The Mack Attack

Thought-provoking clap-trap for the skeptic-minded

Friday, September 29, 2006

Bob Woodward
NEW BOOK TELLS ALL

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war.
The warning is described in “State of Denial,” scheduled for publication on Monday by Simon & Schuster. 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.
The book, bought by a reporter for The New York Times at retail price in advance of its official release, is the third that Mr. Woodward has written chronicling the inner debates in the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent decision to invade Iraq. Like Mr. Woodward’s previous works, the book includes lengthy verbatim quotations from conversations and describes what senior officials are thinking at various times, without identifying the sources for the information.
Mr. Woodward writes that his book is based on “interviews with President Bush’s national security team, their deputies, and other senior and key players in the administration responsible for the military, the diplomacy, and the intelligence on Iraq.” Some of those interviewed, including Mr. Rumsfeld, are identified by name, but neither Mr. Bush nor Vice President
Dick Cheney agreed to be interviewed, the book says.
Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the
National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.
It says that Mr. Blackwill and
L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.
The book describes a deep fissure between
Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld: When Mr. Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that “if I go, Don should go,” referring to Mr. Rumsfeld.
Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.
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.
Two members of Mr. Bush’s inner circle, Mr. Powell and the director of central intelligence,
George J. Tenet, are described as ambivalent about the decision to invade Iraq. When Mr. Powell assented, reluctantly, in January 2003, Mr. Bush told him in an Oval Office meeting that it was “time to put your war uniform on,” a reference to his many years in the Army.
Mr. Tenet, the man who once told Mr. Bush that it was a “slam-dunk” that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, apparently did not share his qualms about invading Iraq directly with Mr. Bush, according to Mr. Woodward’s account.
Mr. Woodward’s first two books about the Bush administration, “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack,” portrayed a president firmly in command and a loyal, well-run team responding to a surprise attack and the retaliation that followed. As its title indicates, “State of Denial” follows a very different storyline, of an administration that seemed to have only a foggy notion that early military success in Iraq had given way to resentment of the occupiers.
The 537-page book describes tensions among senior officials from the very beginning of the administration. 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.
In the weeks before the Iraq war began, President Bush’s parents did not share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts. Mr. Woodward writes about a private exchange in January 2003 between Mr. Bush’s mother,
Barbara Bush, the former first lady, and David L. Boren, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Bush family friend.
The book says Mrs. Bush asked Mr. Boren whether it was right to be worried about a possible invasion of Iraq, and then to have confided that the president’s father, former President
George H. W. Bush, “is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he’s up at night worried.”
The book describes an exchange in early 2003 between Lt. Gen.
Jay Garner, the retired officer Mr. Bush appointed to administer postwar Iraq, and President Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the postwar mission.
After General Garner finished his PowerPoint presentation — which included his plan to use up to 300,000 troops of the Iraqi Army to help secure postwar Iraq, the book says — there were no questions from anyone in the situation room, and the president gave him a rousing sendoff.
But it was General Garner who was soon removed, in favor of Mr. Bremer, whose actions in dismantling the Iraqi army and removing Baathists from office were eventually disparaged within the government.
The book suggests that senior intelligence officials were caught off guard in the opening days of the war when Iraqi civilian fighters engaged in suicide attacks against armored American forces, the first hint of the deadly insurgent attacks to come.
In a meeting with Mr. Tenet of the
Central Intelligence Agency, several Pentagon officials talked about the attacks, the book says. It says that Mr. Tenet acknowledged that he did not know what to make of them.
Mr. Rumsfeld reached into political matters at the periphery of his responsibilities, according to the book. At one point, Mr. Bush traveled to Ohio, where the Abrams battle tank was manufactured. Mr. Rumsfeld phoned Mr. Card to complain that Mr. Bush should not have made the visit because Mr. Rumsfeld thought the heavy tank was incompatible with his vision of a light and fast military of the future. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Card believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was “out of control.”
The fruitless search for unconventional weapons caused tension between Vice President Cheney’s office, the C.I.A. and officials in Iraq. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Kay, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, e-mailed top C.I.A. officials directly in the summer of 2003 with his most important early findings.
At one point, when Mr. Kay warned that it was possible the Iraqis might have had the capability to make such weapons but did not actually produce them, waiting instead until they were needed, the book says he was told by John McLaughlin, the C.I.A.’s deputy director: “Don’t tell anyone this. This could be upsetting. Be very careful. We can’t let this out until we’re sure.”
Mr. Cheney was involved in the details of the hunt for illicit weapons, the book says. One night, Mr. Woodward wrote, Mr. Kay was awakened at 3 a.m. by an aide who told him Mr. Cheney’s office was on the phone. It says Mr. Kay was told that Mr. Cheney wanted to make sure he had read a highly classified communications intercept picked up from Syria indicating a possible location for chemical weapons.
Mr. Woodward and a colleague, Carl Bernstein, led The Post’s reporting during Watergate, and Mr. Woodward has since written a string of best sellers about Washington. More recently, the identity of Mr. Woodward’s Watergate source known as Deep Throat was disclosed as having been W. Mark Felt, a senior
F.B.I. official.
In late 2005, Mr. Woodward was subpoenaed by the special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case. He also apologized to The Post’s executive editor for concealing for more than two years that he had been drawn into the scandal.

