ANOTHER FAULT LINE was opening at the same time. In the two and a half years since Cheney helped usher in the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program, it had been reauthorized twenty-two times. Each time, the intelligence agencies produced what had come to be called the "scary memos" outlining the threat to the country justifying renewal of the program. The program remained so secret that Bush personally had to approve telling anyone outside the NSA about it.

But John Yoo was now gone, and a new crop of lawyers had arrived at the Justice Department, only to be shocked at what they found. Jack Goldsmith, a conservative law professor who had taken over as head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, thought some of the opinions he had inherited were poorly reasoned and unsustainable. As the next reauthorization deadline approached on March 11, he concluded that one element of the program had evolved in a way that went beyond the original presidential authorization and could not be legally supported. Under this part of the program, "metadata" about e-mail and other Internet communications of tens of millions of people was swept up, including names of senders and recipients, and subject lines, but not their content. John Ashcroft was in the hospital with pancreatitis, leaving in charge his deputy, James Comey, the same man who had appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the CIA leak. Comey agreed with Goldsmith.

Goldsmith went over to the White House on March 6 to tell Alberto Gonzales and David Addington that the department would not reauthorize the program.

Addington erupted in full volcanic fury. "If you rule that way, the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands," he thundered.

Goldsmith stood firm. "The president is free to overrule me if he wants."

Addington had been the key architect of the eavesdropping program and as fierce a guardian of executive prerogative as Washington had seen. He was tall, bearded, intellectually formidable, and profoundly intimidating. He kept his office locked at all times and carried a worn copy of the Constitution that he often pulled out of his pocket dramatically to make his arguments. In times of war, he believed that a president's power was largely unfettered. "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop," he once said. Since his time working on the Iran-contra commission with Cheney, Addington had scorned the constraints others tried to apply to a president guarding national security. He particularly disdained the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the secret court that enforced it. At a meeting just a month earlier, he had said, "We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court."

Cheney was alarmed when he heard what the Justice Department was saying. At a meeting at noon on March 9 in Andy Card's office, the vice president consulted with Michael Hayden, the NSA director; John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director; Robert Mueller, the FBI director; and various White House officials.

Cheney made clear the Justice Department's legal objections would not stop the program. "The president may have to reauthorize without blessing of DOJ," he said.

"I could have a problem with that," Mueller responded. The FBI would "have to review legality of continued participation in the program."

So now Cheney faced a revolt not just by the lawyers but by the FBI. He summoned Comey, Goldsmith, and other lawyers to the White House later that afternoon.

"How can you possibly be reversing course on something of this importance after all this time?" Cheney demanded. The program was "critically important," he said, and, echoing Addington, asserted that Comey would risk "thousands" of lives if he did not sign off.

Comey said the program's importance did not change the legal issues. "The analysis is flawed, in fact facially flawed," he said. "No lawyer reading that could reasonably rely on it."

"Well, I'm a lawyer and I did," Addington interrupted.

"No good lawyer," Comey said.

Thwarted, Cheney invited the congressional Gang of Eight to the White House for an emergency meeting on the afternoon of March 10, the day before the program would expire.

This was an important program, Cheney explained to lawmakers. "We think it is essential," he said. But the lawyers were refusing to sign off.

"You ought to get yourself some new lawyers," said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

After Hayden explained the program for those who had not previously attended such briefings, Cheney asked whether the lawmakers thought it should continue. "None of them says, 'Well, then, you ought to stop the program,' " Hayden recalled. Cheney asked whether they thought the White House should go to Congress to explicitly authorize the program. Again, none did. But several Democrats later said they did not recommend the program proceed either.

That evening, Bush had his staff call Ashcroft at George Washington University Hospital, where he had undergone surgery the day before to remove his gallbladder, but his wife, Janet, had ordered no calls be accepted. So Bush picked up the phone himself and was put through. According to Card, who was listening to Bush's end, the president told Ashcroft he had a reauthorization for the attorney general to sign and the program was about to expire. Ashcroft in this version agreed to sign. "I'll send Alberto and Andy over," Bush said.

Janet Ashcroft quickly told the attorney general's chief of staff, David Ayres, that Card and Alberto Gonzales were on their way. Ayres then called Comey, who was in his car on the way home. Sensing an end run, Comey directed his security detail to rush him to the hospital with emergency lights flashing, and he called Mueller and others to urge them to come too.

