At a meeting in her office in the late summer of 2002, months before the war in Iraq, prisoner abuse at Guantanamo is discussed. Condoleezza Rice brings in Donald Rumsfeld for a meeting, and they all agree they have to do something. Nothing gets done. Did everybody understand we were going to be as tough as we could be people we thought were Al Qaeda? Is there a better way to get information, get their trust, establish rapport, try to change their views? Nobody wants to think about that. It's just, let's beat them up. And that attitude was widespread throughout the Administration.

How can you have a security guarantee? The Europeans can give their security guarantees to Iran all they want in return for their stopping their enrichment. But as long as America says we're going to stay out here and we're not going to drop the stick, we're going to pound you if we have to, it's not going to work.

We'd be better off if the whole purpose of the adventure in Iraq was, say, to protect Israel or to protect the flow of oil to America and keep it at a reasonable price and try to get some more control. If it was about oil, going into Iraq, I guess, could have made sense. But at a certain point, when the insurgency began and we were in real trouble, there would have been some awareness that we were going to jeopardize the oil.

Where would we in Washington and we in America be without the Center? We would know much less about the workings of our Congress, and our tax dollars. We would know much less about the powers of the Executive, and its ability to hide wrong doing behind secrecy and classification. The Center takes the notion of integrity very seriously, and its investigations are a model for today's good journalism and, we all hope, an inspiration for the mainstream press to do more.

When George W.Bush attacked Afghanistan, it was widely hailed, and the failure of our war there wasn't understood. Within a few months of attacking Afghanistan, Bush clearly moved on to get ready for Iraq, long before Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda were dispensed with. There was never any serious debate in the press about whether even the notion that every Taliban was our enemy was valid. A lot of assumptions about that war were never challenged.

The general assumption, which I think is a valid one, is that a lot of the major media were on their heels a little bit and prone to share the grief of the nation and to give Bush all the support it could.

Essentially Rumsfeld wins, Cheney wins, and the CIA and State Department lose. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have more centralized control over intelligence, analysis, and operations than ever before. And the way they interpret the law, if the President authorizes an intelligence mission to be run covertly by the Pentagon, they don't have to tell anybody, including Congress, about it because the President is the commander in chief.