Peter Dale Scott = &nb= sp; (1596 words, 1915 w fns) &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; July 22, 2006
A review of The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside =
The One Percent Doctrine is an important book. On a factual level, it is a hard-edged narrative of the conflict between DCI George Tenet’s CIA, representing what Suskind calls “the old world of evidence,” and Vice-Presid= ent Dick Cheney and the Pentagon, the proponents of “a new day of action.= ” But Suskind is writing on behalf of those at State and CIA -- plus “a host of generals at Defense” -- whose conclusion is that the systemat= ic ignoring of “the basics of analytical due diligence” presents “institutional dangers for the government and for the country” (328).
The book’s title derives from a remark by Cheney= at a White House meeting in November 2001, that even a “one percent chance” that al Qaeda might acquire a nuclear weapon demanded, not analysis, but response. In Suskind’s gloss,
Justified or not, fact-base=
d or
not, ‘our response’ is what matters. As to ‘evidence,R=
17;
the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn’t apply. If t=
here
was even a one percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass
destruction…the
The One Percent Doctrine marginalized the CIA, whose
inconvenient facts (there was no al Qaeda-Iraq connection, Saddam was not
purchasing uranium ore in
The book can be construed as a well-argued case for impeachment of the Vice-President, and possibly also of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Both men are accused of misdirecting the country and even = at times of frustrating the clearly expressed will of President Bush, who in t= his book emerges as far closer to Tenet than many of us had believed. Condoleez= za Rice is criticized chiefly for her failure as National Security Advisor to establish a robust process of policy coordination, leaving Cheney and Rumsf= eld to prevail.
An example was the controversial Ahmed Chalabi, whom t=
he
neocons in the V-P’s shop and the Pentagon used to challenge the CIA&=
#8217;s
negative assessments on
Parts of the story have been told before. In February of this year former
CIA analyst Paul Pillar charged in =
Foreign
Affairs that ''intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions t=
hat
had already been made.'' During the 2004 election, while still an officer,
Pillar himself had been attacked by Robert Novak for allegedly leaking his
negative prognosis for
Suskind’s case agai=
nst
Cheney and Rumsfeld seems carefully tailored for exploitation by Democrats =
in
the next Congress. Kerry’s campaign position on
But Suskind, in designing=
a
narrative that can be absorbed and digested by the American political proce=
ss,
avoids some important facts which no one in power seems willing to mention.
Take for example his statement (p. 109, cf. 238) that “
Within two weeks the identi= ties of at least six of the hijackers identified by the FBI were unclear; as men in Arab countries with the same names and histories were protesting that they = were alive and innocent. In response to these protests, FBI Director Robert Muel= ler acknowledged on September 20, 2001, that the identity of several of the sui= cide hijackers was in doubt.[1]
In general Suskind trims his narrative to omit details
embarrassing to the official 9/11 story. He describes the capture in
The story of the 9/11 paymaster, and the subsequent
suppression of that story, may seem esoteric, but must be addressed if we a=
re
ever to fully understand 9/11. For the first man identified as the paymaste=
r,
Mohammed Sheikh Saeed, was widely reported at the time to be a well-known a=
gent
of the Pakistani intelligence service. In addition his immunity from arrest=
in
The mysteries do not diminish with the re-identificati=
on of
the paymaster in 2003 as Mohammed al-Hawsawi. In a bizarre development,
www.terrorismcentral.com reported in its Newsletter
of 3/30/03 that "Mustafa al-Hisawai [sic] is on bail in
The most obvious fact suppressed in Suskind’s
narrative is the importance of controlling Middle East oil as a prime motive
for invading
Suskind’s view of the war as a product of bad
intelligence fits very well with Senator Kerry’s current position that
the war in
if oil had nothing to do with the invasion, why did top officials of the Bush administration mention it in predicting how well the invasion would work ou= t? Cheney opined that by the end of 2003, Iraqi oil output would hit 3 million= barrels a day, and Lawrence Lindsey, the White House economic adviser, ta= lked about 3-5 million, saying in September 2002, “the key issue is oil, a= nd a regime change in Iraq would facilitate an increase in world oil” so a= s to drive down prices. Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy in the Pentagon, enthused that increased Iraqi oil revenues could pay for the war. And White House speechwriter David Frum wrote in his 2003 book on Bush that the war on terror was designed to “bring new stability to the most vicious and violent quadrant of the earth—and new prosperity to us all, by securi= ng the world’s largest pool of oil.”[4]
It is now well known that Cheney’s Energy Task Force in early 2001=
paid
close attention to maps showing Iraqi oil reserves, and the foreign oil com=
panies
laying claim to them. In fact
Instead, on May 22nd, 2003 the U.N. Security Council, under American
pressure, passed Resolution 1483, dropping all sanctions against
An honest analysis of
Journalists who depend on continued contact with inside sources are of course unlikely to write so critically as to alienate or dis= credit them. As a result, the American public continues to learn about its history= on two different levels. One level of narrative, with inside access, is well-informed, but constrained to repeat official fictions and suppress embarrassing truths. A second level, free to look critically at the most important underlying facts, is also remote from the details.
In short, one can hope that the “institutional
dangers” of which Suskind warns us will indeed be addressed in 2007 b=
y a
new and less supine Congress. But there must be a more fundamental rejectio=
n of
our Napoleonic follies in the
[1] Peter Dale Scott, "The 9/11 Commission Report's Failure to Identify the Alle= ged 9/11 Hijackers,” http://socrate= s.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/Hijackers.mht; citing BBC, 9/23/01; Newsday, 9/21/01; Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute (NewYork: HarperCollins/Regan Books, 2004), 498.
[2] Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terroris=
m (
[3]
[3a] "More on 9/11 Report: Who Paid the Hijackers? Al-Hawsawi? Mahmoud Ahmad?" http://www.peterdalescott.net/qfhawsawi2.html.
[4] Kevin Phillips, “American Petrocracy,̶=
1; American Conservative, 6/17/06,
http://www.amco=
nmag.com/2006/2006_07_17/cover.html.
Frum’s statement should perhaps be somewhat discounted for the same
reason as Midge Decter’s on the Warren Olney show, 5/21/04 (“We=
’re
not in the Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We’=
re
there to get something we and our friends in
[5] The Resolution noted the de facto
“Authority” of the
The European media has noted that had Dr. Blix a= nd the U.N. inspectors been allowed to complete their `pre-war' inspection process= for an estimated 6 more months in 2003, they could have ultimately determined I= raq was indeed free of WMD.”
[6] Executive Order 13303 of 5/22/03, F= ederal Register, 31931, h= ttp://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030522-15.html. This had the added benefit to the United States of switching Iraqi oil sales back from euros to dollars (cf. Fin= ancial Times, 6/5/03).