Presidency of George W. Bush

Domestic measures

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Immediately after the September 11 attacks, domestic security and the threat of terrorism became the chief focus of the Bush administration and the top priority of government at every level. Declaring a global “war on terrorism,” Bush announced that the country would not rest until “every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” To coordinate the government’s domestic response, the administration formed a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, which began operating on January 24, 2003.

In October 2001 the Bush administration introduced, and Congress quickly passed, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (the USA PATRIOT Act), which significantly but temporarily expanded the search and surveillance powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law-enforcement agencies. (Most of the law’s provisions were made permanent in 2006 by the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act.)

In January 2002 Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens and others in the United States without first obtaining an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. When the program was revealed in news reports in December 2005, the administration insisted that it was justified by a September 2001 joint Congressional resolution that authorized the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those responsible for the September 11 attacks. Subsequent efforts in Congress to provide a legal basis for the spying became mired in debate over whether telecommunications companies that cooperated with the NSA should be granted retroactive immunity against numerous civil lawsuits. Legislation granting immunity and expanding the NSA’s surveillance powers was finally passed by Congress and signed by Bush in July 2008.

Treatment of detainees

In January 2002, as the pacification of Afghanistan continued, the United States began transferring captured Taliban fighters and suspected al-Qaeda members from Afghanistan to what became a special prison complex at the country’s permanent naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Eventually hundreds of prisoners were held at the facility without charge and without the legal means to challenge their detentions (see habeas corpus). The administration argued that it was not obliged to grant basic constitutional protections to the prisoners, because the base was outside U.S. territory; nor was it required to observe the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians during wartime, because the conventions did not apply to “unlawful enemy combatants.” It further maintained that the president had the authority to place any individual, including an American citizen, in indefinite military custody without charge by declaring him an enemy combatant.

The prison complex at Guantánamo became the focus of international controversy in June 2004, after a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross found that significant numbers of prisoners had been interrogated by means of techniques that were “tantamount to torture.” (The Bush administration had frequently and vigorously denied that the United States practiced torture.)

The leak of the report came just two months after the publication of photographs of abusive treatment of prisoners by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (see below Iraq War). In response to the Abu Ghraib revelations, Congress eventually passed the Detainee Treatment Act, which banned the “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment of prisoners in U.S. military custody. Although the measure became law with Bush’s signature in December 2005, he added a “signing statement” in which he reserved the right to set aside the law’s restrictions if he deemed them inconsistent with his constitutional powers as commander in chief.

In June 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, declared that the system of military commissions that the administration had intended to use to try selected prisoners at Guantánamo on charges of war crimes was in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs American rules of courts-martial. Later that year, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which gave the commissions the express statutory basis that the court had found lacking; the law also prevented enemy combatants who were not American citizens from challenging their detention in the federal courts.

In separate programs run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), dozens of individuals suspected of involvement in terrorism were abducted outside the United States and held in secret prisons in eastern Europe and elsewhere or transferred for interrogation to countries that routinely practiced torture. Although such extrajudicial transfers, or “extraordinary renditions,” had taken place during the Clinton administration, the Bush administration greatly expanded the practice after the September 11 attacks. Press reports of the renditions in 2005 sparked controversy in Europe and led to official investigations into whether some European governments had knowingly permitted rendition flights through their countries’ territories, an apparent violation of the human rights law of the European Union (see also European law).

In February 2005 the CIA confirmed that some individuals in its custody had been subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding (interrupted or controlled drowning, often called simulated drowning), which was generally regarded as a form of torture under international law. The CIA’s position that waterboarding did not constitute torture had been based on the legal opinions of the Justice Department and specifically on a secret memo issued in 2002 that adopted an unconventionally narrow and legally questionable definition of torture. After the memo was leaked to the press in June 2004, the Justice Department rescinded its opinion. In 2005, however, the department issued new secret memos declaring the legality of enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. The new memos were revealed in news reports in 2007, prompting outrage from critics of the administration. In July 2007 Bush issued an executive order that prohibited the CIA from using torture or acts of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, though the specific interrogation techniques it was allowed to use remained classified. In March 2008 Bush vetoed a bill directed specifically at the CIA that would have prevented the agency from using any interrogation technique, such as waterboarding, that was not included in the U.S. Army’s field manual on interrogation.

