Inside The War Room

(7 of 10)

On the morning of Oct. 4, as he prepared to travel to New York for the second time since the attacks, Bush read a Washington Times story that made him, as an aide put it, "very, very angry." The story contained a detailed description, complete with a map, of the terrorist camps in Afghanistan that the CIA and Pentagon had targeted for destruction. Partly because the Bush White House runs the most tightly controlled message operation Washington has seen in decades, Bush was seething when Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, two top advisers, came to his office that morning. "An act of treason was committed in the newspaper this morning," he said.

Soon Bush was calling the four top congressional leaders to inform them that he had ordered the FBI, CIA and Pentagon to sharply reduce the number of lawmakers eligible for classified briefings on the war. Members of Congress, Bush was saying, could not be trusted. Bush backed down a week later, and the pertinent members of Congress were quickly brought back into the loop. But his reaction to the leak was the first of several instances in which Bush has overreached as he has presided over the greatest expansion in federal power in a generation or more.

Without seeking the approval of or even consulting Congress, Bush has significantly increased the powers of federal law enforcement, shrunk the attorney-client privilege for those suspected of being terrorists and detained thousands of Arab men without due process. He has granted himself the power to try terrorist suspects in secret military tribunals rather than in open civilian court, and he has signed orders eliminating some of the restrictions governing the conduct of CIA operatives abroad. He even signed an order making it more difficult for historians to get access to presidential papers.

Inside the White House almost everything is justified by the phrase "We are at war," even when the link is fuzzy. Bush won passage, by one vote in the House, of a controversial bill expanding his power to negotiate trade agreements, after he insisted that he needed the measure to help fight the war on terrorism. Whenever the President was able to draw on war fever, he was given wide latitude by both parties.

Bush made careful, bipartisan moves in the immediate wake of Sept. 11. He brought a parade of lawmakers to the White House and then organized a weekly breakfast with the Democratic and Republican leadership. Everything seemed greased at first. House Speaker Dennis Hastert pulled Bush aside the day after the attacks and told him that he should come to Congress and ask for the authority and money to wage war. Bush's instinct might have been to circumvent Congress, but Hastert made the invitation too sweet to decline. "Lay out your vision," he said. "We're going to give you whatever resources you need."