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Monday, May 03, 2004
Why the White House Likes Woodward's Book
Bob Somerby has been pushing his view on this for a few days now, and I'm now completely sold.
Somerby notes:
Let’s face it: Bob Woodward could do a thousand shows and no TV pundit would ever dare ask about his book’s most puzzling narrative. No one would ever dare to ask about that weird scene from December 2002—the scene in which Strong Leader Bush challenges hapless George Tenet. Everyone knows how to play the scene. They play it the way Tim Russert did when Woodward did an hour-long turn on his eponymous CNBC program:
RUSSERT (4/24/04): The book, Plan of Attack, the author, Bob Woodward, and he is here talking to us about it. December 21, 2002: George Tenet and his top deputy briefing the president, in effect, a slide show, if you will, on the weapons of mass destruction, in the Oval Office, and the president at the conclusion says, quote, “Nice try, but that isn’t going to sell Joe Public. This is the best we got?”
WOODWARD: Question mark.
RUSSERT: A real skeptic.
Bush was “a real skeptic,” Russert said—showing that he, Tim Russert, isn’t. After all, by the time this ballyhooed briefing was held, Woodward’s book quite clearly states that Bush and Cheney had been overstating the intel on WMD for four solid months, driving the nation to war in the process! If Bush was such a masterful “skeptic,” why wasn’t this briefing held before December—before he misstated the intel for months? The question here is perfectly obvious—but every pundit knows not to ask it. Indeed, Russert carried the clowning further only a few moments later:
RUSSERT: You think he—Bob, you take it even further.
WOODWARD: Yeah.
RUSSERT: You say the president several times said to Tenet, Make sure no one stretches to make the case.
Put simply, Woodward let the White House feed him a great story about the President being skeptical about the intelligence that he was given by Tenet, a story that shows Bush as a strong leader, but, perhaps more important, shows that at least he was trying to contain the intelligence from stretching with respect to Iraq's WMDs, providing Bush political cover since we now know that there are no WMDs and the intelligence was stretched.
Somerby rightly notes:
But that’s the problem with Woodward’s book! When Bush tells Tenet not to stretch, he himself has been stretching for months! But Russert knows not to notice this point, or to ask Woodward how to explain it. Everyone knows how this script has been blocked. Everyone knows to admire the way Strong Leader Bush challenged Tenet.
No, no TV pundit ever asks Woodward about this part of his book.
And then, late Thursday night, e-mail flooded our Advanced Message Center. Someone had asked him about it:
E-MAIL: On Monday you pointed out that neither Woodward, nor anyone else, picked up on the fact that while Bush was [allegedly] skeptical about WMD’s when Tenet briefed him in December he’d already been selling the idea for months.
Well one newsman picked up on it. On Thursday night, that’s exactly what Jon Stewart asked Woodward about on The Daily Show.
Somerby rightly notes how dysfunctional our media has become when we have to rely on a comedian to ask the obvious follow-up questions.
Here's the transcript of Stewart's show (unfortuntately things digressed to the point where Woodward never had to answer the question and point out the obvious -- he had been used):
WOODWARD: Tenet’s deputy made a detailed presentation…It was quite long and at the end there was this silence, and the president, President Bush, said, Nice try, but it doesn’t sell. Joe Public will not buy it. And so he turned over to Tenet, who was sitting on one of the couches, and said, What have you got, George? I thought this was good stuff! And Tenet twice said, Oh don’t worry, it’s a slam-dunk. Now Bush’s sniffer—his instinct—told him something didn’t add up here. Tenet said a slam-dunk. Ideally, they should have gone back to Square One and said, Let’s really look at this intelligence, because this was the basis for war. This was not just what sort of bill they were going to send up to the Senate.
Of course, many things don’t quite “add up” in this Official Story. Stewart teased out one such problem with his next pair of questions:
STEWART (continuing directly): Right. What I think was even so interesting about it was the timing. Because when did this briefing take place?
WOODWARD: The Saturday before Christmas, about three months before the war started.
STEWART: And they had been promoting this idea of weapons of mass destruction and the intelligence associated with it already for months, had they not?
WOODWARD: Yes, initiated by Dick Cheney, the steam-roller in all this, saying—
Things were starting to move along. Then, the inevitable occurred. Stewart broke in with a joke:
STEWART: No, he is—and again, I don’t know if you interviewed him on this—a mindless cyborg. He is not man but machine.
The audience laughed, Woodward did too, and Jon-and-Bob never got back on track about Plan of Attack’s puzzling story.
Just curious: has anyone ever heard Tenet confirm that the "slam dunk" conversation ever took place (or that it took place in December '02, and not, say July '02) ?
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