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From articles in "Vanity Fair" to his book about Paul O'Neill's journey through the Bushevik wonderland, Ron Suskind has been a professional chronicler of the White house bumblers.

Now, he has penned his most ominous work, detailing the maniacal Dick Cheney's "War on Terror." The operational basis assumption of Cheney's Strangelovian madness is that even if there is only a 1% possibility of a terrorist attack, then it should be treated as basically a 100% certainty. This, of course, leads to a world permanently at war -- and with the U.S. government precipitating the very chaos it is claiming it is trying to prevent.

As one reader of the book wrote on another website:

"What is most frightening about Suskind's offering is the level of detail and example he provides to go over what many consider to be familiar territory already covered by Richard Clarke, Seymour Hersh, and a pursuing posse of notable others. Yes, indeed, the Bush team glossed over truths, disregarded inconvenient facts, disjointed other technical information to make it fit their preposterous cover stories, and honed the art of secrecy to a new cult of fascistic insistence that those who questioned their methods, arguments, or goals, were "unpatriotic" and are therefore somehow, unlike themselves, "unworthy to lead". They concocted a witch's brew of cover stories and different takes, employing a marketing and advertising firm to float various stories to the media in an attempt to determine which struck the most responsive chord.

"They pressured Western Union and First Data Corporation into providing information covered by existing privacy laws, they held American citizens like Jose Padilla without charges for years without providing him any of the due process rights guaranteed by law. When the Supreme Court overturned this interpretation of Bush's right to do so by virtue of his status as Commander In Chief, the Justice Department found other questionable means to get their way. Indeed, the nation of laws is under assault by an administration that only knows what it wants and will do anything it needs to effect the outcome it desires. In the last six years they have effectively gutted the environmental regulations constraining corporate rape of the national parks, have blunted consumer protection, emasculated the EPA, EEOC, and FDA, and have looted the federal treasury to the tune of nine trillion dollars, all subsidized, at least temporarily, by foreign investment. In the end, however, those left to pay the bill will be those taxpayers not benefiting from the overly-generous tax cuts proffered like booty and tribute by the neo-conservatives to the upper reaches of the socioeconomic ladder. It makes the mind reel.

"The saddest aspect of the book is the picture it paints of the principals; Mr. Tenet, a man all too willing to do anything he had to in order to both placate the President and please his constituency within the spy community; Ms. Rice, who plays fast and loose with honor and truth in service to the President's half-baked goals, Vice President Cheney, who looks more and more like the evil sorcerer, and the feckless George W. Bush, who seems to have mastered the Texas strut even while failing miserably to abide by the constitutional constraints incumbent in the office of the Presidency, and who in this account appears to be allotted the unenviable role of the sorcerer's apprentice. This is a great book, and one I can heartily endorse."

We would add that the media and faux mainstream journalists have uncritically covered the Bush Administration -- and fawned over its Hollywood style photo-ops and fictional, hackneyed propaganda scripts written for George W.

But the occasional journalist like Ron Suskind reminds you that there are still a few reporters out there who haven't forgotten their professional skills.

Publisher's Weekly writes of "The One Percent Doctrine": "In dramatizing the tensions between CIA professionals and White House ideologues, Suskind makes his sympathies clear: CIA chief George Tenet, pressured to align intelligence with administration policy, emerges as a tragic fall guy, while President Bush comes off as a dunce and a bully, likened by some observers to a ventriloquist's dummy on Cheney's knee. Suskind's novelistic scene-setting -- 'Condi looked up, impatiently' -- sometimes meanders. But he assembles perhaps the most detailed, revealing account yet of American counterterrorism efforts and a hard-hitting critique of their direction."

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