Doctrinal Errors

TAP talks to journalist Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Doctrine, about power, secrecy, and the Bush administration's radical approach to fighting terror.
By Benjamin Weyl

In The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, Ron Suskind delves into the shadows of the “war on terror,” portraying a nation confronted with previously unimaginable threats both to its security and to its democratic soul. TAP recently spoke with Suskind by phone.

What is the One Percent Doctrine?

The One Percent Doctrine is the creation of Dick Cheney, who in large measure is running U.S. foreign policy. It comes from a meeting in November 2001. The vice president is being briefed by CIA and NSC about a harrowing intelligence disclosure that Pakistani nuclear scientists had met with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri a few weeks before 9-11 in Kandahar around a campfire. This, of course, is a meeting whose implications no one needs to sketch out. As the briefing proceeds, the vice president says that we need to think about “a low probability, high impact event” in a different way. By the end of the briefing he has that different way and says, “If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon” -- essentially that WMDs have been given to terrorists -- “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.”

This ultimately gets called the One Percent Rule or the Cheney Doctrine, and it ends up guiding U.S. policies for years to come and used in many venues. It separates analysis from action and officially sets a threshold of suspicion -- mere suspicion -- as the standard for the use of the awesome powers of the United States.

An Italian judge recently issued warrants for four Americans, including three CIA agents, for allegedly kidnapping a Muslim cleric in Italy and sending him to Egypt to be tortured. You report in the book that the same was done to a certain Ibn al-Sheik al-Libi. What could these warrants mean for how the United States acts in the future?

By embracing a kind of muscular unilateralism, the United States has made it difficult for even our old friends to be supportive of us in public. I think it’s creating a kind of dysfunction in public dialogue where foreign intelligence services all over the world who may have quietly known about certain things the United States did cannot admit to that in public and we’re getting judicial actions from other countries. I think that that bespeaks how ruptured many of our traditional alliances are. For various governments to now exercise their deniability about that is a corrosive turn but also one that bespeaks some of the haphazard qualities of how we have conducted the war on terror.

You disclose the fact that after the 9-11 attacks, First Data Corp., a huge processor of credit-card transactions, gave the FBI access to its records. Why is that significant?

The stories about First Data and Western Union are a kind of Rorschach blot of the complexities of what happens when large American companies enter into secret arrangements to carry forward U.S. policies. This of course has happened with the telecommunications companies and the NSA. It happened with First Data, and I think that the story provides insights for people in public, in Congress, elsewhere, as to how we need to have a clear discussion about what American firms should or should not be doing in concert with the U.S. government and where the lines ought to be drawn.

Secrecy is obviously a major subject of the book. What do you think is the responsibility of the government, as well as that of the press, to inform people?

I think at this point, five years after 9-11, one of the broken processes is the classification of everything right down to the lunch menu. I think that needs to be re-examined. The public should know everything it is possible for them to know -- the most that it is possible to know, not the least. Up until now, we have been in that latter category. And I think that many inside the counterterrorism communities feel that not only do people have a right to know everything they can possibly know, but also that it strengthens the public to understand how the war on terror is fought -- areas in which we’ve been successful, areas in which we need work, mistakes made, victories won -- because it allows the public to understand the arc of this battle in terms of what they ask of their government and in terms of issues of privacy and civil liberties. All of that is based on a principle that knowledge is indeed power. And that’s the way our system works, because the prized principles of transparency and accountability are right at the heart of a democracy.

How do you think the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld will affect the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war on terror?

I think the Court has struck a blow for the rule of law and has helped to manage what have clearly been imbalances in the powers between the executive and Congress. I think the folks who thought most clearly about the potential institutional changes that the war on terror might create were the executive branch and the administration, specifically. They’ve thought a lot, Dick Cheney certainly had, for many years about the expansion of executive powers. In some ways that preparation met opportunity after 9-11. I think other parts of the government, both the legislative branch and the judicial branch had been playing catch up, and I think the Supreme Court certainly took a big step in catch up.

Is it fair to say that in your book, your sympathies lie with former CIA Director George Tenet as he confronted both al-Qaeda and the White House?

I think it’s fair to say that there was an irresistible political urge that the White House embraced mightily to blame the CIA for not only pre-9-11 intelligence but the supposition of WMDs in Iraq and to essentially take no blame itself. Just getting the historical record correct as to what has gone on over the past few years will act in a way to rebalance people’s views of the CIA and Tenet. You know, I have no personal allegiance or affinity to anyone in the CIA or George Tenet. But as the reporting went forward it became clear that the CIA was getting blamed for everything right down to mortgage interest rates, and that was probably borne mostly of a) the fact that they couldn’t defend themselves and b) the desire of people throughout the government to have someone that they could blame that could not really respond. Tenet is a complex character, like all the characters. There are times when he trips and bumps his head and times when he does things that are quite heroic and quite effective.

The other point I think worth making is that the book shows very clearly that one of our greatest assets in fighting the war on terror is what I call trust relationships. Most of those trust relationships with Arab leaders were built up within the CIA through Tenet and a whole gang of folks. Where they can look people in the Arab world, who may not have a lot in common with us, look them right in the eye and say, “Here’s what I need to know and here’s when I need to know it,” and have frank discussions. Those trust relationships are very, very difficult to build. Many agents, not only those under Tenet but those who replaced them, have been washed away, and that has meant that many of the trust relationships have been washed away. That, I think, probably makes us weaker and more vulnerable at a time when we can’t afford that.

The book seems to bolster the impression, partly supported by your previous book, The Price of Loyalty, that the president is an incurious person, easily influenced by others who understand his affinity for bravado and instinctive action.

I think the book provides the clearest rendering of the key relationship in terms of the American ship of state, which is between Bush and Cheney. Cheney essentially creates an architecture, a kind of platform, in which George Bush can be George Bush and still be president and indulge or embrace his gut, his instinct, a kind of man-of-action posture. Bush is quite active in the book. For some folks on the left, that will be a bit of a change or a deepening of their view of Bush. Certainly it’s not the caricature of Bush that’s been out there, but you do see, for better or for worse, who the president is.

He is quite engaged operationally in how we fight the war on terror, though he is not particularly curious. He often will not read briefings. In many cases, policy debates end at the vice president’s desk. As one person in CIA said to me, “It’s like a case officer in training with absolute powers.” Various parts of the government will be thrown into frenzies that sometimes last days or weeks by virtue of a question the president might ask, which folks in the intelligence community know is not necessarily the right question. That is our president and our vice president in this era. What the book does, which may be one of its most important features, is it fixes accountability, truly and indelibly, to the president and the vice president.

In your book, you address the question of whether the ends justify the means. Do they?

I think history tells us again and again that they do not in almost any case. When we go down the path that noble ends will justify whatever we need to do to get there, we often pay a cost, higher than the positive outcomes that we seek. At the end of the book, I cite George Kennan. Kennan says if we create enormous suffering or havoc by getting where we decide we need to be, we will lose our moral departure point and, ultimately, power. True efficacy comes from possessing the moral departure point. That’s real power, historically speaking. And I conclude with a line from the Hebrew Bible, Tzedek, tzedek tirdof, which is, “Justice, justice, this you must pursue.” Justice is mentioned twice -- once for the ends, once for the means.

I think we need to look much more clearly at the conduct of the United States, because if in fact the means to these ends of self-protection drive us to forfeit the principles upon which we as a democracy rest, we will lose our place in history as a last, best hope of mankind. That’s the challenge: to win the war on terror and do what we need to do, without compromising the things that make this country a beacon to others and distinctive in history’s long pageant.