Road to war

In September 2002 the administration announced a new National Security Strategy of the United States of America. It was notable for its declaration that the United States would act “preemptively,” using military force if necessary, to forestall or prevent threats to its security by terrorists or “rogue states” possessing biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons—so-called weapons of mass destruction.

At the same time, Bush and other high administration officials began to draw worldwide attention to Iraqi Pres. Ṣaddām Ḥussein and to suspicions that Iraq possessed or was attempting to develop weapons of mass destruction in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions. In November 2002 the Bush administration successfully lobbied for a new Security Council resolution providing for the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq. Soon afterward Bush declared that Iraq had failed to comply fully with the new resolution and that the country continued to possess weapons of mass destruction. For several weeks, the United States and Britain tried to secure support from other Security Council members for a second resolution explicitly authorizing the use of force against Iraq (though administration officials insisted that earlier resolutions provided sufficient legal justification for military action). In response, France and Russia, while agreeing that Iraq had failed to cooperate fully with weapons inspectors, argued that the inspections regime should be continued and strengthened.

As part of the administration’s diplomatic campaign, Bush and other officials frequently warned that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, that it was attempting to acquire nuclear weapons, and that it had long-standing ties to al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. In his State of the Union address in January 2003, Bush announced that Iraq had attempted to purchase enriched uranium from Niger for use in nuclear weapons. The subsequent determination that some intelligence reports of the purchase had relied on forged documents complicated the administration’s diplomatic efforts in the United Nations. Meanwhile, massive peace demonstrations took place in several major cities around the world.

Operation Iraqi Freedom

Finally, Bush announced the end of U.S. diplomacy. On March 17 he issued an ultimatum to Ṣaddām, giving him and his immediate family 48 hours to leave Iraq or face removal by force. Bush also indicated that, even if Ṣaddām relinquished power, U.S. military forces would enter the country to search for weapons of mass destruction and to stabilize the new government.

After Ṣaddām’s public refusal to leave and as the 48-hour deadline approached, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, called Operation Iraqi Freedom, to begin on March 20 (local time). In the ground phase of the Iraq War, U.S. and British forces quickly overwhelmed the Iraqi army and irregular Iraqi fighters, and by mid-April they had entered Baghdad and all other major Iraqi cities and forced Ṣaddām’s regime from power.

In the wake of the invasion, hundreds of sites suspected of producing or housing weapons of mass destruction within Iraq were investigated. As the search continued without success into the following year, Bush’s critics accused the administration of having misled the country into war by exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq. In 2004 the Iraq Survey Group, a fact-finding mission comprising American and British experts, concluded that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction or the capacity to produce them at the time of the invasion, though it found evidence that Ṣaddām had planned to reconstitute programs for producing such weapons once UN sanctions were lifted. In the same year, the bipartisan 9-11 Commission (the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States) reported that there was no evidence of a “collaborative operational relationship” between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Ṣaddām, who went into hiding during the invasion, was captured by U.S. forces in December 2003 and was executed by the new Iraqi government three years later.

Occupation and insurgency

Although the Bush administration had planned for a short war, stabilizing the country after the invasion proved difficult. From May 1, when Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq, to the end of December 2003, more than 200 U.S. soldiers were killed as a result of attacks by Iraqis. During the next four years the number of U.S. casualties increased dramatically, reaching more than 900 in 2007 alone. (The number of Iraqis who died during the invasion and insurgency is uncertain.) Widespread sectarian violence, accompanied by regular and increasingly deadly attacks on military, police, and civilian targets by militias and terrorist organizations, made large parts of the country virtually ungovernable. The increasing numbers of U.S. dead and wounded, the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction, and the enormous cost to U.S. taxpayers (approximately $10 billion per month through 2007) gradually eroded public support for the war; by 2005 a clear majority of Americans believed that it had been a mistake. By the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2008, some 4,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed. As the death toll mounted, Bush’s public-approval ratings dropped, falling below 30 percent in many polls.

While acknowledging that it had underestimated the tenacity of the Iraqi resistance, the Bush administration maintained that part of the blame for the continuing violence lay with Iran, which it accused of supplying weapons and money to Iraqi-based terrorist groups. In his State of the Union address in 2002, Bush had warned that Iran (along with Iraq and North Korea) was part of an “axis of evil” that threatened the world with its support of terrorism and its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. In 2006–07 the United States joined other members of the Security Council in condemning Iran’s nuclear research program. The administration’s repeated warnings concerning a possible Iranian nuclear weapon led to speculation that Bush was contemplating military action against the country. In December 2007, however, the administration’s suspicions were contradicted by the National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus report of U.S. intelligence agencies, which declared with “high confidence” that in 2003 Iran had abandoned attempts to develop a nuclear weapon.

