Bob Woodward is getting called out for being “dead wrong” – in none other than his own newspaper.
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Bob Woodward is getting called out for being “dead wrong” – in none other than his own newspaper.
After Woodward wrote an oped piece last weekend harshly criticizing Dick Cheney, four former Bush administration officials have teamed up to give the legendary reporter a taste of his own medicine, charging in an op-ed in the Washington Post Friday that his account “represents a revisionist and misleading story.”
“Woodward’s op-ed purports to demonstrate that then-Vice President Dick Cheney, who advocated a U.S. strike to destroy the Syrian reactor, failed to learn important lessons from intelligence failures in Iraq. In fact, it is Woodward who misunderstands the reality of al-Kibar [the site of the reactor],” wrote Elliott Abrams, Eliot Cohen, Eric Edelman and John Hannah, who touted their participation in the Bush Administration’s consideration of the Syrian issue in 2007.
Abrams & Co. call Woodward’s oped “woefully incomplete.”
“Woodward is dead wrong to present the vice president’s arguments as unreasonable,” they said, referring to Cheney’s position in 2007 that the U.S. should destroy the reactor. “His advice was seriously considered at the time, and his claims look even more prescient in hindsight.”
Woodward penned an op-ed last Sunday, the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, in which he chastised Cheney for failing to learn “a key lesson of the 9/11 decade.”
“It is essential to distinguish between hard facts and what is an assessment or judgment,” Woodward wrote in a Sept. 11 piece, alleging that based on Cheney’s new memoir, “In My Time,” it was clear that the former vice president “has not fully absorbed that lesson.”
Woodward, who said the U.S. intelligence showing that the Syrians were building a nuclear weapons plant at the site was weak, also recounted how Bush “rolled his eyes” after his vice president advocated striking the Syrian reactor, which was destroyed by the Israelis later in 2007.
Woodward did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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