move to a safe place outside Washington—the famous undisclosed location—to ensure continuity of government. The Secret Service recommended that I leave, too. I told them I was staying put. Maybe this was a little bravado on my part. Mostly it was fatalism. I had made my peace. If it was God’s will that I die in the White House, I would accept it. Laura felt the same way. We were confident the government would survive an attack, even if we didn’t.
I did have one good reason to leave Washington for a few hours. The New York Yankees had invited me to throw out the first pitch at Game Three of the World Series. Seven weeks after 9/11, it would send a powerful signal for the president to show up in Yankee Stadium. I hoped my visit would help lift the spirits of New Yorkers.
We flew to New York on Air Force One and choppered into a field next to the ballpark. I went to a batting cage to loosen up my arm. A Secret Service agent strapped a bulletproof vest to my chest. After a few warm-up pitches, the great Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter dropped in to take some swings. We talked a little. Then he asked, “Hey President, are you going to throw from the mound or from in front of it?”
I asked what he thought. “Throw from the mound,” Derek said. “Or else they’ll boo you.” I agreed to do it. On his way out, he looked over his shoulder and said, “But don’t bounce it. They’ll boo you.”
Nine months into the presidency, I was used to being introduced to a crowd. But I’d never had a feeling like I did when Bob Sheppard, the Yankees legendary public address announcer, belted out, “Please welcome the president of the United States.” I climbed the mound, gave a wave and a thumbs-up, and peered in at the catcher, Todd Greene. He looked a lot farther away than sixty feet, six inches. My adrenaline was surging. The ball felt like a shot put. I wound up and let it fly.
Opening Game Three of the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium.
The noise in the stadium was like a sonic boom. “USA, USA, USA!” I thought back to the workers at Ground Zero. I shook hands with Todd Greene, posed for a photo with the managers, Joe Torre of the Yankees and Bob Brenly of the Arizona Diamondbacks, and made my way to George Steinbrenner’s box. I was the definition of a relieved pitcher. I was thrilled to see Laura and our daughter Barbara. She gave me a big hug and said, “Dad, you threw a strike!”
We flew back to Washington late that night and waited out the next day. October 31 passed without an attack.
Putting the country on a war footing required more than just tightening our physical defenses. We needed better legal, financial, and intelligence tools to find the terrorists and stop them before it was too late.
One major gap in our counterterrorism capabilities was what many called “the wall.” Over time, the government had adopted a set of procedures that prevented law enforcement and intelligence personnel from sharing key information.
“How can we possibly assure our citizens we are protecting them if our own people can’t even talk to each other?” I said in one meeting shortly after the attacks. “We’ve got to fix the problem.”
Attorney General John Ashcroft took the lead in writing a legislative proposal. The result was the USA PATRIOT Act.** The bill eliminated the wall and allowed law enforcement and intelligence personnel to share information. It modernized our counterterrorism capabilities by giving investigators access to tools like roving wiretaps, which allowed them to track suspects who changed cell phone numbers—an authority that had long been used to catch drug traffickers and mob bosses. It authorized aggressive financial measures to freeze terrorist assets. And it included judicial and congressional oversight to protect civil liberties.
One provision created a little discomfort at home. The PATRIOT Act allowed the government to seek warrants to examine the business records of suspected terrorists, such as credit card receipts, apartment leases, and library records. As a former librarian, Laura didn’t like the idea of federal agents snooping around libraries. I didn’t, either. But the intelligence community had serious concerns about terrorists using library computers to communicate. Library records had played a role in several high-profile cases, such as the Zodiac gunman murders in California. The last thing I wanted was to allow the freedom and access to information provided by American libraries to be utilized against us by al Qaeda.
Lawmakers recognized the urgency of the threat and passed the PATRIOT Act 98 to 1 in the Senate and 357 to 66 in the House. I signed the bill into law on October 26, 2001. “We took time to look at it, we took time to read it, and we took time to remove those parts that were unconstitutional and those parts that would have actually hurt liberties of all Americans,” Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont said. His Democratic colleague, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, added, “If there is one key word that underscores this bill, it is ‘balance.’ In the new post–September 11 society that we face, balance is going to be a key word. … Balance and reason have prevailed.”
Over the next five years, the PATRIOT Act helped us break up potential terror cells in New York, Oregon, Virginia, and Florida. In one example, law enforcement and intelligence authorities shared information that led to the arrest of six Yemeni Americans in Lackawanna, New York, who had traveled to a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and met with Osama bin Laden. Five pled guilty to providing material support to al Qaeda. The other admitted to unlawful transactions with al Qaeda.
Some claimed the Lackawanna Six and others we arrested were little more than “small-town dupes” with fanciful plots “who had no intention of carrying out terrorist acts.” I always wondered how the second-guessers could be so sure. After all, in August 2001, the idea that terrorists commanded from caves in Afghanistan would attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on U.S. commercial airplanes would have seemed pretty far- fetched. For me, the lesson of 9/11 was simple: Don’t take chances. When our law enforcement and intelligence professionals found people with ties to terrorist networks inside the United States, I would rather be criticized for taking them into custody too early than waiting until it was too late.
As the freshness of 9/11 faded, so did the overwhelming congressional support for the PATRIOT Act. Civil liberties advocates and commentators on the wings of both parties mischaracterized the law as a stand-in for everything they disliked about the war on terror. Key provisions of the PATRIOT Act, such as the authority to conduct roving wiretaps, were set to expire in 2005. I pushed hard for their re-authorization. As I told Congress, the threat had not expired, so the law shouldn’t, either.
Lawmakers delayed and complained. But when they finally held a vote, they renewed the PATRIOT Act by a margin of 89 to 10 in the Senate and 251 to 174 in the House. In early 2010, key provisions of the PATRIOT Act were authorized again by the heavily Democratic Congress.
My one regret about the PATRIOT Act is its name. When my administration sent the bill to Capitol Hill, it was initially called the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001. Congress got clever and renamed it. As a result, there was an implication that people who opposed the law were unpatriotic. That was not what I intended. I should have pushed Congress to change the name of the bill before I signed it.
As part of the 9/11 investigation, we discovered that two hijackers who had infiltrated the United States, Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi, had communicated with al Qaeda leaders overseas more than a dozen times before the attack. My immediate question was: Why hadn’t we intercepted the calls? If we had heard what Mihdhar and Hazmi were saying, we might have been able to stop the attacks of 9/11.
The man with the answers was Mike Hayden, the three-star Air Force general who led the National Security Agency. If the intelligence community is the brains of national security, the NSA is part of the gray matter. The agency is filled with smart, techno-savvy experts and code breakers, along with analysts and linguists. Mike told me the NSA had the capability to monitor those al Qaeda phone calls into the United States before 9/11. But he didn’t have the legal authority to do it without receiving a court order, a process that could be difficult and slow.
With General Mike Hayden.
The reason was a law called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Written in 1978, before widespread use of cell phones and the Internet, FISA prohibited the NSA from monitoring communications involving people inside the United States without a warrant from the FISA court. For example, if a terrorist in Afghanistan contacted a terrorist in Pakistan, NSA could intercept their conversation. But if the same terrorist called someone in the United States, or sent an email that touched an American computer server, NSA had to apply for a court order.
