The One Percent Doctrine: An Intelligence Abuse
If there's a one per cent 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... It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence... . It's about our response. - The Cheney Doctrine
COOPERATE, or you will be bombed back to the Stone Age." This was the sum and substance of an alleged threat by the then U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) Director in the months following 9/11. This sensational revelation was made by Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf during a recent interview over CBS, the reputed American television network.
Speaking at a press conference the next day at the White House in the presence of President George W. Bush, the General refused to expatiate on this, saying that he was restrained by an agreement to maintain silence with his publisher Simon & Schuster. (Musharaff's memoirs In the Line of Fire released on September 25 confirms this charge against the U.S.)
Reacting to this allegation, Bush said with a straight face that he was surprised at the strong language which one of his deputies had allegedly used. Interestingly, he did not upbraid Armitage, nor did he take the position that Armitage could not have made such insensitive remarks. Whatever be the justification for the threat hurled by a superpower at a lesser power in a moment of extreme stress and anguish, objectively viewed, if true, this arm-twisting bordered on insolence and arrogance of the most objectionable kind.
That this was the cavalier fashion in which the White House formulated all major post-9/11 decisions is the theme that runs right through Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind's absorbing work The One Per Cent Doctrine. The book has evoked a mixed response, but on the whole it has attracted wide attention among those who support the current U.S. administration as well as those who are bitterly opposed to it. While the former brand it as a tissue of lies, the others look upon it as yet another confirmation, if one is needed, of how Bush and his coterie have made a mess of the post-9/11 opportunities to neutralise Osama bin Laden.
The merits of the U.S. decision to invade Iraq for its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are being questioned to this day by friends and foes alike of President Bush the world over. Domestically, opposition to this war has waxed and waned. Beneath this, there is a lot of scepticism on whether this involvement in an unwinnable war was in the best interests of the U.S. and its allies. What was the rationale behind hitting at Saddam Hussein is the question that dominates the debate. Was it really to dispossess Saddam of his WMD or was it aimed at taking control of the oilfields in the region?
Suskind is categorical that marching into Iraq was the outcome of an American urge to tell the rest of the world that it was not demoralised by the decisive blow that Al Qaeda had dealt it and that it could still retaliate in a theatre of its choice. Also, President Bush's contrived rhetoric - something in the vein of what is attributed to Armitage - is intended "to show that there is no fear, or doubt... . At least not in his mind."
Suskind denounces this stance vehemently, and surprisingly draws from Mahatma Gandhi to amplify the point: ("Manliness consists not in bluff, bravado or lordliness. It consists in daring to do the right and facing consequences whether it is in matters social, political or other.") This appropriate quotation should gladden every Indian reader, at a time when many decision-makers in our own country are known to care little for the Mahatma or what he stood for. If not for anything else, at least for performing the laudable task of re-emphasising the relevance of the Father of the Nation to our times, Suskind deserves to be read by us in India with some seriousness.
The commonly held belief that crystallised itself in the months following 9/11 was that President Bush was being led up the garden path by a neo-conservative coterie headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney and including, among others, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The latter two had a long friendship dating back to President Gerald Ford's time. Suskind reports that they had collaborated in many dubious past ventures, including the sidelining of Henry Kissinger and the installation of George W. Bush Sr. as the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Suskind's focus is now on Cheney - how he became the focal point for all decisions and how he exploited the President's impatience with details and urge to act on impulse rather than on independent analysis and deliberation. Here and there `Rummie' also comes for some not-so-flattering scrutiny for his effort to prop up the Pentagon's intelligence-collection prowess by exposing the CIA's own failings and vulnerabilities. He was credited with the highly hilarious statement: "Every CIA success is a DoD failure." In India too, there have been turf wars between the Intelligence Bureau/Research and Analysis Wing on the one hand and Army Intelligence on the other.
In the days following 9/11 there was not only chaos within the White House but supreme fear of another wave of attacks, something that was reported by CIA Director George Tenet as most probable. Cheney seemed to thrive on the uncertainties of the time. His bona fides were not suspect, and he was every inch a patriot, but with some megalomaniac traits. He seemed to believe that it was his divine right to take charge of the situation, especially because the nation could otherwise head for disaster. It looked as if he had virtually taken control of access to the President.
Undoubtedly, it was he who decided on what his boss needed to know, a situation that had obviously received sanction from the latter. He lorded over the CIA with its Director kowtowing to him.
