New book: Woodward Shares War Secrets
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| Mon, 04-19-2004 - 8:40am |
See link at the bottom for complete text of the interview. Very interesting.
>"Journalist Bob Woodward calls his new book, “Plan of Attack,†the first detailed, behind-the-scenes account of how and why the president decided to wage war in Iraq.
It’s an insider’s account written after Woodward spoke with 75 of the key decision makers, including President Bush himself.
The president permitted Woodward to quote him directly. Others spoke on the condition that Woodward not identify them as sources."<
>"Woodward says that many of the quotes came directly from the president: “When I interviewed him for the first time several months ago up in the residence of the White House, he just kind of out of the blue said, ‘It's the story of the 21st Century,’ his decision to undertake this war and start a preemptive attack on another country."
Woodward reports that just five days after Sept. 11, President Bush indicated to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that while he had to do Afghanistan first, he was also determined to do something about Saddam Hussein.
â€There's some pressure to go after Saddam Hussein. Don Rumsfeld has said, ‘This is an opportunity to take out Saddam Hussein, perhaps. We should consider it.’ And the president says to Condi Rice meeting head to head, ‘We won't do Iraq now.’ But it is a question we're gonna have to return to,’†says Woodward.
“And there's this low boil on Iraq until the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 21, 2001. This is 72 days after 9/11. This is part of this secret history. President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically, and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, ‘What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.’"
Woodward says immediately after that, Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to develop a war plan to invade Iraq and remove Saddam - and that Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check.
â€Rumsfeld and Franks work out a deal essentially where Franks can spend any money he needs. And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the preparations in Kuwait, specifically to make war possible,†says Woodward.
“Gets to a point where in July, the end of July 2002, they need $700 million, a large amount of money for all these tasks. And the president approves it. But Congress doesn't know and it is done. They get the money from a supplemental appropriation for the Afghan War, which Congress has approved. …Some people are gonna look at a document called the Constitution which says that no money will be drawn from the Treasury unless appropriated by Congress. Congress was totally in the dark on this." "<
>"â€A year before the war started, three things are going on. Franks is secretly developing this war plan that he's briefing the president in detail on,†says Woodward. “Franks simultaneously is publicly denying that he's ever been asked to do any plan.â€
For example, here's Gen. Franks’ response to a question about invading Iraq, in May 2002, after he's been working on war plans for five months: “That’s a great question and one for which I don’t have an answer, because my boss has not yet asked me to put together a plan to do that.â€
But according to Woodward, the general had been perfecting his war plan, and Vice President Dick Cheney knew all about it. Woodward reports that Cheney was the driving force in the White House to get Saddam. Cheney had been Secretary of Defense during the first Gulf War, and to him, Saddam was unfinished business – and a threat to the United States. "<
>"“That decision was first conveyed to Condi Rice in early January 2003 when he said, ‘We're gonna have to go. It's war.’ He was frustrated with the weapons inspections. He had promised the United Nations and the world and the country that either the UN would disarm Saddam or he, George Bush, would do it and do it alone if necessary,†says Woodward. “So he told Condi Rice. He told Rumsfeld. He knew Cheney wanted to do this. And they realized they haven’t told Colin Powell, the Secretary of State.â€
“So Condi Rice said, ‘You better call Colin in and tell him.’ So, I think probably one of the most interesting meetings in this whole story. He calls Colin Powell in alone, sitting in those two famous chairs in the Oval Office and the president said, ‘Looks like war. I'm gonna have to do this,’â€"<
>"“And then Powell says to him, somewhat in a chilly way, ‘Are you aware of the consequences?’ Because he'd been pounding for months on the president, on everyone - and Powell directly says, ‘You know, you're gonna be owning this place.’ And the president says, ‘I understand that.’ The president knows that Powell is the one who doesn't want to go to war. He says, ‘Will you be with me?’ And Powell, the soldier, 35 years in the army, the president has decided and he says, ‘I'll do my best. Yes, Mr. President. I'll be with you.’†And then, the president says, ‘Time to put your war uniform on.’" "<
>"But, it turns out, two days before the president told Powell, Cheney and Rumsfeld had already briefed Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador. "<
>"this wasn’t enough for Prince Bandar, who Woodward says wanted confirmation from the president. “Then, two days later, Bandar is called to meet with the president and the president says, ‘Their message is my message,’†"<
>"For his book, Woodward interviewed 75 top military and Bush administration officials, including two long interviews with the president himself. Mr. Bush spoke on the record, but others talked to Woodward on condition that he not reveal their identities.
