The Scribe

6/20/06: NPR: Fresh Air: Ron Suskind, "The One Percent Doctrine."

6/20/06: NPR: Fresh Air: Ron Suskind, "The One Percent Doctrine."

Interviewer:  Terry Gross
Guest:  Ron Suskind

Terry Gross:  The new book, "The One Percent Doctrine," investigates how the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies were created and reveals some of the secret dealings as well as the successes and missed opportunities in the war on terror.  My guest is the author, Ron Suskind.  His previous book, "The Price of Power," was about former Bush administration Treasure Secretary Paul O'Neill.  It revealed that the Bush administration started to talk about overthrowing Saddam Hussein in January 2001 at its first post-Inauguration National Security Council meeting.  Suskind's new book is based on interviews with many current and former officials with the CIA, FBI, the White House, and the NSC, and the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury.  One chapter that has made headlines is about a terrorist cell in America that was allegedly planning a gas attack on the New York City subway.  Suskind says the attack was called off by a leader of Al Qaeda. 

Ron Suskind: What happens here is that, essentially, in early 2003, several things happened quickly in a row.  One is that, by virtue of some arrests we made in Bahrein, we find that Al Qaeda has developed -- invented, really -- a device called the "mubtakkar."  The key is hydrogen cyanide -- that's the deadly gas which has a long history.  The Nazis used it -- Zycon B -- I suppose in the gas chambers.  And Al Qaeda and other terrorist cells around the world have been trying for years to figure out a way to deliver it.  What they came up with was this device called the mubtakkar which is an elegant portable delivery system.  It's sort of like two Mason jars together in a little paint can -- I think that's the best way to put it -- and between the two jars, one of which has sodium chloride and the other some hydrogen substance like hydrochloric acid or whatnot, and then in between a triggering catalytic element, a seal that can be broken with a cellphone, just like the other bombs.  It mixes these two liquids quickly and sends out a fairly potent cloud of the deadly gas.  This mubtakkar comes to our attention.  It causes something just short of panic inside the CIA.  A model is built and brought to the President and he is, you know, startled!  That's the first step.  The second step is that we don't know what they may or may not do here.  And we tap an inside source, inside Al Qaeda management who's linked to them.  Up to now, Terry, no one has felt publicly that we've had a human intelligence source, connected  [.] to the Al Qaeda leadership.  We do, in fact..

Gross:.... We do or we did?  The impression I got from your book is that we no longer have him...

Suskind:  ... Yeah, we no longer have -- we sort of decommissioned in early 2005, 2004, because we were afraid he might get revealed by his assistance for us.  But at this point we turned to "Ali."  He had done things for the US government for a few months.  Everything he'd said had been reliable, had tracked.  So we go to him and we say, What do you know about this this mubtkkar idea?  And he says, Well, actually, quite a bit...  And he tells us a startling thing.  He said that in fact there is a Saudi leader of Al Qaeda who recently met with Zawahiri about an operational WMD cell in the US that in the fall of 2002 through early 2003 cased the NY City subway systems with the intention of using a mubtakkar device, maybe several devices, and that four to five days away from zero hour Zawahiri called them off.  The key is, not called them back, but called them off.  This information that gets passed to the CIA and then of course to the Oval Office and the situation room -- it's just a startling moment.  It gives us our first real clue into the key questions of what Al Qaeda is really thinking. 

Gross:  What are some of the possible ways of interpreting why Zawahiri, the number two in Al Qaeda, called of this planned attack against the NY subways?

Suskind:  That, of course, becomes the fierce debate inside the US government at the very top.  Obviously the President, the Vice President, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice -- everybody.  There are a variety of positions at the start.  One is that maybe he called it off beause we're putting effective pressure on the Al Qaeda structure at this point.  Some people felt that. That, though, was overwhelmed by another counter argument:  the question, Is that because this, this thing -- mubtakkars in NY subways could cause potentially thousands of deaths but that wouldn't be enough of a "second wave."  That's the key term.  What is the "second wave" strategy?  Meaning that that would not be sufficient to what Al Qaeda is actually planning and wanting for an attack after 9/11, a second wave attack.  The view now is that a) the passage of time without a followup attack after 9/11 should not give anyone confidence that some sort of victory has been won.  In some ways, Al Qaeda thinks long term, in decades or longer.  We think in news cycles.  We have a country with attentional issues, let's just say!  In some ways, it's clear, they're counting on that.  They're counting on us feeling self-satisfied and successful, maybe dropping our guard, maybe just not seeing the things coming.  Because the key in terms of what the most informed people in the US government feel is that the second wave -- the next attack -- will be bigger than 9/11, and that's the idea, so that it creates an upward arc of terror and anticipation between the second and whatever follows that.  Fear and terror without the kind of handle of real knowledge are of course what Al Qaeda is all about.

