Ron Suskind

Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Ron Suskind, finds that Vice President Dick Cheney operates under a principle where threats with even a one percent likelihood, will be treated as certainties in his new book the one percent doctrine. He explores how this thought process has permeated the Bush administration's approach to counter terrorism at this talk from Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington D.C.. Its an hour and fifteen minutes. Good evening everyone. I'm Carla Cohen. Barbara Meade and I would like to welcome you as well as our staff. We would like to welcome you all tonight to Politics and Prose. We, Ron Suskind and Politics and Prose became friends when Ron's first book, "The Hope in the Unseen" was published. I think many of you may know it. It tells a deeply felt story about Cedric Jennings, a high school junior in the worst school in Washington, who by a prodigious effort graduates from Brown University, its a great book. Then about two and a half years ago Ron published "The Price of Royalty", about Paul O'Neil, Bush's first Secretary of Treasury and the world he experiences inside the White House. Look upon that book as a prequel to the "One Percent Solution". Ron has described the months following the World Trade Center attack. The Bush-Cheney administration issued a dictum: if there's only a one percent chance of WMD or if Saddam being hooked up with al-Qaeda, we must act as if tis a certainty. Now I ask you, does it make any sense if there's a one percent chance of your getting a job in California, will you move there? If there's a one percent chance of an earthquake, will you build an earthquake proof house? If there's a one percent chance you have cancer, will you start chemotherapy? The war in Iraq had nothing to do with the war on Islamic terrorists. It came about because Bush-Cheney wanted to take action and could not fight against the (unidentified) enemy. The administration was unable to set upon a course that gathers evidence slowly, meticulously weighing it. This takes intelligence with a small eye and a large eye, neither of which the administration wants to bother with. They attacked Iraq because they were unable to attack the real enemy. The Middle East was a severely troubled region before March 2003. But Bush-Cheney has contributed to a far greater degree of destabilization. We people are going to have to live with the consequences for decades to come. Ron has written a gripping, fast-paced, well researched book. Thank you Ron. Does this work? HI guys. Ok, I'm gonna go with this then. Thank you Carla. I thought I ordered the lower podium Carla, there ya go, this will give out in about twenty minutes, but um... Thank you Carla. That introduction, and I knew Carla was going to try to get me in trouble here. After Chris Matthews, I think Carla is much more formidable, um... A one percent chance, huh? Well coming here tonight, I just want to say that my wife and I were driving in this deluge and we said there's about a one percent chance people will show up tonight. The number here, I'm reexamining the Cheney doctrine. Let me un, not too much, just a little, just a little. Alright, lets a, lets start this conversation with a few stories, uh we have the typically energized Politics and Prose audience, I can see some smiling faces here, folks are loaded with reality based information, i love you for that. You know, back when, before in the pre-historic era, before the 2004 election, I wrote that story in the New York Times Magazine, the phrase was coined in the reality based community, now people ask me to describe the reality based community, who are they, where are they. I say, its simple. Its a store on Connecticut Avenue. You can come and meet them anytime, they're there in force. Um, you know I have a t-shirt that a, I wear at every opportunity, um that my son, Walter, got me from the University of Virginia, my alma mater, got me a t-shirt on line and its got that great Jefferson quote on the back, "for here we are not afraid to follow truth where ever it may lead, nor tolerate any error, so long as reason, that's the key word, age of enlightenment, reason is free to combat it. If I think that Jefferson were here today, I might hire him as my attorney for the battles we are in. These are difficult times, times of extraordinary historical change and I found myself in early in 2004, after "The Price of Royalty" came out, full of questions, even though I know a lot and had been reporting for years about the Bush administration, engaged in the seminal battle of this era, I said what do I really know about this so called war on terror? And I live in Washington, you know (unidentified) and I have sons, we want to continue to live here, I said, you know I don't know very much. I know virtually nothing that I feel that comfortable taking to the bank. So, I started to make a few calls. And people started to meet me, not here, up, some of you will like this, up at Bread and Chocolate, that's my favorite