Back Talk: To Bob Woodward

Back Talk: Distinguishing the Insurgency from Sectarian Violence in Iraq: "A shocking fact the administration has kept secret? Please. As I noted, information about the number of attacks on American troops -- including this particular statistic of one attack every 15 minutes -- is not secret. Instead, it is very publicly available in the form of a big graph on page 22 of the Iraq Index (published by the Brookings Institution). In fact, that's probably where Woodward himself got the information. Some secret. The Iraq Index has been publishing attack statistics for a long, long time for anyone who is interested. I cannot remember how long the exact graph that Woodward apparently refers to has been there, but graphs just like it have been there for months on end. Therefore, the claim that this is top secret information is simply false (to put it as mildly as possible)."

Bob Woodward is coming to Cambridge to sell his new book. The post above demonstrates why I won't be going. I can learn more about Bob and his views on blogs like this than I ever could by listening to him in person. It seems that he could learn a few things too.

Bob is the last dinosaur of the end of the Watergate era. He has no idea where the meteor came from or what it will mean, and that's not going to stop him from doing what he has been doing since Watergate, when there was no Back Talk.

You've got to hand it to him though. He knows that he has an audience in Cambridge, and Boulder, and Eugene, and Madison, and Austin, and... hmm? What do all of these towns have in common?