Let Slip the Spooks of War
Henry, Lawrence
T he conventional wisdom about the CIA and the 9/11 attacks runs like this: In the 1970s, under pressure from a liberal Congress, the press, and the Church Committee, the U.S. intelligence...
...Account after account of breathless, tense meetings sound like nothing more sparkling than a transcribed focus group about Amway...
...It has, since then, assumed a defensive posture, relying on electronic spying capabilities, like satellite surveillance...
...Everybody sounds the same...
...write worth crap...
...T he conventional wisdom about the CIA and the 9/11 attacks runs like this: In the 1970s, under pressure from a liberal Congress, the press, and the Church Committee, the U.S...
...Techniques the administration tried out in Afghanistan will no doubt also be appliedagainst Saddam Hussein...
...Has anyone else noticed the resemblance...
...Woodward cannot recreate realistic-sounding speech...
...And he often seems stupefyingly unaware National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice plays piano and sings after one tension-fraught meeting at Camp David and includes in her repertoire the song "01' Man River...
...Bob Wood-ward's first language is that currency of a Washington insider, information...
...So there...
...He cannot evoke the shifts of argument or opinion or emotion...
...He depicts a CIA restrained, true, in the actions its agents might take—but full of secret agents nonetheless, beavering away in hostile territory like Afghanistan, diligent and competent, and ready to rumble, just say the word...
...And true, the resultant self-serving apologia rings up a tasty encore of Washington gossip about the split between hawks and doves in the Bush administration...
...Woodward simply leaves it at that, failing to explore or depict what it means for this remarkable woman, in the company of so many powerful men, to sit down without apparent self-consciousness and sing, "He don't plant 'taters, he don't plant cotton...
...Almost nobody seems to have noticed this remarkable feat...
...All the President's Men includes a passage obviously penned by Carl Bernstein that slams Woodward for writing as though English were his second language...
...Humint," or human intelligence—actual spies or agents on the ground—have been so reduced in number as to be virtually nonexistent...
...Whatever, to read Bush at War, you're going to have to tote that barge and lift that bale, because Woodward, rhetorically, can't do it...
...If Woodward's reporting on Afghanistan is right, then the CIA is hard at work right now with small units of Special Forces, designating targets via GPS coordinates, suborning Iraqi collaborators with promises and weapons and cash, and generally setting the tripwires for multiple traps—thousands of them—ready to clap shut with a bang on Saddam with a single pull of the American trigger...
...This imposture might also explain why so exalted a personage as this high-ranking Washington Post editor (moonlighting from his infomercials) can't...
...Now, in certain circles, Woodward has a reputation as a kind of CIA stooge...
...Bob Woodward's latest book presents a picture almost entirely at odds with that hoary narrative...
...how to put this delicately...
...All else takes second place...
...Sentence after sentence of Bush at War clonks with all the charm of an empty paint can being kicked down the sidewalk...
...But to overlook what the CIA accomplished in Afghanistan—at least according to Woodward—is to shortchange what's likely going on in another theater: Iraq...
...Instead, like Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post, most readers in the press have concentrated on Woodward's apparent primary source for all this inside dope: Colin Powell...
...The book includes some noteworthy information, but you'll have to work to get it...
...Everybody sounds like a stiff...
...intelligence establishment was emasculated...
...Indeed, most of Woodward's accounts of National Security Council deliberations—and, as narrative, the book is almost nothing but—read like a secretary's not-very-adroit typing-up of somebody's notes (Powell's or Armitage's, most likely...
...military operations to rout out alQaeda and overthrow the Taliban...
...He was an intelligence briefing officer during his Navy career, and that has led to dark speculation about his real role in Watergate, notably in the book Silent Coup, by Len Colodny, Robert Gettlin, and Roger Morris (published by Acacia Press, but now out of print...
...1t...
...And if President Bush has turned the CIA loose to assassinate, collaborate, and kidnap—as Woodward claims he did in Afghanistan—the war against Saddam this time will look a whole lot different from the spectacular massed forces of the Gulf War a decade ago...
...Myself, I think Bob Woodward and Ron Popeil are one and the same person...
...Those agents got the word from President Bush, according to Woodward, and were critically responsible for the success of U.S...
...Maybe that's why so maw/ commentators have missed the CIA story...
...True, Powell and his friends—notably Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage—seem to have performed a virtual core dump of information for this ur icon of investigative journalism...
...Has anyone ever seen the two of them together...
Vol. 36 • January 2003 • No. 1
