Washington Post superstar Bob Woodward can begin to rehabilitate his tarnished image by following up on an intriguing aspect of his 2004 book, Plan of Attack.
On pages 201-02, Woodward writes of the back-and-forth between the CIA and the White House as President Bush’s major speech in Cincinnati, delivered Oct. 7, 2002, was fine-tuned and fact-checked.
On October 5, reports Woodward, “the CIA had sent a three-and-a-half page memo to [deputy national security adviser] Steve Hadley and [top speechwriter] Mike Gerson recommending 22 changes in Draft #6. Some of the recommended changes said the drafted statements could be strengthened; others recommended certain statements be cut back or dropped entirely.â€
Woodward gives enough examples to suggest he saw or possessed a copy of both the draft of the speech and the CIA’s proposed revisions. If Woodward has those documents, or can get his hands on them, he should write a long article detailing every single CIA recommendation and how each dispute was resolved. He’ll have to go back and interview the participants, but it will be worth the effort.
One tantalizing loose end concerns alleged beheadings in pre-war Iraq.
Woodward writes, “The draft said ‘On Saddam Hussein’s orders, opponents have been decapitated,’ The CIA said the evidence was that the opponents had been executed, not decapitated. But decapitated stayed in the final speech.â€
It not only stayed, it stayed unmodified. Bush did not say “This is an allegation the CIA has been unable to confirmâ€; rather, he presented it as incontrovertible fact: “On Saddam Hussein’s orders, opponents have been decapitated.â€
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/print/20021007-8.html
How did this happen? Did the CIA go back to their files in the 48 hours before the speech and discover incontrovertible proof of beheadings? Did Bush and/or Hadley decide that this was a “visual†that was too good not to use, whether true or not? Is there some other explanation?
Did Woodward leave us hanging because he didn’t want to embarrass the president? Critics who regard Woodward as too cozy to the Bush team might jump to that conclusion, but in truth Woodward provides ample evidence of Bush, Cheney and Powell, in their public pronouncements, going beyond what the available intelligence stated. (See, for example, pages 164, 178 and 310.) They did so primarily by stating as fact what were unproven allegations or mere judgments based on flimsy, inconclusive evidence.
Woodward also shows Bush displaying unsupportable certitude in private meetings with congressional groups (pp. 188-90) prior to the vote to authorize the use of force, and with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar (pp. 240-41).
The Oct. 7, 2002 speech also included this newly controversial line: “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.â€
That is an obvious lie, because the only thing the CIA had “learned†for certain by that point is that an Al Qaeda captive made that implausible (and today laughable) claim. If you think something might be true, but you say that it definitely is true, that is a lie — even if it’s eventually proven to be true. That’s because you didn’t KNOW it was true when you said it was true.
We now know that several months before the speech a DIA analyst pegged the captive as a likely fabricator, and all analysts familiar with the interrogation knew that that the captive was short on specifics. The day of the speech, a public letter
(http://foi.missouri.edu/terrorintelligence/cialetter.html) from CIA director George Tenet to Senator Bob Graham made it clear that this claim was based on unconfirmed intelligence; it was not established fact. So how did it wind up as an established fact in a nationally televised address?
If we let Bush define and redefine “torture,†he’ll always come up with something that proves no U.S. personnel under his watch has ever committed torture, no matter how many prisoners die in U.S. custody. If we let him define “lying,†rest assured he’ll define it in such a way that permits him to convert rumor and allegation into established fact.
I suspect that many in the mainstream news media, even under threat of torture, would refuse to call Bush a liar even if the facts warranted it. What about Bob?
Bio: Freelance writer Dennis Hans penned the prescient pre-war essays “Lying Us Into War: Exposing Bush and His ‘Techniques of Deceit’”
(http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/02/12_lying.html) and “The Disinformation Age”
(http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0303/S00011.htm). He can be reached at [email protected]
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