More from Upcoming Woodward Book Emerges

Card Urged Bush to Replace Rumsfeld, Woodward Says
Card Urged Bush to Replace Rumsfeld, Woodward Says
By William Hamilton, Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 29, 2006

Former White House chief of staff Andrew Card on two occasions tried and failed to persuade President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, according to a new book by Bob Woodward that depicts senior officials of the Bush administration as unable to face the consequences of their policy in Iraq.

Card made his first attempt after Bush was reelected in November, 2004, arguing that the administration needed a fresh start and recommending that Bush replace Rumsfeld with former secretary of state James A. Baker III. Woodward writes that Bush considered the move, but was persuaded by Vice President Cheney and Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, that it would be seen as an expression of doubt about the course of the war and would expose Bush himself to criticism.

Card tried again around Thanksgiving, 2005, this time with the support of First Lady Laura Bush, who according to Woodward, felt that Rumsfeld's overbearing manner was damaging to her husband. Bush refused for a second time, and Card left the administration last March, convinced that Iraq would be compared to Vietnam and that history would record that no senior administration officials had raised their voices in opposition to the conduct of the war.

The book is the third that Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, has written on the Bush administration since the terrorist attacks of September, 11, 2001. The first two were attacked by critics of the Bush administration as depicting the president in a heroic light. But the new book's title, "State of Denial," conveys the different picture that Woodward paints of the Bush administration since the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003.

Woodward writes that there was a vast difference between what the White House and Pentagon had known about the situation in Iraq and what they were saying publicly. In memos, reports and internal debates administration officials have voiced their concern about the conduct of the war, even while Bush and cabinet members such as Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have insisted that the war was going well.

Last May, Woodward writes, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence estimate predicting that violence will not only continue for the rest of this year in Iraq but increase in 2007.

"Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year," said the report, which was distributed to the White House, State Department and other intelligence agencies.

The report presented a similarly bleak assessment of oil production, electricity generation and the political situation in Iraq.

"Threats of Shia ascendancy could harden and expand Shia militant opposition and increase calls for coalition withdrawal," the report said.

Woodward writes that Rice and Rumsfeld have been warned repeatedly about the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

Returning from his assignment as the first head of the Iraq Postwar Planning Office, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner told Rumsfeld on June 23, 2003, that the United States had made "three tragic mistakes" in Iraq.

The first two, he said, were the orders his successor, L. Paul Jerry Bremer, had given banning members of the Baath Party from government jobs and disbanding the Iraqi military. The third was Bremmer's dismissal of an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term.

"There's still time to rectify this," he said. "There's still time to turn it around."

But Rumsfeld dismissed the idea, according to Woodward. "We're not going to go back," Rumsfeld said.

Book Says Bush Ignored Urgent Warning on Iraq
September 29, 2006
Book Says Bush Ignored Urgent Warning on Iraq
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, Sept. 28, 2006

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.
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Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington, and Julie Bosman from New York.

Exerpts from STATE OF DENIAL by Bob Woodward
Exerpts from STATE OF DENIAL
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 1, 2006; A01

In May, President Bush spoke in Chicago and gave a characteristically upbeat forecast: "Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat."

Two days later, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence assessment to the White House that contradicted the president's forecast.

Instead of a "long retreat," the report predicted a more violent 2007: "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year."

A graph included in the assessment measured attacks from May 2003 to May 2006. It showed some significant dips, but the current number of attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces and Iraqi authorities was as high as it had ever been -- exceeding 3,500 a month. (In July the number would be over 4,500.) The assessment also included a pessimistic report on crude oil production, the delivery of electricity and political progress.

On May 26, the Pentagon released an unclassified report to Congress, required by law, that contradicted the Joint Chiefs' secret assessment. The public report sent to Congress said the "appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007."

There was a vast difference between what the White House and the Pentagon knew about the situation in Iraq and what they were saying publicly. But the discrepancy was not surprising. In memos, reports and internal debates, high-level officials of the Bush administration have voiced their concern about the United States' ability to bring peace and stability to Iraq since early in the occupation.

(The release last week of portions of a National Intelligence Estimate concluding that the war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for terrorists -- following a series of upbeat speeches by the president -- presented a similar contrast.)

On June 18, 2003, Jay Garner went to see Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to report on his brief tenure in Iraq as head of the postwar planning office. Throughout the invasion and the early days of the war, Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general, had struggled just to get his team into Iraq. Two days after he arrived, Rumsfeld called to tell him that L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, a 61-year-old terrorism expert and protege of Henry A. Kissinger, would be coming over as the presidential envoy, effectively replacing Garner.

"We've made three tragic decisions," Garner told Rumsfeld at their meeting.

"Really?" Rumsfeld said.

"Three terrible mistakes," Garner said.

He cited the first two orders Bremer signed when he arrived, the first banning as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from government jobs and the second disbanding the Iraqi military. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around.

Third, Garner said, Bremer had summarily dismissed an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term. "Jerry Bremer can't be the face of the government to the Iraqi people. You've got to have an Iraqi face for the Iraqi people," he said.