place, four blocks up the road. Folks who are fighting the battle, I think that's the best way to put it. Um, you know there are people out there, public servants, who are involved each and everyday, in a harrowing struggle against largely invisible, ardent and violent people. There is a change, historically, that makes these times different. And just to sum it up in two sentences. I'm sure there are books in this store that put it beautifully, in ways that I'm sure I won't know. But the fact is that the information age has brought just breathless benefits to all of us here and around the world. You know the spored, democratizing power of information easily down loadable. The Library of Congress in any laptop and not just here, but in Islamabad too. Its allowed people the, the energy and capability to wrestle with their problems, find their way, its an ideal prop to Western individualism, the notion of individual destiny and it has also brought to the party its dark and angry cousin, destructive capability. Make no mistake, its an enormous shift. You know many of us in college, years ago and god knows, for centuries prior to that, read about the state to state dance of force and diplomacy, (unidentified) how do you do it? How do you do it in a way that carries national interest, we've been very good about that here in this country. We've prospered, in the United States, especially in the 20th century, from the state to state dance. But it is eroding and changing and under siege in an increasingly borderless world by transnational actors at this point in our history, this history of mankind, individuals, small groups can carry the destructive power once reserved for nations. Where do you start? Sometimes I wish George Cannon were here sitting next to me, help me here, we're trying to figure it out. Huge change and that huge change drives people to Bread and Chocolate. Off hours, very early, it opens quite early, a table in the corner and they'd come, one after another. Folks involved in the fight, in intelligence, in law enforcement, national security council, people at the very top. They'd say, you know I'm afraid and I'm afraid of not what just I face everyday, but I'm also afraid about how, how some of the features of self governance have broken down. We haven't figured out one wit in the way of solutions of how to tell the public what they need to know. Everything down to the lunch menu is stamped classified. That's a problem. The self correcting processes don't seem to be working. We're not having a meaningful public dialog. "There are things we know", they tell me, "that al-Qaeda knew two and three years ago, have already responded to strategically", its past tense. The American public ought to know them. The way our system works, you're the bosses, you're the sovereign, you get the government you deserve. If, as Jefferson puts it on the front of my book in the epigram, "an informed public can be entrusted with its government" and I said, god i need to be informed so that I can maybe write something, cause I'm not informed, and that's the start of the journey. And they come one after another and they build over time these are in many cases heroic characters. People who haven't had a vacation since September 12. People who miss everything that we love, the weddings, the baptisms, even the funerals, they have not seen their husbands, in many cases their wives, for years and they sit up nights, night after night, worrying, i must meet them. And that's who's in the book. I call them the invisibles, because they're largely invisible to us. The people we know, I call the notables. And you know them. They're notable. Each day they are in the magnifying glass, the media magnifying glass of the spotlight. And they're up there telling us to be afraid, to be very afraid, or not so afraid, or less afraid. Well what's today, be more free today. We're winning, we're not winning. Trust us. They take credit for things they can, they dodge the things they need to dodge, they are repositories of public faith and day to day, they are not in fact the people fighting the battle. So we hear from both groups. And that's this book. In a way, its a long interactive story of what it feels like to walk in the shoes in either group. The shoes that I like best, as a writer, are the ones we haven't walked in. The people actually out there crossing swords. They fascinate me. You know in previous years, a war, for wars we have Ed Murrows and Ernie Pyles, traveling with troops. In this secret war, think of the conflict of that term, the contradiction loaded in the side of it, secret war. Wars in this country, any country tend to be public things. You can see, how did that battle go, what are the casualties, how are we doing. In this war we can't see it. Its mostly in secret, that provides a challenge to the way we do what we do. So I tried to be Ernie Pyles, to travel with them. "The One Percent Doctrine". A quick definition. Its two months after 9/11, a situation room, probably at this point, the