Ron Suskind - The One Percent Doctrine

From The New Yorker
In November, 2001, Suskind writes, Vice-President Dick Cheney announced that if there was "a one percent chance" that a threat was real "we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response." He added, "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence." This view of a White House dangerously indifferent to facts is familiar from, among other sources, Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty," but he adds much here that is disconcerting, particularly regarding the embrace of torture. (It's hard to shake the image of Bush asking, literally, for Ayman al-Zawahiri's head, which the C.I.A. briefly thought it had found in a riverbed in Afghanistan.) Suskind, whose main source seems to be the former C.I.A. director George Tenet (to whom he is very kind), has made news with revelations about Western Union's cooperation with the C.I.A. and about a plan to release cyanide gas in subways, although it's not clear that this threat was more real than other phantom! s the White House chased.


About the Author: Ron Suskind is the author of the # 1 New York Times bestseller The Price of Loyalty: George W Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League. From 1993 to 2000, he was the senior national affairs reporter for The Wall Street Journal where he won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two sons.

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