Garner made his final point: "There's still time to rectify this. There's still time to turn it around."

Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. "Well," he said, "I don't think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are."

He thinks I've lost it, Garner thought. He thinks I'm absolutely wrong. Garner didn't want it to sound like sour grapes, but facts were facts. "They're all reversible," Garner said again.

"We're not going to go back," Rumsfeld said emphatically.

Later that day, Garner went with Rumsfeld to the White House. But in a meeting with Bush, he made no mention of mistakes. Instead he regaled the president with stories of his time in Baghdad.

In an interview last December, I asked Garner if he had any regrets in not telling the president about his misgivings.

"You know, I don't know if I had that moment to live over again, I don't know if I'd do that or not. But if I had done that -- and quite frankly, I mean, I wouldn't have had a problem doing that -- but in my thinking, the door's closed. I mean, there's nothing I can do to open this door again. And I think if I had said that to the president in front of Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld in there, the president would have looked at them and they would have rolled their eyes back and he would have thought, 'Boy, I wonder why we didn't get rid of this guy sooner?' "

"They didn't see it coming," Garner added. "As the troops said, they drank the Kool-Aid."

What's the Strategy?

In the fall of 2003 and the winter of 2004, officials of the National Security Council became increasingly concerned about the ability of the U.S. military to counter the growing insurgency in Iraq.

Returning from a visit to Iraq, Robert D. Blackwill, the NSC's top official for Iraq, was deeply disturbed by what he considered the inadequate number of troops on the ground there. He told Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, that the NSC needed to do a military review.

"If we have a military strategy, I can't identify it," Hadley said. "I don't know what's worse -- that they have one and won't tell us or that they don't have one."

Rice had made it clear that her authority did not extend to Rumsfeld or the military, so Blackwill never forced the issue with her. Still, he wondered why the president never challenged the military. Why didn't he say to Gen. John P. Abizaid at the end of one of his secure video briefings, "John, let's have another of these on Thursday and what I really want from you is please explain to me, let's take an hour and a half, your military strategy for victory."

After Bush's reelection, Hadley replaced Rice as national security adviser. He made an assessment of the problems from the first term.

"I give us a B-minus for policy development," he told a colleague on Feb. 5, 2005, "and a D-minus for policy execution."

Rice, for her part, hired Philip D. Zelikow, an old friend, and sent him immediately to Iraq. She needed ground truth, a full, detailed report from someone she trusted. Zelikow had a license to go anywhere and ask any question.

On Feb. 10, 2005, two weeks after Rice became secretary of state, Zelikow presented her with a 15-page, single-spaced secret memo. "At this point Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change," Zelikow wrote.

The insurgency was "being contained militarily," but it was "quite active," leaving Iraqi civilians feeling "very insecure," Zelikow said.

U.S. officials seemed locked down in the fortified Green Zone. "Mobility of coalition officials is extremely limited, and productive government activity is constrained."

Zelikow criticized the Baghdad-centered effort, noting that "the war can certainly be lost in Baghdad, but the war can only be won in the cities and provinces outside Baghdad."

In sum, he said, the United States' effort suffered because it lacked an articulated, comprehensive, unified policy.

Lessons From Kissinger

A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush's Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.

"Of the outside people that I talk to in this job," Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter and I sit down with him." (Scooter is I. Lewis Libby, then Cheney's chief of staff.)

The president met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.

Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw the situation through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.

In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.

In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled "Lessons for an Exit Strategy," Kissinger wrote, "Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy."

He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.

Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don't let it happen again. Don't give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.

He said the eventual outcome in Iraq was more important than Vietnam had been. A radical Islamic or Taliban-style government in Iraq would be a model that could challenge the internal stability of key countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Kissinger told Rice that in Vietnam they didn't have the time, focus, energy or support at home to get the politics in place. That's why it had collapsed like a house of cards. He urged that the Bush administration get the politics right, both in Iraq and on the home front. Partially withdrawing troops had its own dangers. Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create momentum for an exit that was less than victory.

In a meeting with presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson in early September 2005, Kissinger was more explicit: Bush needed to resist the pressure to withdraw American troops. He repeated his axiom that the only meaningful exit strategy was victory.

"The president can't be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece," Kissinger said. "You may want to reduce troops," but troop reduction should not be the objective. "This is not where you put the emphasis."

To emphasize his point, he gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had written to President Richard M. Nixon, dated Sept. 10, 1969.

"Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded," he wrote.

The policy of "Vietnamization," turning the fight over to the South Vietnamese military, Kissinger wrote, might increase pressure to end the war because the American public wanted a quick resolution. Troop withdrawals would only encourage the enemy. "It will become harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers."

Two months after Gerson's meeting, the administration issued a 35-page "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." It was right out of the Kissinger playbook. The only meaningful exit strategy would be victory.

