Joan Didion: Cheney ... The Fatal Touch
It was in some ways predictable that the central player in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up. The son of two New Deal Democrats, his father a federal civil servant with the Soil Conservation Service in Casper, Wyoming, he more or less happened into a full scholarship to Yale: his high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent, introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor named Thomas Stroock who, he later told Nicholas Lemann, "called Yale and told 'em to take this guy." The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney's networking lasted three semesters, took a year off before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave....
If the case for war lacked a link between September 11 and Iraq, the Vice President would repeatedly cite the meeting that neither American nor Czech intelligence believed had taken place between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague: "It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attacks," he would say on NBC in December 2001. "We discovered...the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague," he would say on NBC in March 2002. "We have reporting that places [Atta] in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center," he would say on NBC in September 2002. "The senator has got his facts wrong," he would then say while debating Senator John Edwards during the 2004 campaign. "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11."
This was not a slip of memory in the heat of debate. This was dishonest, a repeate misrepresentation, in the interests of claiming power, so bald and so systematic that the onl instinctive response Did too!) was that of the schoolyard. By June 2004, before the debate with Edwards, Cheney had in fact begun edging away from the Prague story, not exactly disclaiming it but characterizing it as still unproven, as in, on a Cincinnati TV station, "That's true. We do not have proof that there was such a connection." It would be two years later, March 2006, before he found it prudent to issue a less equivocal, although still shifty, version. "We had one report early on from another intelligence service that suggested that the lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta, had met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, Czechoslovakia," he told Tony Snow on Fox News. "And that reporting waxed and waned where the degree of confidence in it, and so forth, has been pretty well knocked down at this stage, that that meeting ever took place. So we've never made the case, or argued the case, that somehow [Saddam Hussein] was directly involved in 9/11. That evidence has never been forthcoming."
What the Vice President was doing with the intelligence he received has since been characterized as "cherry-picking," a phrase suggesting that he selectively used only the more useful of equally valid pieces of intelligence. This fails to reflect the situation. The White House had been told by the CIA that no meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence had ever occurred. The International Atomic Energy Agency and the US Department of Energy had said that the aluminum tubes in question "were not directly suitable" for uranium enrichment. The White House had been told by the CIA that the British report about Saddam Hussein attempting to buy yellowcake in Nigeria was doubtful.
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," the President nonetheless declared in his 2003 State of the Union address, the "sixteen enormously overblown words" for which Condoleezza Rice would blame the CIA and for which George Tenet, outplayed, would take the hit. Nor would the President stop there: "Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
What the Vice President was doing, then, was not cherry-picking the intelligence but rejecting it, replacing it with whatever self-interested rumor better advanced his narrative line. "Cheney's office claimed to have sources," Ron Suskind was told by those to whom he spoke for The One Percent Doctrine.
And Rumsfeld's, too. They kept throwing them [at the CIA]. The same information, five different ways. They'd omit that a key piece had been discounted, that the source had recanted. Sorry, our mistake. Then it would reappear, again, in a memo the next week.
The Vice President would not then or later tolerate any suggestion that the story he was building might rest on cooked evidence. In a single speech at the American Enterprise Institute in November 2005 he used the following adjectives to describe those members of Congress who had raised such a question: "corrupt," "shameless," "dishonest," "reprehensible," "irresponsible," "insidious," and "utterly false." "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence," he is reported by Suskind to have said in the November 2001 briefing during which he articulated the doctrine that if there was "a one percent chance" of truth in any suspicion or allegation, it must be considered true. "It's about our response."...
Read entire article at NY Review of Books
If the case for war lacked a link between September 11 and Iraq, the Vice President would repeatedly cite the meeting that neither American nor Czech intelligence believed had taken place between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague: "It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attacks," he would say on NBC in December 2001. "We discovered...the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague," he would say on NBC in March 2002. "We have reporting that places [Atta] in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center," he would say on NBC in September 2002. "The senator has got his facts wrong," he would then say while debating Senator John Edwards during the 2004 campaign. "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11."
This was not a slip of memory in the heat of debate. This was dishonest, a repeate misrepresentation, in the interests of claiming power, so bald and so systematic that the onl instinctive response Did too!) was that of the schoolyard. By June 2004, before the debate with Edwards, Cheney had in fact begun edging away from the Prague story, not exactly disclaiming it but characterizing it as still unproven, as in, on a Cincinnati TV station, "That's true. We do not have proof that there was such a connection." It would be two years later, March 2006, before he found it prudent to issue a less equivocal, although still shifty, version. "We had one report early on from another intelligence service that suggested that the lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta, had met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, Czechoslovakia," he told Tony Snow on Fox News. "And that reporting waxed and waned where the degree of confidence in it, and so forth, has been pretty well knocked down at this stage, that that meeting ever took place. So we've never made the case, or argued the case, that somehow [Saddam Hussein] was directly involved in 9/11. That evidence has never been forthcoming."
What the Vice President was doing with the intelligence he received has since been characterized as "cherry-picking," a phrase suggesting that he selectively used only the more useful of equally valid pieces of intelligence. This fails to reflect the situation. The White House had been told by the CIA that no meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence had ever occurred. The International Atomic Energy Agency and the US Department of Energy had said that the aluminum tubes in question "were not directly suitable" for uranium enrichment. The White House had been told by the CIA that the British report about Saddam Hussein attempting to buy yellowcake in Nigeria was doubtful.
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," the President nonetheless declared in his 2003 State of the Union address, the "sixteen enormously overblown words" for which Condoleezza Rice would blame the CIA and for which George Tenet, outplayed, would take the hit. Nor would the President stop there: "Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
What the Vice President was doing, then, was not cherry-picking the intelligence but rejecting it, replacing it with whatever self-interested rumor better advanced his narrative line. "Cheney's office claimed to have sources," Ron Suskind was told by those to whom he spoke for The One Percent Doctrine.
And Rumsfeld's, too. They kept throwing them [at the CIA]. The same information, five different ways. They'd omit that a key piece had been discounted, that the source had recanted. Sorry, our mistake. Then it would reappear, again, in a memo the next week.
The Vice President would not then or later tolerate any suggestion that the story he was building might rest on cooked evidence. In a single speech at the American Enterprise Institute in November 2005 he used the following adjectives to describe those members of Congress who had raised such a question: "corrupt," "shameless," "dishonest," "reprehensible," "irresponsible," "insidious," and "utterly false." "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence," he is reported by Suskind to have said in the November 2001 briefing during which he articulated the doctrine that if there was "a one percent chance" of truth in any suspicion or allegation, it must be considered true. "It's about our response."...