What I'm Reading

Mostly blogs, magazines and newspapers of course, but of couse I mean books.

I just finished The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind and I gotta say it was a very good read. Interestly, mixed in with bits of info - disturbing ones - about the troubling developments and lack of process (and messed up intelligence process leading up to the Iraq War) in the US response to terrorism, one also gets the sense that there is heartfelt feelings among people such as Bush and Cheney et al to defend the nation. Not everything is about politics with them but it certaintly has a obvious role. No, I haven't gone soft on them. Suskind in this book has a lot of sympathy for the plight of George Tenet, who as we all know fell on his sword and took the blame for mistakes and decisions that the President VP and his circle were responsible for.

Suskind through his narrative does criticize Tenet for being too eager to please the president and part of that comes profoud loyalty and gratitude from Tenet to the President steming from the fact that the President chose to keep Tenet on after Bush was elected and after 9/11.

Suskind makes clear though that, the both Tenet and his deputy never exlclaimed "slam dunk" in a meeting supposedly about the intelligence on Iraq. I say supposedly because the meeting itself was described more as a meeting on how to "sell" the war (PR) as it was already decided, not as a meeting to asses the evidence and then come to a decision as it has been characterized by the adminisration. The imlplication of course that the administration is attempting to blame the CIA for the Administrations mistakes.

Here is a short excerpt about the in Laden tapes released days before the 2004 election, and the conclusions the CIA analysts made of the purpose of the tape. (One which I agreed with at the time).

He mocked Bush for being stupid, and deceptive and corrupted by big oil and big business entagelements, like those with Halliurton. At the end, he managed to e dismissive of Kerry, but it was an afterthought in his "anyone but Bush" treatise.
....
Inside CIA, of course, the analysis moved on a different track. They had spent years, as had a similar bin Laden unit at FBI, parsing each expressed word of the al Qaeda leader and his deputy, Zawahiri. What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons -- and those reasons are debated with often startling depth inside the organization's leadership. Their assesement, at day's end, are distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversation that the American public, and y association the wider world community, were not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis.

Today's conclusion: bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection.
....
But an ocean of hard truths before them - such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush reelected - remained untouched. (pg. 335 - 336)

What indeed.