Not a good couple of weeks for the White House, forced to admit that numerous warnings before the attacks of September 11, 2001, went unheeded. Changeable and contradictory accounts come from senior government officials including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, about who heard what, and from whom. FBI Director Robert Mueller has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the “Phoenix memo,” in which FBI field agent Ken Williams tried to warn higher-ups about some incongruous flight students in Arizona. Meanwhile, the administration must also battle suggestions that recent threat warnings about terrorism have been deliberately hyped up. In this atmosphere of increasingly public and valid criticism over 9/11, the White House and the Office of the Vice President continue to try to make the case for war against Iraq.

May, 2002, continued:

May 19, 2002 – Vice President Cheney touts the danger of purported Iraqi nukes on Meet the Press, interviewed by Tim Russert:

 
“MR. RUSSERT: Warren Buffett, a hard-headed investor who's made billions of dollars, said last week that he believes a major nuclear event is a virtual certainty in the United States.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I can't say that. I would not go that far, because I think we still have the opportunity to prevent the acquisition of a nuclear weapon, for example, by a terrorist organization. But that's one of the reasons--it takes us back into the axis of evil speech the president made at the State of the Union, our concerns about Iraq, our concerns about the possible marriage, if you will, between the terrorist organization on the one hand and a state that has or is developing weapons of mass destruction on the other. And if you ever get them married up--that is if somebody who has nukes decides to share one with a terrorist organization, with the expectation they'll use it against us, obviously we've got another problem. We know with certainty that the al-Qaeda organization has been trying to acquire this capability. There's ample evidence in the caves and the training camps in Afghanistan that they were out to get chemical weapons, biological weapons and nuclear weapons. We don't know how far they got. We're aggressively trying to run down all those leads. We spent a lot of time on that subject, for example, with the detainees and so forth.”

Buffett is also a foremost investor in the Washington Post Co. and is politically influential enough to serve later as mentor for California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Cheney is also compelled to devote time in this interview to some inconvenient questions, generated by news reports that the administration had received advance warnings about 9/11.

May 21, 2002 – Lawyers for Vice President Cheney file a brief arguing for dismissal of a lawsuit over public release of documents from Cheney’s Energy Task Force of 2001.

“I said in 1984 we cannot allow ourselves to become the hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond . . .When in that same 1984 speech following terrorist attacks on our Embassy and on the Marine barracks in Beirut, and the IRA effort to blow up Margaret Thatcher in Brighton, I called for active prevention, preemption and retaliation and said we must be willing to use military force. I was disowned and dismissed by official Washington and on leading editorial pages . . .

By contrast, we all cheered, I at the top of my voice, when Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld said on the Jim Lehrer Newshour on February 4 of this year, "If you think about it, we have no choice. A terrorist can attack at any time, at any place, using a range of techniques. It is physically impossible to defend at every time in every location against every conceivable technique of terrorism. Therefore, if your goal is to stop it, you cannot stop it by defense. You can only stop it by taking the battle to the terrorists where they are and going after them. What must we do, just sit here and take the blows like the World Trade Center, take the blows that biological weapons would pose for us? The answer is no. You have a responsibility to defend your country."

So preemption with military force is now an operative idea with wide support.”

The ceremony for Shultz is attended by Colin Powell and Dick Cheney. According to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, Cheney privately calls the preemption remarks “George at his wisest and best.”

As General Wesley Clark points out in the 2004 presidential election campaign, the U.S. already had the option of preemptive strike before the Bush administration. In the context of 2002 and 2003, emphasis on the ‘doctrine of preemption’ is translated in practical terms as support for war against Iraq.