Power Wars

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The Captive

1. Aboard Flight 253

It was about half past eleven on December 25, 2009—a quiet Christmas morning. The administration of President Barack Obama, the constitutional lawyer who had risen to power on a message of change from the tumultuous era of President George W. Bush's "global war on terror," was not yet a year old. The new president was vacationing in his native Hawaii, and his national security legal-policy team were scattered to their own homes as an event that would reshape their story began to unfold.

Around ninety-two hundred feet above the surface of the earth, Northwest Airlines Flight 253, an Airbus A330 bound from Amsterdam to Detroit, approached the border between Canadian and American airspace. Inside, one of the two hundred and ninety people aboard, a Nigerian passenger named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, stood up from seat 19A, next to the window looking out onto the aircraft's right wing.¹ Three days earlier, the young man—a banker's son who had studied in Britain and was fluent in English—had marked his twenty-third birthday. Now, he was preparing to die.

Abdulmutallab rummaged through the carry-on bag stashed in the overhead bin a row behind his seat, found a Ziploc of toiletries, and carried it down the aisle to the bathrooms at the rear of the plane.² Inside one of the cramped compartments, he methodically washed his face, brushed his teeth, and dabbed on cologne.³ Then, considering himself purified, he walked back to his seat, past dozens of the strangers whom he intended to kill.

Abdulmutallab believed he was about to commit an act of jihad and martyrdom. This would be "retaliation," in his word, for the United States' support of Israel in its "killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Palestine," as well as for America's "killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and beyond, most of them women, children, and noncombatants."⁴ The innocent passengers on the plane who would die if his suicide bombing was successful were nearly all noncombatants too, and they included many women and children. But Abdulmutallab dismissed them all as "collateral damage" in a war between the United States and Islam.⁵ It was a misuse of the term, since he was deliberately targeting them and a civilian aircraft. But the term was also heavily loaded from its frequent invocation by the American government in its excuses for the civilian casualties that resulted incidentally from its missile strikes targeted at Islamist militants—when the United States acknowledged those strikes and bystander deaths at all.

At 11:38 a.m., Flight 253 was passing over Lake St. Clair, which lies along the international border northeast of Detroit, and was about nine thousand feet above the ground. Muttering to a nearby passenger that he did not feel well and wanted to sleep a bit before they landed, Abdulmutallab slumped back in his seat and draped a thin airline blanket over his head and body. Concealed beneath it, he said his final prayers to himself and then pulled down his cargo-style pants.

His underwear, which he had been wearing for days, was curiously bulky—like a toddler's pull-up Pampers. But the extra padding was not intended to absorb. Sewn into pouches were packages of chemicals known by the abbreviations TATP and PETN, the latter a prime ingredient in plastic explosives. The idea, conceived by a bomb maker in Yemen, was to ignite a chemical fire that would detonate the TATP, which would in turn trigger a far more powerful PETN blast—a compound bomb that used no metal parts and so was undetectable at a routine airport-security checkpoint. The plane would be blown open in midair.

Abdulmutallab unwrapped the tape from a plastic syringe, inserted its tip into the seam around the TATP pouch, and pushed the plunger.

2. Change and Continuity

At that moment, six time zones to the west, the dawn had not yet broken over the highly guarded Hawaiian compound where Obama and his family were staying. Campaigning for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, then–Senator Obama had sharply criticized many of the national security policies that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had put in place following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Claiming that a president's power as commander in chief trumped legal constraints in wartime, the Bush-Cheney administration had authorized Central Intelligence Agency interrogators to torture detainees in secret overseas prisons. It had declared that the Geneva Conventions did not protect wartime prisoners captured in Afghanistan, some of whom it held without trial at the American navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It had directed the National Security Agency to wiretap on domestic soil without the court orders required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In the campaign and in his early days as president, Obama had vowed to chart a new course.