Gross:  In your book, you say that the US officials' assessment is that the homeland is indefensible and that Al Qaeda is going to attack at a time of its own choosing. What leads you to that conclusion?  What were you hearing about that?

Suskind:  Well, I found virtually no one -- and I talked to just about everyone under the sun with direct knowledge of the US position and strategy in the war on terror -- virtually nobody believes that in fact the porous borders of the US are truly defendable against an ardent and targetted attack by Al Qaeda.  A variety of things came up in the research for the book that were, frankly, bracing for me. I live in Washington, I've got my wife, my kids.  I said at one point, Jeez, I know almost nothing about the war on terror really.  I know what the official-speak is, I know what I'm hearing, but there must be more. And god knows there's so much more!  The fact is, Terry, the idea that we can protect America is probably as much posture as it is reality, and it's a posture that Al Qaeda doesn't buy!  They're probably right to not buy it!  That's what the research shows...

Gross:  Is this a good thing, your telling Americans that our government thinks our borders are indefensible?

Suskind:  You know, the guiding principle of this book is that the American people should know now, five years almost since 9/11, what Al Qaeda certainly knows and in many cases has already responded to in terms of their strategic posture.  The dilemma of this war on terror is that it's a war fought in secret.  That's a conflict.  That creates a new kind of tension for us here in this country, a democracy.  A guiding principle of this project from the very start is that this book will contain disclosures, things, information that Al Qaeda already knows and in many cases has already responded to in its strategies.  At some point...  there are people in the government, who cooperated at various levels who I think believe this as well.  They do believe it.  They were asked many, many times, "Is this something that will somehow be dropping a card in our hand, in terms of this global game of cat and mouse, or kill or be killed, and in every single case they said, "No, it's not." 

Gross:  Let's get to "The One Percent Doctrine," which is the title of your book.  Why don't you explain... I mean, was it officially called a "doctrine" before you described it as a doctrine -- and what is it?

Suskind:  Well, some people in the government called in a rule.  One percent rule.  A few used the word doctrine.  It's really the guiding principle, again not disclosed at this point, that's the centerpiece of the US playbook in this war on terror.  And the genesis of it, interestingly, is shown as though you're walking in the shoes of the participants in the book and I think that's important -- to show how they arrive at this idea.  It's from a meeting in November 2001 where the Vice President is being briefed about the most dire threat at that point which is the disclosures that Pakistani nuclear scientists had met with bin Laden and Zawahiri and apparently offered them clues as to how to build nuclear weapons.  Cheney's being briefed on this in the Situation Room.  There are folks from the NSC and the CIA there as well.  As it starts, he sort of stops the proceedings and he says, "You know, we need to think in a different way about these low-probability, high-impact events."  Then he stops and the briefing continues.  It's a harrowing briefing.  It's just two months after 9/11 when we're worried about a second wave attack.  This was really the shared nightmare.  And then he stops it.  And he sayd, "Look.  If there is a one percent chance that Al Qaeda can get its hands on WMD, we need to treat it as a certainty.  It's not about our analysis or the preponderance of evidence.  It's about our response."  That's the key thing in the second part.  It's not about our analysis, it's about our response. We are never going to be able to abide by the evidentiary rules of analysis, or search and find, in this kind of effort.  It's about action.  Action even if we have just a one percent suspicion. 

Gross: What are some of the potential problems that you see with that policy?

