, belong under the category of unprovoked wars,
which were declared at the Nuremburg trials to constitute
the “supreme international crime.”
This traditional
distinction between “preventive” and “preemptive” war
creates a terminological problem, because preventive war,
being illegal, is worse than preemptive war, and yet to most
ears “preemption” sounds worse than “prevention.” As a
result, many people speak of “preemptive war” when they
really mean preventive war. To avoid any confusion, I employ
the term “preemptive-preventive war” for what has
traditionally been known as preventive war.
People known as
neoconservatives (or simply neocons), the most powerful
member of whom has been Dick Cheney, did not like the idea
that America’s use of military power could be constrained by
the prohibition against preemptive-preventive war. In 1992,
Cheney, in his last year as secretary of defense, had Paul
Wolfowitz (the undersecretary of defense for policy) and
Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby write the Defense Planning Guidance
of 1992, which said that the United States should use force
to “preempt” and “preclude threats.”
In 1997, William Kristol founded a neocon think tank called
the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
In 1998, a letter signed by 18 members of PNAC---including
Kristol, Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Donald
Rumsfeld, and James Woolsey---urged President Clinton to
“undertake military action” to eliminate “the possibility
that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of
mass destruction.”
Only after 9/11,
however, were the neocons able to turn their wish to leave
international law behind into official US policy. As Stephen
Sniegoski wrote, “it was only the traumatic effects of the
9/11 terrorism that enabled the agenda of the neocons to
become the policy of the United States of America.”
Andrew Bacevich likewise wrote: “The events of 9/11 provided
the tailor-made opportunity to break free of the fetters
restricting the exercise of American power.”
The idea of
preemptive-preventive war, which came to be known as the
“Bush doctrine,” was first clearly expressed in the
president’s address at West Point in June 2002, when the
administration began preparing the American people for the
attack on Iraq. Having stated that, in relation to “new
threats,” deterrence “means nothing” and containment is “not
possible,” Bush dismissed preemption as traditionally
understood, saying: “If we wait for threats to fully
materialize, we will have waited too long.” Then, using the
language of preemption while meaning preemptive-prevention,
he said that America’s security “will require all Americans
. . . to be ready for preemptive action.”
Having been
sketched in June 2002, the Bush Doctrine was first fully
laid out that September in NSS 2002. This document’s
covering letter, speaking of “our enemies’ efforts to
acquire dangerous technologies,” declares that America will,
in self-defense, “act against such emerging threats before
they are fully formed.”
Then the document itself, saying that “our best defense is a
good offense,” states:
“Given the goals
of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no
longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past.
The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy
of today's threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that
could be caused by our adversaries' choice of weapons, do
not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike
first.”
In justifying this
change of doctrine, NSS 2002 argues that the United States
must “adapt” the traditional doctrine of preemption, long
recognized as a right, to the new situation, thereby turning
it into a right of anticipatory (preventive) preemption:
“For centuries,
international law recognized that nations need not suffer an
attack before they can lawfully take action to defend
themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of
attack. . . . We must adapt the concept of imminent threat
to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. .
. . The United States has long maintained the option of
preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our
national security. The greater the threat, . . . the more
compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend
ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and
place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such
hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if
necessary, act preemptively.”
With this argument,
NSS 2002 tried to suggest that, since this doctrine of
preventive preemption simply involved adapting a
traditionally recognized right to a new situation, it
brought about no great change. But it did. According to the
traditional doctrine, one needed certain evidence that an
attack from the other country was imminent. According to the
Bush Doctrine, by contrast, the United States can attack
another country “even if uncertainty remains” and even if
the United States knows that the threat from the other
country is not yet “fully formed.”
The novelty
here, to be sure, involves doctrine more than practice. The
United States has in fact attacked several countries that
presented no imminent military threat. But it always
portrayed these attacks in such a way that they could appear
to comport with international law---for example, by
claiming, before attacking North Vietnam, that it had
attacked a US ship in the Tonkin Gulf. “Never before,”
however---point out Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, who
call themselves Reagan conservatives---“had any president
set out a formal national strategy doctrine that
included [preventive] preemption.”
This
unprecedented doctrine was, as we have seen, one that
neocons had long desired. Indeed, neocon Max Boot described
NSS 2002 as a “quintessentially neo-conservative document.”
And, as we have also seen, the adoption of this doctrine was
first made possible by the 9/11 attacks. Halper and Clarke
themselves say, in fact, that 9/11 allowed the “preexisting
ideological agenda” of the neoconservatives to be “taken off
the shelf . . . and relabeled as the response to
terror.”
