“Sara, I am sensing you may have Suskin’s book already. I don’t have as much a doubt on the what happened as the how, the mechanism, of it. It has perplexed me that Cheney would run this play through the CIA, when he has always so mistrusted and disdained the Company. I fully agree about Feith, but you would think he would have had some sort of black teams available.”

Yea, just happened something I ordered came in at B&N on Tuesday, which gave me a second reason for heading out and buying myself some more books.

Stayed up till 4AM last night finishing the thing off, and re-reading a few portions.

The case is scattered through a book with a fascinating and eclectic cast of characters who have nothing to do with the Habbush Letter at all. No, the book is about an Afghani teen ager who came to the US as an exchange student, It is about a young Pakistani post BA Economics Student living in DC who got tackled by the Secret Service and arrested because Cheney’s caravan was leaving the gate of the WH as he was walking by on his way to work, and he decided to turn off his Ipod. (Fear was the Ipod was a trigger to blow up the Cheney Car.) — I kid you not. It is about his sister who went to the London School of Economics, and converted herself into a totally black covered Fundamentalist — and the argument they have back in Lahore at a family wedding. (Father is Police Chief of Lahore — has spent months in the FATA trying to root out Taliban. Uncle is one of the Supreme Court Judges who got canned by Musharraf). It is about what caused several CIA leading figures to retire and try to find a way to finally tell the truth — What they have in common is they found Suskind — otherwise they are all over the landscape. Suskind takes us with into the former head of British Intelligence Dearloff’s (of Downing Street Memo fame) digs at Cambridge University for a little truth telling, and a long reflection on British/American psychological and cultural similarities and differences. Suskind takes us into the State Department’s dealings with Bhutto over the past few years — her relationship with Condi, her non-relationship with Cheney, and Cheney’s refusal to make a critical call to Musharraf about Bhutto’s security. He takes us into Bhutto’s house during the last several weeks of her life. He clearly has Oval Office sources, because he has a few very guilty and pointed Bush conversations, all in quote marks.

That’s why I stayed up almost all night last night — I got into the darn thing.

Suskind’s focus in this book is much less with just the details of the Habbush letter, and the British pre-invasion development of him as an intelligence source, a source that pretty much proved that Saddam had no WMD, at which point Bush decided to cut him off as a source (oval office conversation included in the book), but Suskind is getting at something else. We train our spooks to take risks, to lie, to live lies, to adopt fake identities and all that, but behind all that is an assumption that it is being done for a higher moral purpose, such as the security of the country or in the interests of information that informs good policy making processes. Clearly that was not the mission of the Bush/Cheney administration — and even the most dim witted spook understands that now. They are adrift in a sense, but they are also coming to their senses, and they want to find a way to return politics and government to a higher moral plane, essentially to tell the raw truth about all this as the only process likely to lead to positive change.

I can’t think of anyone on this list who will not find this book a “stay up all night and finish it” experience. I need to do some re-reading and some cross referencing — maybe this weekend. We are getting hit by two or three of these a week these days, (publishers are making a fortune off me anyhow) and all of them link into each other in various ways. You wonder, for instance, whether the services of John Yoo were used to write a Legal Opinion that Cheney could order up a forgery that would be a direct violation of the CIA Charter, without criminal responsibility — just as torture memo’s were ordered up on demand — or perhaps having overlooked the need for such a memo back in 2003, perhaps a creamy piece of paper has been forwarded to Berkley asking for a pre-dated memo to the same end.

But the guy around whom the core of this book is built, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, is the same guy who nailed Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. He plays for keeps.

Thanks so much for the capsule review, Sara!

For the lawyers out there: How, exactly is this a violation of the CIA’s charter?

I’ve always assumed that the CIA fed stories to non-U.S. papers when it served their purposes. Given the vast array of unpleasant things I know of the agency having done, this strikes me as relatively minor.

The part that I’m most interested in is not the CIA’s action, but that cream-colored letter. I have difficulty in believing that anyone in the WH or the OVP would commit such a request to paper; too good to be true, and all that.

Are we sure Richer and Maguire haven’t set Suskind up?

They are adrift in a sense, but they are also coming to their senses, and they want to find a way to return politics and government to a higher moral plane, essentially to tell the raw truth about all this as the only process likely to lead to positive change.

wow.
Or, as bmaz might say, ‘the worm has turned’.
So… guess I’ll be late at the bookshop tonight, because I recognize your name from comments through the years and this looks both riveting and important.

And FWIW, I’d sure rather the publishers make fortunes than have all that lucre entering the criminal, corrupt fools at Bear Stearns. Yeepers!