Echoes of Vietnam

Vietnam was also on the minds of some old Army buddies of Gen. Abizaid, the Centcom commander. They were worried that Iraq was slowly turning into Vietnam -- either it would wind down prematurely or become a war that was not winnable.

Some of them, including retired Gen. Wayne A. Downing and James V. Kimsey, a founder of America Online, visited Abizaid in 2005 at his headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and then in Iraq.

Abizaid held to the position that the war was now about the Iraqis. They had to win it now. The U.S. military had done all it could. It was critical, he argued, that they lower the American troop presence. It was still the face of an occupation, with American forces patrolling, kicking down doors and looking at the Iraqi women, which infuriated the Iraqi men.

"We've got to get the [expletive] out," he said.

Abizaid's old friends were worried sick that another Vietnam or anything that looked like Vietnam would be the end of the volunteer army. What's the strategy for winning? they pressed him.

"That's not my job," Abizaid said.

No, it is part of your job, they insisted.

No, Abizaid said. Articulating strategy belonged to others.

Who?

"The president and Condi Rice, because Rumsfeld doesn't have any credibility anymore," he said.

This March, Abizaid was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq.

Afterward, he went over to see Rep. John P. Murtha in the Rayburn House Office Building. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, had introduced a resolution in Congress calling for American troops in Iraq to be "redeployed" -- the military term for returning troops overseas to their home bases -- "at the earliest practicable date."

"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised," Murtha had said. "It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion."

Now, sitting at the round dark-wood table in the congressman's office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis, held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, "We're that far apart."

Frustration and Resignation

That same month, White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. prepared to leave the administration after submitting his resignation to Bush. He felt a sense of relief mixed with the knowledge that he was leaving unfinished business.

"It's Iraq, Iraq, Iraq," Card had told his replacement, Joshua B. Bolten. "Then comes the economy."

One of Card's great worries was that Iraq would be compared to Vietnam. In March, there were 58,249 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. One of Kissinger's private criticisms of Bush was that he had no mechanism in place, or even an inclination, to consider the downsides of impending decisions. Alternative courses of action were rarely considered.

As best Card could remember, there had been some informal, blue-sky discussions at times along the lines of "What could we do differently?" But there had been no formal sessions to consider alternatives to staying in Iraq. To his knowledge there were no anguished memos bearing the names of Cheney, Rice, Hadley, Rumsfeld, the CIA, Card himself or anyone else saying "Let's examine alternatives," as had surfaced after the Vietnam era.

Card put it on the generals in the Pentagon and Iraq. If they had come forward and said to the president "It's not worth it" or "The mission can't be accomplished," Card was certain, the president would have said "I'm not going to ask another kid to sacrifice for it."

Card was enough of a realist to see that two negative aspects to Bush's public persona had come to define his presidency: incompetence and arrogance. Card did not believe that Bush was incompetent, and so he had to face the possibility that as Bush's chief of staff, he might have been the incompetent one. In addition, he did not think the president was arrogant.

But the marketing of Bush had come across as arrogant. Maybe it was unfair in Card's opinion, but there it was.

He was leaving. And the man most responsible for the postwar troubles, the one who should have gone, Rumsfeld, was staying.
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Bill Murphy Jr. and Christine Parthemore contributed to this report.

State of Denial: Two months before 9/11, Rice gave the 'brush-off' to 'impending terrorist attack' warning http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/State_of_Denial_Two_months_before_0930.html

Bush vs. Woodward; Only one reputation can survive
Bush vs. Woodward
Only one reputation can survive.
By John Dickerson, Slate
Posted Friday, Sept. 29, 2006

Bob Woodward's 2002 book Bush at War portrayed the president in such a heroic light that the Republican National Committee promoted it on their Web site. But Woodward's third Bush book, State of Denial, should probably be for sale on the DNC's Web site. Or perhaps Democrats will just hand it out at campaign rallies.

The book doesn't officially come out until Monday, but the storm that attends any Woodward publication is already upon us. An excerpt from Woodward's 60 Minutes interview has been released. The New York Times did a speed-read of a copy they were nimble enough to get early, and the Washington Post started its multiday coverage. (By the end of Friday, State of Denial was No. 1 on Amazon.)

The disclosures so far have been devastating. The book paints the administration as clueless, dishonest, and dysfunctional. The behind-the-scenes anecdotes are irresistible. Laura Bush telling her husband he should fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Vice President Cheney pushing aides to call the chief weapons inspector in the middle of the night with coordinates for a site in Syria that might have those elusive weapons. Secret White House visits by Henry Kissinger. Bush having to tell Rumsfeld to return Condoleezza Rice's calls. Memos describing Rumsfeld's "rubber glove syndrome"?-he didn't want to leave fingerprints on decisions.

In the renewed battle between the Bush and Clinton dynasties over who did more to kill Osama Bin Laden, the book offers a damaging account of a meeting between Condi Rice and then-CIA director George Tenet. In July 2001, Tenet rushed over to the White House to make his case in person about the rising threat, but Rice blew him off. Administration officials from Cheney to Rice have been throwing Tenet under a bus recently, blaming him for the faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They recite his line from Woodward's second Bush book, in which he said the case for weapons was a "slam dunk." Presumably, Tenet or his allies are using the third book as payback.

