I watched Bob Woodward on "60 Minutes" tonight (video and transcript here). The only startling revelation I saw was a chart (classified "SECRET") showing the number of attacks on American forces increasing over the past three years:
Reporter: Woodward says that's the most important measure of violence in iraq, and he unearthed this graph– classified secret– that shows those attacks have increased dramatically over the last three years.Woodward: Getting to the point now where there are 800, 900 attacks a week. That's more than 100 a day. Four attacks an hour, attacking our forces.
One can assume that all the Bush supporters will froth at the mouth, saying "anyone can create a chart with the word "SECRET" on it," which is true enough. However, I think Woodward is smarting from the criticism he's gotten over the past several months about his role in the Plame leak case, and also from the criticism his first two books about the Bush Administration ("Plan of Attack" and "Bush at War") received. Those two books were derided as very sympathetic to Bush, Cheney, and Woodward's other sources within the Administration, as though Woodward had suspended his journalistic skepticism.
I think the chart's real, and it serves as one more example of the lies the Administration continues to peddle (everything's fine, they've got an elected government now, the Iraqi forces are standing up, and blah blah blah).
Posted by Linkmeister at October 1, 2006 09:09 PM | TrackBack