most famous snatch of carpeting in the planet, Vice President is there. The CIA's briefing him. Three weeks before 9/11, Pakistani nuclear scientists sat with Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, his number two, I call him in the book Bin Laden's Cheney, I just take a little license there, and they're briefing the Vice President. You are there as readers. People from (unidentified) and CIA are there, the intelligence is "heroing", its a shared nightmare. The idea that Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are sitting with Pakistani nuclear scientists, who know what to do what they do. Vice President is briefed, starts in, says, "uh, we need to think um, about these low probability, high impact events in a different way" that's what he says. Briefing unfolds and then he stops it. If there is a one percent chance", he says, "the Pakistani nuclear scientists have given the key matter, the key materials, to al-Qaeda, we need to treat is as a certainty, not on our analysis", he demurs, "or in the preponderance of evidence, but in our response". Everyone in the room stops and doesn't breathe for a minute, because they see it take shape, it is the doctrine, the doctrine that guides behavior for the ship of state, the world's most powerful nation, for years to follow, not just in the war against these ardent and violent individuals, but in Afghanistan, in Iraq. Its shaped and molded for virtually every moment. Cheney, a key actor of this era. Its clear each day how important he really is. You know think about it. Think about the drama if you were writing history, looking back a hundred years. The most skilled, the most experienced, Vice President of modern times with a President who has very little experience in foreign affairs. A president who's father he knew likes Rumsfeld, and as you know, from your own lives, if you know someone's son, your peer, you always know that person as a son, that's the way they looked at W. His son. So what does Cheney do here? First off, think its a much forgotten moment, he of course was heading up, remember, the running mate search committee. I forgot that part until recently. And at some point, he said well, "you know", i guess he says sort of out the side of his mouth, "I looked at a lot of people and I decided on really the best guy, ok." That's an enormous historical moment, really. I mean think of all that flows forward from that instant, its breathtaking. What has Cheney done, clear in the book, finally, I've been writing about these two characters, Cheney and Bush, you know four, four and a half years now. Never before I've been able to render them with such clarity as this time, it just is a matter of step by step over years and what it is, it is thus, Cheney essentially creates an architecture, a platform, where the President, well where George Bush can be George Bush and still be the President. He can be the man of action within the framework, Cheney who is the global thinker of the pair constructs. Many things I find in the book are troubling as to who's president. There are briefings that end at Cheney's desk. There is a scene in there where crowned Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia comes to Crawford, its arguably the most important briefing the President ever has in foreign affairs at this point in his presidency, its spring of 2002, the Saudi's and all the Arab world is royaling and that's important now. If we don't have alliances with these people, we're blind in terms of who might be coming after us. They're so aggrieved about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, they are loaded and their faces are red with anger and Abdullah almost, he doesn't even want to come to Crawford. The Saudis draw up a point by point, here are the important issues, here's what we think, here are some alternatives, and they fly to Crawford. President's waiting in the driveway, kicking stones, Abdullah comes, each man has his entourage, they go into the house, they talk, at some point they get into the matter, key issues, Bush takes it off to one side, no lets get in the truck, lets drive around the ranch. Abdullah isn't sure what to do. Next thing you know, they're out in the truck and they're talking about birds and bees and faith and a bond that is created. Make no mistake. Do not view this President as without capability, you will miss the point. He has a kind of improvisational energy and gift. He doesn't get to be President just because. Next thing you know, they're walking, they're talking, bonds are being created, but, but the Saudis are there for a reason. Later they have lunch, they're eating brownies, the brownies are done, Prince Abdullah eating a brownie, I don't know what that means, that he does and likes it I guess. And the Saudis want to get down to business. President doesn't seem to know why they're there. The briefing has stopped at Cheney's desk. People at the time were befuddled in the room. President doesn't seem to be clear about why the Saudis came all this