Disturbing History - George W. Bush: The War On Terror

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

In this episode of the Disturbing History presidential series, we cross out of settled history and into living memory to examine the presidency of George W. Bush through the architecture of the War on Terror.Beginning with the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the fear that reshaped American government overnight, we trace how that fear was translated into law, policy, and ultimately a global apparatus of detention, interrogation, surveillance, and war.We walk through the legal scaffolding built inside the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, where attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee drafted the August 1, 2002 "torture memos" that redefined torture so narrowly that only pain equivalent to organ failure or death would qualify, and that advanced the unitary executive theory placing the president's wartime authority beyond the reach of Congress and the courts.We examine the opening of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on January 11, 2002, deliberately sited beyond the expected reach of American courts, and the roughly 780 men held there, the overwhelming majority eventually released without charge.We follow the CIA's enhanced interrogation program from its first subject, Abu Zubaydah, through the network of secret black sites in Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and Afghanistan, including the death of Gul Rahman from hypothermia at the site known as COBALT or the Salt Pit in November 2002. We cover the extraordinary rendition of innocent men, among them Canadian engineer Maher Arar, German citizen Khaled el-Masri, and the Milan cleric Abu Omar, whose abduction led to the in-absentia conviction of more than twenty CIA operatives in Italian courts.The episode then turns to the case for the Iraq War: the aluminum tubes claim disputed by the Department of Energy and the State Department, the mobile biological weapons labs invented by the fabricator code-named Curveball (Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi), and the "sixteen words" about Niger uranium built on forged documents, along with the leak that exposed CIA officer Valerie Plame.We revisit Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5, 2003 presentation to the United Nations, which he later called a "blot" on his record, and the invasion of March 19, 2003, followed by the "Mission Accomplished" banner of May 1, 2003.We document the conclusion of weapons inspectors David Kay and Charles Duelfer that no stockpiles ever existed.We confront the Abu Ghraib photographs that surfaced in April 2004, the death of detainee Manadel al-Jamadi, and the line connecting low-ranking soldiers to the policies authorized at the top. We cover the warrantless surveillance program Stellar Wind, the 2004 hospital-room confrontation over its reauthorization, and its eventual legalization. We trace the Supreme Court's slow pushback through Rasul v. Bush, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Boumediene v. Bush. And we close with the December 9, 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report, its findings that the program was ineffective and far more brutal than disclosed, that at least 26 of 119 detainees were wrongfully held, and that no senior official was ever prosecuted.Throughout, we ask the question that outlives the administration: how a free nation decided the rules were optional, and why the machinery it built has never been turned off.This episode draws on the public record, including the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program, the Iraq Survey Group's Duelfer Report, the Senate's prewar intelligence assessment, declassified Office of Legal Counsel memoranda, and Supreme Court opinions. Where the historical record remains genuinely contested, such as the question of intent versus error in the WMD case and the British Butler Report's defense of the uranium claim, both sides are presented.  This episode discusses torture, death in custody, and wartime atrocity. Listener discretion is advised.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. For most of this series, we've been digging an old ground. We've stood in candlelit rooms where men in powdered wigs argued about whether a republic could even survive. We've walked battlefields that have gone quiet and green. We've

read letters written in ink that faded a century before any of us drew breath. The dead we've talked about have been dead a long time, and that distance gives us a kind of permission. You can study a body once the grave's gone cold. This one's different. The man at the center of today's story is alive. He paints now. He gives speeches. He showed up at stadium events and got a hug from a former first lady, and the cameras loved it. A whole rehabilitation tour. The kind America runs on its former presidents once enough time has passed, and the country decides it would rather feel good than remember clearly. And a lot of you listening don't have to imagine the events I'm about to walk through because you watch them happen. You remember where you were on a Tuesday morning in

September. You remember the color of the sky. You remember the second plane because the first one could still be called an accident and the second one couldn't. So we're crossing a line today. We're stepping out of the archive and into living memory. Into the modern era with all the mess that comes with it, where the documents aren't yellowed yet and the people who signed them are still giving interviews and defending what they did. That makes this harder, and it makes it more important, because the story I'm going to tell you isn't settled history that everyone agrees on. It's contested ground. People will tell you I've got it wrong before I've even finished a sentence. So I'm going to do what I always do. I'm going to stick to the record, the reports, the memos,

the sworn testimony, the things people actually said and actually signed with their names on them. I spent 16 years carrying a badge. I know what it is to make a decision with bad information and no time. I know the pull of fear, the way it narrows everything down to the next 30 seconds. And I know the line. Every cop knows the line. Even the ones who cross it. There's a difference between questioning a man and breaking him. There's a difference between keeping people safe and throwing away the rules that make safety worth anything. This is a story about a country that walked up to that line and then walked past it and then built a machine on the other side that's still running today. This is how fear became policy, how policy became a war, and how that war became a machine that nobody, not even the men who built it, ever quite figured out how to turn off.

Let's start with the morning, because everything else grows out of it. September 11, 2001. 19 men with box cutters turned four passenger jets into guided missiles. Two of them brought down the towers in lower Manhattan. One tour opened the side of the Pentagon. The fourth went into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, because the people on board found out what was happening and decided to fight. By the time the dust settled, nearly 3,000 people were dead.

Office workers, firefighters who ran up the stairs while everyone else ran down, travelers who just wanted to get home. It was the deadliest attack on American soil in the country's history, and it happened on live television in real time, in front of the whole world. I want you to sit in that for a second, because you can't understand anything that follows if you skip past the fear. This wasn't a distant threat anymore. The country had been hit, hard, and nobody knew if it was over.

Were there more planes, more cells? Was there a follow-up coming that afternoon, that week? Inside the White House, inside the agencies, the working assumption was that a second wave could land at any moment, and that assumption ran the building. People stopped sleeping. People started carrying a particular kind of dread that doesn't show up in the official record,

but shows up in every decision the official record describes. George W. Bush had been president for less than eight months. He'd come in promising a humble foreign policy, less nation building, more focus at home. That president disappeared on September 11th and never came back. The man who took his place was running a country at war, and he said so out loud within days. Congress moved fast. On September 18, 2001, one week after the attacks, it passed something called the authorization

for use of military force, the AUMF. It's 60 words long, and it gives the president the power to use, and I'm paraphrasing only slightly here. All necessary and appropriate force against the nations, organizations, and people he determines planned or aided the attacks or harbored those who did. Sixty words. The House passed it 420 to 1. The Senate, 98 to nothing.