Zelikow and NSS 2002
The 9/11 attacks, we
have seen, allowed the Bush-Cheney administration to adopt
the doctrine of preemptive-preventive war, which the neocons
in the administration---most prominently Cheney
himself---had long desired. One would assume, therefore,
that the 9/11 Commission would not have been run by someone
who helped formulate this doctrine, because the Commission
should have investigated, among other things, whether the
Bush-Cheney administration might have had anything to gain
from 9/11 attacks---whether they, in other words, might have
had a motive for orchestrating or at least deliberately
allowing the attacks. Amazing as it may seem, however,
Philip Zelikow, who directed the 9/11 Commission and was the
primary author of its final report, had also been the
primary author of NSS 2002.
Lying behind Zelikow’s
authorship of NSS 2002 was the fact that he was close, both
personally and ideologically, to Condoleezza Rice, who as
National Security Advisor to President Bush had the task of
creating this document. Zelikow had worked with Rice in the
National Security Council during the Bush I presidency.
Then, when the Republicans were out of power during the
Clinton years, Zelikow and Rice co-authored a book together.
Finally, when she was appointed National Security Advisor to
Bush II, she brought on Zelikow to help with the transition
to the new National Security Council. Given that long
relationship, Zelikow evidently came to mind when Rice found
the first draft of NSS unsatisfactory.
According to
James Mann in Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s
War Cabinet, this first draft had been produced by
Richard Haass, who was the director of policy planning under
Colin Powell in the State Department.
Although this draft by Haass is evidently not publicly
available, an insight into what it contained might be
provided by an address Haass had given in 2000 entitled
“Imperial America.”
While Haass
called on Americans to “re-conceive their global role from
one of a traditional nation-state to an imperial power,” his
foreign policy suggestions were very different from those of
the neocons. Saying that “primacy is not to be confused with
hegemony” and that “[a]n effort to assert U.S. hegemony is .
. . bound to fail,” he called for acceptance of the fact
that the world in coming decades “will be a world more
multipolar than the present one.” Also, insisting that “[a]n
imperial foreign policy is not to be confused with
imperialism,” which involves exploitation, he stated that
“imperial America is not to be confused with either
hegemonic America or unilateral America.” In the new world
order that he envisaged, “The United States would need to
relinquish some freedom of action,” which would mean that it
“would be more difficult to carry out preventive or
preemptive strikes on suspect military facilities.” He
suggested, moreover, that “[c]oercion and the use of force
would normally be a last resort.” The United States would
instead rely primarily on “persuasion,” “consultation,” and
“global institutions,” especially the UN Security Council.
In any case,
whatever the exact nature of the draft for NSS 2002 that
Haass produced, Rice, after seeing it, wanted “something
bolder,” Mann reports. Deciding that the document should be
“completely rewritten,” she “turned the writing over to her
old colleague . . . Philip Zelikow.”
Given the
hawkish tone of the resulting NSS 2002, we might assume that
Zelikow was simply taking dictation from Cheney, Rumsfeld,
or Wolfowitz. According to Mann, however, “the hawks in the
Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney’s office hadn’t been
closely involved, even though the document incorporated many
of their key ideas. They had left the details and the
drafting in the hands of Rice and Zelikow, along with Rice’s
deputy, Stephen Hadley.”
It would seem,
therefore, that we can take this “quintessentially
neo-conservative document,” which used 9/11 to justify
exempting the United States from international law, as
reflecting Zelikow’s own thinking. This means that, besides
being aligned with the Bush-Cheney White House personally
(by virtue primarily of his friendship with Rice) and
structurally (by virtue of helping her set up the new NSC),
he was also closely aligned ideologically with Cheney and
other neocons in the administration.
Such a person
obviously should not have been put in charge of the 9/11
Commission, given the fact that one of the main questions it
should have investigated was whether the Bush-Cheney
administration had any responsibility for the 9/11 attacks,
whether through incompetence or complicity. Pursuing the
possibility of complicity in particular would have required
the Commission to ask whether the administration would have
had motives for wanting the attacks. Given the fact that
Zelikow had authored the document that provided the doctrine
of preemptive-preventive warfare desired by leading members
of this administration, he would have been one of the worst
possible choices to lead such an investigation.
The story of how
Zelikow was, nevertheless, chosen to be the executive
director has been told by Philip Shenon in The Commission.
Zelikow and the
9/11 Commission
In their preface to
The 9/11 Commission Report, Thomas Kean and Lee
Hamilton, the Commission’s chair and vice chair,
respectively, said that the Commission “sought to be
independent, impartial, thorough, and nonpartisan.” In light
of the fact that the 9/11 attacks had occurred during the
watch of the Bush-Cheney administration, being “independent”
and “impartial” would have meant, above all, being fully
independent of this administration.
