October 30, 2005

Bob Woodward--All the President's Man

Bob Woodward has puzzled a lot of people with his appearance on Larry King Live October 28th when he started supporting the Bush administration, Libby, the Iraq War, and Judith Miller fervently while casting aspersions on Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson, Patrick Fitzgerald and the damage outing Plame may have caused.
First of all this began not as somebody launching a smear campaign that it actually -- when the story comes out I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter and that somebody learned that Joe Wilson's wife had worked at the CIA and helped him get this job going to Niger to see if there was an Iraq/Niger uranium deal. And, there's a lot of innocent actions in all of this but what has happened this prosecutor, [...] this is a junkyard dog prosecutor and he goes everywhere and asks every question and turns over rocks and rocks under rocks and so forth[...]there was no malice or criminal intent at the start of this. Some people kind of had convenient memories before the grand jury. Technically they might be able to be charged with perjury.
(transcript here)

But the crazy part is that Woodward professed to have all kinds of inside information that he simply shouldn't have--like a damage assessment report from the CIA regarding the fallout over Plame's outing. Woodward claimed that there was very little damage, contrary to what has been alleged by Joe Wilson and others, and claimed he had seen the report.

However, (via Atrios) "The CIA has not conducted a formal damage assessment, as is routinely done in cases of espionage and after any legal proceedings have been exhausted" says the Washington Post.

Hang on a sec. There's something funny going on here.

Follow-up to the first column I linked here.

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