"To overcome extremism, we must also be vigilant in upholding the values our troops defend, because there is no force in the world more powerful than the example of America," Obama had said a year earlier as part of his first address to a joint session of Congress, in February 2009. "And that is why I have ordered the closing of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and will seek swift and certain justice for captured terrorists, because living our values doesn't make us weaker. It makes us safer, and it makes us stronger. And that is why I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture."⁶

But if Obama's words had seemed clear, his actions proved to be murky. In his first weeks as president, Obama had already started to assemble an ambiguous record on the security state he had inherited from Bush. He banned torture—but his new CIA chief said the agency would continue to use extraordinary rendition, the practice of seizing terrorism suspects and transferring them to the custody of third countries for questioning outside the criminal process, relying on diplomatic assurances that they would not be mistreated. He promised greater transparency—but his Justice Department had already twice reasserted the state secrets privilege to block pending lawsuits, one involving CIA torture practices and the other challenging the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program. He ordered the prison at Guantánamo closed—but his cabinet nominees had testified in their confirmation hearings that it was, nevertheless, lawful for the military to imprison al-Qaeda suspects without trial under the laws of war. He closed the CIA's black-site prisons—but the CIA's drone strikes in Pakistan had continued. And he halted Bush-era military commission trials at Guantánamo—but he left the door open to potentially reviving them after an overhaul of the rules, and he later did just that. In short, having promised change, the new president seemed to be delivering something more like a mere adjustment—a right-sizing—of America's war on terror.

As Obama's team was still drafting that first address to a joint session of Congress in early February 2009, I called the White House and said I was planning to write about what appeared to me to be a surprising degree of continuity between Obama's emerging national security legal policies and those he had inherited from Bush. I asked if I could speak with someone about it. Obama's new White House counsel, Greg Craig, invited me to his office in the West Wing. I had first met Craig in the summer of 2008 at a launch party for a book about the CIA torture program, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. With a shock of white hair, a ruddy face, and an energetic manner, Craig had been President Bill Clinton's defense lawyer during the Monica Lewinsky impeachment scandal, but his first love was foreign policy and national security issues. When many people had thought Senator Hillary Clinton was a lock for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Craig was among those who broke with the Clintons to become an early and senior campaign adviser to Senator Barack Obama. He had hoped to be made secretary of state, but when Obama gave Clinton that job, Craig ended up as White House counsel instead. During the transition, he had been a key force in drafting Obama's executive orders banning torture, directing the CIA black-site prisons to close immediately and the military prison at Guantánamo to close within a year.

Our appointment was for the afternoon of February 13—a brisk, sunny, windy day. I walked down from the New York Times' Washington Bureau office past the statues and trees of Lafayette Square to the White House visitors' gate on Pennsylvania Avenue, which has been closed to vehicles since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Outside the fence, nine protesters wearing orange prison-style jumpsuits and black hoods stood with signs reading Shut Down Guantánamo and Free the Uighurs, a reference to some Chinese Muslims at the military prison who had been brought to Guantánamo by mistake and were stuck there because there was no good place to send them. Several months later, the Obama administration would badly mishandle an attempt to find a solution for the Uighur problem, damaging Craig's standing in the White House.

Inside the West Wing, a press aide ushered me up winding stairs to Craig's corner office. Denis McDonough, the chief of staff and head of strategic communications for the National Security Council, joined us. McDonough had been Senator Obama's top foreign-policy adviser and would later be his fourth White House chief of staff. But as we sat around a coffee table, he let Craig do most of the talking. Craig made no apologies for any disconnect between the expectations created by Obama's campaign rhetoric and his early governing decisions. He told me how during the transition after the election, the incoming Obama team had visited the CIA and spent extensive time talking with incumbent managers of Bush-Cheney administration intelligence and military programs. They were going to be slow, careful, and deliberate before enacting changes, he said. The Obama team's decision-making process about what to do with the counterterrorism structures Bush had bequeathed to them, he added, was not "shoot from the hip. It is not bumper sticker slogans."⁷

