Exceptional (16 page)

As he issued a call to avoid humiliating terrorists who slaughter innocents, President Obama also perpetuated a falsehood that America's critics were peddling—that what happened at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad represented official policy, that it had something to do with or was related to America's enhanced interrogation program. His eliding these things together was utterly irresponsible, particularly since he did it on foreign soil.

During the Q&A session following his remarks, President Obama also explained his view that if America would just cut the size of its nuclear arsenal, Iran and North Korea would be convinced to abandon their nuclear ambitions. “I would like to be able to say that as a
consequence of my work,” he explained, “we drastically lessened the threat of not only terrorism, but of nuclear terrorism.” This meant that America needed to “take serious steps to actually reduce our stockpiles.” Doing so “would give us greater moral authority to say to Iran, don't develop a nuclear weapon; to say to North Korea, don't
proliferate nuclear weapons.” The obstacle to effective diplomacy with rogue states, in President Obama's view, was that America's nuclear arsenal was too big.

The next day in a press conference following a NATO meeting on Afghanistan, President Obama was asked “whether you subscribe, as many of your predecessors have, to the school of American exceptionalism that sees America as uniquely qualified to lead the world, or do you have a slightly different philosophy?” Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in
Greek exceptionalism.”

President Obama's next stop was Prague, where he focused his remarks on nuclear proliferation. Once again the first step in his plan toward seeking a “world without nuclear weapons” was to reduce America's nuclear arsenal. “To put an end to Cold War thinking,” he said, “we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others
to do the same.”

With respect to Iran, the world's chief state sponsor of terror, ruled by a regime with American blood on its hands, Obama explained that he would “seek engagement with Iran based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” This engagement would facilitate Iran taking “its rightful place in the community of nations, politically and economically.” Although never mentioning Iran's support for terrorism, the president did say that Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile activity posed a real threat. “The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense
against these missiles,” he said.

Five months later, President Obama abruptly
canceled the very
missile defense system he had praised in Prague's HradČany Square. Russia objected to the system, and the administration canceled it a week before Obama was scheduled to meet Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. The announcement also came on the seventieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, adding insult to injury to our European allies.

On April 17, 2009, President Obama attended the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. He sat silently in the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency while Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega delivered a fifty-minute diatribe about the evil America had done in the world. When it was his turn to speak, President Obama didn't dispute the lies, or ignore them; he made a joke that affirmed them. “I'm grateful,” he said, “that President Ortega didn't blame me for things that happened when I was
three months old.”

President Obama traveled to Cairo in June 2009 for a speech “
to the Muslim world.” Acknowledging a strain between the United States and the Muslim world, he explained that the tension had been “fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”

He provided his perspective on world order, saying that “human history has often been a record of nations and tribes subjugating one another to serve their own interests.” This could not continue:

In this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; progress must be shared.

These were astonishing assertions for an American president to make. In this new global order where nations do not pursue their
interests, there would be no place for the United States to seek its own security. In this new global order, in which no nation is to be elevated over another, the United States, the most powerful nation in the world, would have to abdicate much of its power.

The president of the United States then proceeded to compare the attacks of 9/11 to the policies put in place afterward to keep us safe:

And finally, just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter our principles. 9/11 was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course. I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantánamo Bay closed by next year.

On that June day in the heart of the Arab world, in the city that was home to 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and al Qaeda's future leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, President Obama suggested that the murderous, evil attacks that al Qaeda had launched on our country were in a category with the lawful actions that the United States undertook afterward in the name of protecting our country.

By September, President Obama was issuing his apology for America and his call for a coequal community of nations at the United Nations General Assembly:

No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation . . . no balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional divisions between the South and the North make no sense in an interconnected world; nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a
long-gone Cold War.

His proclamation was of a piece with the new global order he had advocated in Cairo, but more detailed. Now alliances such as NATO were illegitimate.

The 2009 apology tour finally came to an end in Japan. Two months before President Obama's November visit, the U.S. ambassador sent a cable to Washington reporting that the Japanese vice foreign minister had informed him “the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is
‘a non-starter.' ” When the cable became public, the White House
disavowed the plan. President Obama had to settle for
bowing deeply to the somewhat surprised Japanese emperor, one more unprecedented act in the annals of American presidential diplomacy.

I will end this war in Iraq responsibly, and finish the fight against al Qaeda and the
Taliban in Afghanistan.

—SENATOR BARACK OBAMA, ACCEPTANCE SPEECH, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION, AUGUST 28, 2008

You don't end a war by withdrawing from the battlefield. You just give the ground to your enemies—
IS
[
IS
]
and Iran.