way. So actually its a not particularly substantive meeting for the Saudis, maybe that's good. At the end of it though the President and the crowned Prince are holding hands and hugging and there are tears in their eyes. You decide. The crown Prince leaves and he's had his first Bush encounter. That's the notables. But about the invisibles. Let me tell you one story that I love. One of the key characters in the book is a guy named Dan Coleman. Dan is the al-Qaeda hunter inside of FBI, he's a guy you can't help but love him. He's a big, kind burly, Irish New York, cop come FBI agent, clear-eyed, smart as he can get, has been the agent essentially of prosecutions that have worked since 1993 since the first World Trade Center bombing, he is called the professor, inside of FBI, we walk in his shoes. Now, his shoes bring him back to Washington after 9/11. He's brought down here to answer questions, no one here understands how the war on terror needs to be fought, they don't know thy enemy, they need Dan. Dan's living in an apartment not far from the FBI headquarters in our town. Gets a call in the middle of the night. Dan's gotta go to Dulles airport, top secret. Gets in his FBI issued sedan and drives, catches the Dulles toll road, its empty this time of night, sees Dulles airport, lit up for its own pleasure, i guess, at two in the morning. And at the general aviation terminal, there are two guys waiting for him. One, an army intelligence guy named Steve and some Col. They are standing there and Dan says hi. He's got his son in Afghanistan, Dan does, special forces guy, Steve seems to know about Danny and he's doing ok and Dan's grateful that he gets information about his son. Then he looks at Steve and he says, "well I guess got it?" And Steve says, "Yeah, sorry it took a little while". Its June of 2002. Steve got's sort of a tin hat box. Passes it to Dan. Something sort of rolls around inside and peels the top off, all three watch, reached in there's a little bit of river mud in there, and he lifts it out, its Zawahiri's head. He holds it up. Its got just a little bit of skin on it. A little prayer scar right in the middle of the forehead just like Zawahiri has. A scar from pressing his forehead in piety on bricks and dirt and stone praying, you see that scar a lot. So they look at the head, the three of them, hoping it is him. We've gotten four reports at this point that we got Zawahiri, this is our best chance we figure. Afghani's war lords says, "We got him, we got him" and we said we're gonna need some evidence for the twenty five mil, trust us on this. And so we get the head. And they hold it up. Dan holds it high like Hamlet and Yorik and they look at it hopeful, there it is, right there, they want to see what they want to see. In a way maybe we all want it to be the right guy, the head. "Uh", Dan says, "kinda looks like him. What do ya think?" And then, Dan puts the head in his car. Its an interesting car. Its the car he drove on 9/11 in southern Manhattan and he's been going all out since then, he never had time to deep clean it and there's a tiny residue of ash, you can just pick up near the chrome around the radio in the trunk and Dan puts the head among the ashes and then speeds back to Washington as he says "to bring the head of our enemy to our emperor". This causes great fission inside of the government. This is part of the story of this era. "The One Percent Doctrine", even suspicion is embraced hopefully as evidence. The thinnest bit, plenty. So there's joy in the government, "We got him! We got Zawahiri, the brains" Inside of FBI and CIA there are full out, they gotta drill through the skull to get some tissue in the molar. And they get the tissue and then its for the CIA to call Egyptian intelligence. Why? To get a DNA match, you need a family member. The Egyptians have Zawahiri's brother, his younger brother Mohamed, incarcerated in those lovely Egyptian prisons. The CIA man calls up the Egyptians, "we understand you have the brother. We need a DNA match." The Egyptian intelligence chief says, "what the problem? We cut off an arm and send it right over" CIA guy, (unidentified), (unidentified) "No don't vial of blood, vial of blood, that's all we need! Don't hang up!' The Egyptian seems deflated, "uh, blood, all you want is blood, well, so well, we'll send the blood, ok, fine." Welcome to the war on terror. Going Medievally, you've heard that term? Tough guys use it and tough guy movies like Pulp Fiction. Our enemies know about that term too. They may not use that phrase, but they understand what it means, if we go Medieval, we hand them maybe the most precious weapon, because our character is submerged as a nation. You know the war on terror is a challenge. I don't provide easy answers in the book, I don't. I say, there it is. Each incident, many sides, like a war shack, feel what you feel, some people are gonna read it and say, "Well, i see the President, he's clearly engaged, just like the Vice President, in this battle. Some folks on the right say, there