Monday, September 25, 2006

LONDON (Sept. 24) - A leaked intelligence report of Osama bin Laden's death has met skepticism from Western and Muslim governments but may increase a clamor from his followers to show himself on video for the first time in nearly two years.
One theory surrounding the mysterious French leak is that it was designed precisely to flush the al Qaeda leader into the open, prompting him to release a new tape that might give a clue to his whereabouts and state of health.
"Western intelligence, the Americans, the Saudis want bin Laden to appear," said Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamist groups at the al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.
"Perhaps they're trying to agitate him to appear by video to try to fix some information about his real (location)."
Rashwan said expectations of an imminent appearance by bin Laden had mounted among contributors to Islamist Web sites discussing the report of his demise.
The French regional daily L'Est Republican quoted France's DGSE foreign intelligence agency as saying the Saudi secret services were convinced the al Qaeda leader had died of typhoid in Pakistan in late August.
But France, the United States and Britain all said they were unable to confirm the death of bin Laden, who in previous tapes over the past five years has boasted of how he ordered the September 11 attacks on the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Saudi Arabia said on Sunday it had no evidence that he had died, and reports to that effect were "purely speculative."
Bin Laden's most recent audiotapes were issued in July, but the al Qaeda leader, believed to suffer from a serious kidney ailment, has not recorded any new video message since the eve of the U.S. presidential election in late 2004.
That long absence from view -- contrasting with frequent, high-quality video broadcasts from his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri -- has heightened speculation he is either too ill to appear, or too tightly confined to a secret hiding place.
A new tape would give Western intelligence significant clues to bin Laden's physical state. And the logistical chain involved in producing and delivering it to a broadcaster such as Al Jazeera could also be vulnerable to investigation.
But the other, perhaps more likely, explanation behind the French leak is that is just the latest of many speculative and poorly sourced scraps of intelligence on bin Laden, the world's most famous fugitive.
The latest account said he had died from typhoid; others have had him expiring from a lung disease or killed by bombing. Despite a statement last year from then-CIA boss Porter Goss that he had an "excellent" idea of bin Laden's whereabouts, the trail appears to be cold.
"The big question is whether his death ... would have a demoralising effect, or if he achieves the status of martyr and becomes a rallying figure," one U.S. intelligence official said this weekend.
Rashwan, however, was in no doubt bin Laden's death, whenever it happened, would be announced by al Qaeda within days because it would make him an even more powerful symbol and motivator for his supporters.
"He is now the symbol of the Islamic jihad," he said. "He will become for them a kind of myth. It will give them more inspiration than the individual himself."

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Check out the trailer to this 1983 film
http://www.imdb.com/rg/title-tease/trailers/title/tt0086510/trailers

Is Bin Laden Dead?
Is Bush denying it due to election?

