Free Republic

Did reporter Ron Suskind make up the titillating quotes by Andy Card (in which he called Karl Rove "a beast" and said that with Karen Hughes gone "the balance of what has worked up to now for George Bush, is gone, simply gone") that attracted so much attention in the July issue of Esquire? The Bush administration sure wants you to think so. After the article came out, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said Suskind has a "hyperactive imagination" and that his story was "not an accurate representation of this White House." White House spokesman Ari Fleischer added, "We...

Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration's argument for torture. That's why Sunday's front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists. Finn and Warrick reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms." Zubaida was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House....

While co-host Ann Curry on Tuesday's NBC "Today" wondered if Ron Suskind's "Confidence Men" was "fact or fiction," on August 5, 2008, then-co-host Meredith Vieira touted Suskind's claim in "Way of the World" that the Bush administration's case for the Iraq war was "worse than Watergate." Speaking of Suskind's latest work on Tuesday, Curry described how Obama administration "top officials are lining up to say they were either misquoted or taken out of context by the author." She then wondered: "Did he get the story right?" In contrast, while Vieira noted the Bush White House labeling Suskind's book at that...

President Barack Obama and his team just can't seem to help themselves from making bad situations worse. Latest case in point: When a new book showed the administration in a less than favorable light, the accusations and denials came pouring out like so many tears during a two-year-old's tantrum. The result? What the media would have barely noticed has become a journalistic gotcha moment as the author has proven he got it right.

officials have been busy compiling lists of what they say are a stunning number of basic factual errors. An administration official sent along a partial list under the headline "The Suskind Book Game: 'Too Big to Fact Check?'" From the list of alleged errors: "1.) Suskind wrote that Larry Summers needed Senate confirmation to lead the National Economic Council. 2.) Suskind wrote that Secretary Geithner served as 'Chairman' of the New York Fed. 3.) Suskind wrote that Gene Sperling served as 'an assistant Treasury Secretary.' 4.) Suskind wrote that Geithner had 'never been an undersecretary' at Treasury. 5.) Suskind wrote...

"Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" by Ron Suskind, to be published tomorrow, could not have come at a worse time for Mr Obama. His popularity remains in the doldrums, he is struggling to implement a new economic plan and he faces a tough challenge to be re-elected next year. Larry Summers, a former top economic adviser is quoted as telling Peter Orszag, then Mr Obama's budget director, at a dinner in Washington's Bombay Club: "We're home alone. There's no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes." Mr Summers was US Treasury...

A new book about Barack Obama, whose Pulitzer-prize winning author received extensive co-operation from the White House, portrays the American president as indecisive, out of his depth and facing insubordination from advisers. "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" by Ron Suskind, to be published tomorrow, could not have come at a worse time for Mr Obama. His popularity remains in the doldrums, he is struggling to implement a new economic plan and he faces a tough challenge to be re-elected next year. Larry Summers, a former top economic adviser is quoted as telling Peter Orszag,...

The Obama White House is a "hostile" environment for women even though they occupy many of the senior positions in the West Wing, according to a new book. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind interviewed more than 200 people, including President Obama, for "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and The Education of A President," which will be released Sept. 20. "This place would be in court for a hostile workplace," former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying, according to the Washington Post, which obtained a copy. "Because it actually fits all of the classic legal requirements for...

A new book offering an insider's account of the White House's response to the financial crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of major banks. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the incident is just one of several in which Obama struggled with a divided group of advisers, some of whom he didn't initially consider for their high-profile roles. Suskind states that Obama accepts the blame for mismanagement in his administration while noting that restructuring the financial system was complicated and could have resulted in deeper financial harm....

Exclusive Book Excerpt: How an Al-Qaeda Cell Planned a Poison-gas Attack on the N.Y. Subway The plot was called off by Bin Laden's No. 2 only 45 days from zero hour, according to a new book by Ron Suskind SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHORRelated Blogs: Click here for blog postings from around the web that are related to the topic of this article. Posted Saturday, Jun. 17, 2006 Al-Qaeda terrorists came within 45 days of attacking the New York subway system with a lethal gas similar to that used in Nazi death camps. They were stopped not by any intelligence...