Suskind:  Well, the potential problem is that everything merits a to-be-sure response by the awesome powers of the US government. And when those responses may not be justified -- like the sweeping up of lots of Arab names, and the capturing and rendition of people who may have very little inclination or evidence that is pertinent to us... Certainly many of the excesses that we've seen in terms of torture -- all of those fall into this category.  As well, frankly, much of the debate as to Iraq and WMD.  On the outside, in public, we were arguing about evidence. Is there evidence?  Is there not evidence?  Internally, though, many of the folks said, "You know, evidence is beside the point.  We've already given up our belief that evidence is going to matter deep down.

Gross:  Did people in the FBI or CIA complain to you about this one percent doctrine?  Did they complain to you that it made it difficult to focus on the most serious of plots?

Suskind:  Of course!  That is part of the difficulty.  What if it's ten one percent threats?  What if it's a hundred?  What if it's a thousand?  What does that mean for the capacities or resources of the US government, what does it mean in terms of the people who might be bruised or worse with us essentially saying "better safe than sorry.. you now are under arrest..."  or "your phone line is tapped" or all manner of things... Evidence is at the key of so much of what we call age of reason and enlightenment ideals that essentially are the foundation of a democracy and certainly this country.  This is loosing us from those moorings. 

Gross:  If people in the Bush administration and in our intelligence agencies believe, as you report they believe, that another attack is inevitable, then what's wrong with a one percent doctrine in which a one percent threshhold of a plot is enough to try to investigate it?

Suskind:  There is nothing inherently wrong or right about the one percent doctrine.  What people are going to do is argue about it.  On one side you have the issues of, essentially, a separation and divorcing of action from analysis of evidence.  We know the perils of that.  On the other hand, those who will say "yes," and do say, "yes, Dick Cheney go forward" are going to say "Is this really the best we can do in this era to create a strategy for war that's probably going to go on right up to the lives of our grandkids?"  That's a debate and it's clearly one that's unfurling and will unfurl because of the book over time... 

Gross:  One of the things under investigation now is how telephone companies have cooperated with the National Security Agency and have handed over records that allow the NSA to see who's calling who.  You found that there's a corporation called the First Data Corporation that actually offered to help in the war on terror in any way it could.  You say they're one of the world's largest processors of credit card transactions and they own Western Union. So what have they done in their attempt to cooperate with the Bush administration on the war on terror?

Suskind:  One of the great controversies is the union between the US government and these large companies.  It's very controversial.  It does create a crossing of key lines in American life.  These companies are often brand names around the world as well as in America. We know about the telecom companies.  Here is the first instance where we basically see the other half.  This giant global net, this matrix that they built after 9/11 sort of has a communications head and a financial body.  It's this giant terrorist-catching machine.  On the financial side the lead player was First Data which is this credit card processing giant, owns Western Union.  They approached the government a few days after 9/11.  The FBI managed that relationship.  Many of the sweeps, where thousands of Muslim men were swept up, interrogated around the country in the year or two after 9/11, were driven under the surface by the financial information -- which does tell you an awful lot.  Not that the NSA stuff doesn't get it started. But the financial information tells you pretty much everything you want to know.  First Data was really running that show.  The FBI and First Data set up a kind of out-location near a First Data processing center so they could work together and essentially tap into the First Data giant mainframes.  Then it gets even more interesting.  Western Union, which is early on identified as maybe the gem inside of First Data.  They have thousands of offices around the world.  They're run by folks who are largely independent. Western Union was used by the 9/11 highjackers to move money.  Western Union takes a step in to another whole realm.  What they're doing is, as they're being passed from FBI to CIA, they set up a kind of wire-transfer trap whereby a bit of information would be offered to Western Union and, through a process where it's papered -- meaning they go through a Justice Department office -- and Western Union knows someone is about to send a wire transfer, the key is who picks it up.  And they also then can trace who's picking it up and then give it in real time to folks in the intelligence community.  In the case in the book, they essentially offer this information to Shinbet, the Israeli bureau, and they change the balance of power on the West Bank. And the big question is, should US companies be doing this? US companies with huge communities of customers who frankly are unwitting.  They don't know.  Is it better they not know? Is it better that the brand names of America, Fortune 100 and 500 companies, are in these sorts of secret arrangements with the US government?  And ultimately governments around the world?

