The One Percent Doctrine
Jun 20th, 2006 at 10:42 am by Susie
Ron Suskind is one of those unsung journalists who doesn’t crave the media spotlight, he just does his job. Can’t wait to read this book (oh, and by the way, he says the CIA nickname for Cheney is Edgar - for Edgar Bergen, of Charlie McCarthy fame):
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.”
Mortimer Snerd would be more appropriate than Charlie McCarthy. Charlie was a quick witted, intelligent dummy. Mortimer was slow witted, and obtuse,as is Bush
Somehow, I don’t see Bush as “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”
Ever.
It’s odd… it’s almost as if Bush is the spokesman for the Cheney Administration.
CIA secret hand shake. Thmub stuck between four fingers in the middle.
CIA nickname for CIA Operations Officer Valerie Plame(yes, its all cards) OOPs.
Notice Plame and the CIA culd only get the advisors, but tried for the VP.
Quote swap: Cheney for the ‘CIA and Valerie Plame’s assignment.’
Dummy Update…
Who saw Cheney’s lips move? Michiko Kakutani on Ron Suskind in The One Percent Solution:
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 Loy…
[...] Edgar Bergen Dick Cheney had no agenda before September Eleventh. None at all. 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. [...]
Who the hell is Dick Cheney to be formulating the national risk analysis doctrine?
A threat assessment protocol is not something an untrained amateur just pulls out of his ass while standing around the Oval Office with his pseudo-patrician hand in his pocket.
All of the FRONTLINE specials dealing with Cheney or Rumsfeld are definitely worth watching and purchasing through the PBS website.
The BBC also did an excellent three-part series entitled “THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES”. These three one-hour programs used to be downloadable off the internet, but it seems that is no longer the case. Try your best to find someone who will share these three hours of excellent programming with you.
Also, the Frontline program entitled: THE MAN WHO KNEW deals with the careerism, bureaucratic infighting, and sibling rivalry between the FBI,the CIA, and the State Department that was mostly responsible for the enemie’s success on 9/11 which ended up being the Bush Administration’s meal ticket for the next 7 years and the justification for the plundering of the delicate balance of power that existed up to that point!
Osama has succeeded in spooking and altering our institutions to their very core.
Cheney is attempting to build a secret government witnin a government that will continue on long after he has left government himself. He is, by far, the most powerful vice-president in our history. Some will credibly argue that he has been the president and George W. has been his “understudy in awe” who just rubber-stamps most everything Cheney comes up with.