Woodward Caught Lying About Rice/Tenet Meeting

Bob Woodward has the singular skill of marketing his books well and positioning his stories to be topical and controversial. As we are finding out once again, he does this often by prevarications, exaggerations, and outright lying. Woodward understands that once the Big Lie is out there and well-positioned, it cannot be reeled back in except by an extraordinary media backlash. And Lyin' Bob understands that if the Big Lie bashes Bush, such a backlash will never occur from the Bush-hating far-left media who are openly biased against all things Republican whenever they can get away with it. The WaPo text contains the damning sentences:

Tenet gave testimony about the July 2001 meeting with Rice at his Langley headquarters office on Jan. 28, 2004, occasionally referring to charts and slides. Philip Zelikow, who at the time was the commission's executive director and now works for Rice, was present along with other commission staff members, according to Ben-Veniste and to a portion of the transcript, which was read to The Washington Post by an official with access to it.

At one point in the lengthy session, Tenet recalled a briefing he was given on July 10 by Black and his staff, according to the transcript. He said the information was so important that he quickly called for a car and telephoned Rice to arrange for a White House meeting to share what he had just learned, according to the transcript and Ben-Veniste.

According to the transcript, Tenet told Rice there were signs that there could be an al-Qaeda attack in weeks or perhaps months, that there would be multiple, simultaneous attacks causing major human casualties, and that the focus would be U.S. targets, facilities or interests. But the intelligence reporting focused almost entirely on the attacks occurring overseas, Tenet told the commission.

It was at this session that Tenet said "the system was blinking red," which became a chapter title in the commission report, according to the official who saw the transcript.

According to three people present at the session, including Ben-Veniste, Tenet believed that Rice responded seriously to what she had been told. "We particularly questioned him about whether he had the sense that Dr. Rice and the others on the White House side understood the gravity of what he was telling them," said Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor. "He said that they believed that they did. . . . We asked him further whether Dr. Rice just shrugged this off, and he said he did not have such an impression."

Ben-Veniste's comments seem to contradict his own remarks over the weekend to the New York Times, in which he said that "the meeting was never mentioned to us." Ben-Veniste said yesterday that there was confusion between two different meetings and that the meeting described by Tenet is different in character than the one portrayed by Woodward.

So Woodward's descriptions of the meeting contradict Tenet's own testimony and his recollections to the 9/11 Commission, which puts Woodward once again as standing by his story while multiple participants to the meetings contradict his story.

As with Woodward's controversial recount in his book "The Veil" of a deathbed visit to William Casey, who supposedly confessed to the WaPo reporter that he and Reagan were guilty of Iran/Contra, Woodward is directly contradicted by participants whose credibility is greater than his own.

Woodward is an opportunist, and the MSM will not mind that they have been gulled once again, because his lies fit the prevarications of the leftist narrative the NYT and MSM pilot fish are purveying.