Gross:  What kind of controversies do you expect to be involved in now?  And do you think terrorists are wondering what you know? Do you think people in the Administration are wondering what you know?  What kind of whirlwind are you expecting to be caught up in now?

Suskind:  It's hard to gauge what's going to happen or what will follow.  The Administration has known about the book pretty much from the start.  There are people in the Administration who were helpful, frankly.  Obviously many who were not in the Administration.  I can firmly state, if anyone from the jihadist community is listening, that everything I know is in the book!  There is nothing pertinent held back.  I think ultimately people recognize that. It's a very tricky time to be a journalist and to be involved in this kind of reporting, in this area.  I think, though, that's part of what we're facing in terms of these struggles.  How do you do what you need to do in a democracy so that there is informed consent, so people are empowered by knowledge rather than simply fear that's rooted in ignorance: "My god, I know what's out there, but I can't know too much..."  I think people are strengthened by it.  I think America has shown that in the past, and will have to show it in new ways in the future. 

6/06: Excerpts: CSpan interview with Chalmers Johnson

What follows is a series of excerpts from an hourlong interview with Chalmers Johnson by Brian Lamb of CSpan. It was first posted at Prairie Weather under the title, "A Good Old-Fashioned Wacko."

"The guy's a wacko!"

BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Chalmers Johnson, when you wrote the last line of ”The Sorrows of Empire,” you said this: ”Feeling such a reform, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us.” I get a sense you might even be writing your next book name,  "Nemesis.”
CHALMERS JOHNSON, AUTHOR: The third book is done and it’s called, ”Nemesis.” The subtitle is, ”The Last Days of the American Republic.” It’s to say that I don’t see the way out any longer. ...The separation of powers has clearly broken down; the President has achieved virtually anything he might’ve wanted to do in that area. I don’t think the political system will save us. The military could conceivably take over; they’ve threatened this but I don’t think so for reasons that I think are pretty obvious -- above all, the fact that ...only enlisted men have been convicted in the prison torture scandals, none of the officers. The result is that within the armed forces today, enlisted men are extremely sensitive to illegal orders, saying, you’re going to take the rap for it, not us. There’s no more illegal order than to take over Congress, so the officers I just don’t think believe innocent men would follow their orders today!  So my wife keeps saying to me, come up with something optimistic and I come up with bankruptcy. That looks like it might be the thing that will bring the republic to an end.
LAMB: You know that there are people watching right now that say that guy’s a wacko. I mean that’s an extreme of it but it’s like the conspiracy theorists and all that …
JOHNSON: ... If you and I were having this conversation in say, 1985 and I said to you, four years from now the Soviet Union will disappear, you’d have thought that’s not really a reliable analyst! Well, it’s gone. It’s disappeared. Its – Russia today is a much smaller place than the Soviet Union was. Empires go very, very rapidly and we’re getting extremely overextended; really very serious thin ice. This is not terribly novel with me, right now.  A lot of people know this, understand it, and are worried about the trend of events.

"Duke" Cunningham, corruption, and what it means

JOHNSON [who lives in Cunningham's district]: Well, this is the crookedest congressman we’ve ever had who is now in prison for over eight years for bribery. He was a lot dumber than we thought he was. I mean you’d have thought that he could’ve become a lobbyist and stayed out of prison.  I wrote a piece in the LA Times well before this happened arguing that my congressman was bought and paid for by the military industrial complex.  It was easy to simply see what he reported to the Federal Election Commission and where his money came from and it wasn’t within the 50th District, it was Lockheed-Martin and above all, MZM Corporation, the one that where the guy he was paying him off in order to get defense contracts. It’s extremely serious when the institution that the authors of the Constitution presumed to be the heart of our government, the place where initiatives came from, is today; you just want to ask what’s happened to Congress? Where has it gone? One could talk endlessly about the enthusiasm of Bush and Cheney for greater powers in the imperial presidency but what we don’t understand is how did Congress just disappear? How did it cease to function any more at all?  It has the smell of the Roman Senate, as we come up on the last days.

