Ron Suskind: The One Percent Doctrine

[Gregory Pratt]

Suskind's known for writing "The Price of Loyalty" in which he chronicled the former Treasury Secretary's plagued tenure with the Bush White House. It was the most insightful book about Bush that I've read, and I've read quite a few. Needless to say, O'Neill and Suskind didn't leave him looking very good.

 

Now he's written a new one, "The One Percent Doctrine," and I'll be picking it up later.

 

For now, I've read the excerpt and recommend this book and excerpt to you. Absolutely.

 

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...1205478,00.html

 

I think I may enjoy this one more than the Price, simply because I am a man who loves his CIA and this book is said to have been written with much access to George Tenet.

[kapkomet]

Interesting article.

[Balta1701]

The WaPo has had a look at the book and has a review up, with some interesting quotes. Here's their last paragraph:

 

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

[LowerCaseRepublican]

The WaPo has had a look at the book and has a review up, with some interesting quotes. Here's their last paragraph:

Kinda sounds like the book I just finished A Question of Torture.

 

From the reports in the book with FBI members, a lot of the FBI are pissed at the quasi-extralegal (let's call them what they are -- torture) tactics being used by MI and CIA. They (FBI agents) said that the FBI's methods of non-coercive "getting a relationship with the suspect" method was much more effective at eliciting accurate information than the CIA/MI methods of sensory deprivation, hooding, water boarding and the other means of psychological torture used on detainees.