"The One Percent Doctrine"-anybody read it?

[Elok]

"The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11," by Ron Suskind. I could have sworn I saw that title on 'Poly recently, but a search of the past three months turns up negative, so...anyway, this book got a pretty good review in The Washington Post today. It's about the half-comical, half-terrifying incompetence of the Bush administration's attitude towards intelligence-gathering.

The review highlights the case of Abu Zubaydah, who was caught in Pakistan in 2002 under suspicion of being a major player in al-Qaeda. On examination of the suspect after capture, he turned out to be a bona fide lunatic, with Split-Personality Disorder, who was only trusted by AQ to handle minor scheduling details. He kept detailed diaries for each of his three personalities, recording excruciatingly irrelevant details for every day. The folks at the CIA and FBI all agreed that he was irrelevant--but not only did Bush continue to show off AZ as A Major Victory in the War on Terror, the administration actually ordered them to interrogate AZ (hard interrogation, including dogs and the infamous "water-boarding"), and had agents investigate all the dozens of plots he babbled out to get them to stop.

And there's supposed to be plenty more where that came from. This sounds like a good book to me; has anybody here read it, or heard about it from a friend, etc.?

[snoopy369]

What amuses me is that the same people who complain about the FBI not following leads prior to 9/11 complain about them following leads now...

Unless you're an intelligence official, WITH fairly high clearance, you can't really say that one lead was more reliable than another, given all of the subsidiary data that goes into evaluating a particular lead...

[Elok]

Er, this book was based on exhaustive interviews with at least a dozen senior intelligence officials, according to the review. Including a guy named Henry Crumpton who was in charge of the Afghanistan campaign for the CIA, who told Suskind that he explicitly warned Bush that the folks in Tora Bora weren't up to capturing OBL. Also quoted is another CIA official (not named in the review) who said of the hype surrounding the AZ case, "Why the hell did the President have to put us in a box like this?" Another CIA briefer, interviewed anonymously, reports telling GWB about the threat of a terror attack in mid-2001 and getting dismissed with the phrase, "All right. You've covered your ass, now." GWB is also quoted asking Tenet, about AZ, "I said he was important. You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" And so on. The book lists some pretty impressive sources; I'm just asking about the solidity of its journalism and skill of its analysis...