The one vote against it in the entire Congress came from a representative named Barbara Lee, who stood up and warned that a grief-stricken nation shouldn't write a blank check it couldn't take back. People called her a traitor. They sent her death threats. She needed a security detail. Hold on to that document, the AUMF, because it's going to come up again and again. It's still being used to justify military action today, more than two decades later, in countries that didn't exist as threats when it was written, against groups that hadn't formed yet. Sixty words, passed in a week, that became the legal engine for a war with no edges and no no end date. A month after the AUMF came the Patriot Act, signed on October 26, 2001.

Hundreds of pages voted through by a Congress that mostly hadn't read it, that gave the government sweeping new powers to surveil, to detain, to follow money and phone records and library checkout slips. It sailed through on the same current. Nobody wanted to be the senator who'd blocked the tool that could have stopped the next attack. Fear was the operating system now, and the code was being written in real time. And the fear had a second wave that fall, one a lot of people have half forgotten. In the weeks after the attacks, letters laced with weaponized anthrax spores started showing up in the mail. They went to news organizations and to the offices of two United States senators. Five people died. Buildings were sealed. The capital's mail

system shut down. For a country already braced for the next plane, here was proof that the next attack might not be a plane at all, that it might arrive as a powder in an envelope you opened at your kitchen table. It hardened the conviction that biological weapons in the wrong hands were the nightmare to plan around, and some voices were quick to point a finger at Iraq. Years later, the FBI concluded the anthrax had almost certainly come from inside our own government's biodefense labs, traced to an army scientist who died before he could stand trial. Not Iraq, not al-Qaeda, a domestic source. But that answer came long after the fear had already done its work

and set the country's nerves for everything that followed. Now, there was a war that actually made sense, and it's worth saying so plainly, because it's the contrast that makes everything afterwards so strange. The people who attacked the country on September 11th were al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda was being sheltered in Afghanistan by the Taliban regime. So on October 7, 2001, the United States went to war in Afghanistan. It was a war with a clear target and broad support, here and around the world.

American air power and special forces working alongside Afghan militias on the ground broke the Taliban's hold in a matter of weeks. By December, the regime had fallen and Kabul was in friendly hands. That was the response that fit the crime. And then, in the mountains along the Pakistan border, at a place called Torabora. American forces nearly had the man himself. Osama bin Laden, the architect of the whole thing, was cornered in the cave complexes there in December of 2001, and he got away. The decision had been made to rely on Afghan proxy fighters and a light American footprint, rather than committing

the troops it would have taken to seal the mountain passes, and bin Laden slipped through into Pakistan. He would not be found for nearly 10 more years, and when he finally was killed, in a compound in Pakistan in 2011, it would be under a different president entirely. The man responsible for 3,000 American deaths walked out of the trap, and within months, the country's attention and its forces, and its appetite for war, would start drifting toward a target that had nothing to do with him at all. That drift is the hinge of this whole story, and to understand how it happened, you have to meet the people who were turning the wheel. The vice president was Dick Cheney, and Cheney is the figure you have to understand, to understand all of this.

He'd been around forever, White House Chief of Staff under Ford, Secretary of Defense under the first President Bush, and he came into the job with a settled conviction that the presidency had been weakened and leashed by the reforms that followed Watergate and Vietnam. He thought the executive branch needed its power back. September 11th handed him the argument of a lifetime. Five days after the attacks, Cheney went on meet the press and said the country was going to have to work the dark side. His words. Spend time in the shadows. Use the tools available quietly.

Do things that wouldn't be discussed. He wasn't being coy. He was telling you, on a Sunday morning talk show, exactly what was about to happen. There's a phrase that got attached to Cheney's thinking, reported by the journalist Ron Suskind. The 1% Doctrine. The idea was that if there was even a 1% chance of a catastrophic attack, you treated it as a certainty. You acted as if it were going to happen. Now think about what that does to evidence.

Think about what that does to the burden of proof. In a courtroom, the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt. In police work, you need probable cause just to make an arrest. The 1% doctrine throws all of that out. It says the suspicion is enough. The possibility is enough. And once you believe that, there's almost nothing you can't justify, because you can always imagine the 1%. That's the climate.

Now, let's talk about the lawyers, because this is the part people skip, and it's the part that matters most. When a president wants to do something legally questionable, he goes to a small office inside the Justice Department called the Office of Legal Counsel, an office whose legal opinions bind the entire executive branch, the OLC. Its job is to tell the government what the law allows. When the OLC issues an opinion, that opinion functions like a permission slip. If a CIA officer does something the OLC said was legal, the officer is shielded because he relied in good faith on the government's own top lawyers.

So the OLC is the door. Everything has to pass through it. After September 11th, the men holding that door open were a deputy assistant attorney general named John U. and the head of the office, Jay Bybee. You had a theory, and the theory was bold. He believed that in wartime the president's power as commander-in-chief was essentially unlimited, that Congress couldn't tie his hands and the courts couldn't second-guess him. They call it the unitary executive theory.

In its strong form, the version U was writing down, it meant that a law passed by Congress banning torture might simply not apply to the president if he decided that torture was necessary to protect the country. The law would bend to his will because the Constitution made him the sole judge of how to wage war. A career civil servant writing memos in an office most Americans have never heard of was arguing on paper that the president could order torture

and no statute could stop him. And the people who wanted that conclusion were waiting for it eagerly because they'd already decided what they wanted to do. They just needed the paper. It helps to know that these memos weren't really the product of a neutral office weighing the law. They came out of a tight circle of like-minded lawyers who'd been put in position to deliver the answers the administration wanted. At the center of that circle was David Addington, the vice president's council, and later, his chief of staff.

Addington was the enforcer of the unitary executive theory, a man who believed the presidency's power had been stolen and meant to take it back, and he was the gravitational center that pulled the others into orbit. John U, drafting the opinions. Alberto Gonzalez, the White House counsel who'd carry them to the president, Tim Flanagan, his deputy, William Haynes, the Pentagon's top lawyer. They met, they coordinated, they routed the hard questions to friendly hands, and around the people who might say no, including, at times, the State Department's lawyers and senior people at justice who weren't in the club.

The OLC was supposed to be the honest broker that told the executive branch what it could and couldn't do. Under this arrangement, it became something closer to a vending machine. You put in the policy you wanted, and the legal permission came out the bottom. Before we get to the torture itself, there's one more legal move you have to see, because it set the stage for everything. The administration decided that the people it captured in this new war weren't covered by the Geneva Conventions. The rules of war the United States had helped write after the Second World War. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

In a memo from January 25, 2002, the White House Council, Alberto Gonzalez, described some of Geneva's protections for prisoners as quaint and obsolete in the context of this new kind of enemy. Quaint. The rules that protect captured American soldiers, dismissed as a relic. On February 7th, 2002, President Bush signed off on it. Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters would not get prisoner of war status. They'd be something new, something the law hadn't named yet. And if the law hadn't named you, the thinking went.