Militarism and the military industrial complex

LAMB: Why does this happen in your opinion? What’s the start of all this?
JOHNSON: Militarism, primarily. That is to say – well, its imperialism [whose] inescapable accompaniment is militarism.  This begins to invoke the earliest warnings we have about the threats to republican government. After all, George Washington’s farewell address -- still read in Congress each session -- warns [that] the greatest threat to liberty is standing armies and it’s the particular threat to republican liberty. He meant by this that it would destroy the separation of powers on which the structure was set up. It would move power toward the President and move it away from Congress and the courts. That seems to me today obvious. Then, of course, the equally famous warning, by Dwight Eisenhower as he left office in 1961, where he invented the phrase military industrial complex and it’s worth reading because it’s so strident. This was not a diplomatic remark at all by an outgoing President.  He warns in the harshest possible terms of what’s likely to befall us from spending as much as we do on military affairs ...I think this is culmination. It’s the same sort of thing that happened to the Roman Republic, which one mentions only because the Roman republic was so much a model for Madison and the other authors of the Constitution... This was the first functioning democratic republic that we know of. We used and took many ideas from them.  What happened to them as they rather thoughtlessly acquired themselves an empire which then required these huge standing armies instead of the citizen armies that had prevailed in the early days of the republic and it overwhelmed their government -- leading them finally to populist military figures of which, of course, Julius Caesar is the model.  It led to his assassination in the Senate.  But then you get on to more ruthless figures -- young Octavian who decides to make himself a god, Augustus Caesar.

Military service

JOHNSON:  ...I was a student at the University of California then, just finishing up.  I was always in the Navy. My father had been in the Navy, my cousin had been in the Navy. ...This is back 1951....

Berkeley and the war in Vietnam

JOHNSON: Twenty-six years [at Berkeley], teaching Chinese and Japanese politics.
LAMB: But you were, at some point, supportive of the Vietnam War.
JOHNSON: That’s true and I’ve talked about this in the various books. I was wrong on Vietnam. I – in retrospect, as I’ve said I knew too much about communism, which is what I was specialist in, I was Chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies at this time but I wasn’t a specialist on people like a George Bundy or Robert McNamara.... people who ran the Vietnam War... I was also irritated at the time -- no doubt about it -- by the student demonstrations. They struck me as pampered little brats who didn’t really know what they were doing. I was very proud of the University of California. I thought they were damaging the university at the time and so, I guess there was another issue that when we talk about the Vietnam War, one seems to think that this was the only issue out there. It was a period of enormous change in America and at this time, I was very much caught up with racial integration in America. I had many students in the Black Panther Party who were students at my university. That being the case, Lyndon Johnson became a kind of hero because of the Great Society, the Civil Rights Act, things of this sort and we tended not to pay as much attention to what he was doing in Vietnam, as I should have and was wrong.
LAMB: When did you change your mind on Vietnam?
JOHNSON: Oh, after I changed my mind generally.  That came with something truly unusual, namely, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I regarded the Soviet Union as a menace. I still do. ...I was specialist in the subject.  I traveled extensively in the Soviet Union in 1978 at the height of [that era?] and things of this sort but when the whole raison d’être of the Cold War ended -- that is they’d collapsed, they’d imploded, they disappeared -- I was truly shocked by the American government’s reaction. Instantaneously, we set out to find a replacement enemy -- well, China, drugs, terrorism, whatever to keep the military industrial complex working, to maintain the huge – I mean we’re talking about 737 debts on the Pentagon’s account, military bases located around the world at the present time. I was shocked by this. It led me, as a professor of international relations, to begin to ask, was the Cold War just a cover or something deeper for an American imperial project, probably, to replace the British Empire that went back to World War II and I strongly suspect that is the case. Particularly in East Asia where I worked, it looked very much like we were on the wrong side of issues of national liberation in China, in Vietnam and Southeast Asia -- onething after another. I guess, then the other thing that led me really to shift my views... People have said over the years, well you’re being inconsistent. My answer on that is a famous crack by John Maynard Keynes, when he was accused of being inconsistent. He said, "Well, when I get new information I change my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?"  The new information I got was the remarkable American reaction to the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was no peace dividend. There was no moving back into the United States. Okinawa I’ve spent most of my life studying Japan, working with issues concerned with Japan and Northeast Asia but I’d never been at Okinawa until 1996.  The governor there, a retired professor..., had invited me to come down after a very serious incident in 1995 when two Marines and sailor abducted, beat and raped a 12-year-old girl. It set off the worst demonstrations against the United States since the security treaty had been signed. I had never been to Okinawa and like many others.  It’s a Japanese version of Puerto Rico. It’s a territory that is discriminated against. It was acquired in the late 19th Century by the Japanese Empire. It has 38 American military bases on an island smaller than Kauai, in the Hawaiian Islands, living cheek by jowl with 1,300,000 Okinawans. I took up Mr. Ota’s (ph) offer, visited Okinawa and was simply appalled by what I saw. The signs of the Raj.  We’d been there since the battle of Okinawa in 1945. I mean these troops reminded me of the Soviet troops that were in East Germany and didn’t want to leave. They were living better in East Germany than they would back in Russia after the wall came down. Well, our people were living better than they would in Oceanside, California next door to Camp Pendleton. That led me to start looking at bases....