Following the interview, I drafted a story reporting that despite the early flurry of high-profile executive orders on issues like torture, "the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor's approach to fighting Al Qaeda," which was "prompting growing worry among civil liberties groups and a sense of vindication among supporters of Bush-era policies."⁸

The Times printed the story on an inside page, but it attracted widespread attention on the Internet thanks in part to a lengthy column written about it by Glenn Greenwald, then a prominent Salon blogger on civil liberties and secrecy issues. I had corresponded with Greenwald since 2006, when he took an interest in articles I had written about Bush's use of signing statements to claim a right to bypass new laws; in 2013, Greenwald would evolve from a commentator into a journalist after the former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked him archives of top secret documents about surveillance programs. Back in February 2009, Greenwald highlighted my story as interesting but respectfully disagreed with my analysis, writing: "While believing that Savage's article is of great value in sounding the right alarm bells, I think that he paints a slightly more pessimistic picture on the civil liberties front than is warranted by the evidence thus far (though only slightly)."⁹ But six months later, Greenwald had changed his mind: "In retrospect, Savage was right and I was wrong about that: his February article was far more prescient than premature," he wrote in July 2009.¹⁰

Indeed, what Obama's recalibration would add up to was subject to wildly divergent early interpretations. As Obama's first year wound on, some Bush-Cheney administration veterans, notably Cheney himself, focused on what had changed. They accused Obama of not really believing the country was at war with al-Qaeda and said he was making the country less safe. But other conservatives and Republicans focused on what had stayed the same. They crowed that Obama had vindicated the Bush-Cheney administration, revealing that much of the Democratic criticism of the previous president—including Obama's own campaign rhetoric—had been empty partisanship.

On the other end of the spectrum, some liberals and Democrats also focused on those things that had changed. While celebrating Obama's departures from Bush policies, they also tended to accept what was staying the same, changing their minds about policies they had opposed when Bush instituted them because Obama now said those policies were necessary and they trusted him more. But other liberals, like the American Civil Liberties Union, pointed to the places of continuity and accused Obama of betraying his promises. An anti-Obama left began to take shape, denouncing Obama for institutionalizing and normalizing aspects of the Bush-era security state by creating bipartisan consensus over what had previously been subjects of dispute. This movement would join forces with libertarians on the right, as the anti–Big Government sentiments that had been quiet under Bush reemerged within the Republican Party now that a Democrat was president.

None of these views, of course, reflected what Obama and his legal team understood themselves to be doing. During my early meeting with Craig, Obama's top lawyer insisted that the new administration's early signs of caution about changing some Bush policies should not be interpreted as meaning that Obama had embraced Bush's view of his powers or the world.

"We are charting a new way forward, taking into account both the security of the American people and the need to obey the rule of law," Craig said. "That is a message we would give to the civil liberties people as well as to the Bush people."

3. The Underwear Bomb

Ten months after that meeting, when Abdulmutallab injected the chemicals into the bomb hidden in his underwear, Mike Zantow was sitting just behind him in row 20.¹¹ For the past decade, Zantow had been working abroad as a military contractor for DynCorp International, supervising the repair of U.S. Air Force equipment being used in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was now returning home to visit his sick mother. Zantow later recalled that he had heard a "large pop" like a "very large firecracker." It was not immediately clear where the sound had come from. The whole plane grew quiet as everyone tried to figure out what was happening. Then, after about half a minute, the passenger sitting next to Abdulmutallab cried out, Hey, dude, your pants are on fire! A flight attendant hurried up to investigate and the man reiterated, This guy's pants are on fire! Zantow looked over the seat back and saw smoke rising from Abdulmutallab's "lap area between his legs." The Nigerian man appeared numb and displayed no awareness of what must have been searing pain.

The passengers pulled the passive Abdulmutallab out of the seat—Zantow grabbing his right arm—and laid him flat on his back on the floor of the aisle, exposing the burning and bulky underwear. As people screamed in panic and confusion throughout the aircraft, several passengers tried to smother the flames on his body, one of them using a hat, but the chemical fire needed no oxygen and blazed on.