Then maybe the law didn't protect you. That's the legal architecture. Now watch them build the building. In January of 2002, the first prisoners arrived at a United States naval base on the southeastern tip of Cuba. Guantanamo Bay, Gitmo. On January 11th, a military plane landed and unloaded men in orange jumpsuits. Hooded, shackled, some of them sedated, into open-air wire cages at a place called Camp X-ray.

Over the years that followed, roughly 780 men from more than 40 countries would pass through that base. Why Cuba? Why an island on foreign soil? At a base the United States has leased since before most of these prisoners were born. because of the lawyers. The Justice Department had advised that Guantanamo might sit outside the jurisdiction of American courts, that a prisoner held there couldn't walk into a federal courtroom and demand to know why he was being held, the way you or I could.

It was chosen, deliberately, to be a place where the law couldn't reach. A legal black hole with a view of the water. The administration told the public these were the worst of the worst, Cheney's phrase. The most dangerous men on earth, hardened terrorists, trained killers, and some of them were exactly that. College Sheikh Mohammed, the man who planned the September 11th attacks, ended up at Guantanamo. He was real. The threat he represented was real.

But here's what the years revealed, and what even the base commanders eventually admitted. Most of the men at Guantanamo weren't the worst of anything. A lot of them had been swept up in the chaos. of Afghanistan, sold to American forces for bounties by warlords who'd point at a neighbor and collect the cash. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong name. Of the roughly 780 men held there, the overwhelming majority were eventually released without charge. Released after years, because there was nothing to charge them with. Not because they were exonerated in a trial. There were almost no trials. They were just let go, quietly,

once it became too embarrassing to keep holding them. Think about that as a law enforcement matter, because that's the lens I keep coming back to. If I arrest 10 people, and I have to release eight of them years later, because I never had a case, I haven't kept anyone safe. I've ruined eight lives,

and I've taught a generation to hate the badge. The Guantanamo model wasn't just cruel. By its own measure, it didn't work, but the cages on the island were the part you could see. The worst of it was how to have, happening where you couldn't. In March of 2002, in a house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, the CIA captured a man named Abu Zubida.

The administration announced he was the number three man in Al-Qaeda, a top lieutenant, a fountain of operational secrets. That turned out to be wrong. Later assessments, including the Senate's own investigation, concluded he wasn't even a formal member of al-Qaeda. He'd run a guest house and helped move people through training He was a logistics guy and a wounded one, shot up in the raid that captured him. And here's a detail the agency didn't put on the brochure.

When Abu Zubata was first captured, the men who questioned him were FBI agents, and they did it the way good investigators have always done it. One of them, a man named Ali Sufhan, spoke Arabic, knew the material cold, and worked the prisoner with patience and conversation. He got Abu Zubata talking, and the prisoner gave him. up real intelligence. He identified college Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the September 11th attacks by his alias, which was a genuinely important piece of the puzzle. He gave information that helped lead to an alleged plotter on American soil. He did all of this while he was being

treated like a captured human being before anyone laid a hand on him. Sufon would later testify to the United States Senate under oath that the rapport-based approach was working, that it was producing actionable intelligence, and that he watched it get thrown away, because then the CIA's contractors arrived, took over, and decided the smart, slow, effective way wasn't tough enough for the moment. But the agency thought it had landed a whale, and it wanted everything he knew, and it wanted it now. Abu Zubida became the test case, the first subject of what the CIA started calling, in its sanitized internal language, enhanced interrogation techniques.

EITs. And to design the program, the agency turned to two psychologists, contractors named James Mitchell, and Bruce Jessen. But here's the thing. Mitchell and Jensen had no experience interrogating anyone. None. Their background was in a military training program called Sear, which stands for survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. Sear exists to prepare American troops to withstand torture if they're captured by an enemy that doesn't follow the rules. It exposes our own soldiers to abusive techniques under careful supervision, so they'll know what it feels like and won't break.

The whole premise of Sear is that these methods are what the bad guys do. That's the point of the program. To inoculate our people against the cruelty of regimes that torture. Mitchell and Jensen took that program and ran it backward. They took the techniques designed to simulate enemy torture, and they proposed using them on prisoners as an interrogation method. The thing Sear was built to defend against became the thing the United States would now do on purpose. And for building and running this program, their company was paid.

The figure that came out later was around $81 million. What were the techniques? I'm going to tell you because you can't understand the rest of this story if I keep it abstract, but I'm not going to dwell on it for entertainment. Walling, which meant slamming, which meant slamming, a prisoner backward into a wall over and over. Stress positions, holding the body in agonizing postures for hours. Cramped confinement.

Locking a man in a box. For Abu Zubaita, they used a box the size of a coffin, and a second box so small he couldn't stand or stretch out, and they kept him in it for hours at a time. Sleep deprivation, which the program eventually authorized for as long as around 180 hours. Do that math. That's roughly seven and a half days. A week with no sleep, kept upright, sometimes shackled standing so he couldn't lie down.

And waterboarding. You strap a man to an inclined board, head lower than his feet, put a cloth over his face, and pour water onto the cloth. The water fills his nose and mouth and he can't breathe, and his body believes completely that it is drowning. Because in every way that matters, it is. It is a controlled drowning. stopped just short and then started again. The United States prosecuted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American prisoners after the Second World War. We called it a war crime then.

We charged people with it. Now it was on the menu. The legal permission for all of this came on a single day, August 1, 2002. The Office of Legal Counsel produced two memos that have gone down in history as the torture memos. They were drafted primarily by John Yu and signed by Jay Bybee. One memo defined torture for the whole government, and the definition they wrote was so narrow, so cramped, that it's almost hard to believe it came out of a justice department

and not out of a regime we'd normally condemn. According to that memo, for pain to count as torture under the law, it had to be equivalent in intensity to the pain of serious physical injury, like organ failure, the impairment of bodily function. or even death. Read that again. By that standard, almost nothing qualifies. You can do nearly anything to a human being as long as you stop short of the agony of your organs shutting down. The memo also resurrected U's theory that even if a technique did amount to torture, the president's wartime authority might place it beyond the reach of the law entirely. The CIA interrogators

had a nickname for that document. They called it the Golden Shield. because as long as they had it, they believed they couldn't be prosecuted. The lawyers had handed them a permission slip with the seal of the United States on it. The Defense Department got its own version of the permission slip. On December 2nd, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed a memo authorizing a list of harsh techniques for use at Guantanamo. One of the techniques was forced standing, limited in the memo to four hours. and in the margin, in his own handwriting, Rumsfeld scrawled a note.

He wrote that he stood 8 to 10 hours a day himself, so why was standing limited to 4 hours? A joke. A little margin note, treating a torture technique like an item on a productivity memo. That handwriting is in the record. You can see it. So now the program exists. It's legal.

On paper. It's funded. It's running. And it needs somewhere to run. The men captured. in this war didn't all go to Guantanamo. The most valuable ones, the high-value detainees, went somewhere else. They went into a network the CIA built in secret, scattered across the world, and countries willing to host an American prison. They could pretend didn't exist. The agency

called them black sites. There was one in Thailand. There was one in Poland, at a place called Star Kikuti, operating from late 2002 through 2003. There were sites in Roman. and Lithuania. There was one in Afghanistan near Kabul that the prisoners and the guards came to call the salt pit and that the CIA code named in its cables, Cobalt. In November of 2002, a man named Gul Rahman was being held there. The site was freezing. Concrete, no heat, prisoners kept in the dark, music blasting around the clock. Rahman was shackled, partially stripped and left chained to the floor of his cell overnight in temperatures near freezing. He was found dead the next morning. The cause was determined to be, in large part, hypothermia.

He froze to death, chained to a concrete floor in American custody, in a prison whose own inspector general would later admit the agency barely knew what was happening inside it. Gul Rahman, for the record, was never charged with anything. After he died, the officer who'd been running the site was recommended for a cash bonus. And then there's rendition. Extraordinary rendition. This is the part of the program where the United States didn't even bother torturing people itself. It outsourced. The CIA would grab a suspect, often off a street or out of an airport, put him on an unmarked private jet, and fly him to a country known for torturing prisoners. Egypt, Syria, Jordan. Then it would wait for the information to come back,

generated by methods the United States could officially deny. Let me give you three names. Mar Arar, a Canadian engineer, a software guy with a family. In September of 2002, he was changing planes at Kennedy Airport in New York on his way home to Canada from a family vacation. American agents detained him, held him, and then, instead of sending him to Canada where he lived, they flew him to Syria. The country he'd been born in and left behind.

In Syria, he was held in a cell he later described as the size of a grave, and he was tortured for the better part of a year. Then he was released because it turned out he had no connection to terrorism at all. None. A Canadian government commission investigated the whole thing and cleared him completely, and Canada formally apologized and paid him millions in compensation. The United States never apologized. It kept him on a watch list for years afterward. An innocent man beaten in a Syrian dungeon on America's instructions because of a mistake nobody would own.

Khaled El Masary. A German citizen grabbed while traveling because his name resembled the name of a suspect. Mistaken identity. The CIA flew him to that prison near Kabul and held him for about five months, interrogating a man who was exactly who he said he was, a car salesman from Germany. When the agency finally realized it had the wrong man, it didn't bring him home with an apology. It dumped him on a hillside in Albania at night and drove away. An Abu Omar, an Egyptian cleric living in Milan, Italy, snatched off a public street in February of 2003,

and rendered to Egypt, where he said he was tortured. That one had a coda, the others didn't. Italian prosecutors investigated, and Italian courts convicted more than 20 CIA officers and operatives in absentia for the kidnapping. American intelligence officers found guilty of abduction by the courts of a NATO ally. They never served the time because they were never handed over. But the convictions stand. This is the machine taking shape. The cages you could see in Cuba, the prisons you couldn't see scattered across three continents, the jets moving human beings through the dark, the lawyers in Washington signing the slips that made it all legal on paper.

It was built fast in a climate of fear by people who'd convinced themselves that the 1% justified anything. And it was about to be aimed at a target that had nothing to do with September 11th at all. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Almost from the morning of the attacks, attention inside the administration turned toward Iraq. Not Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda actually was. Iraq. Saddam Hussein's.

Iraq. There were people in that administration who'd wanted Saddam gone for years, who saw him as unfinished business from the First Gulf War in 1991, and September 11th gave them an opening. The problem was that Iraq had nothing to do with September 11th. Saddam was a brutal dictator, a murderer of his own people, but he was a secular strong man who despised the religious radicals of Al-Qaeda, and they despised him right back. There was no operational link. The intelligence community knew there was no real link. The bipartisan commission that later investigated the attacks,

the 9-11 commission, looked hard at the question and found no evidence of a collaborative operational relationship between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaeda. None. And yet, by the time the war began, polls showed that a large share of Americans had come to believe Saddam was personally behind the attacks, because the administration had spent more,

more than a year mentioning Iraq and the September 11th attacks in the same breath, over and over, until the connection lived in people's heads, whether or not it lived in the evidence. And there was a new doctrine to justify the whole thing. In September of 2002, the administration published a formal national security strategy that made preemption official policy. The old rule, going back generations, was that you could go to war to defend yourself against an attack or an imminent one. The new doctrine said the United States would act first against threats that were merely gathering, that hadn't fully formed yet, that might never form at all.

It was the 1% doctrine written into the country's official strategy. Don't wait for the threat to mature. Strike it in the cradle. Once that's your stated policy, you don't really need proof anymore. You only need a possibility frightening enough to act on. And Iraq was about to become the test case for the whole idea. so the case for war couldn't rest on connecting Saddam to the attacks. It had to rest on something else.

It had to rest on weapons of mass destruction. The argument went like this. Saddam has chemical and biological weapons. He's working toward a nuclear bomb. And in a post-September 11th world, we cannot wait for proof because the proof might come in the form of a mushroom cloud. The National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice put it almost exactly that way on television in the fall of 2002.

She said we didn't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. It's a brilliant line. It's also the 1% doctrine in a single sentence. You don't need evidence the bomb exists. You only need to make people afraid that it might. Now, was Saddam a threat? He'd had chemical weapons before. He'd used them on Iranians and on his own Kurdish population.

He'd had nuclear ambitions in the population. past. So the suspicion wasn't conjured out of nothing. But suspicion isn't a stockpile, and a past program isn't a present one. And this is exactly where the intelligence got stretched, shaped, and in some cases simply ignored when it didn't say what the administration needed it to say. Three pieces of evidence built the public case. I want to take them one at a time, because each one fell apart, and the way each one fell apart tells you something. The first was aluminum tubes. The administration claimed that Iraq had been trying to import high-strength aluminum tubes that could only be meant for one thing, centrifuges to enrich uranium for a bomb.

It was the centerpiece of the nuclear argument. The problem was that the government's own experts disagreed, loudly, in writing. The Department of Energy, which actually builds and understands centrifuges, said the tubes were the wrong size and the wrong specification for that purpose, and were far more likely meant for conventional artillery rockets. The State Department's Intelligence Bureau agreed. These weren't fringe doubters. These were the people who knew the most about the subject,

and they were dissenting in the official record. The administration went with the scary interpretation anyway and didn't tell the public about the fight. The second was the mobile biological weapons labs. The claim was that Saddam had built germ warfare factories on wheels, mounted on trucks and rail cars so they could move around and hide from inspectors. And almost the entire basis for that claim was a single source. One man.

In Iraqi defector living in Germany, whose intelligence code name was Curveball. His real name, which came out years later, is Rafid Ahmed Al-Wan al-Janabe. Here's what you need to know about Curveball. German intelligence, which actually had him, considered him unreliable and warned the Americans not to trust him. The Defense Intelligence Agency flagged him as suspect. He was a known fabricator. American officials hadn't even interviewed him directly before using his claims. And years later, Al-Janabi sat down with a newspaper and admitted flatly that he'd made it all up.

He'd lied about the mobile labs to help bring down Saddam, and he said he was proud of it. The entire mobile weapons lab story, the thing that got presented to the world as hard evidence, was the invention of one man trying to topple a dictator, a man his own handlers had begged the Americans not to believe. The third piece was the uranium. The claim was that Iraq had tried to buy a yellow cake uranium, raw material for a bomb, from the African country of Nigeria.

This one produced the single most famous sentence of the entire run-up to war. In his state of the union address in late January of 2003, President Bush said, and these are very close to his exact words, that the British government had learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

16 words. And the documents underneath that claim were forgeries, crude ones. The supposed contract between Iraq and Nigeria had names and dates wrong. Signatures from officials who weren't in office on the dates listed,

errors and analysts caught fairly quickly once anyone actually looked. A former American ambassador named Joseph Wilson had been sent to Nigeria to check the story out, and he'd reported back that there was nothing to it. The claim had even been pulled out of an earlier presidential speech a few months before, because the CIA didn't trust it. And then it showed up anyway, in the biggest speech of the year, attributed carefully to the British so that if it blew up, the British would own it. The British, for their part, ran their own investigation, the Butler report, and

concluded that their underlying intelligence about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa was, in their words, well-founded, separate from the forged documents. The British have never fully backed off it, and the White House itself eventually conceded that the 16 words shouldn't have been in the speech, that they hadn't been corroborated well enough to belong in a presidential address. So this one stays genuinely murky. What's not murky is the bigger pattern. Doubt was everywhere in the system.

And the doubt kept getting filtered out before it reached the public. And the Wilson affair has a poison tale. After Joseph Wilson went public with an op-ed saying the uranium claim was hollow, somebody in the administration leaked the fact that his wife, Valerie Plain, was a covert CIA officer, blowing her cover, ending her career and potentially endangering her contacts overseas. It looked to a lot of people like punishment, a warning to anyone else who might think about contradictory,

the case for war. A criminal investigation followed, and the vice president's own chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was eventually convicted of lying to investigators about it. So the message landed. You question the war, and your family becomes a target. That's the intelligence, and that's how each piece of it crumbled. But the decision to go to war wasn't really waiting on the intelligence. The intelligence was being assembled to support a decision that had, for all practical purposes, already been made. There's a British document from the summer of 2002, the so-called Downing Street memo,

summarizing what a top British official took away from meetings in Washington. His read was that the facts and the intelligence were being fixed around the policy. The conclusion came first. The evidence got arranged to fit. Congress went along. In October of 2002,

lawmakers passed a resolution handing the president the authority to use military force against a Rock. The House voted for it by better than two to one. The Senate passed it 77 to 23. And notice the timing, because it isn't an accident. The vote came just weeks before the midterm elections, with the administration warning of mushroom clouds and a Congress that did not want to be caught looking soft on a dictator who might be building a bomb. Plenty of members who would later say they'd been misled voted yes that October, with the campaign season bearing down on them. Some of those yes votes would shadow careers for years in a couple of cases all the way into a presidential

primary. The fear wasn't only running the White House. It was running the whole capital, and it was running the calendar. To sell that conclusion to the world, the administration needed a closer, someone with credibility, someone the public trusted, and the most trusted man in the entire government was the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, a general, a soldier, a man with a reputation for caution and integrity, who'd actually been skeptical, privately, about the rush to war. So they sent him to the United Nations, February 5, 2003. Colin Powell sat at the horseshoe table of the United Nations Security Council with the director of the CIA seated behind him to lend the whole thing the weight of the agency, and he made

the case. For roughly an hour and a half, he laid it all out, the aluminum tubes, the uranium, and the mobile labs, complete with detailed artists' drawings of the trucks, drawings built on the fabrications of a man named Curveball, whom Powell had been assured was solid. At one point, Powell held up a small vial, about the size of a teaspoon, and told the council that an amount of anthrax that size had shut down the United States Senate. He used the phrase, weapons of mass destruction 17 times. He told the council that every statement he was making was backed by solid sources,

that these were facts and not assertions. It was the most effective sales pitch of the entire war. Newspapers that had been skeptical came around. Editorial boards declared the case proven. Powell's credibility did exactly what it was sent there to do, and almost all of it was wrong. Powell knew it within a year, and he had the decency, eventually, to say so out loud.

He called the speech a blot on his record. He said he regretted it. He said the sourcing he'd been given turned out to be inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading. His own chief of staff, a man named Lawrence Wilkerson, who'd helped prepare the presentation by sitting at CIA headquarters for days vetting the material, later said flatly that he had unwittingly taken part in a hoax on the American people. Those are the words of the men who gave the speech, not critics, the men who stood at the podium. But on February 5, 2003, none of that was known. The case looked airtight, and the machine moved to its next phase.

On the 19th of March, 2003, the bomb started falling on Baghdad. The Pentagon called the opening barrage shock and awe, a deliberate display of overwhelming force meant to stun the regime into collapse. Within weeks, the regime did collapse. American forces rolled into Baghdad, and in early April the famous, statue of Saddam came down in the square, pulled over with a chain and an armored vehicle while a crowd and the cameras watched. It looked like victory. It looked fast and clean. On the 1st of May,

2003, President Bush did something no president had done before. He flew out to an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, in a Navy jet, and he climbed down onto the deck in a flight suit, helmet under his arm, and he gave a speech declaring that major combat operations in Iraq, rock had ended. Behind him, stretched across the carrier's tower, was an enormous banner. It read, in two words, mission accomplished. That banner outlived the moment it was built to capture, and not because of what it claimed, but because of how wrong the claim was about to prove. The mission was not accomplished. The mission, by any honest measure, was barely beginning. What followed the fall of Baghdad wasn't peace. It was an insurgency that ground on for years.

that killed thousands of American troops and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians that gave rise eventually to even worse things, to the group that would later call itself the Islamic State. Saddam himself was pulled out of a hole in the ground that December, tried by an Iraqi court, and hanged in late 2006. But the country he'd ruled didn't settle. It came apart. And then there was the small matter of the reason for the whole thing. The weapons weren't there.

The first man to say it plainly was David Kay, the Chief American Weapons Inspector sent into Iraq after the invasion specifically to find the stockpiles everyone had been promised. He searched, with a large team in full access, and he found nothing. No chemical stockpiles, no biological weapons, no active nuclear program. In testimony to Congress in early 2004, Kay said it about as directly as a man can. He said we were, almost all wrong. The Chief Weapons Hunter, reporting back that the weapons that justified the war did not exist. His successor, a man named Charles Duelfer, led the official Iraq Survey Group to its final conclusion.

After 18 months and a 1,500-page report, the verdict was the same. Saddam had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. He'd destroyed what he'd had years earlier after the First Gulf War. What the report did find was murkier and more human, that Saddam had wanted to keep the capability someday, that he'd hoped to restart programs if the world ever stopped watching, that he'd even cultivated a deliberate ambiguity, letting his neighbors believe he might have weapons because the bluff kept him feared.

He'd bluffed about a deadly hand he didn't actually hold, and the United States had called the bluff with 200,000 troops and a decade of war. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The Senate Intelligence Committee dug into the pre-war intelligence and issued its own scathing assessment in the summer of 2004. The picture it painted was of an intelligence community that had overstated, that had stated as fact what was actually assumption,

that had buried the dissents, like the fight over the aluminum tubes, and had failed at nearly every level. The committee found, for example, that the CIA had withheld key information about curveball's unreliability from the very analysts who were relying on him. So step back and look at what we have. A war launched on a danger that did not exist. Sold with intelligence that was wrong, some of it known to be doubtful at the time and used anyway.

Closed by the country's most trusted public servant, who later called his own speech a hoax he'd been duped into giving, and no weapons at the end of it. The smoking gun that was going to be a mushroom cloud turned out to be a bluff inside the head of a cornered dictator, and it cost an almost unimaginable amount. Roughly 4,500 American service members were killed in Iraq, and more than 30,000 came home wounded,

many of them maimed for life. The Iraqi toll is larger and harder to pin down, which is its own kind of obscenity. The careful body counts that track documented violent deaths put the figure somewhere between roughly 150,000 and 210,000. Civilians and combatants together, and one major study published in 2006 estimated the war had caused on the order of 600,000 excess deaths by then alone.

Millions more Iraqis were driven from their homes, refugees inside their own country, and out of it. And the bill and dollars runs into the trillions once you count the decades of care owed to wounded veterans. That's what the bluff cost. That's the price of a mushroom cloud that was never there. That's the war. Now we have to go back to the prisons,

because while the war was unfolding, the machine we built in those black sites was about to come out into the open in the ugliest way imaginable. In the fall of 2003, American soldiers at a prison outside Baghdad called Abu Ghraib took photographs. This prison had been one of Saddam's own torture houses, a place of legendary cruelty

under the old regime. And now it was an American military prison, overcrowded and badly run. And some of the soldiers guarding it did things to the prisoners, and they photographed each other doing it, and they smiled for the camera. In April of 2004,

those photographs got out. The television program 60 Minutes 2 broadcast them on the 28th, and the journalist Seymour Hirsch published more of them in the New Yorker days later. You've seen them, even if you've tried to forget. A hooded man standing on a box, wires attached to his hands, told he'd be electrocuted if he fell. Naked prisoners stacked in a pyramid.

A soldier giving a thumbs up over a corpse. A young woman holding a leash that ran down to a naked man on the floor. The images went around the planet in hours. In the Arab world, in particular, they were catastrophic. Everything America said about itself, about freedom and the rule of law and being different from the regimes it condemned, collapsed under the weight of those photographs. And one of those prisoners hadn't survived. A man named Manadel al-Gimadi had been brought into Abu Ghra by CIA officers in the early morning hours of November 4, 2003. He was hung by his wrists, which were cuffed behind his

back, in a position that slowly suffocated him under his own body weight. Within hours he was dead. A former chief medical examiner who reviewed the case said the cause was asphyxia and compared the mechanism to a crucifixion. The soldiers later posed for photographs grinning over his body packed in ice. That's the man behind the famous image of the soldiers in the ice. Manadell Al Jammadi, killed in custody, in a position chosen for him, and then used as a prop. When the scandal broke, the official line was that this was the work of a few bad apples. a handful of low-ranking soldiers, night shift reservists, who'd gone rogue.

And some of them did go to prison, Charles Grainer, Lindy England, the young woman with the leash. They were court-martialed and convicted, and they served time. But here's the question the bad apple story couldn't answer. And the question I kept asking as a man who's worked inside institutions, where did they get the idea? Because the techniques in those photographs, the hoodding, the stress positions, the use of dogs to terrify, the forced nudity and sexual humiliation didn't come out of nowhere. They tracked closely with the methods that had been authorized at the top. The same techniques the OLC memos had blessed for the CIA,

the same categories Rumsfeld had signed off on, with his little note in the margin. Some of the people who'd worked at Guantanamo, where the program was formal and approved, had been sent to Iraq to help, quote, set the conditions. The line ran from the lawyers in Washington, down through the cabinet, into the cell block. The reservists at the bottom of the chain were the ones who went to prison. The men who drew up the legal architecture, who signed the memos, who funded the program and ran it, never spent a night in a cell. There's another front to this story, quieter than the prisons, that reached every single one of us,

whether we knew it or not. Surveillance Within weeks of September 11th, President Bush, secretly authorized the National Security Agency to listen in on communications inside the United States without going to a court for a warrant. This mattered because there was a law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed back in 1978 specifically to stop the government from spying on Americans without judicial oversight. That law had been written in response to earlier abuses, to the FBI wiretapping civil rights leaders and the like. It set up a special secret court

precisely so that national security wiretaps would still have to pass in front of a judge. The program the administration built, codenamed stellar wind and known publicly later as the terrorist surveillance program, went around that court. The legal justification came from the same place as the torture memos, the same office, the same theory. John Yu wrote opinions arguing that the president's wartime power let him authorize the surveillance regardless of what the 1978 law said, the unitary executive again, the president as the sole judge of his own power. The program ran in secret for years, and then, in March of 2004, it produced one of the strangest scenes in the history of the American government. The legal authorization for the

program was up for renewal, and the acting attorney general, a man named James Comey, had concluded that parts of it were illegal and refused to sign. The attorney general himself, John Ashcroft was in the hospital, gravely ill, in intensive care after surgery. So White House officials, including the counsel Alberto Gonzalez and the chief of staff, Andrew Card, drove to the hospital and tried to get the sick man to sign the reauthorization from his hospital bed, going around his own deputy. Comey raced to the hospital to stop them. Ashcroft, barely conscious, rallied enough to refuse.

The program had to be modified after senior Justice Department officials threatened to resign en masse. The internal fight nearly tore the administration apart. All of it's secret, all of it over whether the government could spy on its own citizens without a judge. The public didn't find out until December of 2005, when the New York Times finally published the story after sitting on it for more than a year under government pressure. And the reaction wasn't what you might hope. There were objections, lawsuits, hearings. But Congress eventually came around and rewrote the surveillance laws to make a version of the program legal going forward. The architecture wasn't dismantled. It was legalized. The exposure of an illegal program ended not

with the program being shut down, but with the law being changed to permit it. That's a pattern worth remembering, because it's the pattern of this whole era. The machine once built didn't get torn down. It got normalized. And here's the thing that should bother you most. If you've been telling yourself this only happened to foreigners far away. It reached citizens. Take Jose Padilla, an American, born in Brooklyn. In May of 2002, he was arrested at the airport in Chicago, and the administration announced he'd been plotting to set off a radioactive dirty bomb in an American city. Then it did something startling. Rather than charge him with a crime and try him in a court, the government declared this American citizen an enemy combatant and threw him into a

navy brig in South Carolina, where it held him for years, in near total isolation, without charges, and at first, without a lawyer. The dirty bomb allegation, the thing that had justified the whole spectacle, was quietly dropped. It was never charged. When the government finally did move Padilla into a real courtroom, years later it was on different and much vaguer conspiracy charges. An American citizen, picked up on American soil, held for years by the military on the strength of an accusation the government couldn't or wouldn't prove in court. Orteg Yasser Hamdi, another American citizen, captured in Afghanistan and held without charges as an enemy combatant, his case resting on a thin, second-hand declaration. The principle the administration was asserting in both

cases was breathtaking when you say it out loud. The president, on his own say-so, could label American a combatant and hold him indefinitely, without a trial, without the evidence ever being tested, for as long as a war with no end date lasted. No president had ever claimed that power, and it's the claim that finally pulled the courts off the sidelines. For years, the architects of all this operated on the theory that no court could touch them, that Guantanamo was beyond the law, that the president's wartime power was beyond review, that the OLC memo, were a permanent shield. And slowly, case by case, the Supreme Court told them they were wrong. It started in June of 2004. In a case called Rasul v. Bush, the court held that the federal courts

did have jurisdiction over the Guantanamo prisoners after all, that the legal black hole wasn't quite a black hole, that a prisoner there could at least file a petition asking why he was being held. The same day, in a case called Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the court considered an American citizen who'd been declared an enemy combatant and held without charges. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the controlling opinion, and it contained a line that ought to be carved over the door of that whole era. She wrote that a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens. A state of war is not a blank check. After everything, the 1% doctrine, the unitary executive, the 60-word A-UmF treated like a

unlimited power, the court said no. There are limits. There have to be. In 2006, in Hamdon v. Rumsfeld, the court went further and struck down the military commissions the administration had set up to try detainees, ruling that they violated both American military law and the Geneva Conventions, including a provision called Common Article 3, that the administration had spent years insisting didn't apply. The quaint and obsolete rules turned out to apply, after all. The administration's response was telling. It didn't back down. It went to Congress and got a new law, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, that recreated the commissions and tried to strip the courts of jurisdiction over detainee cases all over again. So the fight went back to the Supreme Court

one more time. And in June of 2008, in a case called Boumedienne v. Bush, the court ruled five to four that the Guantanamo prisoners had a constitutional right to challenge their detention in federal court, a right that Congress could not simply legislate away. The Constitution reached Guantanamo. The black hole closed. It took the court the better part of a decade to claw the country back from the edge. And even then, the rulings were narrow, and the men who'd built the machine were already gone from office. And the machine itself, the camp, the surveillance, the precedents. mostly remained. The final accounting came late, and it came from the Senate. For years, the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the CIA's detention and interrogation program.

The committee's staff read through millions of the agency's own internal documents, cables, emails, the program's own paper trail. The full report ran to more than 6,700 pages, with 38,000 footnotes. On December 9, 2014, the committee released, a declassified summary, 525 pages of it, and it remains the most thorough public examination of an American intelligence program ever produced. It found that the program was not effective. That was the first and central conclusion. The brutal techniques did not produce unique life-saving intelligence that couldn't have been gotten another way. The famous claim that torture cracked the case and led to Osama bin Laden, the committee examined in detail and rejected.

The agency had justified the whole program by saying it worked, and the committee, after reading the agency's own records, concluded that the justification rested on inaccurate claims. It found that the treatment was far more brutal than the CIA had ever admitted to the White House, to Congress, or to the public. Among the things in that report, a technique the agency called rectal feeding and rectal rehydration, which is exactly as degrading as it sounds, used as a means of control. Threats against detainees' families, including threats to harm their children and sexually assault their mothers. The death by hypothermia at the salt pit. Detainees kept awake for the better part of a week. College Sheikh Mohammed, the actual September 11th planner, waterboarded 183 times in a single

month. Abu Zubida, the man wrongly billed as the number three, waterboarded 83 times, at one point becoming completely unresponsive, with buzubida. bubbles rising from his open mouth. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. It found that the CIA repeatedly lied. Lied to the Justice Department,

feeding the lawyer's inaccurate information so the legal analysis would come out the way the agency wanted. Lied to Congress, the body that was supposed to be overseeing it. Lied to the White House and lied to the public through the press. And it found something that's almost the bleakest part of all. Of at least 119 people the CIA held in this program, at least 26 were wrongfully detained, held by mistake, wrong man, wrong identity, bad information, roughly one in five. Of the 119, at least 39 were subjected to the harsh techniques.

So we tortured people we'd grabbed by mistake. The senator who chaired the committee, Diane Feinstein, said the program was a stain on the nation's values and its history. Now, the CIA pushed back hard. It issued a formal response acknowledging some management failures and some unauthorized conduct, but disputing the central finding, insisting the program had produced valuable intelligence. Defenders of the program, including former officials, argued the committee was partisan, that it hadn't interviewed the people involved, that it was judging wartime decisions from the safety of peacetime. That argument deserves to be on the table, and I'm putting it.

putting it there. You can weigh it. But the committee was reading the agency's own documents, the agency's own internal account of what it did and what it learned. The numbers, the 183, the 26 wrongful detentions, the death at the salt pit came from inside the program itself. Getting even that summary into the light was its own small war between two branches of government. The committee's investigators worked out of a secure CIA facility. reading documents on a network the agency controlled. At some point, the agency got nervous about what the staff had found, in particular an internal CIA review that seemed to reach many of the same damning conclusions

the committee was reaching. And the agency searched the Senate's computers. It went into the side of the network that was supposed to belong to the investigators and looked at their work. Searching the files of the very people assigned to oversee you is the kind of thing that, in a functioning system, ends careers. The CIA director at the time, John Brennan, first denied it had happened, told the public the notion that the agency had spied on Senate staff was beyond the scope of reason.

An internal review found that it had happened essentially as Feinstein described, and Brennan went and apologized to the committee's leaders in private. In March of 2014, Diane Feinstein walked on to the Senate floor and laid it all out in public. the search, the denials, the whole turf war over the truth. This was a senator who had spent years as one of the intelligence community's staunchest defenders, the person who'd backed the surveillance programs, who law enforcement, and the agencies counted as a friend. And she stood up and said the CIA's actions may have violated the Constitution's separation of powers, may have violated federal law, and had undermined the Senate's basic ability to do oversight at all.

When your most reliable ally in the Senate is describing your conduct as a possible constitutional violation, the institution has a problem that no press release can spin away. And there was a final twist that tells you how upside down the whole thing had gotten. After the search, the agency's response wasn't to answer the committee's questions. It was to suggest that the Senate staffers might have obtained certain internal documents improperly. And the matter got referred to the Justice Department, with the implication that the investigators, the people Congress had assigned to hold the CIA accountable, might themselves be the criminals.

The overseers were threatened with prosecution by the agency they were overseeing. The Justice Department declined to pursue it, but sit with the picture for a second. The spies looked through the files of the watchdog and then accused the watchdog of theft. The committee voted to declassify the summary. The administration negotiated the redactions for months. blacking out the pseudonyms of the officers and the names of the countries that had hosted the black sites, so that even the public version protected the people and the governments involved. And on that December day, after all of it, the 525 pages finally went out to the world.

And here's the ending that, to me, says the most about the country we'd become. Nobody was prosecuted. Not one senior official went to court over any of it. The Justice Department's own ethics office, the Office of Professional Responsibility, investigated the lawyers who wrote the torture memos, John U. and J. Bybee, and initially concluded they'd committed professional misconduct, which could have ended their careers and referred them for discipline. And then a senior Justice Department official named David Margolis reviewed that conclusion and downgraded it, from misconduct to merely poor judgment.

So the finding was softened. The referrals never happened. and the two men went on with their lives. Bibi, in fact, had already been made a federal appeals court judge. He'd been confirmed to the bench, a lifetime appointment, while the memo with his signature on it was still secret. He's still a judge. You went back to teaching law at Berkeley,

and he still defends what he wrote. The next president, Barack Obama, banned the techniques in his first days in office. He signed the order rescinding the program on January 22nd, 2009, two days after taking office. But he also made a choice. He decided not to prosecute anyone. His phrase was that the country needed to look forward, not backward. Years later at a press conference, he put the whole thing into a few words that are about as honest and about as inadequate as American officialdom ever gets. He said, we tortured some folks. The passive shrug of a country

that knew exactly what it had done and had decided collectively to file it under regrettable necessity and move on. So let's go back to where we started with the question of the machine and why it won't turn off. Here's the thing about all of this that I want you to carry out of this episode. The men who built this machinery

weren't cartoon villains twirling mustaches. Most of them believed they were protecting the country. They'd watched 3,000 people die on television, and they'd made themselves a promise that it would never happen again, and they convinced themselves that the only way to keep that promise was to do whatever it took

and to redefine whatever it took until it had no edges left. The fear was real. The threat in those first years was real. That's exactly what makes it a disturbing history story and not just a crime story. The road to that prison near Kabul,

the one where a man froze to death chained to a floor, was paved with the genuine intention to keep your children safe. And the machine outlived all of them. Guantanamo is still open. As I record this, more than two decades after that first plane landed in 2002, men are still being held there. Some of them never charged with anything. The legal question is still grinding through the courts. The surveillance architecture exposed and protested and then quietly legalized is still in place,

and far larger now than it was then. The 60-word A-U-M-M-F from 2001, is still being cited by presidents of both parties to justify military action in countries the original authors never imagined. The drone strike program that the next administration expanded grew straight out of the same soil. The precedent that fear can justify the suspension of the rules and that the rules don't fully come back afterward is now baked into how the country governs itself. That's the afterlife of executive power.

It's the quiet part, the torture program ended. the war in Iraq ended, sort of, after the better part of a decade and hundreds of thousands of dead. But the expansion of presidential authority that all of it created didn't end. It became the new baseline. Every president since has inherited a bigger, less accountable executive branch than the one before, because nobody who holds power ever wants to be the one who gives it back, and the public, frightened and tired, mostly stopped asking them to. As for the man whose name is on this episode, George W. Bush left office with his approval rating near the lowest any president had ever recorded, with the war still grinding in the economy

and collapse. And then he did what disgraced figures in this country are allowed to do. He waited. He stayed quiet. He took up painting, portraits of wounded veterans, actually, which is a complicated and human thing for a man to do. In the country, exhausted by the men who came after, started to remember him fondly. There's footage of him sneaking a piece of candy to a former first lady at a funeral, and it went viral, and people said how much they missed him. That's how it works. Time sands the edges off everything,

and a man who presided over the architecture I just described to you becomes, in the public memory, a likable old painter who gives out candy. Both things are true. He's a human being after all. And he's the president who signed off on the framework that produced Abu Ghraib, the black sites, the wrongful detentions, the surveillance, and a war fought over weapons that weren't there. History is going to have to hold both of those at once, and so do you.

I told you at the top that I spent 16 years carrying a badge and that every cop knows the line. Here's the thing I learned that I keep coming back to with this story. The rules aren't there to protect the guilty. they're there to protect us from what we'd become without them. The moment you decide that the threat is so great that the rules no longer apply, you haven't beaten the enemy. You've agreed to become a version of him, just with better lawyers.

The whole point of being the good guys is that there are things the good guys don't do, even when they're scared, even when it might work, even when the 1% is screaming in their ear. The men in this story decided the line could move, and the disturbing part, the part that should keep you up a little, is how easy it was. How fast a free country, a country that helped write the rules of war, decided that the rules were quaint. All it took was one terrible morning and the fear that followed.

That's how fear becomes policy. That's how policy becomes war. And that's how war becomes a machine that's still running, right now. While you listen to this, with no one quite sure where the off switch is, or whether anyone really wants to find it. I'm going to leave you there. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other. And the next time someone tells you that the threat is so great

that the old rules have to go. I want you to remember a man freezing to death on a concrete floor for nothing. And I want you to ask them very carefully, exactly which rules they mean. is out