One reason the Republicans keep attacking Clinton’s record is to attempt to divert attention away from their own consistent record of massive failures and lies.

Here’s something Republicans don’t want you to know. An interview with Bob Woodward will appear on 60 Minutes in the U.S. this Sunday:

According to Woodward, insurgent attacks against coalition troops occur, on average, every 15 minutes, a shocking fact the administration has kept secret. “It’s getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week. That’s more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces,” says Woodward.

The situation is getting much worse, says Woodward, despite what the White House and the Pentagon are saying in public. “The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], ‘Oh, no, things are going to get better,’” he tells Wallace. “Now there’s public, and then there’s private. But what did they do with the private? They stamp it secret. No one is supposed to know,” says Woodward.

In his last two books (Bush At War and Plan of Attack), Bob Woodward often seemed as if he was acting as a mouthpiece for the current fascist administration. His new book, State of Denial, reverses that course.

The NY Daily News reports the following from the book:


The CIA’S top counterterrorism officials felt they could have killed Osama Bin Laden in the months before 9/11, but got the “brushoff” when they went to the Bush White House seeking the money and authorization.

CIA Director George Tenet and his counterterrorism head Cofer Black sought an urgent meeting with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, writes Bob Woodward in his new book “State of Denial.”

They went over top-secret intelligence pointing to an impending attack and “sounded the loudest warning” to the White House of a likely attack on the U.S. by Bin Laden.

Woodward writes that Rice was polite, but, “They felt the brushoff.”

Woodward claims the intelligence Tenet and Black shared with Rice included communication intercepts indicating the likelihood of an Al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil.

Tenet said he had hoped the meeting would shock Rice into encouraging the President to take immediate action against Al Qaeda.

Black, looking back at the July 10, 2001, meeting with Rice, concludes, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her [Rice's] head.”

Woodward says that Tenet described the meeting as a “tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the 9/11 attacks.”

Tenet also claims that his alarm over Bin Laden was downplayed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who asked, “Could all this be a grand deception?”

The book claims that two weeks before the July meeting with Rice, Tenet told Richard Clarke, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism director, of his gut feeling about a likely attack.

“It’s my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one,” the book quotes Tenet as telling Clarke.

The NY Times focuses in on other sections of the book:

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.

….

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 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.”

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The Iraq war is now costing US taxpayers $2 billion per week. Afghanistan is costing $370 million per week. Republicans are happy about this because they pay the least amount of taxes and most of the money is going into their pockets.

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And now the Iraqis don’t even want us in Iraq. 71% of Iraqis want the U.S. out within a year. 79% of Iraqis say the US presence is having a negative impact in Iraq. 61% of Iraqis support violent attacks against American troops.

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Republicans just seem fundamentally unable to tell the truth about anything. After claiming that there were very few meetings between criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and White House staff, an investigation has found records of at least 485 meetings between Abramoff, his staff and White House staffers.

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