State of Denial is a significant blow to the president both politically and strategically. Politically it comes after the 9/11 anniversary restored some of Bush's popularity and improved voters' feelings about his administration's competency. Democrats jumped on the new revelations, holding a press conference Friday on Capitol Hill to talk about the book before it had even come out, proving that press conferences?-like many book reviews?-do not require actually reading the book.

As a policy matter, the book undermines Bush's attempts to strengthen the national will for the long and drawn-out fight ahead. For the last year, the administration has been unsuccessfully trying to get the mix in the president's public statements right: enough candor to show people Bush is aware of what's really going on in Iraq but enough optimism to keep Americans behind the fight. "There is a clear distinction between having confidence in your strategy and that ultimate success is achievable while also recognizing it will be extremely difficult to get there," says a senior White House official. "The president's speeches during the last year have struck that balance. What was Churchill saying during the middle of the blitz?-'have no fear, we're losing and things won't get better?' Hell no; he was honest about the predicament, but confident that they would succeed. By no means am I saying the president is Churchillian, but there is a long history of war-time leaders being optimistic even during the darkest days."

Woodward's book undermines the effort to make this pitch. He charges the president has not been straight with the American people about how bad things are in Iraq and how much worse it's going to get. But his most damning claim?-screaming at you right there in the title?-is not that Bush is deceitful; it's that he's clueless. People many not care if Bush admits reality to the public, but they hope he's admitting reality to himself.

Gen. John Abizaid, the top military officer in Iraq, has said no troops will come home before next spring at the earliest. Will Americans continue to support that level of engagement or greater if they feel that the strategy behind it is the product of the incompetence outlined in the Woodward book? At some point, the American public's sense of courage and determination will be outweighed by its outrage at ineptitude. In the book, the president reportedly says about Iraq: "I will not withdraw even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me." After State of Denial is published, the president may be closer to that moment.

What makes the Woodward book different from the many other books critical of the Bush war effort is not only the piquancy of his anecdotes but the tonnage of the publicity behind it. The Bob Woodward/Simon & Schuster machine is vast and it's not going to let you sit there and think this is just any other book critical of Bush. First printing was 750,000 copies, and they've already gone back for another 75,000. After the Mike Wallace interview on 60 Minutes, Newsweek and the Washington Post will run excerpts, and then the television daisy chain will begin: the Today show on Monday (the first of two parts), followed by NBC Nightly News with Andrea Mitchell, Larry King Live, ABC World News Tonight with Stephanopolous, Charlie Rose, and NPR. Woodward could very well show up on the BBQ network by the time this is all over.

To battle back, the administration might be inclined to shoot the messenger. But the White House has cooperated with Woodward for his first two books. He provided a kind of cover for the Bush team during the Valerie Plame saga as well. He, like Robert Novak, learned that Plame worked at the CIA from Richard Armitage, but Woodward never wrote about it. He went on to describe the investigation into the leaker as an assault on First Amendment protections of the press. It will be hard to paint him as a partisan hack.

To the extent administration officials are trying to undermine his findings, it is to suggest that he had to "come hard from the outset," as one put it to me. Because he received so much criticism from the left for his first books, the officials suggest, Woodward is trying extra hard to attack the president this time. But the problem the Woodward book presents for the Bush administration is not that his anecdotes of mismanagement seem shocking or unexpected, but that they don't. Woodward isn't going to change minds, but he'll do something more dangerous: He will confirm the doubts about Bush that a majority of Americans already have.
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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at [email protected] .

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2150601/

The Woodward War
The Woodward War
By Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe
Newsweek
Oct. 9, 2006 issue

Another book, another political blow. How the Bush team is handling the rain of bad news on Iraq, and what it means for Secretary Rumsfeld's future.

The White House had more than an inkling of what was coming. This was Bob Woodward's third book about the Bush administration since 9/11, and it was sure to be less friendly than the first two. In scores of interviews over many months, Woodward's questions to senior officials had been more aggressive, more hostile. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seemed to be a particular target of the veteran Washington Post reporter, who remains, three decades after his Watergate debut, the best excavator of inside stories in the nation's capital. White House aides did recommend that the president and the vice president not grant interviews, but it was obvious that Woodward could, and would, get just about everyone else in positions of authority to talk.

When "State of Denial" arrived at the White House Friday morning, a team of aides went to work deconstructing the 576-page volume. Some of Woodward's revelations, like the scenes of Bush rejecting pleas for more troops in Iraq, the White House tried to dismiss as old news. Woodward's depictions of tensions within Bush's inner circle were played down or denied. It was not true, White House aides told reporters, that First Lady Laura Bush wanted to see Rumsfeld fired. Harder to slough off was Woodward's account of the role played by former chief of staff Andy Card. The White House made no serious attempt to refute Card's campaign to unseat Rummy. (Card himself quibbled over the word "campaign," telling reporters that the discussions about Rumsfeld's future needed to be seen in a "broader context.") Instead, White House spokesman Tony Snow took a dismissive, this-too-will-pass tone. Woodward's book is like "cotton candy," Snow said. "It kind of melts on contact."

