The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind

Author:Ron Suskind
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

On October 5, Tenet sat at his desk, a rare occurrence, reading a draft of the President’s upcoming speech slated for two days hence in Cincinnati, and carrying the claim that Saddam Hussein’s “regime has been caught attempting to purchase” uranium in Niger.

The CIA immediately fired off a memo to Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and presidential speechwriter Mike Gerson that the statement was wrong. Another letter the next day—this one also addressed to Rice—repeated that the evidence on Niger was weak and that any such purchase, in any event, would not have been particularly significant since Saddam already had a large yellowcake supply that he could not process into anything usable.

That wasn’t quite enough to reassure Tenet that the line would be excised. He knew the underlying philosophy at work: that evidence, loosely defined, was summoned at the convenience of action. In this case, to convince the world community what it needed to hear. He called Hadley late on October 6, the day before the speech. The question, Tenet understood, was not whether the Niger charge was true or false, it was whether the President’s claim, springing, as it did, from classified materials, could be proven wrong.

Hadley resisted. This was a key claim in their case for war. Tenet knew how to pose the response, to put it in political terms: “Steve,” he said, “you really don’t want the President to be the fact-witness on this. Trust me.”

The line went. And that was just one battle.

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