"The 1% doctrine comes from a meeting that the Vice President has in November of 2001. And it’s one in the White House in the situation room, in which he receives a harrowing bit of intelligence. Pakistani nuclear scientists had sat with bin Laden and Zawrahi a few weeks before 9/11 to discuss the issues of nuclear feasibility for al-Qaeda. This intelligence is delivered to the Vice President. Folks from the CIA and NSC are there.

And the Vice President says two things. He says we need to think in a new way about these low probability, high-impact type events, a different way. And then, by the end of the briefing, he has that different way. He says, “If there’s even a 1% chance that WMDs have been given to terrorists, we need to treat it as a certainty, not in our analysis or the preponderance of evidence,” he demurs, “but in our response.” At this moment the Vice President officially separates analysis from action, allows for an evidence-free model to move forward, and says suspicion may be all we have to use the awesome powers of the United States.

This defines events, episodes, incidents all the way to now, moving forward from that point—Iraq, Afghanistan, the global war on terror. What’s fascinating about it is that people have different names for it inside of the upper reaches of the government—the 1% rule, the Cheney doctrine—but it allowed the United States to essentially operate in an evidence-free realm, using the extraordinary forces at our disposal."

Ron Suskind, author of "One Percent Doctrine" in interview on Democracy Now, July 14, 2006

(http://www.democracynow.org/2006/7/14/the_one_percent_doctrine_journalist_ron)