Ron Suskind’s new book, “The One Percent Solution” is chock full of episodes depicting the flim-flam artists currently running our government. Amidst a number of alarming scenarios, President Bush, our nominal leader, is not so delicately cut out of the loop and therefore denied critical information at times by Vice President Dick Cheney and others. Bush chooses not to correct the situation nor accept the responsibility that comes with his position. ‘Plausible deniability’ is not just the phrase du jour but each and every day. My commentary will follow these book review excerpts.
Michiko Kakutani
New York Times
June 20, 2006
In “The One Percent Doctrine,” he (Suskind) 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 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.”
Barton Gellman
Washington Post
June 20, 2006
…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.” But that approach constricted the mission of the intelligence and counterterrorism professionals whose point of view dominates this book. Many of them came to believe, Suskind reports, that “their jobs were not to help shape policy, but to affirm it.”
…Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department’s counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan’s army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton’s message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were “definitely not” up to the job, and “we’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful.”
…Suskind’s portrait of Tenet, respectful but far from adulatory, depicts a man compromised by “insecurity and gratitude” to a president who chose not to fire him after 9/11. “At that point, George Tenet would do anything his President asked,” Suskind writes.
…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.”
Oh, where to start. Let’s try the business model approach:
* Name a successful and respected company that employs a CEO who decides not to base policies and actions on facts and other information because such might limit possibilities?
* Name a successful and respected CEO who would allow a VP to dictate what information does and doesn’t reach him?
* Name a successful and respected CEO whose modus operandi is ‘knowledge complicates matters so I make decisions using my gut and looking into the souls of people’ ?
* Name a successful and respected CEO who primarily relies on impulse and improvisation, who dictates outcomes and then order his staff to create the ‘facts’ around the desired outcome?
* Name a successful and respected CEO who, on the cusp of taking out a pathological opponent (Bin Laden) refuses to send his own top staff in to close the deal. despite the warning that such is necessary.
As for George Tenet, any head of international intelligence for this country should have the fortitude and morality to resign before compromising the agency he leads. A name for Tenet to recall: former U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson, who resigned in 1973 rather than obey President Nixon’s order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox.
Regarding the torture of Abu Zubaydah and the Keystone Cops-style ensemble that followed, the President of the United States elects to implement torture on his watch bereft of the knowledge if such actually works. A simple call to the prime minister of Israel would have quickly answered that question.
President Bush’s actions are of someone absent basic core values or beliefs. He displays a lack of even the most rudimentary curiosity about the world and exhibits a brazen laziness regarding the ‘knowledge intake’ an effective and responsible president must continually undergo. The shirking of his position’s foremost charge–to serve and protect is a dereliction of his ultimate duty. Agreeable to being a prop rather than someone engaging the full responsibilities of leading the most important country on this earth is so inconceivable even fiction writers couldn’t top this.
Ultimately, we are paying the price for another George Bush absence of duty, our military most of all. But it’s not like such is a new pattern of behavior for him.