"Dick Cheney in handcuffs? That would make for a wonderful campaign poster, Carl!"
"Wouldn't it? I gather the Special Prosecutor is an ambitious young fellow and likes to see his name in the paper. I want you to call John Ashcroft and ask to meet with him - I'll back you - and let's see if you can't be brought up to speed on this. Just remember, you can't even tell your dog about this, not until it comes out. Justice is going to handle this, not you and me. We are innocence personified."
"I'll be damned. I'd like to see that arrogant prick in handcuffs, too." John smiled at that and headed back to his office, to start going through The Tripartite Investigation Report on the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. We were labeling it The Tripartite Report. The Three Amigos name was to be buried as 'inappropriate'; they were now The Tripartite Commission. It would make fascinating reading, if you didn't end up throwing up first. It was not America's finest hour.
The Special Joint Intelligence Committee officially met for the first time two days later, on Wednesday, February 13. The Chairman was Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who was the Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Vice Chairman was his Republican counterpart from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, also from Florida. They spent the entire day swearing themselves in and speechifying for the cameras and fiddling with procedure, and then adjourned in time to get on camera for the evening news. There were promises of bipartisan cooperation and transparency and then they all held hands and sang Kumbaya! It was wonderful.
That was perhaps too cynical a view. The reality was that while Congress as a whole was venal and self-absorbed, more than a few Congressmen and Senators were fairly honest and dedicated, and simply trapped in the system. Every once in a while they could draw together in mutual outrage and get something accomplished, and this was probably one of those times. If we played it smart, we could manipulate them appropriately.
That began Thursday morning. As soon as they opened their proceedings, Graham and Goss called for a vote requesting the White House to provide any and all information it possessed on the 9-11 attacks. The vote passed unanimously. On cue, there was a knock on the door, and the Three Amigos marched in, each of them carrying a copy of the Tripartite Report, with a flunky behind them pushing a cart with additional copies. The report was actually two parts, with a summary section that was all anybody was actually going to read, and a much larger addendum, the size of the Manhattan telephone book. The Three Amigos were sworn in, they each read a statement that had been prepared jointly, and the session was adjourned so everyone could review the materials provided.
The result was predictable. We had written the summary report with an eye towards television, with a fair bit of hyperbole and some phrases that would be great as sound bites. Congress, no matter what they swore to keep secret, could be counted on to leak like a sieve. Every network had received copies in plenty of time for the nightly broadcast, and it made for a compelling lead segment. Phrases such as 'false and misleading' and 'negligence, malfeasance, and intimidation' made their way into the bullet points. Ari made a few pro forma remarks about how we couldn't comment on the ongoing investigation, and then referred a few questions to the Justice Department for their response.
By Friday it had gone ballistic! The Addendum had been examined, and even though some names and dates were redacted, there was plenty of damning evidence. Justice had issued a statement that they couldn't issue a statement about an ongoing investigation, and then issued a statement that the Attorney General had appointed a Special Prosecutor, who had been working with the Tripartite Commission to determine if actionable offenses had occurred. By Sunday morning, the press was baying at the moon, and anybody named in the report, good or bad, had a microphone and a camera in their face.
The really amazing part? It was all true! Our intelligence agencies really had fucked up by the numbers, all across the board. Cheney and his bunch really had been gaming the system. We could sit there and look outraged and angry, and point fingers, and otherwise raise a righteous hoo-raw. As long as nobody overreached – on our side! – we were winners.
And yet there was a bittersweet aspect to all of this. John Boehner asked me if I was enjoying the destruction of these people. Was it really necessary to rip them to shreds on national television? Did I realize there was going to be a pushback, a righteous comeuppance somewhere down the road? No good deed goes unpunished, and what I was doing to the neocons was going to have consequences.
"John, believe me, I take no pleasure from this, but what would have been the consequences if we lied to the American public and killed off their children in a war we didn't need to fight? That's what they want, you know. John, there are an awful lot of people out there who think that war is some sort of high tech video game, and that if we don't like what is happening, we can push the reset button and start over again. It's not! That was the thinking that got us into Viet Nam, and we spent ten years there and lost fifty thousand lives, and our entire generation is still dealing with the aftermath. If I have to stomp the neocons into the ground to prevent that, then I will pay the price they demand.", I told him.
"Just you remember, there will be a price, and you will be paying it. You and I might be moderates, but that is a dying breed in Washington these days, and you would be well advised to remember that. If there is another 9-11, you will be history, and they are going to bring in somebody who breathes fire and eats babies for breakfast, and consequences be damned!", he warned.
The uncomfortable truth was that he was right. I knew what had happened on my first go, and the bitter truth was that Bush and company had kept the homeland safe. They had spent trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, trashed our civil liberties, and destroyed the economy of the nation, but we didn't have another 9-11. Could I do any better? I just didn't know.
Cheney and Wolfowitz ran the gauntlet of the news shows, and were hammered in the process. Libby was keeping his mouth shut. I heard that he was trying to broker a plea bargain, but that Justice had him dead to rights on perjury and obstruction. He wanted it both ways – no conviction and no squealing on his patron – but that was looking unlikely. Fitzgerald knew some of the people who had died in the Twin Towers and was not looking to make deals. The Joint Special Committee began calling people to testify, and both Wolfowitz and Cheney refused, citing executive privilege. The White House Counsel refused to allow me to completely hang them out to dry, but instead sidestepped it and told the Committee that this was best left up to the courts to decide. This was our weakest spot in the whole thing, in that Gonzalez was feeding everything he was learning straight to Cheney. It was a price I had to pay for a while longer. After the fuss died down, and the legal wrangling ended, I was getting rid of Gonzalez come hell or high water!
By April, Cheney was looking increasingly defensive. He hadn't been given a perp walk yet, but Congress had issued subpoenas and contempt of Congress charges, and the Justice Department had done the same. Wolfowitz had caved, somewhat, and had testified to the Committee along the lines that A) no, he hadn't lied but, B) it was very possible to interpret what had been discovered in different ways. Meanwhile, Richard Clarke had done an internal review at the CIA and had determined that almost all of the evidence for Saddam Hussein being behind 9-11 and owning weapons of mass destruction was, at the minimum, suspect. For instance, a report that yellowcake uranium had been bought by Iraq was reported to President Bush. In reality, the report was made up by a low level Iraqi looking for a payday, and every intelligence service around the globe had looked at it and laughed it off. We saw that everywhere. Often an Iraqi expatriate would concoct a story and sell it to multiple spy agencies, and then when they checked with each other, they had multiple 'confirming' reports. Only when you looked closely did you figure it out.