I Cogitate

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind joins us to discuss his new book, "The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11." In it, Suskind writes that that the U.S deliberately bombed the Kabul, Afghanistan offices of Al Jazeera in 2001. Earlier this week, Dima Tahboub - the widow of Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Ayyoub - filed a lawsuit against the Bush administration for her husband's death. On April 8 2003, Ayyoub was reporting from Al Jazeera's offices in Baghdad when he was killed by a US missile. He was the first journalist to be killed in Iraq just hours before U.S. forces seized the capital. At a press conference in Washington D.C earlier this week, Dima's attorney said the case was being launched in part because of the disclosure last year in London's Daily Mirror that President Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair of his desire to bomb Al Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar. The Mirror cited a secret memo leaked from the British government.

In the new book, "The One Percent Doctrine," investigative journalist Ron Suskind writes that that the U.S deliberately bombed the Kabul, Afghanistan offices of Al Jazeera. He writes, "On November 13, 2001, a hectic day when Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance and there were celebrations in the streets of the city, a U.S. missile obliterated Al Jazeera's office. Inside the CIA and White House there was satisfaction that a message had been sent to Al Jazeera."

The "One Percent Doctrine" also examines how the Bush Adminstration's philosophy of separating analysis from action and embracing suspicion as a justification for the use of American power has shaped its policies.

...AMY GOODMAN: Let's start on the issue of Al Jazeera and what happened in Afghanistan.

RON SUSKIND: Well, you know, there are so many things that I found in two years of investigation. This was one of the surprising things. The United States denied this, of course. There's so much in the book they have denied. Now, they can't. It was purposeful. There was great animosity toward Al Jazeera at that point. It was felt inside the administration they were the mouthpiece for bin Laden, and that was a lot of what bin Laden was doing at that juncture. And they wanted to send a message. They asked Al Jazeera to proscribe things it was doing. Al Jazeera said we're a media organization, we don't do that sort of thing. And the headquarters was bombed. It's part of a really secret interchange between the U.S. government and Al Jazeera and the Emir of Qatar, the owner of Al Jazeera, that you see throughout the book, which is quite extraordinary.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk more about this. What evidence do you have? Because this is ongoing. Of course, it didn't just happen in Afghanistan, as we heard. Tareq Ayyoub, the offices in Baghdad were attacked. A reporter was arrested on the way to the Putin-Bush summit in Crawford, an Al Jazeera reporter. And then you have the whole issue of the Daily Mirror, that secret memo, and Qatar's offices. How do you know that Al Jazeera was deliberately targeted in Afghanistan?

RON SUSKIND: The sources for this book are senior officials within the United States government, past and present, such that each one of the disclosures in the book has been sourced with many impeccable sources. Some of this occurs, you know, this is years after the event. Once you pass a certain timeframe, I think folks say, “Well, what do we have to fear about the truth?” Certain people do, and those folks essentially are represented in this book. There's not a doubt about this sort of thing, about the thing we're mentioning, as to the Kabul bombing...

...AMY GOODMAN: Why does the CIA call Cheney “Edgar”?

RON SUSKIND: Well, that's one of the nicknames inside of CIA for the Vice President, Edgar Bergen. I guess you all are old enough to know who that is -- some younger listeners of yours may not be -- the famous ventriloquist and his puppet Charlie McCarthy. Look, there are lots of nicknames. This one is nasty and probably half-true. People inside of CIA and inside of other parts of the government saw early on that the way these two men worked, Cheney and Bush, is that Cheney essentially is the global thinker of the pair. He's created an architecture, a platform of sorts, in which George Bush can be George Bush and still be president. He, inside of this framework, embraces his instinct, his gut, acts as a man of action. But Cheney really is the designer of the architecture and also the global thinker of the pair. That is made very clear in the book through many, many incidents in which you're in the Oval Office, in the room...

...AMY GOODMAN: The report in the last week that the CIA has closed its unit looking for Osama bin Laden. You write in your book about the CIA warning President Bush if he doesn't move troops into Tora Bora, Osama bin Laden's gone. Talk about that.

RON SUSKIND: Right. Another answer people have been waiting for, it's in the book. End of November 2001, in a briefing inside of the White House, the CIA, who is really the point of the spear in many of the initiatives at work -- make no mistake -- they made a lot of mistakes, but they also were carrying the fight. They brief the President. They said there were troops at that point in Afghanistan. 1,200 Marines had landed, and they said, “If you don't move those troops over to the Tora Bora caves, we will lose bin Laden. We are running a terrible risk here.” The Afghan proxies, so-called, are exhausted. They're not really committed to getting bin Laden, as you might think. The President ignored that advice. He seemed to defer to Don Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks. It was an enormous mistake. The President has skirted accountability on that. That can no longer occur.

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