The title's a riff on "Dirty Deeds." We take corrections here seriously and are happy to note it if we make a mistake. We get a number of right-wing visitors and when we were letting Bob Woodward have it repeatedly, we received a number of e-mails telling us that George Tenet had called the case for war with Iraq a "slam dunk." We didn't issue a correction.
Jess and Ava could tell you that even more mail came in from the right to The Common Ills. C.I.'s attitude was "prove he said it because I have people swearing he never did." (Especially after Wired, C.I. is highly skeptical of Woody's reporting.) At one point, George Tenet gave a speech where he joked about "slam dunk." Would we correct it now?
We pow-wowed. C.I. noted that people in the public view, under repeated assaults, often give up defending reality and find it easier just to accept what is said. Did we know Tenet said it? (To be clear, this is our strongest piece saying Tenent didn't say 'slam dunk' here. C.I.'s been much more vocal at The Common Ills. The right-wingers e-mailing felt that we needed to "add" to our coverage more than "correct" it.)
From Robert Parry's "Was Bob Woodward Slam-Dunked?" (Consortium News):
One of the most memorable behind-the-scenes accounts of pre-Iraq War decision-making was Bob Woodward's story of an Oval Office meeting on Dec. 21, 2002, when George W. Bush and his top advisers reviewed the CIA's case against Saddam Hussein for supposedly hiding weapons of mass destruction.
Using flip charts, deputy CIA director John McLaughlin presented the evidence while President Bush watched impatiently. When McLaughlin finished, Bush reportedly remarked, "Nice try" and added "I've been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we've got?"
According to Woodward's account, CIA director George Tenet then rose from a couch, threw his arms into the air and exclaimed, "It's a slam-dunk case!"
When Bush pressed -- "George, how sure are you?" -- the CIA director supposedly threw his arms up again and declared, “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk!” According to Woodward, Bush then cautioned Tenet several times, “Make sure no one stretches to make our case.”
Almost a year later, in an exclusive interview with Woodward on Dec. 11, 2003 -- after the U.S. invasion of Iraq had come up empty in the search for caches of WMD -- Bush confided to Woodward that Tenet’s assurance had been "very important" in the presidential decision to go to war.
When the "slam-dunk" story appeared in Woodward's 2004 book, Plan of Attack, it immediately made Tenet the butt of endless jokes and portrayed Bush as the skeptical leader who wanted the truth but was misled by his subordinates.
While some Bush critics immediately questioned Woodward's version of events, the Washington Post star reporter carried tremendous weight among his mainstream journalistic colleagues who enshrined Woodward's inside story as the new conventional wisdom.
However, in the two years since publication of Plan of Attack, other evidence has emerged suggesting that Woodward was acting less as an objective journalist than as a stenographer taking down the preferred history of Bush's inner circle. The legendary hero of the Watergate scandal may have been the one who was slam-dunked.
Conflicting Account
A contrary version of that Oval Office meeting appears in Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, which drew heavily from U.S. intelligence officials much as Woodward's book relied on senior White House officials.
According to Suskind, the two CIA officials -- Tenet and McLaughlin -- have very different recollections of the Dec. 21, 2002, meeting. They remember it more as "a marketing meeting" about how to present the WMD case, not a review of the quality of the underlying intelligence.
Both Tenet and McLaughlin say they don't even recall Tenet exclaiming the words "slam dunk," although Tenet won't dispute the version from Bush and his top aides, Suskind wrote.
Read Parry's article. With the emergence of Mark Felt in the Watergate tale in the last year, there has been more questions asked about Woody's past reporting and characterizations. It's interesting how little Wired is brought up in that questioning.
Maybe that's because it's the supposed story of the life and death of John Belushi? Maybe it's seen as a celeb book and not very important? It was important enough to Woody to write about it and the criticism he received over that book remains the strongest and most public criticism to date that his work has ever received. Things got so bad he even had to 'explain' himself to Rolling Stone in an interview that will provide chuckles to this day as Woody, repeatedly, alleges that he just prints what he's told.
Anyone surprised by Parry's story or Ron Suskind's latest book, , should probably check out Woody's 'defense' of his 'style.'