PARIS - President Jacques Chirac said Saturday that information contained in a leaked intelligence document raising the possibility that Osama bin Laden may have died of typhoid in Pakistan last month is “in no way whatsoever confirmed.”
Chirac said he was “a bit surprised” at the leak and has asked Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie to probe how a document from a French foreign intelligence service was published in the French press.
The regional newspaper l’Est Republicain on Saturday printed what it described as a copy of a confidential document from the DGSE intelligence service citing an uncorroborated report from Saudi secret services that the leader of the al-Qaida terror network had died.
The DGSE transmitted the document, dated Sept. 21 or Thursday, to Chirac and other top French officials, the newspaper said.
“This information is in no way whatsoever confirmed,” Chirac said Saturday when asked about the document. “I have no comment.”
In Washington, CIA duty officer Paul Gimigliano said he could not confirm the DGSE report.
The Washington-based IntelCenter, which monitors terrorism communications, said it was not aware of any similar reports on the Internet.
“We’ve seen nothing from any al-Qaida messaging or other indicators that would point to the death of Osama bin Laden,” IntelCenter director Ben N. Venzke told The Associated Press.
Last date known is June 29Al-Qaida would likely release information of his death fairly quickly if it were true, said Venzke, whose organization also provides counterterrorism intelligence services for the American government.
“They would want to release that to sort of control the way that it unfolds. If they wait too long, they could lose the initiative on it,” he said.
The last time the IntelCenter says it could be sure bin Laden was alive was June 29, when al-Qaida released an audiotape in which the terror leader eulogized the death of al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq earlier that month.
Chirac spoke at a news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Compiegne, France, where the leaders were holding a summit.
Putin suggested that leaks can be ways to manipulate. “When there are leaks ... one can say that (they) were done especially.”
Earlier the French defense ministry said it was opening an investigation into the leak.
“The information diffused this morning by the l’Est Republicain newspaper concerning the possible death of Osama bin Laden cannot be confirmed,” a Defense Ministry statement said.
The DGSE, or Direction Generale des Services Exterieurs, indicated that its information came from a single source.
“According to a reliable source, Saudi security services are now convinced that Osama bin Laden is dead,” said the intelligence report.
There have been periodic reports of bin Laden’s illness or death in recent years but none has been proven accurate.
According to this report, Saudi security services were pursuing further details, notably the place of his burial.
“The chief of al-Qaida was a victim of a severe typhoid crisis while in Pakistan on August 23, 2006,” the document says. His geographic isolation meant that medical assistance was impossible, the French report said, adding that his lower limbs were allegedly paralyzed.
The report further said Saudi security services had their first information on bin Laden’s alleged death on Sept. 4.
In Pakistan, a senior official of that country’s top spy agency, the ISI or Directorate of Inter-Service Intelligence, said he had no information to confirm bin Laden’s whereabouts or that he might be dead. The official said he believed the report could be fabricated. The official was not authorized to speak publicly on the topic and spoke on condition of anonymity.
U.S. Embassy officials in Pakistan and Afghanistan also said they could not confirm the French report.
Gen. Henri Bentegeat, the French army chief of staff, said in a radio debate last Sunday that bin Laden’s fate remained a mystery.
“Today, bin Laden is certainly not in Afghanistan,” Bentegeat said. “No one is completely certain that he is even alive.”

Friday, September 08, 2006

GOOD FOR CLINTON!

