Reporter Ron Suskind has a blockbuster new book out where the people in our war on terror tell how this administration has been running it. It is called The One Percent Doctrine based on Cheney's response on how to protect against "a low-probability, high-impact event." His answer was to treat them all as a certainty in terms of US actions.
Big story 1 - Abu Zubaydah was declared by the White House as Al-Qaeda's chief of staff after his capture. This was repeated even after they learned he was clinically insane with split personalities and only in charge of minor logistics - travel for wives and children. The White House knows all this as they go on describing their great catch. Then they decide to unleash their new harsh interrogation techniques on him. Under "torture" he gives the interrogators whatever stories they want.
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."Big story 2: First Data Corp. and other credit card and communication companies turned over all data to the NSA shortly after 9/11 as the intelligence community rushed to build incredible large data-mining operations.
Big story 3: There have been at least two spies the CIA had from within al-Qaeda. One collected a $25 million reward and is now living in the USA with a new identity. Do you have a new Arab neighbor?
Big story 4 - Bring me the head of Ayman al-Zawahiri. CIA agents offered a huge bounty on this high ranking al-Qaeda head and Afghan tribal chiefs kept saying they captured or killed him. In one case an agent flew back to Washington with the supposed head in a box for DNA testing. If it turned out to be him Bush said "I hope you bring it here" [to the White House.]
Other not big stories because we have heard it repeatedly - The CIA sent someone to personally reinforce to the president the importance of the memo before 9/11 - "Bin Laden determined to strike in the US." Bush dismissed him as the CIA covering it's ass. The CIA also briefed the White House that Osama would escape from Tora Bora unless many more US troops were sent in. This administration is incompetent and doesn't listen.
The book also finds the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to be "nonexistent" and "basically a joke."
ADDED: I should place here that al-Qaeda's interest in a cyanide gas attack in the New York subway was not a big story or a surprise as the media, like TIME magazine, seems to feel. Gas attacks are easy if you have people willing to die for a cause and a subway or large building or auditorium is the best target. I'd have been surprised if they hadn't planned that.
MORE: The NYT article is a bit better.
Tags: Bush, Cheney, lying, incompetent, terrorism, torture, CIA, intelligence, Homeland Security, Ron Suskind
No comments:
Post a Comment