Do you trust the Pentagon?

LAMB: You said 737 military bases around the world.
JOHNSON: That’s the Pentagon’s count.
LAMB: Do you trust that?
JOHNSON: No.
LAMB: Why?
JOHNSON: Well, I just know it isn’t true. I mean they don’t – there’s a lot of bases they don’t include for various political reasons. They don’t include ...the air base in Qatar. Well that was the headquarters for our assault on Iraq but they don’t do so, in order to not embarrass the Emir of Qatar. They don’t include any of the espionage bases. We have a wonderful old arrangement with Britain, so that most of our bases in Britain, of which there are quite a few, are disguised as Royal Air Force bases. ...I doubt that anybody knows the really full count. I doubt if Mr. Rumsfeld does but it’d probably go up over 1,000.

Okay, but if we can afford it, why not have a huge defense budget?

JOHNSON: ...I think we need to spend the money in other ways. The largest element in our budget of discretionary spending goes for national security. We are spending today more on national defense, so-called really on war, than all the other nations on earth combined. That’s an astonishing figure. Its also amazing to see that perhaps, 20,000 insurgents in Iraq have fought to a standstill 130,000 of the most-highly trained, heavily equipped troops on earth and that’s what has happened and that’s why they’re withdrawing often in their secure bases or very few of them ever leave that base. The thing is a fake. Moreover, what bothers me is the degree to which militarism has penetrated into our society. Its perfectly logical for the Secretary of Defense to want to close bases domestically that we no longer need but its amazing every time he does that to see every community with a closed base erupt and demand that their senator keep our base open; keep those jobs there. ...It’s something we don’t want to admit in this country, how dependent we are increasingly on the military industrial complex. We don’t actually manufacture that much in this country any more but without question, we manufacture more weapons than anybody else on earth and we sell them like crazy to anybody who’ll buy them. We particularly like a military situation where we can sell weapons to both sides.

But doesn't that make you feel more secure, better protected?

JOHNSON: But they’re not protecting me -- that’s the point. In fact the country is in rather serious trouble because of our skewed priorities. I mean after all, we have to create a Department of Homeland Security because the so-called Department of Defense, which in an earlier time in this country, we called the War Department. The Department of Defense has nothing to do with defense. It has to do with buying weapons that are worthless, which we do a lot of. Buying things that were appropriate to the Cold War, even though it’s now 15 years old and even then, we knew throughout the 1980’s that there was never going to be a war with the Soviet Union or we were kidding ourselves with – I mean this is not the first time we’ve had bad intelligence at work. ...Slowly over time, as Eisenhower warned us, we have become oriented toward, dependent upon, accepting of the rationale of why we have monstrous standing armies and why we’ve also given up on the idea of citizen armies. I’m not sure how I stand on the draft. I don’t particularly like it but at the same time, one of the things I do like about it, is that it’s a real check on militarism.

9/11

JOHNSON: ... I believe we’ve handled it miserably. I believe we’d have been much better off if we had treated it as the way we would approach organized crime. That is, attacks on innocent civilians, building cases that would stand up in court; focusing on who did it, since we knew who did it and going after them instead of this, again, war of choice. So many of our wars are wars of choice in which arguably the world couldn’t possibly have been worse off if George Bush and Dick Cheney had never heard of Iraq.

