State of Denial: Bob Woodward on Meet The Press

Bob Woodward describes Cheney cursing him as talking, "Bullshit" and hanging up on him.

As Woodward rightly states, this is the perfect metaphor for this entire administration. Hang up whenever you hear something that you don't want to hear. The most arrogant administration in my lifetime would not have crashed so badly if they had not refused to ever listen to dissenting voices. By equating agreeing with them with patriotism, they sealed their own fate.



tag: Bob, Woodward, State of Denial, Dick, Cheney, Iraq war, war on terror, casualties, rising

More Proof that Condi's lying....

It's now official, Condi's telling porkies... again. Keith Olbermann interviewed MSNBC terror analyst Roger Cressey who was director of trans-national threats on the National Security Council staff at the time Tenet says he was warning Condi of an imminent threat.

On Countdown he and Keith had the following exchanges:

OLBERMANN: My first question, you‘re now consulting within a firm with Richard Clarke, who was at that meeting on July 10, on the central question of whether Rice was warned then of an attack on the U.S. Do we know who‘s right here, Woodward or Secretary Rice?

CRESSEY: Yes, she was warned. I mean, there was a meeting. It was George Tenet, Dick Clarke, another individual from the agency, Cofer Black, and Steve Hadley. And what it was, Keith, was a briefing for Dr. Rice that was similar to a briefing the CIA gave to us in the situation room about a week before, laying out the information, the intelligence, laying out the sense of urgency. And it was pretty much given to Dr. Rice and Steve Hadley in pretty stark terms.

Later Olbermann asks this:

OLBERMANN: And lastly, Roger, about Secretary Rice‘s sharpness, she famously denied getting any warning before the August 6 PDB came to light. Last week she denied that Dick Clarke gave them a strategy to fight al Qaeda left over from the Clinton administration. Now she‘s denying what Tenet and Black say they, or apparently told Woodward. Where is Secretary Rice‘s credibility on this subject of pre-9/11 intelligence right now?

CRESSEY: I just don‘t understand why she keeps denying what has actually happened, because there‘s really—there‘s no good reason for it. The 9/11 Commission had it right about the summer of 2001, Keith, which was, there was an overwhelming body of evidence, but there was not that sense of urgency in the West Wing of the White House to be proactive and aggressive in going after al Qaeda and taking proactive steps, and directing the interagency to do so.

That‘s what was missing, and I think what you see in Bob Woodward‘s book is another recitation of that very sad fact.

Where is Rice's credibility indeed? I'll go further... she's simply a bare faced liar.

Click title for Olbermann transcript.

tag: Condi, Rice, Olbermann, Bob, Woodward, 9-11, lies,

60min interview with Bob Woodward

Tags: Bob, Woodward, State of Denial,

Bob Woodward's New Book Highly Critical of Bush Failures

Tags: Countdown, Keith, Olbermann, Bob Woodward, President, Bush, State Of Denial, Iraq, War,

Bombshell Book: Has Bush Lost Control Of Iraq?

Tags: Bob, Woodward, State of Denial,

White House Disputes Book's Report of Anti-Rumsfeld Moves

I said yesterday that I fully expected the Republican attack dogs to be set on Bob Woodward ahead of the publication of his new book which alleges that Bush ignored warnings over the need to send more troops to Iraq.

The White House now seem to have adopted a strategy of dismissing key parts of the book and dismissing the rest of it as somehow being "old news". It's similar to the way Snow wishes to deal with Clinton's allegations regarding bin Laden. They simply choose "not to engage".

"In a lot of ways, the book is sort of like cotton candy -- it kind of melts on contact," White House spokesman Tony Snow said at a briefing dominated by the topic. "We've read this book before. This tends to repeat what we've seen in a number of other books that have been out this year where people are ventilating old disputes over troop levels." Snow said it was well known that events in Iraq have been difficult and that officials have debated the right approach. "Rather than a state of denial," he said, "it's a state of the obvious."

"State of the obvious". It's a good line, but it doesn't go anywhere near addressing the points raised in Woodward's tome.

One of the most incendiary is the sheer amount of people who wanted Bush to remove Donald Rumsfeld from his post; Colin Powell, Condaleeza Rice and even Laura Bush all thought Rummy should go.

The book reports that then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. twice suggested that Bush fire Rumsfeld and replace him with former secretary of state James A. Baker III, first after the November 2004 election and again around Thanksgiving 2005. Card had the support of then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his successor, Condoleezza Rice, as well as national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and senior White House adviser Michael J. Gerson, according to the book.

