3 Words To Explain Manipulation of Intel: ‘The Vice President"

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Former Admin. Official Needs Only Three Words To Explain Manipulation of Intel: ‘The Vice President’

The Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing this afternoon to examine the manipulation of pre-war Iraq intelligence. Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), who previously disavowed his vote for the war, attended the hearing and asked the panelists why a small number of individuals in the administration “had more influence…than the professionals.” Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said he only needed three words. Watch it.

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Here is what Wilkerson said to reporter Tony Jones in March:

COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: I think, unquestionably. I'm hearing from lieutenants, captains, majors, generals, many in uniform, many of whom were my students in years passed when I taught at the nation's war colleges. I'm hearing from the civilians who were foreign service officers, civil service and so forth in our embassy in Baghdad and I can tell you that the morale in the uniformed military is being impacted and I can also tell you that our ground forces are stretched to the point where you hear talk about withdrawal from Iraq. Within 24 months, we're going to have to withdraw from Iraq, whether the situation there, politically, economically and so forth, is adequate or not because we've stretched our ground forces to the point of breaking. We have officers who are leaving the Army and the Marine Corps now because they don't want to do a third and possibly a fourth tour in Afghanistan or Iraq. We have people who are beginning to question their leaders, just as they did in Vietnam. We have families that are beginning to fall apart because of second and third tours in Iraq. This is a situation with which I am well familiar. The signs are there and the signs are available for anyone to see, which is what makes me consider Secretary Rumsfeld an inadequate Secretary of Defence at best because he doesn't seem to see those signs, or if he does, he's not doing anything about it.

Information Clearing House

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The Reviews Are In

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, June 20, 2006; 1:12 PM

A new book hitting the stores today and a new do entary hitting the airwaves tonight offer detailed and highly unflattering looks at the behind-the-scenes workings of the Bush administration's war on terror.

And they're both getting rave reviews.

The new book, by Ron Suskind, is called "The One Percent Doctrine." I wrote about it at some length already in <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/06/19/BL2006061900578.html>yesterday's column . It takes its le from Vice President Cheney's assertion that if there's even a one percent threat of a "high-impact" terrorist event, then the government should respond as if it were a certainty. That assertion, Suskind writes, became an unspoken but momentous new guiding principle for the Bush administration's national security policy.

The new do entary is on PBS tonight, from Frontline, and it's called "The Dark Side," inspired by Cheney's <http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/vp20010916.html>interview with NBC's Tim Russert on Sept. 16, 2001, in which he spoke of military responses to terrorism then added prophetically: "We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will."
'The One Percent Doctrine'

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/19/AR2006061901211.html>Barton Gellman writes in a Washington Post book review that Suskind "tells some jaw-dropping stories we haven't heard before." Among them, the story of the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations, he turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure he was alleged to be.

Writes Gellman: "Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was 'echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,' Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04/20020409-8.html>speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as 'one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.' And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques. . . .

" 'I said he was important,' Bush reportedly told [then-CIA director George] Tenet at one of their daily meetings. 'You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?' 'No sir, Mr. President,' Tenet replied. Bush 'was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,' Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, 'Do some of these harsh methods really work?' Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, 'thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.' And so, Suskind writes, 'the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.' "

Gellman asks the right question: "How could this have happened? Why are we learning about it only now?"

Here's another telling tale: "The book's opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo led 'Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.' Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: 'All right. You've covered your ass, now.' "

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/books/20kaku.html?ex=1308456000&en=bd894c25382ef940&ei=5 090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss>Michiko Kakutani writes in a New York Times book review: "Just as disturbing as Al Qaeda's plans and capabilities are the descriptions of the Bush administration's handling of the war on terror and its willful determination to go to war against Iraq. . . .

"Within the government, [Suskind writes], there was frequent frustration with the White House's hermetic decision-making style. 'Voicing desire for a more traditional, transparent policy process,' he writes, 'prompted accusations of disloyalty,' and 'issues argued, often vociferously, at the level of deputies and principals rarely seemed to go upstream in their fullest form to the president's desk, and if they did, it was often after Bush seemed to have already made up his mind based on what was so often cited as his "instinct" or "gut."'

Suskind "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. . . .

"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.' . . .

( "plausible deniability" goes back to Repug Nixon's administration. )


" '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.' "

<http://www.calendarlive.com/columnists/rutten/cl-et-rutten20jun20,0,7966904.story>Tim Rutten writes in a Los Angeles Times book review that Suskind's book "makes for deeply unsettling reading and is a major contribution to our national conversation concerning these issues."

Suskind is already making headlines for his chilling disclosure that al-Qaeda apparently planned, then called off, a hydrogen cyanide gas attack in New York's subway in 2003.

But Rutten notes: "It is one of Suskind's provocative conclusions that the terrorists called off this attack for reasons of their own and that the Bush administration's election year claim to have prevented any attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 was delivered in the knowledge that this was so."

'The Dark Side'

<http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2006/06/20/dark_side_sheds_light_on_cheney/>Sam Allis writes in a Boston Globe review: " 'Frontline' delivers a devastating look tonight at the efforts of Vice President Cheney to gain control of the war on terror after 9/11. In doing so, the show purports, he compromised the integrity of America's intelligence system. . . .

" 'Frontline' chronicles the brutal campaign by two consummate political in-fighters -- Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- to decimate the CIA, politically emasculate Secretary of State Colin Powell, and construct a near-limitless concept of executive power during war. While many of these strands are familiar, they have not been assembled as effectively before on television to present a coherent picture of what happened after 9/11."

<http://www.nydailynews.com/06-20-2006/entertainment/col/story/428192p-360963c.html>David Bianculli writes in the New York Daily News: "Simply by underlining in red the names of Cheney loyalists on the organizational flow chart of the George W. Bush administration, 'The Dark Side' shows how deep Cheney's influence stretches."

<http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/14854749.htm>Glenn Garvin writes in the Miami Herald: "Precisely because it avoids looney-tune conspiracy theories about Halliburton and oil pipelines, and stays away from name-calling in favor of old-fashioned journalism, Frontline presents a powerful indictment of the White House's decision to go to war."

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/arts/television/20stan.html?ex=1308456000&en=1b1e5f4e3f04dfbc&ei=5 090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss>Alessandra Stanley isn't quite as positive in the New York Times: " 'The Dark Side' is so intent on hammering home how Mr. Cheney twisted arms -- and the facts -- that it allows the C.I.A. to whitewash its own failings."

Here's more from the do entary's <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/>Web site : "In the initial stages of the war on terror, Tenet's CIA was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. But when Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with the president that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and marginalize the agency and Tenet. Through interviews with DoD staffers who sifted through mountains of raw intelligence, Frontline tells the story of how questionable intelligence was 'stovepiped' to the vice president and presented to the public. . . .

"The film also examines how that stovepiped intelligence was used by the vice president in unprecedented visits to the CIA, where he questioned mid-level analysts on their conclusions. CIA officers who were there at the time say the message was clear: Cheney wanted evidence that Iraq was a threat."

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