Cheney's Shadow government. What the one percent doctrine really means!
Yesterday Ron Suskind was on Terry Gross' Fresh Air to discuss his new book The One Percent Doctrine and he really blew my mind. Suskind reiterated what he wrote in the book that Cheney is pretty much behind all the disasters we've had visited upon us in Iraq and the "war on terror" from the beginning. You can already hear the howls from the right wingers, but is it really that big of a shock that Bush is out of the loop pretty much all of the time?
Suskind said in an interview with Matt Lauer that," The evidence is that Cheney is the global thinker. Bush is an action-based man, but he operates within a framework that Cheney largely designed. Not that this is a big surprise but it sure explains a lot of things.
Shortly after 9/11, Suskind writes that, "'Absorbing the possibility that al-Qaeda was trying to acquire a nuclear weapon, Cheney remarked that America had to deal with a new type of threat -- what he called a 'low-probability, high-impact event' -- and the U.S. had to do it 'in a way we haven't yet defined.
And then Cheney defined it: 'If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis . . . It's about our response.' Suskind writes, 'So, now spoken, it stood: a standard of action that would frame events and responses from the Administration for years to come." [WaPo]
So facts, normal analytical practices, checks and balances, and everything else was out the door. On Frontline last night, Michael Kirk lays out how this doctrine of darkness played out in practice. Cheney basically had a shadow (pardon the pun) presidency operating along side W.'s. He deeply distrusted the CIA and he and Rummy, his more affable conspirator, created a duel national security apparatus that made up the phony evidence for the Iraq invasion.
While most of the media is focusing on the revelation that al-Qaeda called off a poison gas attack on the New York Subway, I think this news that Cheney has his own shadow government going on is a bit more worthy of attention.
Suskind said in an interview with Matt Lauer that," The evidence is that Cheney is the global thinker. Bush is an action-based man, but he operates within a framework that Cheney largely designed. Not that this is a big surprise but it sure explains a lot of things.
Shortly after 9/11, Suskind writes that, "'Absorbing the possibility that al-Qaeda was trying to acquire a nuclear weapon, Cheney remarked that America had to deal with a new type of threat -- what he called a 'low-probability, high-impact event' -- and the U.S. had to do it 'in a way we haven't yet defined.
And then Cheney defined it: 'If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis . . . It's about our response.' Suskind writes, 'So, now spoken, it stood: a standard of action that would frame events and responses from the Administration for years to come." [WaPo]
So facts, normal analytical practices, checks and balances, and everything else was out the door. On Frontline last night, Michael Kirk lays out how this doctrine of darkness played out in practice. Cheney basically had a shadow (pardon the pun) presidency operating along side W.'s. He deeply distrusted the CIA and he and Rummy, his more affable conspirator, created a duel national security apparatus that made up the phony evidence for the Iraq invasion.
While most of the media is focusing on the revelation that al-Qaeda called off a poison gas attack on the New York Subway, I think this news that Cheney has his own shadow government going on is a bit more worthy of attention.
posted by William Duane at 2:25 PM
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