Left-Leaning Dopers: who is a better investigative journalist, you or Bob Woodward?

[Bryan_Ekers]

@tomndebb

No, there was not. The only “intelligence” that claimed there were WMDs was the bullshit sent to the White House by the Office on Special Plans. That group of advertising writers were called together based on their ability to spin anything into a commercial. They were placed in the DoD so that Rumsfeld could have direct control over their organization, preventing the CIA, FBI, or Army Intelligence from being allowed to review or criticize their work. Claiming that there was “contradicting intelligence” does not even makes sense. It puts a group of 18 propaganda producers on an equal footing with every professional intelligence organization in the country, as well as the UN inspection teams that were actually in the country.

Well, y’know… teach the controversy.

[tomndebb]

@adaher

Claiming that Woodward reports from the right is like saying the facts have a right-wing bias.

That doesn’t mean that everything he reports is factual, and I don’t really know that he’s an “investigative journalist” since Watergate. What Woodward does is use an incredible amount of access and skill at getting people to talk to him that he gives us inside accounts of government decisionmaking that will probably never be equalled once he’s gone. I see no difference in tone or objectivity between his books on the Bush administration and the Obama administration. His opinions are almost entirely left out. He just reports what was done and what was said. If you think that makes Democratic administrations look less flattering, tough.

ou are pretending that Woodward only writes investigative reports. That is not true. He also writes opinion pieces that all skew to the Right.

@adaher

As for Bush and WMDs, we didn’t need Woodward to tell us that the facts paint a complicated picture. There’s no doubt that they cherry picked intelligence. There’s also no doubt that there was nearly unanimous agreement that Saddam still possessed large stocks of chemical weapons. And now we know that chemical weapons were indeed found, although they were not very useful on a battlefield due to their lack of maintenance.

Piffle. There was no legitimate evidence that Iraq had any WMDs subsequent to the re-entry of the UN inspection teams in the Autumn of 2002. None. There was unanimous agreement that Iraq had no such weapons any more–as proven by the fact that we never secured suspected sites, never examined any sites, never interrogated Iraqis looking for them, and only stumbled on a small cache of obsolete containers that even the Iraqis appear to have forgotten by accident. The “complicated” story was just an OSP lie…

[GIGObuster]

@adaher

Claiming that Woodward reports from the right is like saying the facts have a right-wing bias.

Basically you are making the same mistake as the OP, when one looks at what the left thinks about Woodward it is not in nice terms, just another effect IMHO of the right wing media even twisting the idea of what the left is actually thinking about the media. In this case even telling their viewers or readers about how Woodward is seen by the left. They never seem to bother to ask them what they do think.

Bob Woodward providing cover for Bush crimes and blame for Obama - Democratic...

IMHO even the idea that Woodward is considered to report from the left is a construction from the right.

@adaher

That doesn’t mean that everything he reports is factual, and I don’t really know that he’s an “investigative journalist” since Watergate. What Woodward does is use an incredible amount of access and skill at getting people to talk to him that he gives us inside accounts of government decisionmaking that will probably never be equalled once he’s gone. I see no difference in tone or objectivity between his books on the Bush administration and the Obama administration. His opinions are almost entirely left out. He just reports what was done and what was said. If you think that makes Democratic administrations look less flattering, tough.

Based on what was presented by the OP and the right wing media Woodward is just indeed flaring up like many formerly great reporters that are still trying to remain relevant today.

@adaher

As for Bush and WMDs, we didn’t need Woodward to tell us that the facts paint a complicated picture. There’s no doubt that they cherry picked intelligence. There’s also no doubt that there was nearly unanimous agreement that Saddam still possessed large stocks of chemical weapons.

No, this is really bullshit, and it was demonstrated first by the doubts of other intelligent groups from the ones that were allies to us in Afghanistan and then when the inspectors were allowed to come in a few months before the start of the hostilities.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/18_blix.shtml

@adaher

And now we know that chemical weapons were indeed found, although they were not very useful on a battlefield due to their lack of maintenance.

That straw has been grasped so many times that it is only wisps.

