Woodward is not caving in to the White House Thought
Reform...It is probably less of a sign of personal
redemption for Woodward than it is a sign of a deep
fracture developing in the Bush Cabal stranglehold on
the "US Mainstream News Media." The WASHPS, in
particular, represent a closed circle of interests, a
power elite, THE establishment (yes, it is real and
tangible, Chomsky has denlineated it). Woodward is the
court hagiographer. This Establishment has become very
*uncomfortable* with the incredible shrinking
_resident and his Cardinal Richileiu (Cheney), his
Torquemada (Ashcroft) and his Custer (Rumsfeld)...They
have become *unseemly* Their methods have become
*unsound* The Bush cabal are making a *mess* That
closed circle of interests, the power elite, THE
establishment, has turned on the Bush Cabal...That is
where Woodward's strength is coming from...And,
frankly, it is probably more powerful than personal
redemption...
Eric Alterman, The Nation: The Administration has reacted to this revelation with(a) dishonesty: On CBS's Face the Nation, Condoleezza Rice tried to argue that "resources were not taken from Afghanistan." This is false--Bush removed Special Forces from Afghanistan in 2002 to send them to Iraq, as David Sirota of the Center for American Progress notes; and (b) disingenuousness and more dishonesty: White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy told an
interviewer that the "significant buildup" in the
Persian Gulf region before the war was not necessarily
preparation for an invasion. (Apparently it was in
preparation for a regional swim meet, to be held on a
date yet to be determined.) Duffy also said the
Administration wanted to be ready to aid weapons
inspectors. This is ridiculous. The record
demonstrates that the White House went out of its way
to undercut the weapons inspectors in order to justify
its obsession with war. For the past year, the
goofball President of the United States and his
Defense Secretary have been denying that inspectors
were ever even allowed inside Iraq--something that
goes all but unreported in the US media because
reporters apparently find it too weird (see my last
column).
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040510&s=alterman
column | Posted April 22, 2004
STOP THE PRESSES by Eric Alterman
Woodward Returns
Well, Bob Woodward has partially redeemed himself. His
last book, Bush at War, read like a superhero comic
book mistranslated from its original Serbo-Croatian.
Everyone in the Bush Administration was portrayed as
they might have wished: brave, steadfast, determined
to protect America from evildoerdom, no matter the
cost.
Because Colin Powell and his aides evidently decided
to tiptoe off the reservation in preparation for their
long-overdue departure, the new book, Plan of Attack,
has texture. There are conflicts. Not everybody can be
right about everything. And while the book does gloss
over many of the Administration's most nefarious
characteristics--its serial dishonesty with Congress
and the media, for instance--the trust Woodward earned
with his hagiographic first account put him in good
stead to expand our understanding of how these people
go about making their catastrophic decisions and then
denying them. Here's what I learned:
1. For foreign policy purposes, Dick Cheney is
President: Cheney wanted this war from way back when;
it was Bush who needed convincing. As Slate's Tim Noah
points out, "The closest Woodward comes to showing
Bush making a final decision is when Bush pulls
Rumsfeld aside in early January 2003 and says, 'Look,
we're going to have to do this I'm afraid. I don't see
how we're going to get him to a position where he will
do something in a manner that's consistent with the UN
requirements, and we've got to make an assumption that
he will not.'" When the President is not around,
Administration officials refer to Cheney as "the Man,"
as in, "The Man wants this" or "The Man thinks that."
2. That's too bad, because unfortunately Cheney is
nuts. As Powell puts it, Cheney was in the grip of a
"fever," no longer the "steady, unemotional rock that
he had witnessed a dozen years earlier during the
run-up to the Gulf War. The vice president was beyond
hell-bent for action against Saddam. It was as if
nothing else existed." Woodward gives us the
backstory: Cheney, confirmed by his equally fevered
aide "Scooter" Libby, repeatedly pitched--as he does
today--the apparently imaginary meeting between
Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague.
Powell/Woodward aptly term this contention "worse than
ridiculous." It goes on. "Cheney would take an
intercept and say it shows something was happening.
No, no, no, Powell or another would say, it shows that
somebody talked to somebody else who said something
might be happening. A conversation would suggest
something might be happening, and Cheney would convert
that into a 'We know.'"
3. Rumsfeld's Pentagon, led by Paul Wolfowitz and
Douglas Feith, caught Cheney's nutty fever too. The
war party in the Pentagon was no less obsessed than
Cheney and Libby with finding the nonexistent link
between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Powell considered them to
be "a separate little government" and referred to them
as the "Gestapo office."
4. George W. Bush cannot be bothered to listen to the
views of those with whom he disagrees, even
(particularly?) people who clearly know a great deal
more about the topic than he does and hold Cabinet
responsibility for it. Bush told Woodward that when he
saw Powell for twelve minutes in the Oval Office on
January 13, 2003, it was "not a meeting to have a
discussion. This was a meeting to tell Colin Powell
that a decision had been made and that the president
wanted his support."
5. Which is also too bad, because Bush lives in a
dream world. This from the transcript of Larry King
Live,:
WOODWARD:...I said, OK, you've found no weapons of
mass destruction, and one of my bosses at "The Post"
said, The question is, did you deceive us or were you
deceived? And I got two very emphatic, No. No.
KING: On both?
WOODWARD: On both.
6. The United States Constitution is meaningless to
these people: The Bush Administration decided to lay
out $700 million on a "massive, covert public works
program" in Kuwait in 2002, even though, as Woodward
aptly notes, they did not inform Congress. This is a
violation of Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the
Constitution, which vests the power of the purse in
Congress, along with various statutes that bar the
executive from unilaterally moving money out of areas
explicitly mandated by spending bills. It is,
moreover, an explicit violation of the post-9/11
emergency supplemental bill, which gave the President
discretion to direct the $40 billion it appropriated
but specifically required him to "consult with the
chairmen and ranking minority members of the
Committees on Appropriations prior to the transfer" of
any funds. There is no evidence of any such
consultation, and indeed the White House is not
claiming any exists.
The Administration has reacted to this revelation with
(a) dishonesty: On CBS's Face the Nation, Condoleezza
Rice tried to argue that "resources were not taken
from Afghanistan." This is false--Bush removed Special
Forces from Afghanistan in 2002 to send them to Iraq,
as David Sirota of the Center for American Progress
notes; and (b) disingenuousness and more dishonesty:
White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy told an
interviewer that the "significant buildup" in the
Persian Gulf region before the war was not necessarily
preparation for an invasion. (Apparently it was in
preparation for a regional swim meet, to be held on a
date yet to be determined.) Duffy also said the
Administration wanted to be ready to aid weapons
inspectors. This is ridiculous. The record
demonstrates that the White House went out of its way
to undercut the weapons inspectors in order to justify
its obsession with war. For the past year, the
goofball President of the United States and his
Defense Secretary have been denying that inspectors
were ever even allowed inside Iraq--something that
goes all but unreported in the US media because
reporters apparently find it too weird (see my last
column).
There's plenty more in Plan of Attack, like the Saudis
playing with our elections and stuff, but those are
the lowlights. Read it and weep.