Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
August 7, 2006
Herrmann is ideal for this reading. He has the voice and style of a trusted news anchor, but is also a masterly interpreter of Suskind's ironic and painful narration of how the Dick Cheney/Donald Rumsfeld friendship and power grab got us into the fix we're in today. "Even if there's only a one percent chance of the unimaginable becoming true, act as though it's a certainty," Cheney told CIA and NSA officials in Nov. 2001. "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It's about our response." This separation of fact-based analysis and action, Cheney's 1% doctrine, became the basis of decision making in both foreign and domestic affairs, with the Patriot Act as its legal underpinning. Rumsfeld hired his protégé Cheney during the Bush Sr. administration, and both believed that Bush "missed history's call" by leaving Saddam Hussein in power. Since Bush Jr. had no foreign affairs experience, it wasn't difficult to start pushing him into Iraq even before 9/11 offered such "rationale" as WMDs and an al-Queda connection. "Such alignments," says Suskind, "often turn the wheel of history." Suskind believes George Tenet was so grateful that Bush didn't fire him after 9/11 that, though the CIA knew better, he loyally permitted the endless fabrication of "facts" to become the backbone of public policy statements. Simultaneous release with the Simon & Schuster hardcover.
Starred review from June 19, 2006
In this troubling portrait of the war on terror, America's intelligence agencies confront not just al-Qaeda but the Bush administration's politicized incompetence. Journalist Suskind (The Price of Loyalty
) follows the triumphs and failures of the "invisibles"—the counterterrorism experts at the NSA, the FBI and especially the CIA—as they painstakingly track terrorists' communications and financial transactions, interrogate prisoners and cultivate elusive al-Qaeda informants. Unfortunately, he contends, their meticulous intelligence-sifting went unappreciated by administration policymakers, especially Dick Cheney, who formulated an overriding "one percent" doctrine: threats with even a 1% likelihood must be treated as certainties. The result was "the severing of fact-based analysis from forceful response," most glaringly in the trumped-up alarm over Iraqi WMDs. In dramatizing the tensions between CIA professionals and White House ideologues, Suskind makes his sympathies clear: CIA chief George Tenet, pressured to align intelligence with administration policy, emerges as a tragic fall guy, while President Bush comes off as a dunce and a bully, likened by some observers to a ventriloquist's dummy on Cheney's knee. Suskind's novelistic scene-setting—"Condi looked up, impatiently"—sometimes meanders. But he assembles perhaps the most detailed, revealing account yet of American counterterrorism efforts and a hard-hitting critique of their direction.