Adding to the fear of the already heady mixture of events was Cheney's insistence that he and other key presidential advisers see raw intelligence data. The reports he received were filled with frightening information. Reading them was a “mind-altering” experience. But much of that raw data was also “garbage.” Still, given the tons of new threats that appeared daily in the chatter streams, national security concerns became of near religious import to Cheney and other key policy makers inside the Bush administration — anything, anyone could be sacrificed on that altar.
But it is a mistake to believe that the panic that followed the attacks was solely responsible for the attempts to run around the Constitution. Mayer sketches a much longer history of the idea of the imperial presidency. The notion that the president should have more power and authority can be traced to the era of Watergate and the Nixon presidency's disgraceful fall. For conservatives like Cheney, this was a difficult intellectual and cultural era. The Congress, seizing on the public outrage over Nixon's excesses, had, in their view, gone too far in laying down the law, which ended up hamstringing the president.
The Iran-contra crisis indicated the degree of dissatisfaction on part of certain people in government with the growing power of the legislative branch — decisions were made, according to Mayer, to simply get around Congressional interference and meddling. 9/11 seems to have offered a silver lining, giving them the perfect opportunity to push back and to put into place their interpretation of the office of the president, even if it conflicted deeply with the established ideas.
The fact that Al Quaeda did not sprout overnight had a great deal to do with the perceived need for a more muscular presidency. Bin Laden had been formally, if secretly, recognized as America's main enemy long before 9/11. As early as 1996, for example, he and his organization had been targeted by the Clinton administration. And the CIA was waging a slow and largely unsuccessful war against Al Quaeda for at least five years before the tragic events of 9/11. There were obstacles to a more aggressive approach. Obstacles, one concludes after reading the book, that Cheney and his men would later work to address in a way that made sense to them — by giving removing much of the restraints on the executive. In one instance, which illustrates the ethical quandaries that held back American power, Bin Laden was in the sights of a Predator drone but the president hesitated giving the order to kill the terrorist leader, the incredibly clear live video feed showing the unsuspecting criminal mastermind also showed a swing, indicating the presence of children. It would take 9/11 and Dick Cheney for the gloves to come off. It was okay for the President to hurt children, as Yoo latter would admit in a 2005 interview, if the president was doing so to protect American children.
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