Arriving at the hospital around 7:10 p.m., Comey did not wait for the elevator and bounded up the stairs, beating the president's emissaries to Ashcroft's room. He called Mueller back and had him instruct the FBI detail that under no circumstances should Comey be removed from Ashcroft's room. Card and Gonzales arrived at 7:35 p.m. with an envelope containing forms to renew the surveillance program. By Comey's account, they did not acknowledge him.

Gonzales asked Ashcroft how he was feeling.

"Not well," the attorney general said.

"You know, there's a reauthorization that has to be renewed," Gonzales ventured.

Ashcroft, still woozy from the surgery, lifted himself in his bed and said he shared Comey's concerns.

"But that doesn't matter," he added, "because I'm not the attorney general." Pointing to Comey, who was formally acting in his stead, Ashcroft said, "There is the attorney general." Physically spent, he sank back into the bed.

Card and Gonzales later said they did not know that Ashcroft had transferred his power to Comey and made no further effort. "We said, 'Hope you are doing better,' and left," Card recalled. "We were not trying to get him to sign something that he didn't want to sign."

Janet Ashcroft stuck her tongue out at Card and Gonzales as they walked out. Mueller arrived at 8:00 p.m. and spoke with Ashcroft. "AG in chair; is feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed," Mueller wrote in his notes.

There are conflicting accounts of key details of the episode. By Card's account, Bush explicitly raised the program on the phone and Ashcroft agreed to sign, only to change his mind after Comey arrived first. In his memoirs, though, Bush made no claim that he said anything other than telling Ashcroft he was sending Card and Gonzales over on an urgent matter. Aides to Ashcroft have cast doubt on the notion that he agreed on the phone to sign.

The confrontation escalated. After returning to the White House that night, Card called Comey and ordered him to come to his office right away; Comey refused to come without a witness and had Solicitor General Theodore Olson pulled out of a dinner party. Comey met first at the Justice Department with a group of lawyers, and there was broad agreement that they would all resign if the White House overruled their judgment. One of the lawyers quietly e-mailed a friend at the White House, who passed on news of the brewing mass resignation to Card. By the time Comey arrived at the White House at 11:00 p.m., Card realized he faced an insurrection and convinced the acting attorney general to leave Olson outside while they talked. But Comey still refused to budge on the surveillance program.

The next day, March 11, Bush signed the order renewing the surveillance program without Ashcroft or Comey. Addington retyped the order to delete the signature line for the attorney general and substituted the White House counsel instead, so Gonzales could sign it, even though he had no authority. As far as Bush and Cheney were concerned, the importance of the program was brought home all too vividly the same day when terrorists set off ten bombs on four commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring another 1,800 just three days before Spain was to hold elections. It was one of the deadliest such attacks since September 11, and in the heart of Europe, dooming the government of Bush's ally Prime Minister Jose Mara Aznar.

Comey and Goldsmith drafted letters of resignation. At 1:30 a.m. on March 12, Mueller scrawled out his own by hand, saying he was "forced to withdraw the FBI from participation in the program." He added, "Further, should the President order the continuation of the FBI's participation in the program, and in the absence of further legal advice from the AG, I would be constrained to resign as Director of the FBI."

Bush did not understand just how far the conflict over the program had gone until later that morning when Card told him Comey and as many as a dozen officials planned to quit because the president had reauthorized it. "I was stunned," Bush said later, asserting that he did not even realize that Ashcroft had transferred his powers to Comey. When Comey showed up for a routine meeting that morning, Bush asked him to stick around afterward.

"I just don't understand why you are raising this at the last minute," Bush said.

Comey was shocked and realized Bush had been kept in the dark. "Mr. President," he said, "your staff has known about this for weeks."

Only then did Bush learn that Mueller also planned to resign. Flashing through his mind were visions of Richard Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre," when the attorney general and the deputy attorney general both resigned rather than carry out the president's order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. "I was about to witness the largest mass resignation in modern presidential history, and we were in the middle of a war," Bush concluded. One Justice Department official predicted, with only a bit of hyperbole, that if the top law enforcement officials all walked out, the president would have to resign within seventy-two hours or risk impeachment.

