The One Percent Doctrine - Continued

Today’s episode in my serial review of Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Solution goes to the destruction of the intelligence programs of the United States as we have known them for two-thirds of a century. The Central Intelligence Agency has classically provided honest analysis and coordinated the intelligence delivered to the President and other key players. The Director gave his best estimate of what any given situation was with caveats representing any dissent from within the agency or among the other intelligence agencies.

Let me begin by saying that for failing to spot or stop the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, scapegoats – if nothing more – from the FBI, CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and perhaps others should have been offered up for public satisfaction and entertainment within months of the tragedy. It never happened.

Suskind makes it clear, that in the aftermath of the attacks those making the calls on how things ran in this administration, the President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, and the small cadre of Bush intimates in the White House inner circle had more important things to do than watch George Tenet publicly fall on his sword for the benefit of those assembled in the national TV coliseum. They were going to transform the intelligence agencies, especially the CIA into a mechanism for supporting administration foreign and war policy.

The President and even more Cheney and Rumsfeld had a low opinion of the CIA and the FBI before the attacks. The Cheney/Rumsfeld axis had been watching the CIA fail to predict major events for almost four decades. The break up of the Soviet empire and the fall of the communist regime in Moscow as well as this extraordinary failure in New York and Washington had filled them with contempt for the agency. The honest broker role of the CIA and carefully nuanced reporting was viewed by the players as little more than the CIA covering its collective ass when things went wrong – which they often did. Their view of a clumsy FBI was not much better.

Even more galling to Cheney and Rummy, in the days immediately after the al Qaeda attacks, the President turned to the CIA which he perceived to be quicker and lighter on its feet than the ponderous Defense Department to deliver the first blows against the terrorists in Afghanistan. This enraged Rumsfeld and he complained bitterly to his staff that every glory assignment for the CIA was a direct slap at DOD. Suskind details the bureaucratic wars between the CIA and the FBI and especially between the DOD and the CIA for the heart and mind of George W. Bush. It was never pretty but ever petty.

As a veteran with experience in winning and losing in this kind – but of nowhere near the import - of bruising infighting inside and among agencies for decades, it was obvious that Suskind’s sources at CIA and elsewhere were spilling their guts and were very angry with what happened to them – the losers. Either this book is fiction of the finest quality or we have some mighty disgruntled intelligence and law enforcement officers on duty and recently retired. Suskind offers up word for word conversations from some of the most closely guarded telephones and closely held meetings in the world.

It’s clear that that the suspected but loudly denied war between the White house and the CIA is very real. The White House no longer wanted carefully nuanced and ass covering `possibly’, `likely’ and `at some time in the future` baloney; they wanted confirmation that what they were doing was in accord with the intelligence – what I would term, `If it doesn’t fit, make it fit.’ The intelligence community would now be a rubber stamp for an administration that was desperate to deter the next attack.

But soon George Tenet departed as head of Central Intelligence and Porter Goss came onboard to reform it; i.e., turn it into a cheerleader for the White House. The book closes prior to Goss leaving an agency in disarray after the most contentious and unsuccessful year and a half tenure in the history of the agency.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice comes across in the book as a person quick to blame the intelligence community – or any other handy body - for her own failure to assure that George Bush was up to speed on the issue at hand – a difficult task since the President is neither a reader nor analytical. But that’s the topic of tomorrow’s installment.

Are you scared yet? You should be but it’s four o’clock; bottoms up!

Blog on!

Wild Bill