In his book, The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind writes that Vice President Dick Cheney forcefully stated that the war on terror empowered the Bush administration to act without the need for evidence or extensive analysis.
Suskind describes the Cheney doctrine as follows: "Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about 'our analysis,' as Cheney said. It's about 'our response.' & Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to 'evidence,' the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."
Yesterday's announcement by the DIA that Al Qaeda is now at the same strength as it was before 9/11 was a follow-up to Chertoff's "gut feeling" about an imminent terrorist attack the previous day. It is that tired old 1% doctrine that has itself terrorized our country the last 6 years. So the question is: Who are the real terrorists? My response to the Bush Administration terrorist tactics is what I call the 99% doctrine. Coincidentally, this is the reciprocal of the 1% doctrine. And you can take it for granted that any Homeland Security terror alert has a 99% chance of being false.
According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary terrorism is: "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion." The fear of Al Qaeda and terrorism has been highly exaggerated by this Administration to portray an image that is really a myth. That is what I call terrorizing our own people. Somehow they want you to think that Al Qaeda is some sophisticated organization with a centralized network somehow located in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now there's a real stretch. Every terrorist group in the world now has the Al Qaeda franchise. Al Qaeda is now the MacDonalds of the terrorist organizations.
The sad part about all this is that journalists have not taken the time to do any investigation of what Al Qaeda really is other than a name. In the documentary The Power of Nightmares, produced by the BBC and banned in America, the case is made in a very convincing way that Al Qaeda as a sophisticated centralized organization is a myth. What is called Al Qaeda represents a lot of disparate groups that are very primitive. And most of their terrorism is localized having nothing to do with the U.S.
If one looks at 9/11 with any objectivity, the chance of that happening again is highly unlikely. The fact is that either there was major incompetence or it was an inside job. The idea that 4 hijacked airplanes were allowed to perform a kamikaze attack is still hard to accept given our highly sophisticated air defense system. However, with the cock pit door security and the pilots now able to protect themselves, the risk in the U.S. from terrorist of any kind is probably limited to what is called "soft targets." Soft targets include those that have been publicized since 9/11 in Europe and elsewhere. They include railroads, buildings, ports, embassies and the like.
As FDR said in his first inaugural address: "The only thing we have to fear is, fear itself." Today, using my 99% doctrine, the only thing we have to fear is, Bush and Cheney.