A chance in a hundred
The 'one per cent doctrine' was the measure by which the US government could break the rules to enforce its rules.
Robert Fox
To beat al-Qaida, the vice president Dick Cheney declared on NBC's Meet The Press on September 16 2001, the US government had to "work through, sort of, the dark side". Specifically this worked out as his "one per cent doctrine". If there is a 1% chance that Saddam or al-Qaida have weapons of mass destruction, the terrorists and crypto-commies are out to get you at home or abroad, then you hit them with any means, fair, foul, legal or illegal, at your disposal.
"If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaida build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response," explained Cheney later to the CIA. Using The One Per Cent Doctrine as his title, the Pulitzer prize winner Ron Suskind has written an eye-watering study of the secrecy, duplicity and sheer incompetence of the Bush regime with its "war on terror" enemies at home and abroad, real and imagined, in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is the real life I Claudius of conspiracy in high places of our day.
The "one per cent" idea was there before 9/11 - because Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush had decided to attack Iraq from the moment they got into power in 2001. Suskind shows that it became the "overarching principle" by which Cheney and his pal and erstwhile boss Rumsfeld ran the presidency. It was the measure by which they could break the rules to enforce their rule, by torture and detention without trial, illegal phone taps and spying on the citizenry, deceiving and undermining those that would thwart you from Asia to Alexandria Va, Waziristan to Washington. By "information management", ie just not telling him, they could manage their president, notorious for his excess of testosterone, deficit in attention and powers of dispassionate analysis.
By the summer of 2004, re-election year, Cheney, apparently, had decided that the CIA was against George W's re-election, so the agency and its boss George Tenet, a Bush inner courtier until now, had to be fixed. Condi Rice, the ever-faithful office girl of the clique, fixed Tenet and got him fired, and in the undermining of CIA credibility the name of an agent, Valerie Plame, was leaked to the press.
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http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/robert_fox/2006/09/post_343.html
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