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Also See Bart Gellman’s review: Inside the Shadow War Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and
nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be....Abu Zubaydah also
appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's
go-to guy for minor logistics....And yet somehow, in a speech delivered 2 weeks
later, Pres. Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives
plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." 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." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/19/AR2006061901211.html Books of the Times:
Personality, Ideology and Bush's Terror Wars
'The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its
Enemies Since 9/11 by Ron Suskind, Simon & Schuster, 367 pages By MICHIKO KAKUTANI, New York Times Review of Books, June 20, 2006 The title of Ron Suskind's riveting new book, "The One
Percent Doctrine," refers to an operating principle that he says Vice
President Dick Cheney articulated shortly
after 9/11: in Mr. Suskind's words, "if
there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass
destruction — and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for
some time — the United States must now act as if it were a certainty."
He quotes Mr. Cheney saying that it's not about "our analysis," it's
about "our response," and argues that this conviction effectively
sidelines the traditional policymaking process of analysis and debate, making
suspicion, not evidence, the new threshold for action. Mr. Suskind's book — which appears to have been written with
wide access to the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet, as well as to other C.I.A. officials
and a host of sources at the F.B.I., and in the State, Defense and Treasury
Departments — is sure to be as talked about as his "Price of Loyalty"
(2004) and the former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke's "Against All Enemies"
(2004). The book, which focuses on the 2001 to 2004 period, not only sheds new light on the Bush White
House's strategic thinking and its doctrine of pre-emptive action, but also
underscores the roles that personality and ideology played in shaping the
administration's decision to go to war in Iraq. It describes how poorly
prepared homeland security was (and is) for another terrorist attack, and looks
at a series of episodes in the war on terror that often found the
"invisibles," who run intelligence and enforcement operations on the
ground, at odds with the "notables," who head the government. In fleshing out key relationships among administration
members — most notably, between Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush, Mr. Bush and Mr.
Tenet, and Mr. Tenet and Condoleezza Rice,
then the national security adviser — it adds some big, revealing chunks to the
evolving jigsaw-puzzle portrait of this White House and its modus operandi,
while also giving the reader some up close and personal looks at the
government's day-to-day operations in the war on terror. In "The One Percent Doctrine," Mr. Suskind
discloses that First
Data Corporation
— one of the world's largest processors of credit card transactions and the
parent company of Western
Union — began
cooperating with the F.B.I. in the wake of 9/11, providing information on
financial transactions and wire transfers from around the world. The huge
data-gathering operation in some respects complemented the National Security
Agency's domestic surveillance program (secretly authorized by Mr. Bush months
after the Sept. 11 attacks), which monitored specific conversations as well as
combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of
patterns that might lead to terrorism suspects. Despite initial misgivings on the part of Western Union
executives, Mr. Suskind reports, the company also worked with the C.I.A. and
provided real-time information on financial transactions as they occurred. Mr. Suskind's book also reveals that Qaeda operatives had
designed a delivery system (which they called a "mubtakkar") for a lethal gas, and that the United
States government had a Qaeda source who said that plans for a hydrogen cyanide
attack on New York City's subway system were well under way in early 2003, but
the attack was called off — for reasons that remain unclear — by Osama bin
Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The book also reports that Al Qaeda had
produced "extremely virulent" anthrax in Afghanistan before 9/11,
which "could be easily reproduced to create a quantity that could be
readily weaponized." Just as disturbing as Al Qaeda's plans and capabilities are
the descriptions of the Bush administration's handling of the war on terror and
its willful determination to go to war against Iraq. That war, according to the
author's sources who attended National Security Council briefings in 2002, was
primarily waged "to make an example" of Saddam Hussein, to "create
a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to
acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United
States." "The One Percent Doctrine" amplifies an emerging
portrait of the administration (depicted in a flurry of recent books by authors
as disparate as the Reagan administration economist Bruce Bartlett and the former Coalition
Provisional Authority adviser Larry Diamond)
as one eager to circumvent traditional processes of policy development and
policy review, and determined to use experts (whether in the C.I.A., the
Treasury Department or the military) not to help formulate policy, but simply
to sell predetermined initiatives to the American public. Mr. Suskind writes that the war on terror gave the president
and vice president "vast,
creative prerogatives": "to do what they want, when they want to, for
whatever reason they decide" and to "create whatever reality was
convenient."
The potent wartime authority granted the White House in the wake of 9/11, he
says, dovetailed with the administration's pre-9/11 desire to amp up executive
power (diminished, Mr. Cheney and others believed, by Watergate) and to impose
"message discipline" on government staffers. "The public, and Congress, acquiesced," Mr.