Under pressure from former President Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party, ABC scrambled on Friday to make 11th-hour changes to a miniseries suggesting he was inattentive to the Islamic militant threat that led to the September 11 attacks.
Officials at the Walt Disney Co.-owned network said they were still tinkering with the five-hour production, titled "The Path to 9/11," which is scheduled to air without commercial interruption in two parts on Sunday and Monday.
But ABC declined to say how the movie was being reshaped or whether any changes would address specific complaints lodged by Clinton, his former aides and congressional Democrats that the film contained numerous inaccuracies and distortions.
The Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety, citing sources close to the project, reported the network was considering canceling the miniseries altogether.
The docu-drama, which ABC says is based largely on the official 9/11 Commission Report, opens with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and traces subsequent events leading up to the coordinated suicide hijackings five years ago that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Much of the controversy focuses on a scene depicting CIA agents and Afghan fighters coming close to capturing al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, only to have then-White House national security advisor Samuel Berger refuse to authorize completion of their mission.
An unfinished version of the film circulated by ABC to TV critics for review portrays Berger as abruptly hanging up the phone while the CIA is pressing him to approve the raid.
In letters of protest to Disney President Robert Iger, Berger and former White House aide Bruce Lindsey said no such episode ever occurred.
The executive producer of the film, Marc Platt, acknowledged to Reuters on Thursday the Berger scene was a "conflation of events."
The film also drew denunciations from Clinton supporters for strongly suggesting his administration was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to deal effectively with the gathering threat of Islamic militancy. Lindsey said the 9/11 Commission Report disputed that notion.
POLITICS AND SHOWBIZ
The show has added fuel to the election-year debate over which party, the Republicans or Democrats, is tougher on terrorism.
The Democratic Party, in a message posted on its Web site, called the miniseries "a despicable, irresponsible fraud" and urged an e-mail campaign demanding Iger keep "this propaganda off the air."
Joining the clamor for changes in the miniseries was the star of the film, Harvey Keitel, who said he accepted the role as an FBI counter-terrorism expert under the premise the story was to be told as "history."
"It turned out not all the facts were correct," he said on the Headline News network's "Showbiz Tonight." "You can't put things together, compress them, and then distort the reality. ... You cannot cross the line from conflation of events to a distortion of the event."
Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, who chaired the 9/11 Commission and served as a consultant for the miniseries, has defended the production as balanced. But he told The Washington Post he asked for changes that would address complaints raised by the former Clinton officials.
The newspaper quoted one unidentified ABC executive as saying changes were "intended to make clearer that it was general indecisiveness" by federal officials that left America vulnerable to attacks, "not any one individual."
Trade publication the Hollywood Reporter, citing unnamed sources, said the scene involving Berger and an aborted mission to capture bin Laden would be toned down so that no particular individual was made to appear culpable.
The controversy was reminiscent of the furor stirred by a CBS miniseries about Ronald and Nancy Reagan, which the network canceled after Republicans complained it unfairly and inaccurately portrayed the former president. "The Reagans" ended up airing on sibling cable channel Showtime.
Further complicating the situation for ABC was a prime-time address to the nation President George W. Bush has planned for 9 p.m. EDT on Monday to mark the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, right in the middle of part two of ABC's miniseries.
The network said it would air the first hour of the film, break for 20 minutes to carry Bush's speech live, then broadcast the rest of the movie.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

BURBANK, Calif. (Sept. 6) - Brooke Shields says Tom Cruise has apologized for publicly criticizing her use of antidepressants after the birth of her first daughter. The two had a public beef last year after the "Mission: Impossible III" star, echoing the position of Scientology, said in an appearance on NBC's "Today" show that depression can be treated with exercise and vitamins rather than drugs. The 41-year-old actress says Cruise apologized in person Thursday. "He came over to my house, and he gave me a heartfelt apology," Shields said Friday during an appearance on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." "And he apologized for bringing me into the whole thing and for everything that happened. "And through it all, I was so impressed with how heartfelt it was. And I didn't feel at any time that I had to defend myself, nor did I feel that he was trying to convince me of anything other than the fact that he was deeply sorry. And I accepted it." Cruise's spokesman confirmed the celebrities made up. "It is true that his friendship with Ms. Shields has been mended," spokesman Arnold Robinson said in a statement. "He has not changed his position about antidepressants, which as evidenced by the black label warnings issued by the FDA on these types of drugs, are unhealthy." Shields, who wrote "Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression," has dismissed the actor's remarks as a "ridiculous rant" and "a disservice to mothers everywhere."

web page hit counter
Travelocity Discount Travel