No WMDs in Iraq - FactCheck.org

During its investigation, the ISG reported that “[a] total of 53 munitions have been recovered, all of which appear to have been part of pre-1991 Gulf war stocks based on their physical condition and residual components.” These isolated discoveries received significant media attention, and it’s likely that these overhyped reports contributed to your friends’ beliefs that Iraq really did possess WMDs. But the finds were rare, and the ISG concluded that they were not part of a significant stockpile of weapons. Indeed, after nearly two years of investigation, the ISG concluded that:

"Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program."

"While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter."

"In practical terms, with the destruction of the Al Hakam facility, Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain advanced BW [biological warfare] weapons quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes."

Experts from the three nations failed to document any existent biological or nuclear weapons and discovered only a few random chemical weapons. The ISG concluded that contrary to what most of the world had believed, Iraq had abandoned attempts to produce WMDs. In his congressional testimony, the head of the ISG, Charles Duelfer, admitted, “We were almost all wrong” on Iraq.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Ravenman

I clicked on the link to the IAEA cite you provided, and unfortunately it was dead. I looked at the other link and the article was dated March 2003, and it more or less shows that the aluminum tube story divided the intelligence community. I addressed that in my last post, but I can expand.

Here’s a different link. Basically, the untruth Bush said was that he was citing a 1998 IAEA report that Iraq was six months away from gaining nuclear weapons. This statement is uncontrovertibly false (well, unless you can dig up the report). He later amended the statement to saying it was a 1991 report, which is also factually inaccurate.

He made this claim as part of an effort to mislead the public into believing their was overwhelming and uncontroversial evidence that Iraq had significant WMD possessions.

Either thing by itself doesn’t have the components of a lie. A misstatement can be unintentional, and misleading folks can be technically true. But his statement was an untruth uttered in order to deceive folks. And if that’s not what a lie is, there’s no real meaning to the word.

The link to the article about aluminum tubes was simply to show that at the time there was controversy over the intelligence and that his one-sided presentation of the evidence was misleading.

[marshmallow]

A more fundamental issue is that America’s long standing policy for Iraq was regime change, which is at odds with the process of weapon inspections potentially leading to the removal of sanctions – as presciently detailed by Scott Ritter here in 2002.

In 1998, Iraq was disarmed. Between then and 2002 it could have reconstituted its WMD programs. Given the large scale industrial nature of this process Western intelligence agencies would know about it. If you want to find out for sure the answer isn’t war, but the continuation of the weapons inspection program. This actually happened in early 2003. But Americans wanted regime change and didn’t care that the inspectors couldn’t find anything. We saw what happened then.

[Ravenman]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

[Either thing by itself doesn’t have the components of a lie. A misstatement can be unintentional, and misleading folks can be technically true. But his statement was an untruth uttered in order to deceive folks. And if that’s not what a lie is, there’s no real meaning to the word.

Frankly, that sounds like Bush was told about Iraq being six months away from a uranium enrichment capability and he screwed it up while talking to the press. We are talking about the guy who said, “Fool me twice… Won’t get fooled again.”

Then once Bush said it, it’s rather hard for his press secretary to say that he was totally wrong. If that specific claim was repeated further, however, then it couldn’t be a Bush tongue-tied screwup sort of thing. I’ll see if I can find anything about that claim being repeated

The link to the article about aluminum tubes was simply to show that at the time there was controversy over the intelligence and that his one-sided presentation of the evidence was misleading.

Yes, I totally agree it was misleading to interpret ambiguities in a way to further one’s preconceived agenda. But there is a difference between interpreting ambiguities in your favor and taking untruths and knowingly presenting them as truths. The former is akin to spin and bullshit, and perhaps incompetence; the latter is what constitutes a lie.

[Trinopus]

Naive appeal to authority.

Who’s the better scientist, you or Linus Pauling, or William Shockley? Both of them, most assuredly. Therefore, everything they said about Vitamin C, or heritability of high intelligence, is right, and you can’t argue with it… Right?

Hell no. Wrong as sin. Even the greatest within their fields can be ass-backwards, wrong-headed, and mule-foolish. If Bob Woodward believes that GWB was telling the truth about Iraq, he’s as mule-foolish as Pauling on Vitamins and Shockley on IQ.

