Decision Points

House?
    Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley explained that the FBI was testing the suspicious substance on mice. The next twenty-four hours would be crucial. If the mice were still scurrying around, feet down, we would be fine. But if the mice were on their backs, feet up, we were goners. Condi tried to lighten the mood. “Well,” she said, “this is one way to die for your country.”
    I went to the summit meetings and awaited the test results. The next day, Condi got a message that Steve was trying to reach her. “I guess this is the call,” she said. After a few minutes, Condi came back with the news.
    “Feet down, not feet up,” she said. It was a false alarm.

    Years later, incidents like the botulinum toxin scare can seem fanciful and far-fetched. It’s easy to chuckle at the image of America’s most senior officials praying for lab mice to stay upright. But at the time, the threats were urgent and real. Six mornings a week, George Tenet and the CIA briefed me on what they called the Threat Matrix, a summary of of potential attacks on the homeland. On Sundays, I received a written intelligence briefing. Between 9/11 and mid-2003, the CIA reported to me on an average of 400 specific threats each month. The CIA tracked more than twenty separate alleged large-scale attack plots, ranging from possible chemical and biological weapons operations in Europe to potential homeland attacks involved sleeper operatives. Some reports mentioned specific targets, including major landmarks, military bases, universities, and shopping malls. For months after 9/11, I would wake up in the middle of the night worried about what I had read.
    I peppered my briefers with questions. How credible was each threat? What had we done to follow up on a lead? Each piece of information waslike a tile in a mosaic. In late September, FBI Director Bob Mueller inserted a big tile when he told me there were 331 potential al Qaeda operatives inside the United States. The overall image was unmistakable: The prospect of a second wave of terrorist attacks against America was very real.

    With the national security team in the Situation Room in late October 2001.
Clockwise from me:
Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Pete Pace,
Condi Rice, George Tenet, Andy Card, and Dick Cheney.
White House/Eric Draper
    Prior to 9/11, many had viewed terrorism primarily as a crime to be prosecuted, as the government had after the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. After 9/11, it was clear that the attacks on our embassies in East Africa and on the
USS
Cole
were more than isolated crimes. They were a warm-up for September 11, part of a master plan orchestrated by Osama bin Laden , who had issued a religious edict, known as a fatwa, calling the murder of Americans “an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”
    On 9/11, it was obvious the law enforcement approach to terrorism had failed. Suicidal men willing to fly passenger planes into buildings were not common criminals. They could not be deterred by the threat of prosecution. They had declared war on America. To protect the country, we had to wage war against the terrorists.
    The war would be different from any America had fought in the past. We had to uncover the terrorists’ plots. We had to track their movements and disrupt their operations. We had to cut off their money and deprive them of their safe havens. And we had to do it all under the threat of another attack. The terrorists had made our homefront a battleground. Putting America on a war footing was one of the most important decisions of my presidency.
    My authority to conduct the war on terror came from two sources. One was Article II of the Constitution, which entrusts the president with wartime powers as commander in chief. The other was a congressional war resolution passed three days after 9/11. By a vote of 98 to 0 in the Senate and 420 to 1 in the House, Congress declared:
    That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.
    In the years ahead, some in Congress would forget those words. I never did. I woke up every