"Blow Back"

JOHNSON:  "Blow Back" is a specific CIA term. It was first used in the after action report on our first overthrow of a democratic reelected government, namely the government of Iran in 1953, in which the report was not declassified before the year 2000, in which the word – phrase occurs in there, we’re going to get some blow back from this. Now, blow back doesn’t just mean retaliation. It means retaliation for things that we did abroad for which – that were kept entirely secret from the American public, so that when the retaliation comes they have no ability to put into context to see cause and effect. That’s why we ended up with the President actually getting away with a truly absurd question to congress, why do they hate us? You might well have wanted to ask, who is it on earth that doesn’t hate us for good reason. I mean often in many cases very good reason. These things were kept secret from the American public; they’re not kept secret from the people on the receiving end that – when we carry out one of these so-called clandestine operations. ... I was criticized almost at once for suggesting that the United States was in some way responsible; some way had – was involved in what had happened on September 11th, 2001. Of course, I had argued precisely that. That this was blow back from the largest single clandestine operation we ever carried out, namely, the recruiting army and sending into battle of the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, against the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union collapsed George Bush rather famously just walked away from Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was an asset and an ally of ours in those days. We worked closely with him. We armed him. We certainly knew where his base was because we had built it for him. That when Bill Clinton decided to bomb it with cruise missiles, things of this sort. They felt betrayed; let down. It was also foolish on our part that we never once asked who were these people we were supporting. They were anti-Soviet but William Casey, Reagan’s CIA Director, who is a deeply devout and a passionately devout Catholic, who seemed to believe that the greatest single force against Communism would be religion and he welcomed Islamic allies, never once asking what about Islam? What kind of Islam, whom they might be, what they – at any rate – Osama bin Laden and company felt betrayed by the Americans and they got even. They let us know what they were doing. They did it quite regularly. They already destroyed two embassies in East Africa. They’d bombed the USS Cole. Similar bombings had already occurred at the World Trade Center. To be surprised at what happened on 9/11 seemed to me is incompetent on the part of political leaders.

"Democratizing" the Middle East and Central Asia

JOHNSON:   With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, we moved vigorously into this area. It wasn’t certainly just George Bush and the Republicans. It was very much a Democratic thing, too. A lot of money involved. We had already had troop exchanges. We now had bases in Uzbekistan and Kurdistan. The Vice President has just visited Kazakhstan to try and arrange more oil after insulting the Russians in a speech in Vilnius. ...This territory -- Southern Eurasia -- was opened up by the collapse of the Soviet Union to enormous geopolitical pressures. I don’t think we’ve done it particularly well. I think we’ve been remarkably cynical. I can’t imagine how these people, with a straight face, talk about the promotion of democracy in places still ruled by old Soviet apparatchiks who are very regularly welcomed to the Oval Office by our President and described in glowing terms, whereas, the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan quit because of the tortures being carried out by the government and explained them to the world. ...We’ve had a long history of this, after all, going back into the first World War when Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, his Secretary of State, were declaring that we were the exemplar for good government on earth that all moral issues rested in the American leadership. I think as a historical generalization you could not be wrong today to say its unmitigated tragedy that the American President believes such nonsense. Had he not, we might have avoided intervening in a war between the British and German Empires.

The four sorrows of empire:  endless war, loss of liberty, habitual official lying, and financial ruin.

JOHNSON:   By the loss of liberty I mean that the structure of government bequeathed to us by the founders, is today, in tatters. If you believe the government in Washington D.C. bears any resemblance to the government outlined in the Constitution of 1787, the burden of proof is on you. There’s just way – I mean I cannot – for example, its just inconceivable to the people who created our republican, little r, form of government that you would – that the President would have at his disposal, a private army and that’s the CIA -- totally secret. No way you can do oversight on it. No way you can – that he can be held accountable for it. That 40 percent of the defense budget is black, it’s not reported. It’s in contrary to Article One of the Constitution that says, you will be told how your tax money is spent. You will never be told and that’s not something George Bush did. It started with the Manhattan Project in World War II to build atomic bombs. These things are cumulative. There’s now so many of it, so built up over such a long period of time that I believe there is a real threat to the continuation of the republican form of government. That is what provides our democracy; what provides our civil liberties and by this we mean divided government. The impossibility of somebody becoming a dictator; being checks and balances, a balance of power; imperial presidency is a good term for it today and it’s out of control.