A truer simile might be to a loud musical instrument. An orchestra of books has raised a cacophony of doubts about the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq. Coming after Bernard Trainor and Michael Gordon's "Cobra II," Tom Ricks's "Fiasco," Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine," "Hubris" by NEWSWEEK's Michael Isikoff and The Nation's David Corn, Woodward's "State of Denial" resounded among the administration's growing chorus of critics like a clash of cymbals.


With the midterm elections only five weeks away, Bush and his political minions have been striving mightily to direct the attention of voters away from Iraq and toward the threat of a terrorist attack. But Iraq keeps coming back into the headlines. Before the Woodward book began landing in stores late last week, portions of a National Intelligence Estimate began leaking out, suggesting that the war in Iraq was undermining the war on terror. The leaked portions of the NIE, a document representing a consensus of the U.S. intelligence community, disclosed the somewhat unsurprising conclusion that Iraq was turning into a training ground for terrorists. Bush responded by authorizing the declassification of other portions of the NIE, suggesting that if American forces were to quit Iraq, the problem would only grow worse. But simply "staying the course" in Iraq may not satisfy American voters who can see only darkness at the end of the tunnel.

Democrats as well as a few Republicans will renew their calls for Rumsfeld's head, but it is doubtful that Bush will dump his Defense secretary before the elections. That might be seen as a concession to the "Defeatocrats," as the GOP likes to call the opposition. (Rumsfeld himself had no comment about Woodward's book.) But a senior White House official, operating under the usual cover of anonymity, gave a less than airtight guarantee of Rumsfeld's job security. The president, normally one to rely on his inner circle, has been consulting outsiders. The official did not say which ones, but it is known that Bush speaks on occasion to Henry Kissinger and to his father's former secretary of State, James A. Baker. The counsel of the outsiders, says this official, "so far has been that Rumsfeld should stay. But I can't predict the future."

The Rumsfeld portrayed by Woodward is bullying and petty. Bush himself doesn't come off much better. The president is folksy and jocular, but incurious to the point of cluelessness. His war cabinet is deeply dysfunctional. Condoleezza Rice is almost a pathetic figure, whining to the president that she can't get Rumsfeld to return her calls.

As you read the excerpt that follows, keep in mind some essential context. The administration was not just unlucky. It was almost willfully blind to the risks entailed in invading and occupying a large, traumatized and deeply riven Arab country. Rumsfeld, who pushed aside Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell to take over even the planning for postwar Iraq, wanted a lean and mean force to get in and get out quickly. This was all well and good as long as American forces could turn over the job of running the country to an effective group of local Iraqis. But the planning for this was hamstrung by disputes over the postwar role of Iraqi exiles. When Iraq began to unravel, the administration?-with little debate?-lurched in the other direction. The White House installed Paul Bremer as a kind of grand pooh-bah over all of Iraq, but Rumsfeld refused to give him the forces he needed for a long occupation.


Woodward writes that when Gen. Jay Garner, the man Bremer replaced in Baghdad, returned to Washington in June 2003, he told Rumsfeld that the United States had made "three terrible decisions." Garner told the Defense secretary that Bremer had seriously blundered by purging the bureaucracy, disbanding the Army and dismissing an interim leadership group. Rumsfeld shrugged off the concerns, according to Woodward. "I don't think there's anything we can do, because we are where we are."

There is always the risk in these instant histories that disgruntled former officials will cover their posteriors for posterity. One of Woodward's more obvious and prominent sources is former CIA director George Tenet. In "State of Denial," Tenet is deeply ambivalent about going to war in Iraq, but it does not appear that he voiced his concerns loudly or well inside the Oval Office. White House spokesmen were not just blowing smoke last week when they cautioned reporters to look for self-serving motivations behind some of the leaks.

Even so, Woodward's book is studded with documents and memos from Bush insiders that paint a much gloomier view of the war than the president's public statements at the time. After the first two, generally positive, volumes in his "Bush at War" series, Woodward (an object of fascination and much jealousy in the press corps) was widely derided for playing stenographer to the president and his hero-worshiping advisers. In "State of Denial," Woodward expresses shock and disbelief in interviews with Rumsfeld at his apparent denials and equivocations. Interviewed by Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, Woodward was matter-of-fact about his new, more critical tone. "I found out new things, as is always the case when you replow old ground," Woodward said. "The bulk of them I discovered this year. I wish I'd had some of them for the earlier books, but I didn't."


Woodward's new book, like the other critical treatments of the war, is still an early draft of history. But with each new revelation, with each depiction of the chaotic events inside the White House and Pentagon in the months before and after the invasion of Iraq, the picture of Bush's leadership becomes more refined and more disappointing.