Cheney and others urged Bush not to give in. "I had little patience with what I saw happening," the vice president said. But Bush backed down, modifying the Internet surveillance part of the program that Comey and Mueller objected to. Ultimately, it was restarted several months later under a different legal theory, this time with Comey's assent.

But Cheney struck back at Comey, who had already gotten on the vice president's bad side by appointing the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case; several months later, Cheney blocked a move to make Comey's aide Patrick Philbin deputy solicitor general.

ON THE ELECTORAL front, John Kerry had locked up the Democratic nomination, and the Bush team was feeling on the defensive. Bush tried to settle down his jittery staff during a meeting in the White House residence.

"Listen, I've been involved in a lot of campaigns," he started, implicitly reminding his team that he had already seen five presidential campaigns up close. "The accidental genius of the process in its length is it strips you bare. You're totally revealed to the American people. You can't hide who you are. It's one of the reasons why people made fun of me with my pillow in 2000 and I wanted to get home. But you need your sleep. It's exhausting." The bottom line this year, he added pointedly, was this: "We're going to win because John Kerry is an asshole."

Bush and Cheney wasted little time before going after Kerry. The challenge was to shape his public image before Kerry could do it himself, and the vice president would be the pit bull. "Cheney would be the attack dog who went after Kerry a little more pointedly than the president could," as Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, later put it. The opening came in mid-March. The campaign team learned that Kerry would be visiting West Virginia, so they decided to try to bait him by airing an ad on local television attacking him for voting against funding for troops in Iraq. When a member of the audience posed the same question at Marshall University in Huntington on March 16, Kerry was already irritated. He explained that he first voted for a Democratic alternative to finance the war by reducing Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it," he said.

There it was, one sentence that neatly summed up the argument that Kerry was an unreliable flip-flopper. Mark McKinnon ran around the Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters wearing a beret and screaming with delight. Game, set, and match, he thought. He quickly recut the West Virginia ad to include the Kerry line and sent it out nationally. "When I saw that," Cheney recalled, he thought, "that is a gift." He quickly inserted the line into his stump speech. "I couldn't pass it up and I quoted Kerry saying that and the crowd just roared and I used it in just about every speech."

While exploiting Kerry's gaffe, Bush tried to find a way to minimize his own vulnerability: the missing weapons in Iraq. Humor historically had helped presidents smooth over political problems. So at the black-tie dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association on March 24, Bush presented a slide show of photographs, including a couple of him looking under furniture in the Oval Office.

"Those weapons of mass destruction gotta be somewhere," he joked. When another such picture showed up later in the slide show, he quipped, "Nope, no weapons over there. Maybe under here."

The jokes went over fine in the room at the time, but by morning making light of a colossal intelligence failure that propelled the country to war seemed in poor taste.

In the same performance, Bush needled Cheney, making him a foil, as he did increasingly over the course of his presidency. Bush showed a picture of the two of them in the Oval Office with Andy Card making an odd face as the vice president seemed to be talking to his finger and thumb. "As you can tell from the look on Andy Card's face, we've become a little concerned about the vice president lately," Bush said. "Whenever you ask him a question, he replies, 'Let's see what my little friend says.' "

Other Republicans saw not a punch line but a liability-among them, one of Cheney's most important patrons. A number of Republicans approached Gerald Ford to see if he might help ease Cheney off the ticket. Despite their different political philosophies, Cheney revered Ford, who had entrusted his White House to him at a young age. Ford rebuffed the emissaries who approached him. But Ford told a friendly journalist in March, "Dick has not been the asset I expected on the ticket. As you know, he's a great friend of mine. He did a great job for me. But he has not clicked, if that's the right word."

AS THE CAMPAIGN took shape, Bush was simultaneously juggling the politics of far-off Baghdad, where the fractious Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish segments of society were overlaid with the personalities and ambitions of exiles who had returned to Iraq. Two separate yet interrelated events inflamed both Shiite and Sunni communities, putting the Americans in between lots of men with guns. On March 28, American troops on Jerry Bremer's orders shut down a newspaper run by Moqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric who had been challenging the occupation. In padlocking the gate, they touched off a violent and sustained backlash from Sadr and his supporters in Baghdad, Najaf, and other Shiite areas.