With Zelikow as its
executive director, the 9/11 Commission could have been
independent of the Bush-Cheney administration only if the
executive director’s role was merely that of a facilitator,
meaning a person who did not influence either the
Commission’s research or the content of its final report.
Some people, in hearing Zelikow described as the 9/11
Commission’s “executive director,” may assume that he had
that kind of role. As Shenon has shown, however, nothing
could be further from the truth. Zelikow ran the Commission
and took charge of the writing of its final report.
With
regard to the work of the Commission, Zelikow sought, and
largely achieved, total control. He achieved this control
through several means.
First,
the work of the Commission was done not by Kean, Hamilton,
and the other commissioners who, by virtue of appearing on
television during the Commission’s open hearings, became the
public face of the Commission. The work, instead, was done
by the 80-some staff members.
Second, Shenon points out, these staff members worked
directly under Zelikow: “Zelikow had insisted that there be
a single, nonpartisan staff.” This meant that none of the
commissioners would “have a staff member of their own,
typical on these sorts of independent commissions.” Zelikow
thereby prevented “any of the commissioners from striking
out on their own in the investigation.”
Third, none of the commissioners, including Kean and
Hamilton, were given offices in the K Street office building
used by the Commission’s staff. As a result, “most of the
commissioners rarely visited K Street. Zelikow was in
charge.”
Fourth, even though the Commission would not have existed
had it not been for the efforts of the families of the 9/11
victims, “the families were not allowed into the
commission’s offices because they did not have security
clearances.”
Fifth, Zelikow made it clear to the staff members that they
worked for him, not for the commissioners. He even prevented
direct contact between the staff and the commissioners as
much as possible. “If information gathered by the staff was
to be passed to the commissioners, it would have to go
through Zelikow.”
Although the commissioners forced Zelikow to rescind his
most extreme order of this nature---that the staff members
were not even to return phone calls from the commissioners
without his permission---he
largely, Shenon reports, achieved his goal: “Zelikow’s
micromanagement meant that the staff had little, if any,
contact with the ten commissioners; all information was
funneled through Zelikow, and he decided how it would be
shared elsewhere.”
Indeed, Shenon says, Zelikow insisted “that every scrap of
secret evidence gathered by the staff be shared with him
before anyone else; he then controlled how and if the
evidence was shared elsewhere.”
Although the fact that the 9/11 Commission was controlled by
someone who was essentially a member of the Bush-Cheney
White House was bad enough, even more contrary to the
Commission’s alleged independence was the fact that Zelikow
had determined its central conclusions in advance. In their
2006 book, Without Precedent, which is subtitled
The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, Kean and
Hamilton claimed that, unlike conspiracy theorists, they
started with the relevant facts, not with a conclusion: they
“were not setting out to advocate one theory or
interpretation of 9/11 versus another.”
They admitted, however, that after Zelikow divided the staff
into various teams and told them what to investigate, he
told team 1A to “tell the story of al Qaeda’s most
successful operation---the 9/11 attacks.”
So, the question that most Americans probably assume to have
been one of the 9/11 Commission’s main questions---“Who was
responsible for the 9/11 attacks?”---was not asked. The
Bush-Cheney administration’s theory was simply presupposed
from the outset.
The fact that the Commission’s conclusion had been
predetermined was made even clearer by Kean and Hamilton’s
admission that an outline of the final report was prepared
in advance by Zelikow and his former professor Ernest May
(with whom he had previously coauthored a book).
Shenon revealed more about this startling fact. Pointing out
that Zelikow and May had prepared this outline secretly,
Shenon wrote: “By March 2003, with the commission’s staff
barely in place, the two men had already prepared a detailed
outline, complete with ‘chapter headings, subheadings, and
sub-subheadings.’” When Zelikow shared this document with
Kean and Hamilton, they realized that the staff, if they
learned about it, would know that they were doing research
for a predetermined conclusion.
And so the four men agreed upon a conspiracy of silence. In
Shenon’s words:
“It
should be kept secret from the rest of the staff, they all
decided. May said that he and Zelikow agreed that the
outline should be ‘treated as if it were the most classified
document the commission possessed.’ Zelikow . . . labeled it
‘Commission Sensitive,’ putting those words at the top and
bottom of each page.”
The
work of the 9/11 Commission began, accordingly, with Kean
and Hamilton conspiring with Zelikow and May to conceal from
the Commission’s staff members the fact that their
investigative work would largely be limited to filling in
the details of conclusions that had been reached before any
investigations had begun.
When the staff did finally learn about this outline a year
later (in April 2004), some of them began circulating a
two-page parody entitled “The Warren Commission
Report--Preemptive Outline.” One of its chapter headings
was: “Single Bullet: We Haven’t Seen the Evidence Yet. But
Really. We’re Sure.”