[elucidator]

@adaher

…And now we know that chemical weapons were indeed found, although they were not very useful on a battlefield due to their lack of maintenance.

(emphasis added with a gasp of admiration)

What an artful turn of phrase!. Are you blissfully unaware of their date of manufacture? Or simply defered mentioning, out of consideration for possible information overload? Perhaps that is best, fighting ignorance is all very well, but it simply won’t do to cram too many facts into the narrative.

Aside, did you know that that world’s oldest person died just last week, at the age of 121! I wonder the cause of death, if perhaps it might have been lack of maintenance.

[adaher]

Saddam could have just given those old weapons up. He chose not to, so it was reasonable to assume he did that for a reason.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Ravenman

Then once Bush said it, it’s rather hard for his press secretary to say that he was totally wrong. If that specific claim was repeated further, however, then it couldn’t be a Bush tongue-tied screwup sort of thing. I’ll see if I can find anything about that claim being repeated

Yes, I totally agree it was misleading to interpret ambiguities in a way to further one’s preconceived agenda.

I’ll concede that it might have inadvertently been a mistake. But it was uncontestably untrue, and as you say, he was misleading the public. When you tell an untruth in an attempt to mislead the public, it’s a mighty fine hair to split when you say, “but I thought I was telling the truth in an attempt to mislead the public!”

This is why I think it’s fair to say that Bush lied: he was trying to mislead the public, and he said something false in this attempt. I don’t especially care whether the specific falsehood he told was intentionally untrue, given the overall attempt at misdirection he was engaged in when he said it.

[Ravenman]

Do you believe Obama lied when he said, if you like your insurance you can keep it?

What he said was untrue, and it clearly mislead the public as to the nature of the ACA. However, I tend to think that he genuinely didn’t think the bill would require some people to change insurance, so I can’t call that a lie. It sounds like by your reasoning, Obama’s statement would be a lie.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Ravenman

Do you believe Obama lied when he said, if you like your insurance you can keep it?

What he said was untrue, and it clearly mislead the public as to the nature of the ACA.

I don’t really have an opinion on your question. However, the situation as you describe it doesn’t match the criteria I set up. It’s not enough for the statement to mislead the public. The statement must be part of an effort to mislead. In this case, do you believe that Obama was intending to mislead the public as to the nature of the ACA?

I don’t want to take the thread far afield into that question, so I’ll just say that, to the extent that Obama had such an intent, the statement was a lie.

[tomndebb]

@adaher

Saddam could have just given those old weapons up. He chose not to, so it was reasonable to assume he did that for a reason.

It was not reasonable when the UN inspectors could find no evidence of their use or storage. He may not even have had a reason if they had fallen out of the inventory records and he thought they had all been expended or destroyed. And no evidence subsequent to the invasion, when after months of puttering around, we finally stumbled on them, indicated that the Iraqis were keeping track of them.
And since the UN inspectors were successfully examining both the records and sites for such weapons, there was no reason to start a war until those teams had finished and brought back evidence of deliberate non-compliance.

[GIGObuster]

@adaher

Saddam could have just given those old weapons up. He chose not to, so it was reasonable to assume he did that for a reason.

Again those old weapons were not viable. One reason the charade was maintained by the Iraqis was to discourage enemies like Iran, but in reality they were bluffing, but by the time the invasion was clearly coming the reason why those old stokes were not reported properly was simply a case of bad accounting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12115-2004Oct6_3.html

One of the reasons the intelligence community feared a chemical weapons arsenal was that U.N. inspectors said Iraq had not fully explained missing chemical agents during the 1990s. The report determined that unanswered questions were almost certainly the result of poor accounting.

Iraq’s responses to U.N. inspectors regarding chemical weapons appear to have been truthful, and where incomplete, with differing recollections among former top officials, mostly the result of fading memories of when or how stockpiles were destroyed. Those were the identical reasons Iraq offered to U.N. inspectors before the war.

[XT]

@jayjay

Hell, they apparently weren’t even ordered to secure sites of CONVENTIONAL weapon creation or storage. Didn’t insurgents clean out at least one of Saddam’s stockpiles without even an American military presence within reach in the early days?

