Pat Dollard | Young Americans

So, since Bob Woodward’s appearance last week on CBS’s “60 Minutes” to push his strategically timed book release, I have heard from more than a half-dozen people, some military veterans, asking me. “Hey! Did you watch? Did you hear what Woodward said about some new ’secret weapon’ we’ve used in Iraq?? Nothing this big since WWII!?!???”

Well, no, I hadn’t seen the “60 Minutes” piece with Wooodward. I tend to sigh and shake my head every time this guy ‘writes’ something … Seems he’s made quite a living ‘writing’ during the Bush Administration.

Personally, I have always seen Bob Woodward as something between a smarmy weasel and a shifty rodent. I wouldn’t trust him with my rotting garbage …

Before we even went into Iraq … Before September 11, 2001 I had heard ‘rumors’ online and via radio talk shows about some of our new secret weapons that range from the ones that make someone poop themselves, to one that has such a high-pitched emission of sound as to drive someone mad and make them feel as though they are on fire.

Stealth project turning tide in Iraq, veteran journalist hints in new book

by Craig Offman - National Post

Long considered a consummate Washington insider with unusual access to the country’s most influential politicians, Bob Woodward has made a career out of getting high-level secrets — some of which he writes about, some he doesn’t.

He is best known for exposing Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. His discoveries have prompted swift direct intervention from Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. In his new book about the Bush administration and Iraq, Mr. Woodward hints at a stealth project that has changed the course of the conflict, something akin to the Manhattan Project.

But this time, anyway, he isn’t saying what the secret is.

“I’m really not going to go beyond what’s in the book because it is so secret,” Mr. Woodward said about the book, The War Within. “The arguments were made by senior White House people and senior generals that you just can’t write about this: It will tip off the other side,” he said, his voice trailing with disappointment.

The venerable journalist, known for his increasingly harsh coverage of the most recent administration in his series of “Bush at War” books, has invited controversy in recent days, criticizing the U. S. President for delegating crucial authority to National Security advisor Stephen Hadley.

Equally contentious, the other half of All the President’s Men singles out the President for dereliction of duty in his role as the military’s Commander-in-Chief. “Bush didn’t figure out how to tell the truth about what was going on in Iraq,” he said. “It was sugar-coated, triumphant rhetoric when things were a disaster.”

At the same time, Mr. Woodward’s meta-scoop about the secret project has sent military journalists on a fishing expedition: Just how is the U. S. tracking and assassinating its foes?

“Everyone’s buzzing about the ’sophisticated and lethal special operations program,’ ” said a posting on Wired.comlast Tuesday. “What in the heck was Woodward talking about? Secret death rays? The Voice of God weapon?” More likely, the Web site speculated, it was a tagging, tracking and locating program that placing thermal signatures, or tags, on unsuspecting targets to monitor them.

Two reporters from The Washington Post — Mr. Woodward’s newspaper — posited that it is an assassination team called “fusion cells,” which involves special operations, unmanned drones, forensic scientists and the members of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

While remaining tight-lipped on its details in his book, he was a little more explicit during his publicity tour earlier this week. “If you were a member of al-Qaeda or some extremist militia, you would be wise to get your rear end out of town,” he told CNN’s Larry King this week.

Mr. Woodward said he has faced this kind of quandary going all the way back to his coverage of Watergate and the CIA.

“Ronald Reagan called [the late Washington Post publisher] Katharine Graham, got her out of the shower one Saturday morning, arguing that a story that I had should not be published because of that damage it would do,” he recalled. “I’ve been in the Oval Office with

Carter, when he was president, about secret CIA operations, listening to the arguments about why something should not be published.”

While his journalistic instinct urged him to push the envelope with his latest scoop, a more cautious instinct warned him to protect those whom the information might harm.

It is a rarefied position in journalism that he arguably shares with Seymour Hersh, whose revelations — the My Lai Massacre or the Abu Ghraib prison — sometimes leave the New Yorker reporter open to criticism that he is endangering national interests.

Too much knowledge can trigger an uncomfortable dilemma.

“My presumption is that things should be published, but you have to listen to the arguments,” Mr. Woodward said. “No one wants to write stories or books that get people killed.”

While Mr. Woodward treaded carefully with that one particular bit of privileged information, the book still features other scoops, namely that the Bush administration has conducted an extensive spying operation on its putative ally, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

It also reveals that Mr. Bush informed his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, of his decision to fire Mr. Cheney’s mentor and secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, on Nov. 6, 2006 — the day before U. S. elections in which the Republicans lost control of Congress.

“Well, Mr. President, I disagree,” Mr. Cheney is quoted as saying, “but obviously it’s your call.”

Mr. Bush also selected Mr. Rumsfeld’s replacement, Robert Gates, without telling Mr. Cheney– and only after the election did Mr. Bush inform the country that the unpopular Mr. Rumsfeld had resigned– a decision that might have helped Republicans at the polls.

Mr. Woodward said it was unlikely he would write a follow-up, saying instead he might write about Barack Obama or John McCain.

“My wife says that if there’s a fifth ‘Bush at War’ book, she’s going to shoot me.”