The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11

by Ron Suskind

Simon & Schuster, $211

Two months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, US Vice-President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice met George Tenet in the White House Situation Room. The presentation delivered by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency included unsettling information that, three weeks before September 11, two Pakistani nuclear scientists had met Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Characteristically, Cheney waited until the end of the briefing before giving his opinion: 'If there's a 1 per cent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty. It's not about our analysis, or about finding a preponderance of evidence. It's about our response.'

This response-based approach to perceived threats - or the Cheney doctrine - came to define American policy towards al-Qaeda, as well as upending its traditional policy-forming process, writes Ron Suskind in The One Percent Doctrine.

Covering the period 2001-2004, and using Tenet's directorship as the framework for the book, Suskind traces the impact the doctrine had on both the US intelligence community and its targets. He elucidates this further by focusing much of his attention on the interplay of the CIA and senior Bush administration figures.

For suspected terrorists, this new creed would reveal itself in torture-by-proxy, whereby the US sent alleged al-Qaeda operatives from Afghanistan and elsewhere to countries such as Egypt, where brutal information-extracting techniques are a quotidian part of the secret police's repertoire.