At other moments, the president who proudly relied on his "gut" for decision making, raised a pertinent question. "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" he asked at one point about the torture of detainees. But he never followed up. Meanwhile, Cheney developed the "rules." Action was liberated from evidence. Even a "1 percent chance" that some conjectured terrorist threat would materialize was good enough for a preemptive strike.
In March 2002, Abu Zubaydah, touted as a top al-Qaida commander, was captured by a CIA and FBI team in Pakistan. Bush was prompted to call him "chief of operations" for al-Qaida, naming him as "No. 3" to bin Laden. Dan Coleman, one of FBI's top agents on al-Qaida, was assigned to read Zubaydah's diary. In it, he writes in three incoherent voices, reflecting different personalities, writes Suskind. "The CIA had long suspected that the ubiquitous Zubaydah was involved in the August 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa. He [Coleman] looked for entries in the summer of 1998 in Zubaydah's diary. Nothing ... nothing but nonsense." Coleman reported to an FBI official: "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."
Bush was briefed. "I said he was important," the president complained to Tenet. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President." So Zubaydah became the first experiment in the new rules on torture in which the Geneva Conventions did not apply. Over at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., a CIA official told Suskind, "Around the room a lot of people just rolled their eyes when we heard comments from the White House. I mean, Bush and Cheney knew what we knew about Zubaydah. The guy had psychological issues. He was, in a way, expendable. It was like calling someone who runs a company's in-house travel department the COO."
But the decision was made to "torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered." He was "waterboarded," simulating drowning. Zubaydah babbled about terrorist threats to shopping malls, nuclear power plants, supermarkets, and about al-Qaida plans to build a nuclear device. The administration sounded alerts on every unconfirmed threat. In May 2002, New York City was put on high alert over Zubaydah's torture-incited ravings that the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty were targets. Cheney went on "Larry King Live" to defend the alerts: "We now have a large number of people in custody, detainees, and periodically as we go through this process we learn more about the possibility of future attacks."
Throughout 2002, Cheney directly pressured the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence to assert both that Saddam was connected to al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks and that Saddam was seeking yellowcake uranium for his nuclear weapons program. But the agency determined through numerous sources that these claims were false. Yet Cheney's operation and Rumsfeld's jerry-rigged intelligence shop kept insisting that the CIA put its seal of approval on the Atta-in-Prague story and the yellowcake uranium one, too.
On Jan. 10, 2003, Stephen Hadley, then deputy national advisor, called Jami Miscik, deputy director of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, from the office of Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, demanding that Miscik appear in Libby's office that afternoon. According to Suskind, Miscik told Tenet, "If I have to go back to hear their crap and rewrite this goddamn report ... I'm resigning, right now." So the report was not rewritten. As a result, U.S. intelligence sources could not be cited and the disinformation had to be attributed elsewhere. Thus Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union address, delivered his infamous 16 words: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Bush's falsehoods were an accomplishment of Cheney's "deniable" presidency. Inside the CIA, Cheney was nicknamed "Edgar," after ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.
In place of regular policy deliberation there was a series of vacuums. Every morning, after reading his Bible, eating breakfast and working out, Bush received his briefing from the CIA and FBI directors, which was repackaged to him orally by Cheney or Condoleezza Rice. "What Bush knew before, or during, a key decision remained largely a mystery. Only a tiny group ... could break this seal." "There was never any policy process to break, by Condi or anyone else," Suskind quotes Deputy Secretary of State Armitage as saying. "There was never one from the start. Bush didn't want one, for whatever reason. One was never started."
On Oct. 29, 2004, Osama bin Laden released his "October surprise," an 18-minute tape attacking Bush. The CIA analyzed the tape and concluded that "bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection." That day, at a meeting at the CIA, acting director John McLaughlin remarked, "Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the president." Miscik presented analysis that bin Laden felt challenged by the rise of the thuggish Zarqawi, who called himself commander of al-Qaida in Iraq, and that bin Laden was refocusing attention through his tape on his cosmic and continuing one-on-one battle with Bush. "Certainly," she said, "he would want Bush to keep doing what he's doing for a few more years."
After the presidential election, in mid-November 2004, Suskind writes, Cheney directly pressured Miscik to leak a distorted part of a CIA report to "prove" that the war in Iraq was quelling, not inciting, terrorism. Cheney intended to declassify it and have the CIA make it public. But Miscik knew that the report "concluded nothing of the sort," and refused to take part in leaking false information. She was told that the new CIA director, Porter Goss, had said, "Saying no to the vice president is the wrong answer." "Actually," she replied, "sometimes saying no to the vice president is what we get paid for." Within a few weeks, she was forced out. Soon much of the CIA's top echelon was purged for adhering to its residual professional standards.
The passage of the Republican congressional resolution on Iraq stands on the wreckage of those standards. (The Pentagon talking points refer to Zubaydah as "bin Laden's field commander.") The continuing primacy of apparatchiks Cheney and Rumsfeld reflects the conquest of their conception of the executive. And Rove's exploitative strategies subordinate a potential political solution in Iraq to the paramount importance of a political solution in the midterm elections. Call it the triumph of surrealpolitik.
About the writer
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.
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