you go, god bless em. Some on the left, no, I can see them in action, that's for sure. There's a phrase that I use as a title in the book. Its called "going operational". This President likes to make things personal. That's the way he engages. Visceral, instinct, gut. Vice President sets the framework, the geo-political idea, and within it the President acts, man of action. He wants to know every detail. Lots of Presidents get briefed everyday, this is the way it works. Most of them like to sit with the analysts. The incident occurs but the analysts is who, carries the ball explaining to the President what this might mean for the region or a state. The president likes the operators, staying directly involved, you. I want all the details. Why is this cooperating with us? Can we trust him? Those are some questions that we might want to ask too. President is in the weeds, in the grain of it. Lets tell another short story about the President and Vice President in full tilt operational mode. You don't know this story, because frankly, what we know about the war on terror is apart of a kind official speak. A think gruel, its right out of Dickens. This is all we're telling you, you are not getting a refill on that bowl. Now you can actually go in the rooms. The thing thats got a lot of publicity, might as well talk about it, its February of 2003, and we have people all over the world trying to figure out what they need to know. We get a piece of information some arrests are made in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the computer of one of those arrested, we finds the designs to a truly harrowing device, its called (unidentified), and um that means inventive or innovative in Arabic. For years, terrorists have been trying to figure out a way to deliver hydrogen cyanide gas. Its widely available in terms of the chemicals you need, but its hard to turn into a gas that you can deliver in a confined space. Hydrogen cyanide has a long history, god knows, (unidentified) B is hydrogen cyanide, essentially, that's what the Nazi's used in gas chambers. Bad guys know this and they've been trying to split the atom here, figure out a way to deliver. You gotta turn it into a gas in a way that is handled remotely. We find in the computer the designs to this device. It sends a panic through the government. A week later the CIA has built a model, its placed in the center of the table in CIA and everybody says oh god. Tenant says the man needs to see this, lets call and tell him a few more people are coming tomorrow morning to the briefing and it is delivered to the President. In a way you feel the way the laws of expectation and in a way the physical properties that guide us in our assessments are bending. The (unidentified) in the Oval Office bends it, everyone looks at it and people say almost nothing. Soon, the President goes and meets with the Japanese Prime Minister and he decides he wants to show him the model. Let him understand what's changed. That's step one. Two: We don't know what these Iranians and Saudis are up to. They seem to be unconnected. They are arrested, the Saudis keep telling us, I love this part, the Saudis talk to us like Clarence (unidentified), about due process, "You guys told them, sorry, no evidence, what can I do?" but if you commit adultery, they cut your head off... In any event, the Saudis are saying we need evidence, otherwise we'll have to let these people go. Saudis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, are they really our friends? I'm not so sure. They have a way of disappointing us again and again. In this case, the panic is royaling and we decide we are going to tap our source inside of al-Qaeda management. We had one of those that heartens people, it should. This is a war, human intelligence is what wins. How do you build that? We'll talk about that in a minute. We had one, I call him Ali in the book, he had provided valuable intelligence prior to this moment in the spring of 2003. What he said was reliable so now we go to him and tap him again, what do you know about this device? What do you know about these groups that have been picked up by the Saudis? One of the key players already le go. He says two things. I know a lot about this, in fact there is an operational WMD (unidentified) cell in the United States. Came in the fall of 2003, cased the New York City Subways and by January 2003, Fall of 2002, January 2003 they were forty five days away from zero hour. Then he tells us a second thing. Zawahiri called them off. We are startled. This is brought back to the Oval Office, the situation room and it starts a conversation that goes to this moment. What exactly is al-Qaeda's second wave strategy? Maybe not what we thought before. Inside the administration, they know not to take credit really, for the fact there has not been another attack in the United States, though they take credit almost everyday. The fact is, whatever follows 9/11, the intention and idea in terms of their play book is that it should be bigger than 