With John Barry

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15081915/site/newsweek/page/2/

Woodward on '60 Minutes' Denies He Was Out to Get Bush
Woodward on '60 Minutes' Denies He Was Out to Get Bush
By E&P Staff
Published: October 01, 2006 8:25 PM ET

Appearing on "60 Minutes" Sunday night, Bob Woodward talked with Mike Wallace about his new book "State of Denial," but many of the revelations in the interview had already emerged since the existence of the book broke several days ago.

In one dramatic moment, however, Wallace told Woodward that since President Bush did not talk to him for this book -- after submitting to lengthy interviews for his past two books on the White House -- that critics might say that the reporter decided to hit back at Bush in response. Woodward strongly denied it, saying "It's not true." He said he had passed along to Bush his questions based on what he'd heard from others, so that might explain why the president did not respond. "What could he say?" Woodward asked. "That what was said in meetings did not occur?"

Woodward also revealed that Wallace's producer at "60 MInutes" had listened to many of his audio tapes of interviews to confirm certain charges.

Another excerpt from the Woodward books appears in The Washington Post on Monday. Yet another runs in Newsweek.

The "60 Minutes" interview opened with Woodward stating flatly: "It's the oldest story in the coverage of government -- the failure to tell the truth."

He said that John Negroponte, the former top U.S. official in Iraq, had told him that the situation is worse there now, and will get worse. Negroponte said "we always miscalculated" the strength of the insurgency.

Another new item concerned Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. military operations in Iraq, visiting Rep. John Murtha last year after the latter called for a speedy U.S. withdrawal. According to Woodward, Abizaid in the meeting held up two fingers "only a quarter inch apart" and said that was how close they were in their views on a pullout.

Referring to administration claims of progress in turning over duties in Iraq, Woodward said of the Iraqi forces: "They stood up, and up -- and we didn't stand down." In fact, he added, the war "is worse." Two and a half years after the invasion, the administration "can't agree on a strategy -- the bumper sticker," Woodward added.

Another twist tonight was the playing of a portion of Woodward's interview with Vice President Cheney, where Cheney said that the president is a "big fan" of Henry Kissinger. Woodward added that Kissinger is "almost a member of the family." It had previously come out that that the book reveals that Kissinger is considered one of the top advisers to Bush and Cheney on the war, with Woodward commenting, "Kissinger is fighting the Vietnam war again."

Woodward said he didn't know if George H.W. Bush had expressed his dismay about the decision to invade Iraq to his son, but the former president did express that to Brent Scowcroft.

The Woodward excerpt in the Post on Monday includes much that has already been reported based on early leaks from the book. It closes with this the following anecdote.

*

Card's relationship with Rumsfeld was always difficult. Last year, in the days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans with devastating effect, Bush decided more troops were needed and asked Card to relay the message to Rumsfeld.

"You know I don't report to you," Rumsfeld said.

"I know you don't report to me," Card replied. "You report to the president. But believe me, he would like you to do this."

"I'm not going to do it unless the president tells me," Rumsfeld told the chief of staff. Too many strains and obligations were being placed on the National Guard.

Card protested that he had just talked to the president, who had made an absolute decision.

"Then he's going to have to tell me," Rumsfeld said.

"Hey," the president said to Card later. "Rumsfeld called me up. I thought you were going to handle that."

Condi Rice vs. Bob Woodward: Let the Battle Begin
Condi Rice vs. Bob Woodward: Let the Battle Begin
By Greg Mitchell, editor of E&P.
October 01, 2006

Why wasn't the 9/11 Commission told about a July 10, 2001, meeting in which Condoleezza Rice was warned, in no uncertain terms, that a terrorist attack on the U.S. was near at hand? Now she disputes the account in the Woodward book. If it's accurate, will she resign?

While it may get overlooked in the torrent of revelations related to Iraq in the new Bob Woodward book, "State of Denial," his bombshell account of a previously unknown warning about terror attacks on the U.S. just before 9/1, delivered directly to Condoleezza Rice, seems equally significant. Now Rice is disputing the account. How will Woodward respond? And if his story holds up, will she resign?

This angle gained more attention on Monday with The New York Times reporting that some 9/11 Commission members are alarmed that they were never told about this warning. Timothy J. Roemer, a member of the commission, tells the Times, "I'm deeply disturbed by this. I'm furious." The Times relates that some commissioners question "whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel." The Washington Post, meanwhile, on the same day, carries Rice's denial -- meaning the next move belongs to Woodward, perhaps on "Larry King Live."

President Bush, refering to Osama bin Laden, told Woodward for one of his previous books: "I have no hesitancy about going after him, but I didn't feel that sense of urgency and my blood was not nearly as boiling. Whose blood was nearly as boiling prior to September 11?" We now know, thanks to the new Woodward book, that two months before 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet and his counter-terrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, did feel their "blood boiling," but Rice, in an urgent meeting they called, brushed them off -- about a coming attack on U.S. soil.

