Bob Woodward further exposed: Tenet's "Slam Dunk" revisited.

Swopa's blog characterizes it this way, Tenet's "slam dunk" came in garbage time. Following from praktike's blog, Swopa's timeline starts with this fact:

...the conversation happened in late December 2002.

What does this mean with respect to Booby's attempt to help the WH stage manage the CIA's culpability in deceiving dear leader?

And the response -

In other words, after Big Dick Cheney gave a speech in August saying that "we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." After the famed WHIG "product rollout" in September, with Condoleezza Rice talking about smoking guns and mushroom clouds. After Dubya gave a speech in Cincinnati in October saying that Saddam Hussein " could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year."

Oh, and after Congress has already surrendered voted to authorize the use of force, and the troop buildup in Kuwait was already in the works.

In other words, Tenet supposedly "convinced" Dubya and his crew long after everything had already been decided. And Woodward wrote it up with a straight face.

This is not unlike the the deathbed Casey interview, I'd say. As Attytood points out in Bob and Me:

But he and Bernstein were American heroes to me. And I very much wanted to do what they did -- to wrestle the powers that be from the bottom position, and win.

Well, at least that's what I thought Woodward did.

Looking back, I can't tell the exact moment that I realized that Bob Woodward wasn't the crusader and role model that my generation of eager-beaver journalists so foolishly thought he was. Maybe it was when he wrote his only non-political book, "Wired"-- a John Belushi bio that had all the charisma of a World War I-era anti-pot film. Or maybe it was his 1987 CIA book "Veil," with its reeks-of-phoniness-or-worse deathbed confession by Bill Casey of his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, because "I believed."

This gets it said for me (Christopher Hitchens is good for something):

You want a muckraker? Go read some old I.F. Stone, or some recent Seymour Hersh.

And after 1974, being Bob Woodward became way too easy. Who needs cement parking garages when Washington's top players will call you onto their plush carpets, and spill the beans in broad daylight. Most people only hustle when they have to, and Woodward didn't have to anymore. He became what Christopher Hitchens called "the stenographer to the stars" -- a role that seemed to not trouble him in the least.

A few people started to see through Woodward's schtick -- the trade of access for a chance to sway an early draft of history, and his almost pathological refusal to analyze or interpret what he was told by the politically powerful. Joan Didion wrote that his books are all characterized by "a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured."

Everybody, so it seems, is Piling On Booby

•  He totally deserves it. n/t

  by litigatormom on Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 10:54:10 AM PDT

  •  And how!

    One wonders how much of this seemingly "pathological behavior" boils down to: repentance for helping to bring down the Nixon admin; his republican credentials are solid, no?

    I donated to ePluribus Media; kindly join me: "I participate therefore I am...."

    by libby on Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 11:26:45 AM PDT

    •  No, that's a mischaracterization

      Woodward has been doing this for so long and getting amply rewarded for it that he no longer see's any problem with access journalism, as practiced by him. As the saying goes, there's no whore like an old whore.

      There is no great plan or machinations of conscience within Bob Woodward about any of this. It's what he does and has been doing for 30 years.

      by Scarce on Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 11:39:42 AM PDT

•  I would have to

  differ with Hitchen's characterization of Hersh as "muckraker."

  "Truth-teller" is more like it.

  by wildcat6 on Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 10:59:32 AM PDT

  •  This is Attytood's characterization:

    so-called in the finest tradition of journalism, I think.

    I donated to ePluribus Media; kindly join me: "I participate therefore I am...."

    by libby on Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 11:30:07 AM PDT

•  It's so obvious

  that the "slam dunk" conversation never happened.
  John McLaughlin pointed it out as soon as it was published.

  Did Woodward single source it? From Cheney? Or Chimpy? Lousy, lousy reporting, zero objectivity.

  Why would Tenet say that, when his own CIA had been pushing against the nuclear claims for months?

  by HeavyJ on Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 10:59:52 AM PDT

  •  Because Tenet is a yes man?