9/11 and when that can be mustered, in terms of planning and operation, then we will see it. Probably the time and the place they're choosing, they clearly have capability. Homeland Security, don't get me started. That would create that bigger attack and upward arc of terror and anticipation and that's what they sell. That's their play book. An upward arc from the second attack after 9/11 and whatever follows. This is the real war on terror. In the briefing Bush says, "my question is, what was the bigger thing Zawahiri didn't want to mess up?" He's probably right about that. That's the real conversation. We are up to here again. Nothing in the book hands anything to our enemies, that they did not already know and in many cases have already responded to in terms of what they've been doing. You know I watch that Jack Nicholson part, I've got it on my computer on a little video, from A Few Good Men, when he does that "You can't handle the truth. I'm not sure if we can. Sometimes. I'm worried. But the fact is that handling the truth is what we do in this country. When we are least afraid, not because some challenge has come, but because we know we don't know. We know were not really being told. We want the whole story. Lets move forward to the finish. The fact is, its in the political calculations, its in the political mandate, maybe our undoing in this partisan era, in what we have to do to fight and to win this battle, to fight and win this battle without compromising what makes the country what it is. That which makes us distinctive. Time and again as people read the book they're like, "But they said black when it was white. In the inside it was clearly white. They said it was up when in the inside, they had decided that it was down." Make no mistake, when Don Rumsfeld said information is a weapon on the war on terror, he's not just talking about oversees. We are the subject here of regular disinformation. Its not just what you need to know and what we can tell you, its somethings that are false that we think its better you believe. Big difference. If history is harsh in its judgments here, one of the areas may be this, on September 12, everybody with any knowledge of this situation knew it was going to be tricky. The Vice President got and meet the press and said, "You know we're gonna have to engage in the dark side, its gonna be fought in the shadows, mostly with intelligence with mean sources and methods. Frankly we may not want to talk about it in daylight." Anyone would know that everything you say in a democracy in a situation like this, there is somethings you can't tell them. Everyone gets that. Everything you say better be point perfect, not one dollop of political self interest or self-aggrandizement. Not one kernel of padding on the back of what a great job we have been doing. The trust here was like a precious commodity, it just evaporated day after day and the WMD's are just a part of it. One of the incidences in the book is the first major capture (unidentified), think where we were. It was the spring of 2002, we hadn't gotten Bin Laden, We hadn't gotten Zawahiri, it was pressure, it was Afghanistan of failure. The book also shows that the President was warned in plenty of time, that if you didn't move troops, the Marines from another part of Afghanistan, to Tora bora, we'd loose Bin Laden. He was briefed in the White House in plenty of time in the end of November. He took other advice. Just be honest. Just say look I messed up. You know people might forgive that. So they pick up (unidentified) what's on the outside, whata we here? We got number three, the first of eighteen number threes. Operational chief, a man bent on malevolence, a man with plans that will destroy America, on and on, everybody. Everyone with a cue card in the White House, the President, Condi Rice, the Vice President. What's happening inside where the invisibles sit, well (unidentified) is captured, he becomes an experiment. Someone in the CIA said, he got shot three times, remember when he's picked up... he said we sent over the finest doctors you can find in the United States to nurse him back to health so we could begin to torture him. And we did. He gave up a few things, not mostly from the harsh stuff actually, but works tends not to be that. Don't confirm their expectations. They expect us to be blood thirsty monsters. Don't encourage them with your example. What works is when you surprise them. Get in their head, talk about things that really are important to them. They are human beings, thought blood thirsty in everything that they do, malevolent, they get one around the neck you want to kill em, but they're constructed like us. That's what the interrogators that understand interrogation know. In this case, he tells us who (unidentified) is, he tells us a few other things. Meanwhile, inside a CIA and FBI the readings of (unidentified) diary. He speaks over ten years in three different voices. Hani 1, Hani 2 and Hani 3, they're different ages, you know there talking about little