I Want Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine"!

When I first heard of and then read about this book I was not that interested yet "these times they are a-changing". Ron Suskind's site has a blurb on the book yet the real buzz is with what the reporting is picking up. The book is described at and available via Amazon. I'll give you a summary of the news below but let me first remind you of Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty", his main source being former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. As the first "insider", and I'll offer that is a serious stretch, O'Neill of course reminded us that Bu$h didn't know the questions to ask on anything of substance.

Gary Kamiya of Salon gives us "License to lie : In his devastating new book, Ron Suskind shows how 9/11 allowed George W. Bush and his shadowy courtier, Dick Cheney, to "create whatever reality was convenient." that begins with,

"If there are any observers who still deny that the Bush administration is the most secretive, vengeful, reality-averse, manipulative and arrogant government in U.S. history, they will have a lot of fast talking to do after reading Ron Suskind's new book, "The One Percent Doctrine." A meticulous work of reporting, based on interviews with nearly 100 well-placed sources, many of them members of the U.S. intelligence community, Suskind's book paints perhaps the most intimate and damning portrait yet of the Bush team. "

We've got Sidney Blumenthal via Salon giving us "Surrealpolitik : Ron Suskind's latest book offers new details about how the Bush White House has used theological certainty to mask political expediency -- facts be damned." There is less "theology" I'd offer than politics and power and arrogance and ... involved in this disaster of a GWOT "led" by the Worst Administration Ever. Some portions worth sharing include:

... On June 14, the Pentagon dispatched a document titled "Iraq Floor Debate Prep Book" to Republicans in the House. A Pentagon public affairs officer admitted to the Washington Post that the 74-page document originated in the White House but was repackaged as a Pentagon publication. It is a cut-and-paste rush job to refute advocates of "cut and run." It is also a representative document of the Bush administration: Evidence is cherry-picked, slogans substitute for facts, falsehoods are sold as truth, and "victory" is promised. Connections between al-Qaida and Iraq are slyly hinted at. The old accusations against Jose Padilla as the "dirty bomber," no longer being pressed against him, reappear. The Pentagon document, eagerly seized upon by congressional Republicans as a treasure trove of talking points, accurately gauges the White House's estimate of their ability to assess information on their own. ...

... On Tuesday, Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech at the National Press Club, defended his statement of May 2005 that the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes." "I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered," he added. His comment, besides strangely echoing Bush's on Hurricane Katrina ("I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees"), belied precise warnings from the CIA, the Army War College and 70 experts gathered by the National Defense University, who sent a report before the war to the administration but never received acknowledgment of receipt. But for the moment at least, Cheney's restatement of optimism or obliviousness expresses regained political confidence. ...

... The passage of the Republican congressional resolution on Iraq stands on the wreckage of those standards. (The Pentagon talking points refer to Zubaydah as "bin Laden's field commander.") The continuing primacy of apparatchiks Cheney and Rumsfeld reflects the conquest of their conception of the executive. And Rove's exploitative strategies subordinate a potential political solution in Iraq to the paramount importance of a political solution in the midterm elections. Call it the triumph of surrealpolitik.

Barton Gellman of the WaPo, upon reading the book, wrote,

One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind's gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war's major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques. ...

... Cheney, by Suskind's account, had been grappling with how to think about "a low-probability, high-impact event." By the time the briefing was over, he had his answer: "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response."

This "Cheney Doctrine" let Bush evade analytic debate, Suskind writes, and "rely on impulse and improvisation to a degree that was without precedent for a modern president." ...

... Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

Suskind has also claimed "the US took out Al-Jazeera office in Kabul purposefully". My reading on this is still a bit sketchy. Without claiming to know doctrine, I could think of a few rare circumstances where going after journalists could be excused yet this does seem very extreme, even for Bu$hCo.

Unfortunately, and I'd think understandably, Suskind is unable to source this book as would be ideal. However, given the undisputed fact that the Rubber Stamp Congress, with special scorn for Kansas Senator Pat Roberts who continues to stall on what he has long promised and is required to do by our laws and traditions, has abandoned their oversight role I'm pleased to get the story out there. If Congress will investigate, journalist will demand substantive answers from Snow Job (keep your day job Tony as you'll never make it as a historian) plus in fact all of Bu$hCo, and most importantly if the American public will press their rights and responsibilities in a democracy then perhaps we'll start getting some answers. Peace ... or War!