Then, even as American troops were trying to contain Sadr's fighters, four security contractors from the private Blackwater firm were ambushed and killed in Fallujah, the Sunni-dominated city in Anbar Province west of Baghdad where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and al-Qaeda followers were now based. The charred bodies of the slain contractors were dragged from their sport-utility vehicles into the street and ripped apart by a cheering mob. "Where is Bush? Let him come here and see this!" shouted a boy no older than ten as he ground his heel into a burned head. Two mutilated corpses were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The desire for retaliation among the Americans was overpowering.

The marines resisted suggestions for a full-fledged assault on the city, arguing for a more targeted approach rather than risk further alienating the population. "We ought to probably let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge," Lieutenant General James Conway, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, recalled arguing. His colleagues split; Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez agreed, but his superior, General John Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander, thought the marines' indirect approach had failed, and Bremer also favored a strong response. So did Washington. "No, we've got to attack," Sanchez remembered Rumsfeld saying in response to the general's concerns. "We need to make sure that Iraqis in other cities receive our message." In Sanchez's account, the president expressed appreciation for the military's caution, "but then ordered us to attack." After leaving office, Rumsfeld disavowed responsibility for the decision, attributing it to Abizaid. "Military commanders decide that, absolutely," Rumsfeld said.

Now managing simultaneous operations against Sunni and Shiite extremists, Bush, Cheney, and the National Security Council heard from Bremer and Sanchez over a secure videoconference on April 7. Bush was in a feisty mood. He declared that Sadr's Mahdi Army was "a hostile force" and that they could not let a single radical cleric change the course of Iraq. "At the end of this campaign, al-Sadr must be gone," Bush declared. "At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out."

Rumsfeld asked whether the effort should be low intensity or high intensity, and the high-intensity president interrupted. As Sanchez remembered it, Bush delivered a sharp tirade. "Kick ass!" Sanchez recalled Bush saying. "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them. We must be tougher than hell." He went on: "Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out. We are not blinking." If it stood out in Sanchez's memory as perhaps more cartoonish than it really was, it reflected the president's state of mind.

Yet the marine assault in Fallujah had already precipitated a crisis in Baghdad that would force Bush to blink. Members of the Iraqi Governing Council threatened to resign if it continued. Tony Blair called Bush asking him to back off, and Bremer agreed they should suspend the operation for fear of losing the government just weeks before the scheduled transfer of sovereignty. Abizaid disagreed, urging that they continue the offensive, even though it would take another two or three weeks. Cheney agreed. "The vice president was pretty adamant about continuing the attack, and he wasn't worried about the government falling," one participant in the discussions recalled. But Bush was. On April 8, Sanchez was ordered to halt the offensive. Once again, the marines were furious. Having launched the operation over their own objections, they now wanted to finish it. Abizaid flew to Fallujah on April 9 to tell the marine commander, Major General James Mattis, whose pants were splattered with blood. Mattis exploded.

"If you are going to take Vienna, take fucking Vienna!" he roared, embellishing Napoleon's famous phrase.

But the order stood. "Let me say again, we're going to stop," Abizaid told him.

Mattis was not the only one unhappy about it. Cheney seemed to have been taken by surprise by the decision. His staff called senior military officers to ask what happened.

The Fallujah episode underscored the uncertain way Bush was managing the war from Washington. One minute he wanted to be tough; the next he was convinced the whole enterprise would unravel. His instinct was to defer to the people on the ground, but when the people on the ground disagreed among themselves, he was reluctant to mediate or insert himself. In his head were images of Lyndon Johnson picking out bombing targets during the Vietnam War, an object lesson, he felt, in what presidents should not do. "You fight the war, and I'll provide you with political cover," he told the generals more than once. But in this instance, his equivocation had a cost. Conway concluded, "We certainly increased the level of animosity that existed." Along with stirring the Sadr hornet's nest without capturing him, the Fallujah debacle led Sanchez to call those days in March and April "a strategic disaster for America's mission in Iraq." Taken together, he said, "our actions had undeniably ignited a civil war in Iraq."

THAT WAR WAS taking a toll on Bush's standing at home, and there was rising pressure on him to admit the invasion had been a misjudgment. At a prime-time news conference in the East Room on April 13, Bush stumbled when John Dickerson of Time magazine asked him to name his biggest mistake since September 11. Bush considered it a trap, a way of getting him to backslide on Iraq. But his faltering inability to come up with an answer was perhaps as damaging.

