Woodward Gets Belated Hindsight

The narrative gets starker from Woodward, whose tone in his third book on Bush apparently has scuttled leftward after Bob was flamed about Plame. Gotta keep those fences in repair on both sides and the Henry James-wannabe keeps fact and docudrama balanced tenuously in his new book, which I'll read just because Woody wrote "Wired," one of my fave Hollyweird chronicles.

In a separate story, the Post's Peter Baker reveals: "The July 10 meeting of Rice, Tenet and Black went unmentioned in various investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, and 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."

So Tenet and Black, as well as the Bushies, held back from telling the Commission about their self-justifying July 10th meeting? Methinks Jamie Gorelick is the least credible member of that Commission, with her fingerprints all over the FBI/CIA logjam on intelligence. Tenet was not shy about boosting his Agency in the past. Why should he now come out and give a highly-sensationalized "gun-to-her-head" rendition of a meeting they thought unfit to share with the 9/11 Commission in the year or so it was investigating the run-up? Or is Woodward eliciting and inciting enhanced memories as the facts fade into time?

Or is he just making things up, as in this little fools-gold nugget?:

"According to Woodward, insurgent attacks against coalition troops occur, on average, every 15 minutes, a shocking fact the administration has kept secret. 'It's getting to the point now where there are eight, 900 attacks a week. That's more than a hundred a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces,' says Woodward.

After his fabrications and prevarications about being at William Casey's deathbed, unattributed sources should be inspected closely. Rumsfeld is not the only one with little credibility inside the Beltway. After Plamegate and "The Veil," Woodward deserves to be taken with multiple grains of salt.