From http://www.consortiumnews,com, excerpted:

Review of 'The One Percent Doctrine'
By Peter Dale Scott
July 27, 2006

The One Percent Doctrine is an important book. On a factual level, it is a hard-edged narrative of the conflict between DCI George Tenet's CIA, representing what author Ron Suskind calls "the old world of evidence," and Vice-President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon, the proponents of "a new day of action."

But Suskind is writing on behalf of those at State and CIA -- plus "a host of generals at Defense" -- whose conclusion is that the systematic ignoring of "the basics of analytical due diligence" presents "institutional dangers for the government and for the country" (328).

The book's title derives from a remark by Cheney at a White House meeting in November 2001, that even a "one percent chance" that al Qaeda might acquire a nuclear weapon demanded, not analysis, but response. In Suskind's gloss:

"Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to 'evidence,' the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply. If there was even a one percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction…the United States must now act as if it were a certainty. This was a mandate of extraordinary breadth." (62)

Cheney's "one percent doctrine"marginalized the CIA, whose inconvenient facts (there was no al Qaeda-Iraq connection, Saddam was not purchasing uranium ore in Niger) were seen as obstructive; and marked the agency as a target for White House displeasure and ultimately retribution.

The book can be construed as a well-argued case for impeachment of the Vice-President, and possibly also of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Both men are accused of misdirecting the country and even at times of frustrating the clearly expressed will of President Bush, who in this book emerges as far closer to Tenet than many of us had believed. Condoleezza Rice is criticized chiefly for her failure as National Security Adviser to establish a robust process of policy coordination, leaving Cheney and Rumsfeld to prevail.   (...)