Suskind Book Suspect

As we learn more about Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Solution, I think many are going to conclude it doesn't hold up and is basically just another attempt to hurt the Bush administration by sources within the CIA.

Today in the Washington Post, Suskind is telling us that alleged al-Qaeda operations guru Abu Zubaydah was an imbecile, with split personality disorder. He goes on to assert that Bush continued to portray Zubaydah as central to al-Qaeda after knowing the truth.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

... In interviews with intelligence officers, Suskind often finds them baffled by White House statements. "Why the hell did the President have to put us in a box like this?" one top CIA official asked about the overblown public portrait of Abu Zubaydah. But Suskind sees a deliberate management choice: Bush ensnared his director of central intelligence at the time, George J. Tenet, and many others in a new kind of war in which action and evidence were consciously divorced.

But Suskind has a problem, as it looks like so-called sources at the CIA are trying to have it both ways. Similar sources attempted to use Zubaydah's statements to prove there was no link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

The CIA provided four reports detailing the debriefings of Abu Zubaydah, a captured senior coordinator for al-Qaida responsible for training and recruiting. Abu Zubaydah said that he was not aware of a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida. He also said, however, that any relationship would be highly compartmented and went on to name al-Qaida members who he thought had good contacts with the Iraqis. For instance, Abu Zubaydah indicated that he had heard that an important al-Qaida associate, Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, and others had good relationships with Iraqi intelligence. [Redacted sentence(s)] During the debriefings, Abu Zubaydah offered his opinion that it would be extremely unlikely for bin Ladin to have agreed to ally with Iraq, due to his desire to keep the organization on track with its mission and maintain its operational independence. In Iraqi Support for Terrorism, Abu Zubaydah's information is reflected as:

[Redacted] Abu Zubaydah opined that it would have been "extremely unlikely" for bin Laden to have agreed to "ally" with Iraq, but he acknowledged it was possible there were al-Qaida-Iraq communications or emissaries to which he was not privy. [emphasis added]

Along with that and much more, Zubaydah was also convicted in absentia by Jordan and sentenced to death for planning terrorist attacks. So, which Zubaydah is it yet another round of unnamed CIA sources want us to believe?

In the late 1990s, Zubaydah played a lead role in one of the 2000 millennium attack plots, and a possible tangential role in a second. There were plans to bomb a fully booked Radisson hotel in Amman, Jordan, and three other sites. This targeted tourists from the United States and Israel. But on November 30, 1999, Jordanian intelligence intercepted a call between Zubaydah and Khadr Abu Hoshar, a Palestinian militant, and determined that an attack was imminent. Jordanian police arrested 22 conspirators and foiled the attack. Zubaydah was sentenced to death in absentia by a Jordanian court for his role.

Suskind and others may have been able to get away with a book like this before the new media. I predict there's going to be enough information which didn't originate with the Bush administration to make Suskind's book look more like swiss cheese, than red meat for the CIA and the Left, both so obviously intent on hurting the Bush administration.