Things I learned

from Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine. Your learning experience may differ.

• There are some 100 "unaccounted for" "suitcase nuclear weapons" (p. 6)
• CIA warned about al Quaeda in its very first briefing to President GWB (22)
• DOD controls some 80 percent of the total US intelligence budget (31)
• First Data has been monitoring credit card transactions, without warrant, since 2001 (34, 208-9)
• Rumsfeld: "Every CIA success is a DoD failure" (77)
• How aggressively the Saudis obstructed US efforts to investigate the fifteen Saudi nationals who were among the nineteen 9/11 highjackers (109)
• Moussaoui was not meant to be the "twentieth highjacker" -- al Quaeda pulled him from the op "because he was deemed unreliable" (133)
• Perhaps two-thirds of all Islamic-terrorist funding comes from Saudi Arabia (143)
• Suskind claims that it was "immediately clear to U.S. policy makers" that bin Laden's target was only indirectly the US -- that his ultimate goal was to force the US to withdraw from the Mid East, thereby unsettling regimes and creating room for him and his followers to move in and assume greater power (147)
• An e-book anonymously written by al Quaeda's Yusef al-Ayeri "said that an American invasion of Iraq would be the best possible outcome for al Quaeda," because it would create a "radicalizing quagmire" (235)

And Suskind offers the most satisfying, credible explanation I've yet heard about why the US invaded Iraq in the first place:

The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those who attended the NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period [spring/summer 2002], was to make an example of Hussein, to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States.

In Oval Office meetings, the President would often call Iraq a 'game changer' (123)

And, of course, there's much that's not news, but is confirmed, such as infighting between CIA and FBI, the control VP Cheney has over the US foreign policy decision-making apparatus, the fait accomplis that was the invasion of Iraq, that CIA never trusted Chalbi, the targeting and bombing of Al Jazeera's Kabul office by the US, the fact that Khaddafi's turnabout had nothing to do with the US "War on Terror", the pathological privileging of politics over policy in the White House, and the manner in which belief precedes (and often creates) evidence.

It inevitably brings to mind something from another work by Suskind (NYT, 10/17/2004):

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush [I've always assumed this was Rove; it certainly sounds like him -- sp]. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'