Does any of this matter if "we're toast"?

JOHNSON:  If I’m wrong you’re going to forgive me because you’re going to be so pleased I was wrong!  But the evidence adds up. That is, all you can do is to try in dealing with contemporary history, to use your experience, the facts that you can get, put them together in a plausible and coherent way. It looks like the United States continues to head toward a terrible cul-de-sac that as it stands right now, given the largest bankruptcy, the largest trade and current account and fiscal deficits virtually in economic history. In my latest book I call it a Blanche DuBois economy. We are increasingly dependent on the kindness of strangers.   As you remember the strangers became less and less kind to Blanche in Tennessee Williams’ play, too!  We’re dependent on the kindness of the Minister of Finance of the Peoples Republic of China and of Japan. Now, as many smart economists have said, it’s an odd business for the world’s largest debtor nation to go around insulting its banker all the time. That’s what we do to the Chinese all the time and all he’s got to do is to say one day, "I think we’ve got too much money in dollars. The Euro is a much stronger currency. The Yen is a stronger currency..."  The truth of the matter is, he’s obviously thought of that and they’re doing it privately and quietly anyway, in order to not disturb the markets.

The new book, "Nemesis."

JOHNSON:  I say that Nemesis is already here, she’s just waiting her turn. She’s watching. She’s an extremely interesting figure in Greek mythology. Edith Hamilton has a wonderful treatment of it in her famous work on mythology that – and I believe that probably it is irreversible. That is, I can’t imagine a President who could – any President, who could bring the military industrial complex, the secret intelligence agencies and the Pentagon under control. I think they are – they have lives of their own today.

Personal politics

LAMB: Define your own politics.
JOHNSON: Well that’s hard to say. I guess, I voted twice for Ronald Reagan and I – but today I vote Democratic.
LAMB: No matter what?
JOHNSON: Oh, certainly matter what...!
LAMB: And then after Ronald Reagan who’d you vote for?
JOHNSON: I did vote for Dukakis, simply because the first George Bush got on my nerves. I thought he was a walking watercress sandwich, too Yalie for my taste and I just didn’t care for him. It was more of a personality thing than anything else. He didn’t – he did know a great deal more than his son about the world; ex-Director of Central Intelligence, Scowcroft was...not the world’s greatest intellect but you have to say he’d never let things get out of control the way Condoleezza Rice did and he didn’t. He understood how the government worked and what were our responsibilities to International affairs. I did not like Bill Clinton but he ended up being President anyway. I didn’t think he had the right background. I still don’t think he did the right things. I was astonished at how fast after he’s elected Wall Street showed up to give him a lesson in the bond market and he changed his policies very, very quickly. Even so, I do admire, at least, he did begin to reduce the national debt.
LAMB: So, what do you think of the current President?
JOHNSON: I can control my enthusiasm! Just wait, I don’t think he’s qualified in any way and will go down as an unmitigated disaster but the worst thing is the citizens with which he has mobilized the hopes and aspirations of a large number of American citizens and distracted the public through a meaningless and worthless war. We could’ve handled – I mean what Osama bin Laden did on 9/11 didn’t affect the balance of power one iota. There was nothing changed at all on the day after. If you wanted to maintain democracy you didn’t want to declare war on him. You didn’t even want to call it a war. You only call it an emergency. We knew how to deal with terrorists. We would – had we been more intelligent we’d still have all of our allies. We have most of the Arab world supporting us, too. They understood these issues. We’d have been able to proceed intelligently and correctly; instead, we are in terrible trouble and it’s extremely hard to figure out how we’re going to get out.
LAMB: Anybody you see coming along in the leadership world that you would supportive of in the future?
JOHNSON: Not that I’ve noticed, frankly. No, I don’t think so.