On Tuesday, Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech at the National Press Club, defended his statement of May 2005 that the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes." "I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered," he added. His comment, besides strangely echoing Bush's on Hurricane Katrina ("I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees"), belied precise warnings from the CIA, the Army War College and 70 experts gathered by the National Defense University, who sent a report before the war to the administration but never received acknowledgment of receipt. But for the moment at least, Cheney's restatement of optimism or obliviousness expresses regained political confidence.
The Republican resolution on Iraq, the Pentagon's "Iraq Floor Debate Prep Book," Snow's fractured knowledge of history and Cheney's last "last throes" all fall back on a seamless but warped account of current events that is fabricated out of manipulated intelligence, filtered through ideological blinders and held to no tests by a deliberately unaccountable presidency.
Suskind, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the author of "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill," provides new details in this ongoing story in his new book, published this week.
Suskind begins at the briefing of President Bush at his Crawford, Texas, homestead on Aug. 6, 2001, about a CIA memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Upon listening to the CIA briefer, Bush says, "All right, you've covered your ass, now." He asks no more questions.
The week after Sept. 11, Cheney tasked CIA director George Tenet, who was grateful he had not been fired and was eager to please, to establish the link between the terrorist attacks and Saddam Hussein by putting the CIA imprimatur on a meeting of one of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, Czech Republic, early in 2001. "We'll get right on it, Mr. Vice President," Tenet said. On Sept. 21, he reported: "Our Prague office is skeptical about the report. It just doesn't add up." Two weeks after that, at Cheney's instigation, Rumsfeld created a parallel intelligence operation called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, headed by neoconservative Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. This operation funneled unevaluated intelligence and disinformation directly into the White House through Cheney's national security staff.
Shortly after Sept. 11, Brent Scowcroft, George H.W. Bush's former national security advisor and his closest associate, whom George W. Bush appointed chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, met with Cheney. Scowcroft told him that the intelligence community required reorganization and in particular that much of the Pentagon's intelligence operations should be transferred to the CIA. But that would have divested Cheney and Rumsfeld of much of their bureaucratic empire. Scowcroft's recommendation was the beginning of the end of his influence. He never met with Cheney again. Secretary of State Colin Powell was also systematically cut out and trampled. The elder Bush was not consulted.
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the Saudi ambassador, with long ties to the Bush family, observed that the relationship between the 41st and 43rd presidents was, as Suskind writes, "cool and distant, not even what one would expect of a father and son; that the son didn't consult the father -- even though he was, quite possibly, the most valuable advisor presented by modern history."
Cheney took it upon himself to withhold crucial information from the president on the theory that fostering Bush's ignorance was a defensive wall of "plausible deniability." Cheney's thinking ran back to Nixon in Watergate. "He [Nixon] was accountable, and that doomed his presidency," writes Suskind. Cheney created an unaccountable executive, who subsisted on information given him on a "need to know" basis determined by the vice president and "could essentially be 'deniable' about his own statements." At first, Cheney acted as a visible regent. "Bush asked Cheney not to offer him advice in crowded rooms. Do that privately. Cheney did."
Cheney decided not to give Bush the entire National Intelligence Estimate on WMD in Iraq, but only a one-page summary of "key findings," which excluded caveats, including statements from the Energy Department and the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research that the aluminum tubes that Cheney and the neoconservatives insisted were proof of Saddam's ongoing nuclear weapons program "more likely are intended for conventional weapons." Bush read or skimmed what he was handed and asked no questions. He was the perfect "deniable" president.
Suskind's Bush is a familiar figure, a mixture of bluster and cluelessness. He loves being briefed by groups of men talking tough. "They all start talking like operators, no matter what's being reported. These are men who, on balance, never experienced the bracing effects ... of military action. The few who have, like Powell, and his deputy Rich Armitage, smooth over these disparities ... by joining in the tough talk that they know, from experience, is hollow at its core."
At one briefing in 2002, Suskind writes, Bruce Gephardt, deputy director of the FBI, told Bush that a group of men of "Middle Eastern descent" in Kansas had been discovered offering "cash for a large storage facility." "Middle Easterners in Kansas," said Bush. "We've got to get on this, immediately." Bush is reported to like barking orders, almost at a shout. The next day, he demanded a report. "Mr. President, the FBI has Kansas surrounded!" "That's what I like to hear," Bush replied. But it turned out that the men of Middle Eastern descent were operators of flea markets, not would-be terrorists. The diligent FBI had closed in on their accumulated piles of old clothing and Sinatra records.
At a Dec. 13, 2002, year-end review of the war on terror for the president in the Cabinet Room conducted by two dozen senior officials, Bush had some difficulty following the complex details and lack of a simple story line. When Kenneth Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, informed him, "Mr. President, the majority of the funders for al Qaeda are Saudis," Bush "looked at Dam, perplexed, as though he either hadn't read the handout in front of him, or was somehow surprised -- though this was all but common knowledge." "That's enough for today," said the president.
Next page: Even a "1 percent chance" of terrorism was good enough for a preemptive strike