"I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it," Bush said, pausing to think. "Uh, John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way."

Clearly flummoxed, he paused again. Watching from the side of the room, his press secretary, Scott McClellan, thought to himself, Come on, sir, this one is not difficult!

"You know," Bush continued, "I just, I'm sure something will pop in my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet."

He went on to reaffirm his decision to invade Iraq despite the missing weapons. "You just put me under the spot here," he told Dickerson, "and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."

Bush knew he had blown it. Conferring with aides in the darkened State Dining Room afterward, he said, "I kept thinking about what they wanted me to say-that it was a mistake to go into Iraq. And I'm not going to. It was the right decision."

The answer provoked an uproar about a president who could admit no wrong, and it weighed on Bush for weeks. When Adam Levine, a press aide who was leaving the White House, stopped by the Oval Office for a departure photograph, Bush raised the encounter.

"How would you answer the Dickerson question?" Bush asked.

"Mr. President, that isn't fair. I have had three weeks to think about it."

"I know you have, so what would you have said?"

"Well, I would have looked at him and said, 'That's a great question, John. You are right. I make a lot of mistakes. Laura Bush reminds me every night. You probably want to ask her because she keeps better track of them than I do.' "

Bush laughed because of course it was true.

While Bush acknowledged no mistakes, George Tenet became convinced that the president's people were trying to pin them on him instead. When he picked up the Washington Post on April 17 to find a story about Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack, he read with exasperation that he had told the president the case for weapons in Iraq was a "slam dunk." Tenet felt like "the guy being burned at the stake." He took a few days off work and headed to the New Jersey shore to stew. First, he thought, the White House had hung him out to dry on the sixteen words, and now this.

From his beach getaway, Tenet called Andy Card to vent. "Andy, I'm calling to tell you that I'm really angry," he said. He complained about the leak. "What you guys have gone and done is make me look stupid, and I just want to tell you how furious I am about it. For someone in the administration to now hang this around my neck is about the most despicable thing I have ever seen in my life." Card said little, and Tenet concluded his relationship with the White House was broken beyond repair.

ON THE MORNING of April 29, Bush and Cheney welcomed ten members of a bipartisan commission investigating September 11 into the White House. It was a bright, sunny day, with light beaming through the windows of the Oval Office as the president and the vice president greeted their visitor-inquisitors. Bush was friendly and warm, Cheney quiet and stoic.

The White House, and especially Cheney, had long viewed the inquiry with suspicion, sure that it would turn into an exercise in finger-pointing that could only be damaging in an election year. Richard Clarke had used his appearance before the commission to accuse Bush and his team of not taking the threat of terrorism seriously enough and to dramatically apologize to relatives of the victims of September 11. The White House resisted turning over sensitive intelligence documents or letting aides to the president testify. But eventually the resistance began to look like stonewalling, and the White House agreed to send Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly and to let the commission interview Bush and Cheney-as long as they appeared together and no transcript or recording was made.

The insistence that the two do the interview jointly set tongues wagging about a president who needed to lean on his vice president, feeding into a public perception that it was Cheney who was really in charge, not just in ordering that hijacked planes be shot down on September 11, but in every phase of the war on terror that followed. "My immediate suspicion was that they want to do it together so that we don't get them separately and their stories don't match up, including about the shoot-down episode," recalled Philip Zelikow, the commission's executive director. Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission, said he thought it might be "a way of diluting the time we would have with the president."

But in fact Bush dominated the session. As the commissioners settled into the couches and chairs set up in a semicircle around the president and the vice president, the panel's leaders, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, opened the questioning for about an hour, taking Bush through the events leading up to September 11 and the day itself. Cheney said nothing unless a question was directed at him or the president asked if he wanted to add something. After Kean and Hamilton were done, the other commissioners were given ten minutes each to pose their own questions.

When one of the Democrats risked straying beyond his time, Kean gently tried to cut in, but Bush waved him off.

"This is the Oval Office," Bush said. "I make the rules."

Then to the commissioner he said, "Go on to your next question."