It was during a meeting in November 2001 that the CIA referred to Cheney a reported meeting between bin Laden and two Pakistani officials who had sold nuclear technology to Libya and bin Laden. This was an uncorroborated report that, because of its huge importance to global security, warranted attention but not to jumping to conclusions. Cheney was stirred and took the position that the troubled times they were living in did not brook delay. One could not lose precious time demanding proof. Presumptions of probabilities were enough to act. This was perhaps faultless logic at a time of great national danger.
This is how the celebrated Cheney doctrine was born, and thereafter everyone, including the mighty CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had willy nilly to fall in line. Intelligence did not shape policy, but it had to be tailored to what had already been made.
Suskind's diagnosis of the scene may look naively simple. But the circumstances in which Tenet was shown the door later - because a beleaguered White House managed successfully to circulate the impression that it had been misled by intelligence into believing that Iraq had WMD - engender in one a strong belief that Suskind was possibly correct when he said that intelligence agencies were being dictated to. Suskind is widely known to have had the right sources - one of which was probably Tenet himself - who spoke to him at length while writing The One Per Cent Doctrine.
Cheney and his cohorts seemed hell bent on keeping the CIA and the FBI on their toes by feeding them with bits and pieces of dubious information that they had received from their untested sources.
One questionable and controversial character was Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi dissident and a friend of the neo-conservative gang in the U.S. Chalabi by all accounts was feeding Rumsfeld with information that was suspect and which did not excite the CIA.
President Bush himself did not rate Chalabi highly and wanted his administration to distance itself from him. This did not, however, happen for quite a while, notwithstanding the CIA's strong reservations about Chalabi. This was one clear instance of how the coterie could defy and also get the better of one from whom it derived its strength.
Another accusation is that Cheney's team was unabashed in its efforts to cherry-pick information received from the CIA to suit its own ends. The tactic was to use intelligence reports selectively, cull out portions that suited its own perceptions and ignore the other parts that ran counter to its own pre-conceived notions. Another ploy was to send the CIA information received from some source or the other for verification, and if the CIA did not find it to be true, keep on asking it to check and cross-check until it found something that seemed to support the coterie's case.
One such instance was the reported meeting of one 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, and Iraqi intelligence. Picked up by Cheney, the report said the meeting took place in Prague five months before the 9/11 attack. When CIA Director Tenet subjected this to considerable scrutiny, there was nothing to suggest that the report was true. Cheney was not exactly pleased that the CIA had found his source to be unreliable, although he did not make an issue of it.
Suskind is no doubt hypercritical of the White House's misuse of the intelligence machinery. Efforts to wrest from the CIA in particular reports that would suit the administration were not all that subtle. President Bush seemed to be acting by the proxy that Dick Cheney had readily agreed to become. But then would this coterie have succeeded if it did not have a pliable civil service?
Tenet was by all accounts a highly rated operative known for his integrity and professionalism. Then why did he become an unquestioning ally of an administration that was steamrolling things? Suskind provides the answer. Tenet, who was appointed by the Democrats, was retained by Bush (presumably under the advice of his father). He was also not fired after the 9/11 debacle, something that raised quite a few eyebrows.
More than this, whenever the CIA was under the direct line of attack from the Democrats, Bush went to Tenet's support in the strongest possible language. ("The nation is at war. We need to encourage Congress to frankly leave the man alone. Tenet is doing a good job. And if he's not, blame me, not him.") Here was therefore a CIA Director living on borrowed time, and whatever be his mettle his survival depended on his loyalty to the Chief Executive. So, if he appeared complicit one could not blame him.
It was an entirely different matter that Tenet had to leave abruptly in June 2004, ostensibly for "personal reasons" but more probably for allegedly misleading the administration on the WMD issue. The popular surmise was that he was being made a scapegoat for the failures of the coterie that was somehow trying to justify the action in Iraq. This was a sad end to a distinguished career. But then, life in high places is very insecure.
Suskind writes with remarkable clarity. There are some who berate him for taking liberties with facts. I do not know how far they are right. Whatever be the truth, The One Per Cent Doctrine gives more than a glimpse of the processes that render policy-making an intricate adventure. To both honest and not-so-honest leaders, the path to decisions can be tricky and craggy. Some survive and march gallantly and some stumble never to recover.
This absorbing work (The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind, Simon & Schuster, London 2006) has attracted wide attention among both the supporters and the opponents of the current U.S. administration.
