Scary Story

Thanks to Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly for pointing us to The Washington Post's review of Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine, which seems to be the newest must-read book. Suskind's title comes from Deadeye Dick Cheney's comment that if there were even a one-percent chance of terrorists getting hold of a nuclear weapon, the United States would have to treat that likelihood as if it were a certainty--a dictum that makes intelligence gathering and analysis virtually irrelevant to basic national policy, as well as providing a convenient justification for the kind of irresponsible adventurism to which the Bush administration will be forever connected.

One of the tales told in the apparently well-researched book (Suskind is a former Pulitzer Prize winner) concerns the capture of one Abu Zubaydah, whom no less an authority than George W. Bush described as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." Except that he was nothing of the sort. To the extent that Zubaydah had any role in al Qaeda, he was a low-level logistics expediter. He was also certifiably crazy, as the review relates in some detail.

Was the capture of Zubaydah just another one of the numbing series of wildly overblown "successes" proclaimed by Bush and his surrogates? Not quite. In fact, it became a prime example of how sick the administration is. As the review of Suskind's book relates:

"Bush 'was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,' Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, 'Do some of these harsh methods really work?' Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, 'thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.' And so, Suskind writes, 'the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.'

Perhaps because I have been reading Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy, I see in this anecdote a parallel to the macabre "experiments" of Dr. Joseph Mengele and his cohorts, in which sadistic curiosity would lead to outrages in the name of some twisted science. If Suskind is accurate--and as far as I know the White House has not denied his account--Bush's interest in the effect of brutality led to Zubaydah's torture as that scrap of humanity was turned into a human guinea pig. (That would be a war-crime, no?) Then, to make matters worse--if that's possible--the administration got caught up in its own sick game and became imprisoned in the fantasy world that its excesses had helped create.

Are you scared yet, or merely sickened?