"I never thought I'd live to see the day when old-fashioned journalism would be a form of civil disobedience". - the late William Sloane Coffin, Oct 2005
Ron Suskind quotes the long-time peace activist in his excellent book The One Percent Doctrine (2006). It's a reflection of the state to which the Bush administration and the corporate media companies have reduced the American press, which in turn has been all too willing to comply with Bush postmodernism. Suskind writes:
Sloane Coffin ... may have overstated it a bit - one of his gifts - but not by very much.
To report about national affairs and, especially, national security in this contentious period demands at least a spoonful of disobedience - a countermeasure to strong assurances by those in power that the obedient will be rewarded or, at the very least, have nothing to worry about.
During two years reporting and writing this book, I found myself thinking more about my sources, and protecting them, than I ever had in my twenty years as a journalist. None of them, not one, had done anything improper - legally or ethically. But they had, similarly, committed modest acts of disobedience. Those included being "off message," digging among hard lessons they'd learned for insights about how America might respond to the manifold challenges it faces, and believing that transparency and accountability are not matters of convenience in a democracy, not ever.
The news reports on the book have understandably focused on new factual material, like the fact that the CIA's al-Qaida analysts saw Bin Laden's pre-election message of 10/29/04 as an attempt to boost Bush's re-election chances.
Or the quote from Dick Cheney from which the title is taken:
"If there's even a one percent 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," Cheney said. He paused to assess his declaration. "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence," he added. "It's about our response."
So, now spoken, it stood: A standard of action that would frame events and responses from the administration for years to come. The Cheney Doctrine. Even if there's just a one percent hcance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about "our analysis," as Cheney said. It's about "our response."
The real theme of Suskind's book is how this approach to questions of war and foreign policy created a situation in which decisions became unhinged from evidence. And the practical result was to hide the administration's policies behind extreme government secrecy, to the point of seriously endangering the democratic process. He writes:
The torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay; the construction of the great terrorist-catching machine, with its communications head and financial body; the self-interested use of classified materials to carry forward political ends; the very concealment of the true nature of what's been happening since 9/11 in favor of a sanitized, "need to know" version - are all means that, whatever their advertised value, strike at the nation's character.
And, sadly, give true comfort to our enemies, graced with more recruitment tools than they could have hoped for. (my emphasis)
With his background as a Wall Street Journal reporter, Suskind also gives attention to certain things in the management process that don't necessarily get treated the same way in typical political writing. For instance, his description of the general attitude of Cheney and Rummy toward Bush Junior, which also attracted some press attention in reporting on the book:
For Cheney and Rumsfeld, George W. Bush started as a footnote - the child of their contemporary. In these complex engagements of powerful men, it is important not to overlook basic human interaction, conventions that people know, surely, from their own lives. To wit: the son of a friend or colleague is always, in large part, a son, seen, for better or for worse, in reference to the parent. For Cheney, George W Bush is the son of a man he admired, despite his belief that the former President missed history's call by not destroying Saddam Hussein. For Rumsfeld, he was the son of a man he never felt was an equal in intellect or enterprise, proven also by the fact that he missed history's call by not destroying Saddam Hussein. Now place this pair in their respective senior positions in the administration of that son, George W. Bush: a President without foreign policy experience of any kind, who, conveniently, has long struggled to emerge from his father's shadow; It's simple math. Such alignments — more than the play of competing memos or forgotten debates — often turn the wheel of history. Which is why, a hundred years from now, scholars will most probably look at this array of actors and say, clearly, that Saddam Hussein's days were numbered. It was, after all, about the only matter on which all three agreed, and felt passionately. In this view of personality guiding destiny — of people gravitating toward what they happen to share and, when in power, getting what they want — it is. in retrospect, no great surprise that the first National Security Council meeting in January of 2001 dealt with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. And so did the second. It was a matter of how, not whether. (my emphasis in bold)
One thing that comes through clearly from this book is the powerful role of Dick Cheney. Billmon is not so far off the mark when he describes this government as "the Cheney administration".