Even first lady Laura Bush reportedly told Card that she agreed Rumsfeld had become a liability for her husband, although she noted that the president did not agree. "I don't know why he's not upset with this," she told Card, according to the book. But Vice President Cheney and senior Bush adviser Karl Rove argued against dumping Rumsfeld, and Bush agreed.

Apparently the reason given by Cheney and Rove was that the President might be criticised as the removal of Rumsfeld might imply that the war in Iraq was being fought in the wrong way.

Now, in my naivete, I would have thought that the decision on whether or not the Secretary of Defence should or should not be removed would have something to do with the good of the troops on the ground; it seems extraordinary to me that the decision is made with no consideration of the troops, but rather a lot of consideration on whether or not such a decision would embarrass the President.

It seems "the Decider" decides such important matters based solely on how it reflects on himself.

The other astonishing thing the book reveals is the staggering level of complacency exhibited by Condaleeza Rice.

The book also reports that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, grew so concerned in the summer of 2001 about a possible al-Qaeda attack that they drove straight to the White House to get high-level attention.

Tenet called Rice, then the national security adviser, from his car to ask to see her, in hopes that the surprise appearance would make an impression. But the meeting on July 10, 2001, left Tenet and Black frustrated and feeling brushed off, Woodward reported. Rice, they thought, did not seem to feel the same sense of urgency about the threat and was content to wait for an ongoing policy review.

The report of such a meeting takes on heightened importance after former president Bill Clinton said this week that the Bush team did not do enough to try to kill Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said her husband would have paid more attention to warnings of a possible attack than Bush did. Rice fired back on behalf of the current president, saying the Bush administration "was at least as aggressive" in eight months as President Clinton had been in eight years.

It is also noteworthy that Rice has never given any details of these supposedly "aggressive" actions and that when she has given concrete examples in the past, they have turned out to be blatant lies.

It is also rather odd that this July 10 meeting is missing from the timeline reported by the 9-11 Commission. Is it because this meeting would shed bad light on to the administration? This certainly appears to be the impression held by J. Cofer Black.

Woodward wrote that Black "felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."

Jamie S. Gorelick, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said she checked with commission staff members who told her investigators were never told about a July 10 meeting. "We didn't know about the meeting itself," she said. "I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it."

White House and State Department officials yesterday confirmed that the July 10 meeting took place, although they took issue with Woodward's portrayal of its results. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, responding on behalf of Rice, said Tenet and Black had never publicly expressed any frustration with her response.

And it's a sad day when your best defence is "You've never mentioned this before!" which appears to be the tack Sean McCormack is taking regarding Tenet and Black's criticisms.

However, the overall impression of a White House in denial certainly corresponds to every public utterance Bush has made on the subject of Iraq. For the last three years it has been almost impossible to reconcile Bush's Iraq with any of the facts emanating from the ground.

"The president himself is out of touch with reality, is in denial as to what is happening in Iraq," Pelosi said. "That could be the only explanation for why he has withheld the truth to the American people."

I think Nancy is being overly generous in that reading. There are many other reasons for why the President could be withholding the truth. Not least of which is the competence of his entire administration.

The book is released next week.

Click title for full article.

Tags: State of denial, Snow, Rice, Rumsfled, Woodward, Bush, Iraq, war on terror

Book Says Bush Ignored Urgent Warning on Iraq

Bob Woodwards new book, "State of Denial", describes a White House at war with itself over the conflict in Iraq with Bush ignoring pleas from a top Iraq adviser who stated that thousands more troops were needed to combat the insurgency.

The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation in Iraq.

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

It's also interesting to note that Bush declined to be interviewed for this book having made himself freely available for the two preceding books by Woodward. It also describes the lengths that Cheney went to in order to "prove" that Iraq possessed WMD.

Vice President Cheney is described as a man so determined to find proof that his claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was accurate that, in the summer of 2003, his aides were calling the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, with specific satellite coordinates as the sites of possible caches. None resulted in any finds.

It is known that Powell was ambivalent about Bush's plan to invade Iraq but what is surprising is Woodward's claim that George Tenet shared Powell's viewpoint, although it is claimed that Tenet did not make these views known to Bush.

What does promise to be explosive though, especially in the light of Clinton's claim that the Bush administration did not do enough to capture bin Laden prior to 9-11, are Woodward's claims regarding Rumsfeld and Rice:

Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.

On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.

It's a wonder that a man who thought al Qaeda were indulging in "an elaborate deception plan" and a woman who seemed not to take "the warnings seriously" should remain in their positions after the worst terrorist attack in US history, but that appears to be the story that Woodward is telling.

We can expect the Republican attack dogs to be set on Woodward any day now.

Tags: Bob, Woodward, State of Denial, Iraq, war, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, WMD