Although Mr. Suskind's book has received attention for some apparent reportorial scoops--such as al Qaeda's aborted plan, in 2003, to attack the New York subway system with poison gas--they could easily be condensed to the length of a magazine article. The bulk of its 350 pages is given over to shoddy analysis and self-serving ventriloquism. If "The One Percent Doctrine" merits any comparison, it is certainly not to Bob Woodward's "you are there" books, though Mr. Suskind's subtitle--"Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11"--seems to suggest a Woodward approach. Rather, the book is the literary equivalent of a Michael Moore film--a didactic montage that often appears factual but edits out all the inconvenient bits.

So when it comes to Iraq, all we read about is an administration determined to go to war even though, supposedly, Saddam is no threat at all. That the Clinton administration felt compelled to bomb Iraq for four days in 1998 to degrade its alleged WMD capability doesn't merit a mention. Nor does Mr. Suskind mention the fact that Saddam was in material breach of more than a dozen United Nations resolutions. He writes as if such history doesn't exist.

The same strategy of omission is evident in his treatment of the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib. Nine different courts-martial have now been held to punish the offenders there, and not one has found that the abuses had anything to do with a policy of "torture" designed to get information. Mr. Suskind doesn't dispute the evidence. He just ignores it.

And of course Mr. Suskind advances the standard left-wing criticisms of prewar Iraq intelligence--that the administration pressured analysts and deliberately distorted findings. This despite the fact two major bipartisan inquires--conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by the Robb-Silberman Commission--have found no evidence to support such a charge.

"The Committee," the Senate report reads, "did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities." The report was based on hundreds of interviews and has the names of Democratic senators like Carl Levin and Jay Rockefeller attached to it. Mr. Suskind is hardly required to agree with its conclusions or with those of the Robb-Silberman Commission. But he can't just pretend that such major investigations never took place.