60 Minutes won’t name those Woodward interviewed, but we've listened to the tapes and read the transcripts of his key interviews to verify that his accounts are based on recollections from people who took part in the meetings he describes, including a historic meeting on March 19, when Bush gives the order to go to war. "<
>"Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, ‘Well, no,’ and then he got defensive about it,†says Woodward. “Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There's a higher Father that I appeal to.’"
Beyond not asking his father about going to war, Woodward was startled to learn that the president did not ask key cabinet members either. "<
>"â€The relationship between Cheney and Powell is essentially broken down. They can't talk. They don't communicate,†says Woodward. “Powell feels that Cheney drove the decision to go to war in Iraq. And Cheney feels that Powell has not been sufficiently supportive of the president in the war or in the aftermath.â€
Which of the two was more prescient about how Iraq would turn out? “All of Powell's warnings think of the consequences, Pottery Barn rules: If you break it, you own it. And that's exactly what has happened in Iraq. We own it. In a way, they've had victory without success,â€"<
Quotes from 60 Minutes interview with journalist Bob Woodward...........
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/15/60minutes/main612067.shtml


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You're assuming...please reread the rest of the paragragh, not just one sentence.
As for Woodward, IMHO, one has to look to see how many credible sources are saying the same thing.
What am I assuming? I read both paragraphs. I made a comment regarding CNN and the like. Next I asked you about determining fact from fiction.
How to Slant the News: NBC's Andrea Mitchell Distorts CIA Testimony to Benefit Democrats
By Notra Trulock |
March 19, 2004
To make matters worse, Mitchell falsely claimed that Tenet had apologized for allegedly getting the intelligence wrong.
On March 9, CIA Director George J. Tenet testified about threats to our national security before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Most of the mainstream media focused on Democrat Senators Ted Kennedy and Carl Levin challenging Tenet to admit that the Bush administration had hyped pre-war intelligence on Iraq. NBC Nightly News' Andrea Mitchell took the same approach but then failed to note that Tenet, a former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill, did not take the bait and explicitly denied that the Bush administration had manipulated the intelligence.
To make matters worse, Mitchell falsely claimed that Tenet had apologized for allegedly getting the intelligence wrong.
The Mitchell story serves as a case study of how to manipulate the news in order to make a political point.
Tom Brokaw opened Mitchell's segment by saying that the "senators zeroed in on the possibility the president and his senior advisors overstated the dangers in their eagerness to go to war." Of course, he failed to mention that questions of that nature only came from Democrats, but left it to Mitchell to drive the point home.
For example, during the actual hearing, Kennedy asked Tenet straight out if Tenet thought the administration "misrepresented the facts to justify the war."
Sen. KENNEDY: All right. On that then…but do you believe the administration, then misrepresented the facts to justify the war?
Mr. TENET: No, sir, I don't.
Tenet's response couldn't be clearer, but Mitchell and her editors ignored that exchange and selected another clip edited to depict Mr. Tenet as somewhat more equivocal in his response. This is what viewers saw on the Nightly News.
Sen. KENNEDY: Did you ever tell him, 'Mr. President, you're overstating the case?
Mr. TENET: Well, Senator, I do the intelligence. They then take the intelligence and assess the risk and make a policy judgment about what they think about it.
But C-SPAN and a Federal News Service transcript show the exchange as follows:
Sen. KENNEDY: All right. Did you ever tell him that he was overstating the case? You see him every other morning after he makes these statements. Did you ever tell him, "Mr. President, you're overstating the case?" Did you ever tell Condoleezza Rice? Did you ever tell the Vice President that they were overstating the case? And if you didn't, why not?