—RYAN CROCKER, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ, 2007–2009

P
resident Obama was determined to take America off its war footing. On his first full day in office, at his first National Security Council meeting, he instructed his military commanders to provide timetables for withdrawing U.S. forces
from Iraq. Twenty-four hours later, he signed an executive order requiring the closing of the prison facility at Guantánamo Bay and a second order ending the
enhanced interrogation program, thereby curtailing America's ability to detain or interrogate terrorists effectively.

According to former CIA director General Mike Hayden, more than half of what America knew about al Qaeda in the years after 9/11 came from detainees in the enhanced interrogation program.
Hayden was appointed by President Bush, but members of President Obama's intelligence team have expressed similar views:

LEON PANETTA, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR:
“At bottom, we know we got important, even critical intelligence from individuals subjected to these enhanced
interrogation techniques.”

JOHN BRENNAN, CIA DIRECTOR:
“[I]nterrogations of detainees on whom EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives. The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al-Qa'ida and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day.”

DENNIS BLAIR, FORMER DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE:
“High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was
attacking this country.”

Despite the weight of the evidence about the importance of this program to our national security, the new president canceled it on his second full day in office. Three months later, in April 2009, President Obama decided to publicly release the Justice Department memos describing the enhanced interrogation methods in detail. CIA directors going back to 1995 urged the president not to
take this step. President Obama's own CIA director, Leon Panetta, was so concerned with the damage the memo release could do to our intelligence capabilities that he rushed to the White House with the leading officers from the CIA's Clandestine Service and Counterterrorism Center in an attempt to stop the president. Sitting in the Oval Office, every one of these individuals argued against the
release of the memos. Men and women who spent their days on the front lines of the war on terror
argued vehemently that making these memos public would do extensive damage to our intelligence capabilities.

Release of the memos meant al Qaeda would now know every one of our methods and the limits to which we could legally go in questioning terrorists. The president would be tying the hands of every future president by revealing techniques that would no longer be effective if needed, including in situations where thousands of American lives were on the line. Revealing this information publicly also put at risk our relationships with other intelligence services and countries that had cooperated with us in this program. Finally, in the middle of a war, releasing these memos would be devastating to the morale of the men and women in America's intelligence community on whom we depend to keep us safe. Their work had been authorized by the president and every member of his National Security Council and approved by the Department of Justice, but now a new president was rescinding the authorization and accusing them publicly of abandoning American values.

Barack Obama was undeterred. He released the memos the next day.

On April 20, he visited the CIA in the wake of the memos' release. “Don't be discouraged,” he told hundreds of agency professionals gathered in the lobby. “Don't be discouraged that we have to acknowledge, potentially, that we've made some mistakes. That's
how we learn.” One wonders exactly what lessons the men and women in our intelligence community, whose work had saved lives and prevented attacks, were supposed to learn from a commander in chief who was saying they had failed “to uphold our values and ideals” and who had just released information that made it harder to fight and win the war.

One of the authors of this book, Dick Cheney, recalls when he decided to speak out:

By May 2009, I had had enough. I fully understood the prerogative of President Obama to put his own policies in place and to change course from policies we had pursued, even though I disagreed fundamentally with the decisions he was making. It was altogether different, however, when he began spreading untruths about our programs and slandering the people who ran them. I was not going to sit by and let him attack men and women whose actions had been approved by us and had saved thousands of American lives. Nor was I going to head for the hills, as so many politicians do when a policy they once supported becomes unpopular. When Attorney General [Eric] Holder suggested he would investigate and potentially prosecute intelligence officials for doing their jobs, my view was he would have to start with those of us on the National Security Council who had approved this program in the first place. I wanted the American people to know the truth about the program.

I scheduled a speech for Thursday, May 21, 2009, at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., to set the record straight. Shortly after the day and time for my speech were announced, the White House announced the president would be making a speech that same day. The two sets of remarks set out a stark contrast between President Obama's beliefs and my own.

Speaking from the National Archives, President Obama accused those of us in the previous administration of “walking away from
the sacred principles enshrined in this building.” He said we had “failed to use our values as our compass” and had, through the establishment of Guantánamo and the use of enhanced interrogation, implemented policies that “are not who we are, and they are not America.” In a speech in which he made national security a wedge issue, challenged the patriotism of his opponents, and
claimed we had abandoned America's most sacred values, he closed by insisting we should not make national security a wedge issue.