Education

In January 2002 Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which introduced significant changes in the curriculum of the country’s public elementary, middle, and high schools and dramatically increased federal regulation of state school systems. Under the law, states were required to administer yearly tests of the reading and mathematics skills of public school students and to demonstrate adequate progress toward raising the scores of all students to a level defined as “proficient” or higher. Teachers were also required to meet higher standards for certification. Schools that failed to meet their goals would be subject to gradually increasing sanctions, eventually including replacement of staff or closure.

In the first years of the program, supporters pointed to its success in increasing the test scores of minority students, who historically had performed at lower levels than white students. Indeed, in the 2000 presidential campaign Bush had touted the proposed law as a remedy for what he called “the soft bigotry of low expectations” faced by the children of minorities. Critics, however, complained that the federal government was not providing enough funding to implement the program’s requirements and that the law had usurped the states’s traditional control of education as provided for in the Constitution. Others objected that the law was actually eroding the quality of education by forcing schools to “teach to the test” while neglecting other parts of the curriculum, such as history, social science, and art.

Medicare

In December 2003 Bush won Congressional approval of the Medicare Modernization Act (MMA), a reform of the federally sponsored health insurance program for elderly Americans. Widely recognized as the most far-reaching overhaul of Medicare to date, the MMA enabled Medicare enrollees to obtain prescription drug coverage from Medicare through private insurance companies, which then received a government subsidy; it also vastly increased the number of private insurance plans through which enrollees could receive medical benefits. Although many members of Congress from both parties criticized the MMA as needlessly complex and expensive (its cost was estimated in January 2004 at $534 billion over 10 years), a bipartisan majority accepted the measure as an imperfect but necessary compromise that would bring a much-needed insurance benefit to senior citizens. Some conservative Republicans, however, rejected the MMA on both fiscal and philosophical grounds, and many Democrats objected to a provision in the plan that prevented Medicare administrators from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices.

Reelection

In 2004 Bush focused his energies on his campaign for reelection against his Democratic challenger, U.S. Sen. John Kerry. According to opinion polls, the candidates entered the fall elections in a virtual dead heat. Bush’s key campaign platform was his conduct of the war on terrorism, which he linked with the war in Iraq. Kerry countered that the Iraq War had been poorly planned and executed and that Bush had neglected domestic priorities. The election was notable for the prominent role played by independent political-action groups in organizing and fund-raising and for the influence of highly partisan blogs as alternative sources of political news. Bush defeated Kerry with a slim majority of the electoral and popular vote, and the Republicans increased their majorities in both the House and the Senate.

Social Security and immigration

The major domestic initiative of Bush’s second term was his proposal to replace Social Security (the country’s system of government-managed retirement insurance) with private retirement savings accounts. The measure attracted little support, however, mainly because it would have required significant cuts in retirement benefits and heavy borrowing during the transition to the private system.

Bush also proposed a reform of immigration laws that would have allowed most of the estimated 12 million people living in the country illegally to remain temporarily as “guest workers” and to apply for U.S. citizenship after returning to their home countries and paying a fine (though citizenship would not be guaranteed). Although the proposal was supported by some prominent Democrats, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, most other Democrats and many members of Bush’s own party remained wary of the idea. Some conservative critics denounced the program as an amnesty that would encourage a new wave of illegal immigration, while liberal opponents warned that it would create a permanent underclass of poor and disenfranchised workers. More than two years of debate produced no reform legislation, though Bush did sign a measure that authorized the construction of a 700-mile (1,127-km) fence along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Environmental and science policy

The Bush administration’s environmental policies reflected its conviction that economic development could be accomplished without serious harm to the environment and that limits on development, where necessary, should be achieved through voluntary cooperation by industry rather than regulation by government. In keeping with the recommendations of the energy task force, the administration’s proposed Clear Skies Act would have introduced a cap-and-trade system to regulate major sources of air pollution by power plants throughout the country. Although the measure would have reduced emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and mercury by 70 percent by 2016, critics charged that the reductions were less than what would be achieved by enforcing the existing Clean Air Act. Largely because of disagreements about whether the Clear Skies Act should regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, the measure died in the Senate in 2005. Despite this setback, the administration soon implemented the Clean Air Interstate Rule, a regional cap-and-trade system for 28 Eastern states and the District of Columbia.