Reviewed by R.K. RAGHAVAN
COOPERATE, or you will be bombed back to the Stone Age." This was the sum and substance of an alleged threat by the then U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) Director in the months following 9/11. This sensational revelation was made by Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf during a recent interview over CBS, the reputed American television network.
Speaking at a press conference the next day at the White House in the presence of President George W. Bush, the General refused to expatiate on this, saying that he was restrained by an agreement to maintain silence with his publisher Simon & Schuster. (Musharaff's memoirs In the Line of Fire released on September 25 confirms this charge against the U.S.)
Reacting to this allegation, Bush said with a straight face that he was surprised at the strong language which one of his deputies had allegedly used. Interestingly, he did not upbraid Armitage, nor did he take the position that Armitage could not have made such insensitive remarks. Whatever be the justification for the threat hurled by a superpower at a lesser power in a moment of extreme stress and anguish, objectively viewed, if true, this arm-twisting bordered on insolence and arrogance of the most objectionable kind.
That this was the cavalier fashion in which the White House formulated all major post-9/11 decisions is the theme that runs right through Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind's absorbing work The One Per Cent Doctrine. The book has evoked a mixed response, but on the whole it has attracted wide attention among those who support the current U.S. administration as well as those who are bitterly opposed to it. While the former brand it as a tissue of lies, the others look upon it as yet another confirmation, if one is needed, of how Bush and his coterie have made a mess of the post-9/11 opportunities to neutralise Osama bin Laden.
The merits of the U.S. decision to invade Iraq for its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are being questioned to this day by friends and foes alike of President Bush the world over. Domestically, opposition to this war has waxed and waned. Beneath this, there is a lot of scepticism on whether this involvement in an unwinnable war was in the best interests of the U.S. and its allies. What was the rationale behind hitting at Saddam Hussein is the question that dominates the debate. Was it really to dispossess Saddam of his WMD or was it aimed at taking control of the oilfields in the region?
Suskind is categorical that marching into Iraq was the outcome of an American urge to tell the rest of the world that it was not demoralised by the decisive blow that Al Qaeda had dealt it and that it could still retaliate in a theatre of its choice. Also, President Bush's contrived rhetoric - something in the vein of what is attributed to Armitage - is intended "to show that there is no fear, or doubt... . At least not in his mind."
Suskind denounces this stance vehemently, and surprisingly draws from Mahatma Gandhi to amplify the point: ("Manliness consists not in bluff, bravado or lordliness. It consists in daring to do the right and facing consequences whether it is in matters social, political or other.") This appropriate quotation should gladden every Indian reader, at a time when many decision-makers in our own country are known to care little for the Mahatma or what he stood for. If not for anything else, at least for performing the laudable task of re-emphasising the relevance of the Father of the Nation to our times, Suskind deserves to be read by us in India with some seriousness.
The commonly held belief that crystallised itself in the months following 9/11 was that President Bush was being led up the garden path by a neo-conservative coterie headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney and including, among others, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The latter two had a long friendship dating back to President Gerald Ford's time. Suskind reports that they had collaborated in many dubious past ventures, including the sidelining of Henry Kissinger and the installation of George W. Bush Sr. as the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Suskind's focus is now on Cheney - how he became the focal point for all decisions and how he exploited the President's impatience with details and urge to act on impulse rather than on independent analysis and deliberation. Here and there `Rummie' also comes for some not-so-flattering scrutiny for his effort to prop up the Pentagon's intelligence-collection prowess by exposing the CIA's own failings and vulnerabilities. He was credited with the highly hilarious statement: "Every CIA success is a DoD failure." In India too, there have been turf wars between the Intelligence Bureau/Research and Analysis Wing on the one hand and Army Intelligence on the other.
In the days following 9/11 there was not only chaos within the White House but supreme fear of another wave of attacks, something that was reported by CIA Director George Tenet as most probable. Cheney seemed to thrive on the uncertainties of the time. His bona fides were not suspect, and he was every inch a patriot, but with some megalomaniac traits. He seemed to believe that it was his divine right to take charge of the situation, especially because the nation could otherwise head for disaster. It looked as if he had virtually taken control of access to the President.
Undoubtedly, it was he who decided on what his boss needed to know, a situation that had obviously received sanction from the latter. He lorded over the CIA with its Director kowtowing to him.
