Takedown Read Free

other sovereign nations. If we don’t truly place that principle above all else then we can’t be any better than the terrorists we’re fighting against.”
    “That’s it!” bellowed General Hank Currutt as he rose from his chair and stabbed his thick finger at Driehaus. “I’m not going to listen to any more of this subversive garbage.”
    “Subversive?” replied Driehaus. “That’s a mighty convenient way to label opinions that don’t agree with yours.”
    “Listen, you smug SOB, if you don’t like the way things are being done here, then resign your post, pick up a picket sign, and stand on the other side of the fence with the rest of the whackos out on Pennsylvania Avenue.”
    Once again, things were quickly spinning in the wrong direction. “Let’s take our seats and all calm down,” said the president. When Currutt didn’t comply, the president ordered, “General, I said sit down. ”
    Once the man had retaken his seat, the president looked at Driehaus and said, “You’ve got a sharp mind, Alan, especially when it comes to homeland security issues and that’s why—”
    “Mr. President,” interjected Driehaus, “our enemies use our extraordinary rendition policy as prime recruiting propaganda. In fact, with all the attention the media has been devoting to it, they don’t need to recruit at all. Willing bodies are lined up out their doors and down the block. This policy makes us look like hypocrites.”
    “No it doesn’t,” stressed Rutledge, who had been getting progressively more frustrated with his appointee’s refusal to be a team player. “The policy makes us look tough. What’s more, it gets results. Civilized rules of engagement and jurisprudence mean nothing to a vicious enemy willing to do anything to succeed. If we want to win, we have to adopt the same strategy—success at any cost. I’m sorry, Alan, but if a nation refuses to bend, then that nation is almost certainly doomed to break. In this case we have to suspend the rule of law in part, in order to save it.”
    That one remark tore at the very few remnants of respect Driehaus had left for the president. “We know Mohammed exchanged information with the Palestinian and Hezbollah bombmakers who helped Richard Reid design the shoe bomb he carried on the Paris-to-Boston flight in 2001. Let’s indict him under that. If we put him on trial here, a fair trial, it will go a long way to repairing our image abroad. And it’ll send the message that we’re tough.”
    “Ramzi Yousef bombed the World Trade Center in 1993,” interjected the attorney general, Laura Finley. “We found him, tried him, and put him in SuperMax out in Colorado, but where’d that get us? His uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, came back with al-Qaeda and hit the Trade Center again in 2001. Yousef got a fair trial and then he got life in prison. That’s pretty tough, if you ask me, but it didn’t stop anything. Alan, we’ve worked together and you know I have a lot of respect for you, but the president’s right. We can’t bring knives to gunfights anymore.”
    Driehaus was about to respond, when the secretary of state, Jennifer Staley, piped up and said, “As someone who deals with America’s image abroad on an around-the-clock basis, I want to put my two cents in here. Have the press leaks about our interrogations of detainees abroad hurt our image overseas? Yes, they definitely have. But the bottom line is that right or wrong, the United States is safer because of what we’re doing.”
    “So we shouldn’t be concerned with what happens to these people once they’ve been handed over to another government?”
    “When we render a suspect, that suspect is often being rendered to his or her country of origin or a country where that individual already has outstanding warrants. Despite how the press warps our involvement, we actually have very little control over what happens from that point forward.”
    “So there’s a slice of absolution in it for