After the Supreme Court ruled in April 2007 that greenhouse gas emissions by automobiles constitute a form of air pollution under the Clean Air Act, Bush signed energy legislation that imposed increases in automobile fuel economy standards by the year 2020. In December, however, the Environmental Protection Agency blocked a proposal by California and 16 other states to issue regulations that would have required fuel economies greater than those called for in the new federal law.

The Bush administration was frequently accused of politically motivated interference in government scientific research. Critics charged that political appointees at various agencies, many of whom had little or no relevant expertise, altered or suppressed scientific reports that did not promote administration policies, restricted the ability of government experts to speak publicly on certain scientific issues, and limited access to scientific information by policy makers and the public. Numerous complaints by environmental and scientific groups led to Congressional hearings in 2007 on political interference in the work of the Surgeon General of the United States and in research on climate change conducted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In most cases the administration claimed that the interventions were an appropriate attempt to ensure scientific objectivity or simply a benign exercise of the authority of political appointees.

2006 elections

The continued lack of progress in the Iraq War, a series of corruption scandals involving prominent Republican politicians, and the administration’s poor response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and surrounding areas in August 2005 helped the Democrats win control of both houses of Congress in the midterm elections of November 2006. The new Congress soon began investigations of the NSA spying program undertaken in 2002 and of allegedly improper political influence in the dismissals of several United States attorneys in December 2006. In the latter investigation the testimony of Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush’s attorney general since 2005, was viewed with skepticism by both parties and reinforced the impression that the Justice Department under his leadership was not sufficiently independent of the White House. Gonzales resigned in August 2007 and was replaced in November with Michael Mukasey.

The Plame affair

In March 2007 Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby, was convicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with an investigation into the leak of the identity of a covert CIA agent in 2003. The agent, Valerie Plame, was the wife of Joseph C. Wilson, a retired foreign service officer who had traveled to Africa in early 2002 at the request of the CIA to help determine whether Iraq had attempted to purchase enriched uranium from Niger. Wilson reported that there was no evidence of an attempted purchase, and in July 2003 he publicly speculated that the administration had ignored or distorted intelligence reports such as his to justify a military invasion of Iraq. Plame was identified as a CIA agent to journalists, allegedly to punish Wilson and to discredit him by suggesting that his selection for the CIA mission was the result of nepotism. In testimony before a grand jury and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Libby made false statements about the substance of conversations he had had with journalists concerning Wilson’s mission to Niger and about when and how he had learned that Plame worked for the CIA. Libby was not charged with the underlying crime of disclosing the identity of covert intelligence personnel, nor were two other administration officials who had identified Plame to a journalist who subsequently published the information in his column. Bush commuted Libby’s 30-month prison sentence in July 2007. Libby was pardoned by Pres. Donald J. Trump in April 2018.

During his second term Bush appointed two Supreme Court justices: John G. Roberts, Jr. (confirmed as chief justice in 2005), and Samuel A. Alito, Jr. (confirmed in 2006). The appointments increased to four the number of solidly conservative justices on the nine-member Supreme Court.

As Bush entered the final year of his presidency in 2008, the country faced enormous challenges. Although al-Qaeda had been subdued, it had not been destroyed. The United States and its allies continued to fight skirmishes with terrorists and their Taliban supporters in Afghanistan, and the insurgency in Iraq continued to claim U.S. casualties. The surpluses in the federal budget in 2000 and 2001 were a distant memory, as the combined effects of military spending, tax cuts, and slow economic growth produced a series of enormous budget deficits starting in 2003. Later in 2008 the economy was threatened by a severe credit crisis, leading Congress to enact a controversial Bush administration plan to rescue the financial industry with up to $700 billion in government funds (see Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008). Despite Bush’s 2000 campaign promise to be “a uniter, not a divider,” the country remained politically polarized to an extent not seen since the Vietnam War. While Bush’s critics faulted him for these problems and many others, his supporters vigorously defended him as a strong leader who had guided the country through one of the most dangerous periods in its history.