It was during a meeting in November 2001 that the CIA referred to Cheney a reported meeting between bin Laden and two Pakistani officials who had sold nuclear technology to Libya and bin Laden. This was an uncorroborated report that, because of its huge importance to global security, warranted attention but not to jumping to conclusions. Cheney was stirred and took the position that the troubled times they were living in did not brook delay. One could not lose precious time demanding proof. Presumptions of probabilities were enough to act. This was perhaps faultless logic at a time of great national danger.
This is how the celebrated Cheney doctrine was born, and thereafter everyone, including the mighty CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had willy nilly to fall in line. Intelligence did not shape policy, but it had to be tailored to what had already been made.
Suskind's diagnosis of the scene may look naively simple. But the circumstances in which Tenet was shown the door later - because a beleaguered White House managed successfully to circulate the impression that it had been misled by intelligence into believing that Iraq had WMD - engender in one a strong belief that Suskind was possibly correct when he said that intelligence agencies were being dictated to. Suskind is widely known to have had the right sources - one of which was probably Tenet himself - who spoke to him at length while writing The One Per Cent Doctrine.
Cheney and his cohorts seemed hell bent on keeping the CIA and the FBI on their toes by feeding them with bits and pieces of dubious information that they had received from their untested sources.
One questionable and controversial character was Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi dissident and a friend of the neo-conservative gang in the U.S. Chalabi by all accounts was feeding Rumsfeld with information that was suspect and which did not excite the CIA.
President Bush himself did not rate Chalabi highly and wanted his administration to distance itself from him. This did not, however, happen for quite a while, notwithstanding the CIA's strong reservations about Chalabi. This was one clear instance of how the coterie could defy and also get the better of one from whom it derived its strength.
Another accusation is that Cheney's team was unabashed in its efforts to cherry-pick information received from the CIA to suit its own ends. The tactic was to use intelligence reports selectively, cull out portions that suited its own perceptions and ignore the other parts that ran counter to its own pre-conceived notions. Another ploy was to send the CIA information received from some source or the other for verification, and if the CIA did not find it to be true, keep on asking it to check and cross-check until it found something that seemed to support the coterie's case.
One such instance was the reported meeting of one 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, and Iraqi intelligence. Picked up by Cheney, the report said the meeting took place in Prague five months before the 9/11 attack. When CIA Director Tenet subjected this to considerable scrutiny, there was nothing to suggest that the report was true. Cheney was not exactly pleased that the CIA had found his source to be unreliable, although he did not make an issue of it.
Suskind is no doubt hypercritical of the White House's misuse of the intelligence machinery. Efforts to wrest from the CIA in particular reports that would suit the administration were not all that subtle. President Bush seemed to be acting by the proxy that Dick Cheney had readily agreed to become. But then would this coterie have succeeded if it did not have a pliable civil service?
Tenet was by all accounts a highly rated operative known for his integrity and professionalism. Then why did he become an unquestioning ally of an administration that was steamrolling things? Suskind provides the answer. Tenet, who was appointed by the Democrats, was retained by Bush (presumably under the advice of his father). He was also not fired after the 9/11 debacle, something that raised quite a few eyebrows.
More than this, whenever the CIA was under the direct line of attack from the Democrats, Bush went to Tenet's support in the strongest possible language. ("The nation is at war. We need to encourage Congress to frankly leave the man alone. Tenet is doing a good job. And if he's not, blame me, not him.") Here was therefore a CIA Director living on borrowed time, and whatever be his mettle his survival depended on his loyalty to the Chief Executive. So, if he appeared complicit one could not blame him.
It was an entirely different matter that Tenet had to leave abruptly in June 2004, ostensibly for "personal reasons" but more probably for allegedly misleading the administration on the WMD issue. The popular surmise was that he was being made a scapegoat for the failures of the coterie that was somehow trying to justify the action in Iraq. This was a sad end to a distinguished career. But then, life in high places is very insecure.
Suskind writes with remarkable clarity. There are some who berate him for taking liberties with facts. I do not know how far they are right. Whatever be the truth, The One Per Cent Doctrine gives more than a glimpse of the processes that render policy-making an intricate adventure. To both honest and not-so-honest leaders, the path to decisions can be tricky and craggy. Some survive and march gallantly and some stumble never to recover.
This absorbing work (The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind, Simon & Schuster, London 2006) has attracted wide attention among both the supporters and the opponents of the current U.S. administration.
Reviewed by R.K. RAGHAVAN
posted by Mas Qisa'i at 11:05 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home for More Stories