That defused much of the tension, and Bush gave no appearance of being rushed. Despite the strictures White House lawyers had tried to put on the session, they had actually blocked out the entire morning on the president's schedule so he could give the commission as much time as it wanted. In doing so, he could appear magnanimous and not defensive. "Every time we asked a specific question to the president, he thoroughly answered it or honestly said, 'Here's what I recall,' " Roemer said.

On the shoot-down order, Bush backed Cheney's account that he had obtained permission from the president first. None of the logs or notes taken that day confirmed such a call, but Bush and Cheney were firm in their mutual recollection and attributed the lack of documentation to the confusion of the day. "I just think it was the fog of war and the communications scramble that morning," Cheney said later. "I think there were calls that weren't recorded." Some of the commissioners remained unconvinced, though. While the vice president had no power to issue a military order on his own, few could fault him if he had taken the initiative in the most exigent of circumstances to prevent the destruction of the White House. But some commissioners assumed that the president and the vice president were unwilling to fuel the impression that Cheney was really the dominant member of the tandem, acting on his own.

At one point, Fred Fielding, a Republican commissioner who would later serve as Bush's White House counsel, asked about issues surrounding the Twenty-Fifth Amendment that dealt with the succession of power. Bush replied that his relationship with Cheney was like that of no other president and vice president because there was no political rivalry. "The vice president isn't interested in my job and I'm not interested in his," Bush said.

As they answered questions, though, Bush left little doubt that he was in charge on this day at least. He used no notes and was in full command of the details. "The commissioners go in expecting that Cheney is going to do a lot of talking, except for the few people that know the two men," recalled Zelikow. Instead, "Bush utterly dominates the conversation. The commissioners didn't expect that, a lot of them, especially the Democrats. They had the caricature in their head of Bush, and they didn't understand that the caricature is not quite right." In the end, "Bush probably did 95 percent of the talking. Cheney just stayed silent, which I think he is totally content to do."

So rather than Cheney guarding Bush, it was Cheney who was protected from questioning.

18.

"When are we going to fire somebody?"

This is going to kill us," Alberto Gonzales said quietly as he watched the images on his White House television.

On the night of April 28, the CBS show 60 Minutes II aired photographs of Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison being abused by American soldiers. The photographs were depraved in every way. Several showed Iraqi prisoners stripped naked and blindfolded or hooded, with American soldiers posing next to them smiling or flashing thumbs-ups. One showed naked Iraqi prisoners stacked on top of each other in a pyramid. The most horrific image, one that would be seared into the consciousness of the world as a symbol of American hypocrisy, showed an Iraqi forced to stand on a box of military rations, his head covered with a sandbag and wires attached to his fingers and genitals. He was told if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted.

President Bush had been told about the Pentagon investigation back in January but had never seen the photographs until now. He felt angry and blindsided. "I had no idea how graphic or grotesque the photos would be," he recalled. Bush understood pictures like this would be interpreted around the world as evidence that the Americans were no better than Saddam Hussein.

Investigators found a broad pattern of abusive behavior at the prison. In a report marked "Secret/No Foreign Dissemination," Major General Antonio M. Taguba concluded that military police had kept detainees naked for days at a time, forced groups of male prisoners to masturbate while being photographed or videotaped, placed a dog chain around a naked detainee's neck so a female guard could pose with him, used unmuzzled military dogs to intimidate detainees and once bite a prisoner, forced male detainees to strip and wear women's underwear, and punched, slapped, and kicked detainees. The abuse did not occur during interrogations, but some guards said they were encouraged by interrogators and believed it helped soften up detainees for later questioning.

At 10:00 a.m. on May 5, Bush met with Rumsfeld, who handed him a handwritten letter. "Read this," the secretary said.

Mr. President, I want you to know that you have my resignation as Secretary of Defense anytime you feel it would be helpful to you.

Don Rumsfeld Rumsfeld told the president that there had to be accountability and the furor would just grow until there was a sense that the government had taken it seriously.

Bush agreed. "Don, someone's head has to roll on this one," he said.

Well, Rumsfeld responded, you have my resignation.

The meeting broke up without a decision.

Rumsfeld's letter was not precisely a letter of resignation; it was an offer to resign if the president wanted him to. Generously, it could be read as an honorable act taking responsibility; more cynically, it could be seen as forcing Bush either to support him or cut him loose. Bush saw it as the latter.