Responding to the Woodward book, Rice told The Washington Post for Monday's edition that an aide was checking on the meeting, but added, "What I am quite certain of, however, is that I would remember if I was told--as this account apparently says--that there was about to be an attack in the United States. The idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible."

So, if the story is confirmed -- Woodward's track record is strong -- Rice should quit. Let's see what Tenet and Black and any documents say.

My check of her testimony before the 9/11 Commission in 2004 reveals that not only did she not disclose this meeting with the two men -- she also gave misleading information about the level of threats to the homeland that she learned about that summer.

How do we square Black's account (in the Woodward book) of that July 10, 2001, meeting -- "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head"?-and Rice's statement to the 9/11 Commission, "There was no threat reporting of any substance about an attack coming in the United States"?

The Woodward book describes how, on that July day, Tenet met with Black at CIA headquarters. Black laid out the case, consisting of intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States: "The mass of fragments made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately."

Tenet urgently called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser. "Tenet and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action," Woodward writes. "Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming."

Woodward describes the meeting, and the two officials' plea that the U.S. "needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden." The result? "Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long....

"Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, Tenet thought, but she just didn't get it in time. Black later said, 'The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.'"

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

Now, what about Rice's testimony to the 9/11 Commission? Rice not only did not mention the July 10 meeting, but insisted that all or nearly all warnings about impending terrorist activity concerned attacks outside the country, not within our borders. She said this multiple times.

Her other main defense was that there was a ?'structural' problem that prevented direct and clear communication between agencies and up the chain of command. Yet nothing could have been more clear and direct than the July 10, 2001, meeting.

"We had a structural problem in the United States," Rice testified, "and that structural problem was that we did not share domestic and foreign intelligence in a way to make a product for policymakers, for good reasons -- for legal reasons, for cultural reasons -- a product that people could depend upon."

Rice also said, "I've asked myself a thousand times what more we could have done." She said if she knew an attack was coming, "we would have moved heaven and earth to try and stop it. And I know that there was no single thing that might have prevented that attack.

"In hindsight, if anything might have helped stop 9/11, it would have been better information about threats inside the United States." Of course, to get that started, she might have let Richard Clarke brief the president, or -- something.

Instead, Rice declared, "I think it is really quite unfair to suggest that something that was a threat spike in June or July gave you the kind of opportunity to make the changes in air security that could have been -- that needed to be made."

Some of the most revealing passages in her 2004 public testimony before the 9/11 Commission came in exchanges with Roemer. Here are some highlights.

ROEMER: I don't understand, given the big threat, why the big principals don't get together. The principals meet 33 times in seven months, on Iraq, on the Middle East, on missile defense, China, on Russia. Not once do the principals ever sit down -- you, in your job description as the national security advisor, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the president of the United States -- and meet solely on terrorism to discuss in the spring and the summer, when these threats are coming in, when you've known since the transition that al Qaeda cells are in the United States, when, as the PDB said on August 6, bin Laden determined to attack the United States.

Why don't the principals at that point say, "Let's all talk about this, let's get the biggest people together in our government and discuss what this threat is and try to get our bureaucracies responding to it"?

RICE: Once again, on the August 6 memorandum to the president, this was not threat-reporting about what was about to happen. This was an analytic piece. Mr. Roemer, threat reporting is: "We believe that something is going to happen here and at this time, under these circumstances." This was not threat reporting.

ROEMER: Well, actionable intelligence, Dr. Rice, is when you have the place, time and date. The threat reporting saying the United States is going to be attacked should trigger the principals getting together to say we're going to do something about this, I would think.

RICE: Mr. Roemer, let's be very clear. The PDB does not say the United States is going to be attacked. It says bin Laden would like to attack the United States. I don't think you, frankly, had to have that report to know that bin Laden would like to attack the United States.

ROEMER: So why aren't you doing something about that earlier than August 6?

RICE: The threat reporting to which we could respond was in June and July about threats abroad. What we tried to do for -- just because people said you cannot rule out an attack on the United States, was to have the domestic agencies and the FBI together to just pulse them and have them be on alert.

ROEMER: So, Dr. Rice, let's say that the FBI is the key here. You say that the FBI was tasked with trying to find out what the domestic threat was. We have done thousands of interviews here at the 9/11 Commission. We've gone through literally millions of pieces of paper. To date, we have found nobody -- nobody at the FBI who knows anything about a tasking of field offices.

We have talked to the director at the time of the FBI during this threat period, Mr. Pickard. He says he did not tell the field offices to do this.

And we have talked to the special agents in charge. They don't have any recollection of receiving a notice of threat.

Nothing went down the chain to the FBI field offices on spiking of information, on knowledge of al Qaeda in the country, and still, the FBI doesn't do anything.

Isn't that some of the responsibility of the national security advisor?

RICE: The responsibility for the FBI to do what it was asked was the FBI's responsibility. Now, I...

ROEMER: You don't think there's any responsibility back to the advisor to the president...

