A chapter excerpted from Allan Weisbecker's new memoir, Can't You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer's Memoir and a Tale of a Lost Surfer's Paradise.

CHAPTER SEVEN

They say in my country that the Dark Lord can govern the storms in the Mountains of Shadow that stand upon the borders of Mordor. He has strange powers and many allies.

--J.R.R. Tolkein

 

The nonfiction book by Bob Woodward I was reading and which slightly exacerbated my terminal loneliness and nudged me further towards the brink of losing my mind was called Veil, The Secret Wars of the CIA. I was seeking a better handle on the CIA’s antics in Central America back in the 1980s, which is the time frame of my reinvented Cosmic Banditos screen story about The Meaning of Life.

Not only did I not get a better handle on the CIA’s antics in Central America back in the 1980s, or anything else, but my reading of Veil resulted in a rush of insight of the negative variety, a dispiriting one. Woodward’s book is so packed with lies by omission and outright lies, plus blatant perception management, that it’s safe to say that the book itself is a lie. See, I already knew a bit about the 1980s, having been around then (including in Central America) and having paid attention to what was going on while doing so. In fact, all one need to have done during the 1980s – aside from being around – would have been to be conscious, i.e., not comatose, to realize that Woodward’s book, his nonfiction book, is a lie. One example: Endings. Important, right?

Woodward sees fit to end Veil, The Secret Wars of the CIA with a lie on every level you can lie in a nonfiction book. He ends it with a chapter describing a personal visit with CIA director William Casey on his deathbed (from the brain tumor).

About two sentences into this, I knew Woodward had made up the scene. Remember that when it comes to making up stuff, I know whereof I speak – the old one, you can’t bullshit a bullshitter comes to mind. (Others have opined the same regarding that scene, based on looking into dates and hospital records and the like.)

But I could have forgiven that lie, which was only about facts, i.e., Woodward’s deathbed visit to Casey having never happened. I’ve lied about facts myself. Sometimes it’s okay, sometimes not. What Woodward does, however, in the deathbed scene he made up, is to lie in subtext as well — in what is really going on — which kind of lying is a sin, for the commission of which writers will rot in Writer Hell.

Here’s the scene: Casey, on his deathbed, admits to having known about the diversion of Iran arms sales funds to the contras. The subtext here is that Casey didn’t have anything to do with the diversion. He knew about it.

Technically, Woodward wasn’t outright lying. But what he left out of his fucking narrative is that Casey knew about the diversion because he had been instrumental in planning and executing it.

A whopper of a lie by omission, no?

Another thing Woodward left out of his fucking narrative about the CIA in the 1980s involves drug trafficking by the contras. Casey and his protégé, Oliver North, didn’t just know about contra drug trafficking, they were likewise directly involved in the okaying of it, plus the cover-up. (In 1989, Oliver North was barred entry into Costa Rica for being a known drug trafficker.) In Veil, Woodward doesn’t even mention the contras and drug trafficking, let alone that Casey and North knew about it, let alone that they were directly involved in the okaying and subsequent cover-up. Since the contra war in Nicaragua was one of the secret wars of the CIA of the title of Woodward’s book, one would think that the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking to finance that war would bear mention, no?

Since other journalists from that time knew about all this, how did Bob Woodward miss it? The answer is that he didn’t miss it. He just left it out of his fucking narrative, for reasons related to Woodward having turned into a shitball motherfucker toady of the powers that be.

Of Bob Woodward’s nonfiction books since All the President’s Men, at the time of my brink-hovering I had only read Veil, The Secret Wars of the CIA. Out of (morbid) curiosity I went on to read two of his subsequent books. In The Commanders, purported to be the definitive history of the U.S. military’s overthrow of Manuel Noriega, Woodward devotes one sentence to U.S. history with the Panamanian dictator. Here it is, the one sentence:

 

Although he once had been one of the CIA’s key Latin American assets, the administration now viewed (Noriega) as an outlaw and an enemy of U.S. interests.

 

In his definitive history, Bob Woodward justifies the invasion of another country by telling us… nothing whatsoever…

Do you think maybe Woodward left out some stuff about Noriega’s relationship to the CIA in his fucking narrative? I mean aside from not even mentioning the CIA’s collusion with Noriega on drug trafficking (likewise to fund the contras) and aside from not even mentioning the list of treaties and international laws solemnly signed by the United States that were broken by the invasion. Nor does he mention that the unilateral aggression of invading another country without “imminent threat” (or any threat) is the same crime for which Nazis were executed at Nuremburg. Noriega being an “outlaw” (a drug trafficker) was fine and dandy as long as some of the drug money made its way to the illegal war the CIA was supporting, but when the dictator quit cooperating, colluding with the CIA in big-time criminal activities, he was now an “enemy of U.S. interests” and his country was fair game for invasion.

But my favorite lie by omission, one near and dear to my heart, comes in Woodward’s Plan of Attack – his definitive history of our conflict with Saddam Hussein. Woodward does better, wordage-wise, in this one, devoting one whole page (out of 450) to U.S. history with “The Beast of Baghdad.” A little problem, though: In his one page history Woodward skips from the 1970s to the 1990s, leaving out the 1980s. Not a word about the decade of the 1980s. Right: The decade during which the U.S. and The Beast of Baghdad were close allies and the U.S., under Reagan then Bush I, was actively and knowingly aiding and abetting The Beast of Baghdad in his crimes against humanity.

Thing is, Bob Woodward himself classifies his books, his nonfiction books, as being “somewhere between the news and the history books.” Let’s take him on his word on that.

See if you concur: People who provide a democratic society (like what the United States is purported to be) with news (meaning journalists) should maybe question what the shitball motherfuckers in power tell them about their antics. Same goes for the writers of history books, which mold the minds of our children.

Bob Woodward does not question anything the shitball motherfuckers tell him. Woodward just parrots their lies and perception management as facts. Bob Woodward’s books, his nonfiction books, which are something “between the news and the history books,” are lies.

That I had this rush of insight about the journalist who in the 1970s questioned everything and in so doing uncovered the truth, then followed the truth wherever it led, even to the toppling of a president, and who was a hero of mine, and who was now the personification of why Orwell was an optimist and hence of why the world is so fucked-up, slightly exacerbated my terminal loneliness.*

 

* If the rewriting (or erasing) of history, which is what Woodward does in his books, sounds vaguely familiar, this was the protagonist Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984. Smith, along with the rest of the world of that story, was intimidated, threatened, bullied, into denial/lying via “jackboots on human faces.” That the jackboots are unnecessary in the real world of today to get Woodward (and the rest of the mainstream media) to rewrite history is the basis of my observation that Orwell was an optimist.

From Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer’s Memoir, and a Tale of a Lost Surfer’s Paradise by Allan C. Weisbecker.

Take a look at Allan's new (free) Ezine. There is nothing like it on the Web.

If you're interested in World Affairs, go directly to the Alert the Media/Orwell was an Optimist section.

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Keith Olbermann's Blurt Pieces of Paradise