The point, of course, was that the crucial chapter of
Zelikow and May’s outline could have been headed: “Osama bin
Laden and al-Qaeda: We Haven’t Seen the Evidence yet. But
Really. We’re Sure.”
Besides controlling the Commission’s work and predetermining
its conclusions, Zelikow also, Shenon says, largely
“controlled what the final report would say.”
He could exert this control because, as Ernest May reported,
although the first draft of each chapter was written by one
of the investigative teams, Zelikow headed up a team in the
front office that revised these drafts.
Indeed, Shenon adds, “Zelikow rewrote virtually everything
that was handed to him---usually top to bottom.”
Given
the control exerted by Zelikow over the investigative work
of the 9/11 Commission and its final product, it is not
inaccurate to think of the report of the 9/11 Commission as
the Zelikow Report.
In light of the
foreseeable fact that the executive director of the 9/11
Commission would be able to exert such control over its work
and final product, how could Kean and Hamilton, knowing that
the Commission needed to be---or at least appear to
be---independent of the Bush administration, have chosen
Zelikow for this position? Did they not fear that his
personal, structural, and ideological closeness to the
Bush-Cheney administration could easily lead him to be more
interested in protecting it from blame than in discovering
and publishing the truth about how the 9/11 attacks were
able to succeed? That this would not have been an
unreasonable fear is shown by the fact that many members of
the
Commission’s
staff, Shenon reports, said that Zelikow’s conflicts of
interest resulted in a “pattern of partisan moves intended
to protect the White House.”
At least part of the
answer as to how Zelikow became the executive director,
Shenon reveals, is that Zelikow, in applying for the
position, concealed some of his conflicts of interest from
Kean and Hamilton.
The résumé he
gave them mentioned the book he had co-authored with Rice
and his appointment to the White House intelligence advisory
board---two conflicts of interest that Kean and Hamilton
deemed “not insurmountable.”
But Zelikow’s
résumé failed to mention some other problems---most
crucially his authorship of NSS 2002. Given the fact that
this document had been used to “justify a preemptive strike
on Iraq,” as Shenon says, it would have been in Zelikow’s
interest “to use the commission to try to bolster the
administration’s argument for war---a war that he had helped
make possible.”
And in fact, Shenon points out, Zelikow did try to use it
for just this purpose, even trying to insert statements into
the final report connecting al-Qaeda to Iraq (this being one
of few times that Zelikow did not get his way).
Zelikow was also
dishonest with the Commission in another way, Shenon
reports. Although “Zelikow had promised the commissioners he
would cut off all unnecessary contact with senior Bush
administration officials to avoid any appearance of conflict
of interest,” he had continuing contacts with both Karl Rove
and Condoleezza Rice. “More than once, [the Commission’s
executive secretary] had been asked to arrange a gate pass
so Zelikow could enter the White House to visit the national
security adviser in her offices in the West Wing.”
The secretary’s logs also revealed that Rove---who was the
White House’s “quarterback for dealing with the Commission”
(according to Republican member of the 9/11 Commission John
Lehman)--- called the office “looking for Philip” four times
in 2003, after which, she said, Zelikow ordered her to quit
keeping logs of his contacts with the White House.
Implications for
The 9/11 Commission Report
Shenon’s revelations
of Zelikow’s close and ongoing relationship with the White
House, his authorship of NSS 2002, and his duplicity should
make people, at the very least, suspect that The 9/11
Commission Report is less of a truth-seeking than a
political document, designed to protect the Bush-Cheney
administration.
However, as helpful as
Shenon’s book is, it fails to mention an even more serious
conflict of interest created by Zelikow’s authorship of NSS
2002: If the Bush-Cheney White House enabled the 9/11
attacks in order to reap foreseeable benefits---such as the
Bush Doctrine and carte blanche to attack Iraq (with
its enormous oil reserves) and Afghanistan (through which
the administration wanted to enable the construction of an
oil-and-gas pipeline)---it would have been in Zelikow’s
interest to cover up this fact.
In my 2005 book,
The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions,
I have provided abundant evidence that this is indeed what
he did. In my most recent book, The New Pearl Harbor
Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé, I have
pointed out---in what must be one of the longest footnotes
of all time---that
Shenon, while revealing many problematic facts about
Zelikow’s behavior, failed to mention any of the ways in
which the Zelikow Report used dishonesty to support the
Bush-Cheney administration’s implausible interpretation of
9/11, according to which the attacks were orchestrated and
carried out solely by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
David Ray Griffin
is Professor Emeritus at Claremont School of Theology and
Claremont Graduate University in California. He has
published 34 books, including seven about 9/11, most
recently The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up,
and the Exposé (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008), from which
the present essay has been drawn.