They cleaned out a bunch of them…and no, even conventional weapons didn’t have special details to secure. I don’t think that the lack of special details to round up the supposed WMD is any indication that Bush et al didn’t think they were really there, rather it was part of their overall incompetence as well as their blindered and blinkered view on reality. They thought we’d go in easily (with minimal forces and, in their minds minimal causalities on either side, as well as the least amount of money and cost) simply unseat Saddam et at, the Iraqis would be free and happy that we had done so, we could then install a new democratic (and more friendly to the US) government, maybe march in some parades, and at our leisure we’d collect up the WMD and stroll out conquering heroes to the world (and, most importantly to the US voters), securing key basing rights in Iraq that would allow us to pursue AQ AND keep an eye on a vitally strategic area for the US and the world. Obviously they were delusional, and completely misread not only the WMD but also the sectarian tribal chasms in Iraq and how things would rapidly spin out of control once the boot came off various necks in the area. This, more than anything tells me that Bush et al didn’t lie (oh, they TOLD lies, but they didn’t lie in the way that folks mean in this debate)…they were clueless fucks. I mean, look at the level of force we sent in, and what we expected to happen…and what we ACTUALLY needed, not just for the fictitious WMD but to actually do what we set out to do. Look at how we just arbitrarily dissolved the Iraqi military without any plan for what that would mean or what we could do to mitigate the chaos that one act (among the many fuck ups we did) would cause! It was a sad comedy of fuckups, one after the other. But Bush et al fully expected things to play out the way they fantasized they would…and, IMHO, they fully expected to find WMD as well, just waiting for them to find and to show the world.

At this late date, however, it really makes zero difference. Bush is out and we are actually nearing the end of the next presidents tenure, with no more actual evidence of a lie (or the truth) being presented than we had 5 years ago, or 10 or even 12. Certainly there were no stunning revelations from the Obama administration about this big lie (nor, to the sadness of a lot of hopeful lefties on this board were any arrests made or GW sent to Geneva for trial and execution), and if we don’t have any now I seriously doubt we ever will have anything more solid to go on than folks speculations based on their own view of the evidence. As for Bob Woodward…meh. He’s no liberal, and I don’t think he’s a very good investigative journalist either, so not sure why his report with nothing really new in it means anything one way or the other.

[Fubaya]

Whether he lied or was simply convinced that he was right, a million people died as a direct result of what he chose to do, and that number is ten years old. Whether the decision to take that action happened through deceit or ineptitude matters not to the dead left in it’s wake. This should transcend politics. This should keep every single one of us up at night.

But as long as we can poke the person beside us and say “See, one of your guys says my guy was just mistaken,” I guess that’s what really matters.

[jayjay]

@XT

As for Bob Woodward…meh. He’s no liberal, and I don’t think he’s a very good investigative journalist either, so not sure why his report with nothing really new in it means anything one way or the other.

My understanding was that Bernstein was the real hard-hitting journalist on Watergate. Woodward was included because he knew the right people in DC and would be able to be Bernstein’s “in”.

[CarnalK]

Wow. Don’t you guys get it? Woodward took down Nixon! Only a lefty would have done that! So if such an obvious lefty decided Bush didn’t lie then you’re all hypocrites or something! /thread win

Distressingly pathetic OP. Quite sad.

[Richard_Parker]

@XT

…nor, to the sadness of a lot of hopeful lefties on this board were any arrests made or GW sent to Geneva for trial and execution…

You say that like only partisans could believe that Bush Administration officials committed war crimes. Cheney, at least, pretty clearly ordered that detainees be tortured. Major General Taguba certainly thinks so. Not sure I’d call him a “hopeful left[y].”

Sadly, asking for accountability for torture is seen by a lot of people as some sort of partisan crusade. I, for one, could give a fuck about Dick Cheney’s politics right now. In fact, I think the only thing keeping him out of a jail cell is the fact that he is a Republican, and jailing him would mean (and would have meant) all-out partisan civil war. I hope Obama pardons him.

[elucidator]

Well, its all so confusing, isn’t it? All so vague and uncertain. Sure, we have videos of speeches, and appearances, and transcripts of public statements, published interviews, documents, expert testimony, and 8 x 10 colored glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was.

But is that really enough?