MR. TENET: Well, Senator, I do the intelligence. They then take the intelligence and assess the risk and make a policy judgment about what they think about it. I engage with them every day. If there are areas where I thought someone said something they shouldn't say, I talked to them about it. There are instances, obviously, with regard to the State of the Union speech where I felt the responsibility to say something that the president said should not have been in that speech.
But I will tell you that I've now worked on Iraq in consecutive administrations and I have watched policymakers take language from intelligence and translate it into language where they do the risk calculus. They think about what the policy implications are and then talk about it in ways that we may not necessarily talk about.
But Mitchell was not done. She saved her worst for later in the segment. There she has Tenet apologizing for mistakes supposedly made by the Intelligence Community. Viewers saw the following:
Mitchell: Tenet has apologized.
Tenet: If we were in error, then we have to be willing to stand up and say so.
But Mitchell took that snippet out of a much longer response by Tenet to a question from Senator Hillary Clinton. Again from C-SPAN and the FNS transcript:
SEN. CLINTON: All right. Also, with respect to this continuing question about the quality of intelligence -- and I do think that, frankly, the people we should be talking to in closed, open or any session are the people who are the policymakers because I think you've made very clear what you have tried to do with respect to providing intelligence. But I was struck by a comment by Mr. Kay that was reported in the British newspapers, in The Guardian, last Wednesday. David Kay said, and I quote, "It was time for President Bush to come clean with the American people and admit that he and his administration were wrong about the presence of WMD."
And Dr. Kay went on to say that he was worried that our intelligence would lose credibility not only among our allies, but I would assume among others as well. And concluded by saying the next time you have to go and shout there's fire in the theater, people are going to doubt it.
I don't think any of us on this committee doubt the seriousness of the threats we face. And I am personally very grateful and impressed with all the work that has gone on to roll up networks and diminish their effectiveness. But it is, I think, a legitimate point that Dr. Kay makes that if we're going to be waging an ongoing struggle against terrorism, it's clear that we have to rely on intelligence and we have to persuade others of the intelligence.
Do you have a response to Dr. Kay's comment?
MR. TENET: Yeah. I would say, Senator, first of all, whether we were wrong or right is an important professional judgment for us to reach. That's why we're going through all of this. I would say that we're -- and I've said publicly -- we're not going to be all wrong or all right. We have to critically -- and we are, and the committees are -- assess every bit of intelligence we collected, what our shortfalls were. I tried to get up in a public statement at Georgetown to basically say, "Here's my bottom lines today; here's what I think was good, here's what I think didn't work so well. Here's where I think we are in all of these major files." There is no other community of people that take this as seriously as we do. Our credibility matters. It matters on terrorism and proliferation and other issues.
So, open, honest debate; telling the truth; standing up when we come to conclusions is what we're about in this country. And, you know, many of our allied services, quite frankly, saw this the same way as we saw it. We're all playing off the same sheet music. Well, that's just not good enough. In this society, we have to give people the confidence that we know what we're doing, and if we were in error, then we have to be willing to stand up and say so.
The only thing I'd say is I think that men and women on the ground in Baghdad who work at the ISG, who I visited two or three weeks ago, don't believe their job is done. They still think they have a lot of work to do. And I think we need some patience to find out the additional data that they will give us. And we'll report it honestly.
To us, Mitchell's coverage of this hearing went beyond simple bias, but represented the worst form of dishonest reporting. Mitchell has been NBC News' Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent since 1994 and her biography identifies her as a "long-time analyst of the intelligence community." But reporting like that would never pass muster in the real world of intelligence.
http://www.aim.org/aim_column/1383_0_3_0_C/
President's campaign site calls book 'suggested reading'.
From my original post:
I like these two the most, because they seem to give equal grief to both sides:
Fact Check - www.factcheck.org
Spinsanity - www.spinsanity.org
Anyway, just thought I'd share that in case you were interested.
Glassy
Thanks for the links.
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