    I'm skeptical myself about whether Tenet actually said this.  But I have heard him confronted with the quote, and not denying it.

    by lysias on Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 12:40:06 PM PDT

    •  I think I heard McLaughlin deny it:

      his 2nd in command? He's now an analyst for CNN.

      I donated to ePluribus Media; kindly join me: "I participate therefore I am...."

      by libby on Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 12:42:43 PM PDT

•  Popular use of stenographer

  "It just looks really bad," said Eric Boehlert, a Rolling Stone contributing editor and author of a forthcoming book on the administration and the press. "It looks like what people have been saying about Bob Woodward for the past five years, that he's become a stenographer for the Bush White House."

  Seems Hitchens used this as early as 1996.

  http://www.salon.com/...
  

  by Scarce on Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 11:06:46 AM PDT

  •  Access Journalism

    There are various kinds of journalism, of which the best known are the "color" or descriptive, the "objective" or reportorial, and the "muckraking" or investigative. There's also a new kind, peculiar to Washington, which might be termed "access" or insider journalism. This method involves a trade-off between sources and methods, where anonymously-donated high-grade information will at least ensure that the source has his or her side of the story narrated. There's nothing intrinsically dubious about this proceeding, which is very often the only way of composing that "first draft on history" which is the proper ambition of journalism. (A lot of people believe, indeed, that Woodward and Bernstein's original Watergate story was not a triumph of shoe-leather and sleuthing but a masterly spinning of the Post by well-placed anti-Nixonian forces.)

    More good lines from the same article:

    ....the role of Bob Woodward as a gatekeeper in the nation's capital and at the capital's most powerful newspaper

    I have all of Woodward's books and often use them for reference. I have learned a good deal from reading them. One thing I have learned is that access journalism is not a one-way street.

    Access journalism cannot be value-free because it involves playing, and rewarding, favorites.

    Passages like the above are a handy reminder of the essential shallowness and ephemerality of Washington journalism, and indeed of the ethereal mediocrities that it purports to "cover" even as it acts as their megaphone.

    Still, Woodward is evidence of something in the postmodern publishing game -- an author whose books are written by his sources.

    But as it becomes ever clearer that vacuous Washington possesses no "inside" and no core, so the role of the alleged "insider" becomes more and more a matter of making bricks without straw.

    
    

    by Scarce on Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 11:22:09 AM PDT

•  Why did George Tenant allow himself to be used?

  
  
  So the question is, why did CIA Director George Tenant just allow himself to be used as the fall-guy for both:

  1. The Sept. 11 protection & defense failures

  2. For leading Bush with phony intelligence

  why?

  The reverse is actually true.

  I)  George Tenant warned the Bush administration in advance of the Sept. 11 attacks, but they did nothing.  (not only did they do nothing, but they both weakened Airport Security regulations, sat on evidence, and shut down the FBI's investigation into Osama Bin Laden and Al Qeada. Then Dick Cheney ran War Games simulations of hijacked Airlines on the morning of Sept. 11 to throw off the FAA -- while Condi Rice said no one could even "imagine" that).
  
  
  II)  The "Slam Dunk" came directly from none other than Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Condi Rice themselves (but particularly Dick Cheney).

  These were the guys who mounted a very visible marketing campaign to switch public attention away from Osama Bin Laden and switch it onto Saddam Hussein as the new boogeyman that was the source of all things evil.

  Dick Cheney not only was the lead guy in introducing and prepping the public & the Media of the urgent Hussein problem ( a "Nuclear War problem") but also was the lead guy in intimidating the CIA and creating parallel phony Intelligence data, i.e. "Curveball" to fabricate & manufacture out of whole cloth these rationales for starting an illegal War in Iraq.

  So, again, the question is why is George Tenant just allowing himself to be used by these guys?

  Why is he just letting them shift all the blame on himself and the CIA?

  When will George Tenant speak-up and tell the world that Dick Cheney & George Bush arranged all this?

  The day that Tenant speaks up ... we will all finally learn something!

  ... and it will not be pretty.
  
  

  by NewAmerica on Thu Nov 17, 2005 at 11:31:03 AM PDT