In this clip Ron Suskind explains why the 2nd Amendment is second, at least he thinks he does. The fact of the matter is Suskind, that you can't load your weapons to protect the 1st amendment if you can't hold any weapons.

Deciding to showcase the allegations in Ron Suskind's new book which “says President Bush committed an impeachable offense” by ordering “the CIA to forge a letter to bolster his case for the war in Iraq,” CNN's Jack Cafferty posed as one of his “Cafferty File” questions on Tuesday: “What does it mean, do you suppose, if the White House did, in fact, order the CIA to forge a letter in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq?” (Anchor Wolf Blitzer marveled: “We're just hearing now, Jack, that there may be an effort in the Congress to now...

Snip-- CIA director George J. Tenet regarding the publication of “The Way of the World,” by Ron Suskind: ... the book is seriously flawed. One supposed “news” item from the book apparently asserts that British intelligence had a high-placed Iraqi source who convincingly told them before the start of the war that Iraq had no WMD and that the British relayed this to the United States. As Mr. Suskind tells it, the White House directed (and CIA allegedly went along with) burying that information so that the war could go ahead as planned. This is a complete fabrication. In fact,...

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein. Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war. The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in...

You can imagine why George Tenet is mad at the 9/11 book The One Percent Doctrine and reviewers who finger the ex-CIA director as the key leaker in the tale of how the administration flopped into war. "It's not true that he was a cooperating source for [author Ron] Suskind," says an ally. Suskind agrees, E-mailing us: "Reviewers who've suggested that Tenet was the primary source [of over 100] are simply incorrect." But now stirred, the former top spy's team is taking aim at the larger book, which they say includes errors and exaggerations. Like where Suskind says Vice President...

Sorry if this has been posted before, but I haven't seen it posted in exactly this way: In the new issue of Time (but already aluded to last week in USA Today), Ron Suskind's excerpt about the planned AQ attack on U.S. subways he reveals this: "There was a source from within Pakistan who was tied tightly into al-Qaeda management. Call him Ali. . . . . Whatever Ali's motivations, his reports--over the preceding six months--had been almost always correct, including information that led to several captures. . . . .He told his CIA handlers that a Saudi radical had...

Journalist Ron Suskind is one-stop shopping for Bush administration castaways. But what if John DiIulio -- Suskind gave him a platform in Esquire magazine in 2002 to call the administration "the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis" -- and Paul O'Neill had been shopping a conservative critique of Bush? Would Suskind have cracked open his notebook? Not likely. Few events excite liberal journalists more than the inevitable defection of an "insider" from a Republican administration, provided that the defector is a liberal who is telling the media what it wants to hear. What interests the Suskinds are not conservative defectors but...

It is rare to have books exploring the legacy of a presidential administration still in its first term. It is rarer still to have the number of insider accounts that Americans have access to in 2004. “These books appear to be painting history before our eyes,” said Charlotte Abbott, news editor of Publishers Weekly. “No one in the industry of publishing can remember a time since Watergate when so many political books have come out and the public has been interested – and a lot of those Watergate titles came out after.” One of the reporters who first exposed Watergate,...

Laurie Mylroie sent out an email about Paul O'Neill's appearance on 60 Minutes last night; she notes what appears to be a major error in Ron Suskind's book, which casts doubt on the credibility of both Suskind and O'Neill. Here is the key portion of Mylroie's email: "In his appearance this evening on '60 Minutes,' Ron Suskind, author of The Price of Loyalty, based to a large extent on information from former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, made an astonishing, very serious misstatement. "Suskind claimed he has documents showing that preparations for the Iraq war were well underway before...

The flap over former Bush White House adviser John DiIulio's cutting criticisms of his former colleagues, followed by his earnest, near-groveling apology — all stemming from a still-to-be-published article in the January issue of Esquire magazine — has obscured another, perhaps more newsworthy aspect of the story.In the piece, a preview of which is available on Esquire's website, DiIulio ridicules the "Mayberry Machiavellis" in the White House, whom he defined, in a letter to the writer Ron Suskind, as the "staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing...