confRontAtion And consensus 351
what a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff characterized as the
brilliant bureaucratic BS he shoveled out to “stay afloat” when he was
challenged or proven wrong.^20
Clearly well prepared, Rumsfeld began by earnestly praising the com-
mission’s diligence. He also empathized with the difficulty of its mission.
It was his as well, he said. “You’ve been asked to try to connect the dots
after the fact, to examine events leading up to September 11th and to con-
sider what lessons, if any, might be taken from that experience that could
prevent future dangers. It isn’t an easy assignment.... Our task is to con-
nect the dots not after the fact but before the fact, to try to stop attacks
before they happen. That must be done without the benefit of hindsight,
hearings, briefings or testimony. Another attack on our people will be
attempted. We can’t know where, or when, or by what technique. That
reality drives those of us in government to ask the tough questions: When
and how might that attack be attempted and what will we need to have
done, today and every day before the attack, to prepare for it and to, if pos-
sible, to prevent it?”
Having heard Gorton remark to William Cohen, Clinton’s second-
term secretary of defense, that he found “actionable intelligence” to be “a
very troubling two-word phrase,” Rumsfeld said, “I knew of no intelli-
gence during the six-plus months leading up to September 11th that indi-
cated terrorists would hijack commercial airliners, use them as missiles
to fly into the Pentagon or the World Trade Center towers.”
Kerrey and Gorton were poised to probe.
“Mr. Secretary,” said Kerrey, “you’re well-known as somebody who
thinks about all kinds of terrible possibilities that might happen that no-
body else is thinking about. I mean, that’s what you do so well when
you’re going into a difficult situation. I mean, it seems to me that a decla-
ration of war, either by President Clinton or by President Bush, prior to
9/11 would have mobilized the government in a way that at least would
have reduced substantially the possibility that 9/11 would have happened.
Do you agree or not?”
“Possibly. Let me put it that way. The problem with it—it sounds good
the way you said it. I try to put myself in other people’s shoes. And try to
put yourself in the shoes of a new administration that had just arrived.
And time had passed. We were in the process of bringing people on
board. And the president said he wanted a new policy for counter-
terrorism... .”
Gorton picked up where Kerrey left off, noting that in 1998 Osama bin
Laden had declared an Islamic holy war—jihad—against the Jews and