Suskind notes, "with little real resistance, to a 'need to know' status —
told only what they needed to know, with that determination made exclusively,
and narrowly, by the White House." Within the government, he goes on, there was frequent frustration
with the White House's hermetic decision-making style. "Voicing desire for
a more traditional, transparent policy process," he writes, "prompted
accusations of disloyalty," and "issues argued, often vociferously,
at the level of deputies and principals rarely seemed to go upstream in their
fullest form to the president's desk, and if they did, it was often after Bush
seemed to have already made up his mind based on what was so often cited as his
'instinct' or 'gut.' " This book augments the portrait of Mr. Bush as an incurious and curiously uninformed executive that Mr. Suskind earlier set
out in "The Price of Loyalty" and in a series of magazine articles on
the president and key aides. In "The One Percent Doctrine," he writes
that Mr. Cheney's nickname inside the C.I.A. was Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen), casting Mr. Bush in the puppet role of
Charlie McCarthy, and cites one instance after another in which the president
was not fully briefed (or had failed to read the basic paperwork) about a
crucial situation. During a November 2001 session with the president, Mr.
Suskind recounts, a C.I.A. briefer realized that the Pentagon had not told Mr.
Bush of the C.I.A.'s urgent concern that Osama bin Laden might escape from the
Tora Bora area of Afghanistan (as he indeed later did) if United States
reinforcements were not promptly sent in. And several months later, he says,
attendees at a meeting between Mr. Bush and the Saudis discovered after the
fact that an important packet laying out the Saudis' views about the
Israeli-Palestinian situation had been diverted to the vice president's office
and never reached the president. Keeping information away from the president, Mr. Suskind
argues, was a calculated White House strategy that gave Mr. Bush
"plausible deniability" from Mr. Cheney's point of view, and that
perfectly meshed with the commander in chief's own impatience with policy
details. Suggesting
that Mr. Bush deliberately did not read the full National Intelligence Estimate
on Iraq, which was delivered to the White House in the fall of 2002, Mr.
Suskind writes: "Keeping certain knowledge from Bush — much of it
shrouded, as well, by classification — meant that the president, whose each
word circles the globe, could advance various strategies by saying whatever was
needed. He could essentially be 'deniable' about his own statements." "Whether Cheney's innovations were tailored to match
Bush's inclinations, or vice versa, is almost immaterial," Mr. Suskind
continues. "It was a firm fit. Under this strategic model, reading the entire N.I.E. would
be problematic for Bush: it could hem in the president's rhetoric, a key weapon
in the march to war. He would know too much." As for Mr. Tenet, this book provides a nuanced portrait of a
man with "colliding loyalties — to the president, who could have fired him
after 9/11 but didn't; and to his analysts, whom he was institutionally and
emotionally committed to defend." It would become an increasingly
untenable position, as the White House grew more and more impatient with the
C.I.A.'s reluctance to supply readily the sort of intelligence it wanted. (A
Pentagon unit headed by Douglas Feith
was set up as an alternative to the C.I.A., to provide, in Mr. Suskind's words,
"intelligence on demand" to both Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the office of the vice
president.) While many C.I.A. analysts were deeply skeptical of the
imminent danger posed by Mr. Hussein
and simultaneously worried about the fallout of a possible invasion, the
C.I.A., paradoxically enough, would become a favorite scapegoat for the
administration's decision to go to war against Iraq, thanks in no small measure
to Mr. Tenet's remark (quoted in Bob Woodward's 2004 book "Plan of
Attack") that the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was a
"slam dunk." In this volume Mr. Suskind reports that Mr. Tenet says
he does not remember uttering those famous words: "Doesn't dispute it.
Just doesn't remember it." Mr. Suskind credits Mr. Tenet with deftly using his personal
bonds with "key conditional partners" in the war on terror, from
President Pervez Musharraf of
Pakistan to King Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia. He depicts the former C.I.A. director as frequently being made by the
White House "to take the fall" for his superiors, on matters
including the administration's handling of prewar intelligence to the 16
disputed words in the president's State of the Union address, regarding Iraq's
supposed efforts to obtain uranium from Africa. Because it was Mr. Tenet
"who brought analysis up the chain from the C.I.A.," Mr. Suskind
writes, he "was best positioned to assume blame. And Rice was adept at
laying it on Tenet." At the same time, Mr. Suskind suggests that Mr. Tenet acted
as a kind of White House enabler: he writes that in the wake of 9/11, Mr. Tenet
felt a "mix of insecurity and gratitude" vis-à-vis George W. Bush,
and that eager to please his boss, he repeatedly pushed C.I.A. staff members to
come up with evidence that might support the president's public statements. In the days after 9/11 Mr. Bush defended the embattled
C.I.A. chief to angry congressmen, and at that point, Mr. Suskind writes:
"George Tenet would do anything his President asked. Anything.
And George W. Bush knew it." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/books/20kaku.html |
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