RICE: I believe that the responsibility -- again, the crisis management here was done by the CSG. They tasked these things. If there was any reason to believe that I needed to do something or that Andy Card needed to do something, I would have been expected to be asked to do it. We were not asked to do it. In fact, as I've...

ROEMER: But don't you ask somebody to do it? You're not asking somebody to do it. Why wouldn't you initiate that?

RICE: Mr. Roemer, I was responding to the threat spike and to where the information was. The information was about what might happen in the Persian Gulf, what might happen in Israel, what might happen in North Africa. We responded to that, and we responded vigorously.

Rumsfeld says he won't resign
Rumsfeld says he won't resign
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer
Sun Oct 1, 2006

MANAGUA, Nicaragua - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, coming under renewed fire for his management of the Iraq war, said Sunday he is not considering resigning and said the president had called him personally in recent days to express his continued support.

Speaking to reporters en route to Nicaragua for a meeting of defense ministers, Rumsfeld said he was not surprised by reports in a new book that White House staff had encouraged President Bush to fire him after the 2004 election.

"It's the task of the chief of staff of the White House ?- and having been one, I know that ?- to raise all kinds of questions with the president and think through different ways of approaching things," Rumsfeld said. "So it wouldn't surprise me a bit if that subject had come up."

Asked by reporters if he had recently considered resigning, Rumsfeld said, "No."

In the new book "State of Denial," Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward writes that former White House chief of staff Andrew Card twice sought to persuade Bush to fire Rumsfeld.

Card on Friday did not dispute that he had talked about a Rumsfeld resignation with the president but said it was his job to discuss a wide range of possible replacements, including his own.

Rumsfeld on Sunday also denied any rift with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and said the ongoing debate doesn't detract from his work with other international leaders.

He said he had spoken to Bush since the book's contents were made public. Bush "called me personally," said Rumsfeld, to voice support.

Rumsfeld has previously acknowledged that he twice offered Bush his resignation, but it was not accepted.

The defense secretary and Bush have faced growing criticism for their handling of the Iraq war as violence there has escalated, U.S. casualties have mounted and public support for the conflict has declined. Fueling the debate in recent days was the release of a classified intelligence report that concluded that the Iraq war has helped fuel a new generation of extremists and increased the overall terrorist threat.

Just back from a five-day trip to the Balkan region, which included a NATO defense ministers meeting in Slovenia, Rumsfeld arrived in Nicaragua Sunday afternoon for two days of meetings with defense officials from more than 30 South and Central American countries.

The talks here ?- in one of the Western Hemisphere's poorest countries ?- are expected to focus on counter-narcotics and counterterrorism efforts, peacekeeping missions, humanitarian and disaster relief and the removal of land mines from the region.

The meeting of the region's defense ministers follows a tense period in which Venezuela's leaders lashed out at the U.S. and President Bush during a U.N. meeting in New York City. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called Bush "the devil" and slammed U.S. leaders for trying to block his country from taking a seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Rumsfeld said Sunday he did not expect to meet privately with the Venezuelan defense minister, although he will see him during the regular meeting.

U.S. officials have long considered Chavez a destabilizing force in Latin America. And they have suggested that Venezuela would make the U.N. Security Council unworkable if the nation were to win its bid against U.S.-backed Guatemala for a rotating council seat.

Also of interest to U.S. leaders is the possibility that Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, whose socialist government was a major antagonist of the United States in the 1980s, has been leading in the polls for the upcoming Nicaraguan presidential election.

Ortega led the overthrow of dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979 and fought the U.S.-backed Contra rebels as Nicaragua's president from 1985-90.

Bush 'kept Blair in the dark over Iraq'
Bush 'kept Blair in the dark over Iraq'
by SHARON CHURCHER
Daily Mail
10/1/06

An explosive new book claims that Tony Blair pleaded in vain with George Bush to share vital combat intelligence about the Iraq war.

The author, Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, paints a devastating portrait of Bush as an incompetent pawn of his chief advisers and the Pentagon's war planners.

He says that, with Bush locked in a desperate battle to win re-election in 2004, they were more interested in hiding the truth about the failures to thwart the September 11 attacks and find weapons of mass destruction than running a competent military operation.

The book, State Of Denial, which is released tomorrow, reveals that the Prime Minister repeatedly complained to Bush after discovering Britain was being denied access to key information on the grounds that it was a 'foreign' nation.

The attempt to bluff the Prime Minister involved a highly class-ified database called the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNET) which the Pentagon used to store and communicate years of potentially embarrassing intelligence, as well as technical information about combat operations in Iraq.

Woodward says that top Pentagon officials took the decision to deny Britain access to it, apparently with the backing of America's Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

"The classified information had a caveat - NOFORN - meaning no foreigners were allowed access, a restriction that included even the British troops fighting alongside Americans in Iraq,' Woodward adds.

In July 2004, Bush assured Blair he had signed a directive saying the NOFORN rule would no longer apply to the British on military operations.

But the book says the Pentagon ignored it, hatching a scheme to hoax the British into believing they were being kept fully informed.