Journalists From The United States

"Bob Woodward is the assistant managing editor for investigations at The Washington Post. Over the last twenty years, he has authored or coauthored six number-one national bestsellers. Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in their Pulitzer Prize-winning work for The Washington Post and in their two books, All the President's Men The Final Days, set the standard for White House reporting. Since then Woodward has tackled the Supreme Court in The Brethren, the Hollywood drug culture in Wired, the CIA in Veil, and the Pentagon in The Commanders. In The Agenda, he returns to the White House, producing one of the most illuminating books on the modern presidency."

"For nearly 50 years, I have written about nine presidents from Nixon to Trump- 20 percent of the 45 U.S. presidents. A president must be willing to share the worst with the people, the bad news with the good. All presidents have a large obligation to inform, warn, protect, to define goals and the true national interest. Trump has, instead, enshrined personal impulse as a governing principle of his presidency. When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job."

"The dead-seated hatreds of American politics flourished in the Trump years. He stoked them, and did not make concerted efforts to bring the country together. Nor did the Democrats. Trump felt deeply wronged by the Democrats who felt deeply wronged by Trump. The walls between them only grew higher and thicker. My 17 interviews with Trump presented a challenge. He denounced Fear, my first book on him, as untrue, a "scam" and a "joke," calling me a "Dem operative." Several of those closest to him told him that the book was true, and Lindsey Graham told him that I would not put words in his mouth and would report as accurately as possible. Trump decided, for reasons that are not clear to me, that he would cooperate. To his mind, he would become a reliable source. He is reliable at times, completely unreliable at others, and often mixed... But the interviews show he vacillated, prevaricated and at times dodged his role as leader of the country despite his "I alone can fix it" rhetoric. As America and the world know, Trump is an overpowering presence. He loves spectacle. In a time of crisis, the operational is much more important than the political or the personal. For tens of millions the optimistic American story has turned into a nightmare."

"On January 28, 2020, when Trump's national security adviser and his deputy warned Trump that the virus would be- not might be, but would be- the biggest national security threat to his presidency, the leadership clock had to be reset. It was a detailed forecast, supported by evidence and experience that unfortunately turned out to be correct. Presidents are the executive branch. There was a duty to warn. To listen, to plan, and to take care. For a long time Trump hedged, as did others, and said the virus is worrisome but not yet, not now. There were good reasons to ride both horses, but there should have been more consistent and courageous outspokenness. Leading is almost always risky. The virus, the "plague," as Trump calls it, puts the United States and the world in economic turmoil that may not be just a recession, but a depression. It is a genuine financial crisis, putting tens of millions out of work. Trump's solution is to try to recreate what he believes is the economic miracle he created in the pre-virus time. Democrats, Republicans and Trump did agree to spending at least $2.2 trillion on recovery, which will create its own future problems with growing deficits. The human cost has been almost unimaginable, with more than 130,000 Americans killed by the virus by July and no real end in sight."

"After I finished reporting for this book on President Trump, I felt weariness. The country was in real turmoil. The virus was out of control. The economy was in crisis with more than 40 million out of work. A powerful reckoning on racism and inequality was upon us. There seemed to be no end in sight, and certainly no clear path to get there. I thought back to the conversation with Trump on February 7 when he mentioned the "dynamite behind every door," the unexpected explosion that could change everything. He was apparently thinking about some external event that would affect the Trump presidency. But now, I've come to the conclusion that the "dynamite behind the door" was in plain sight. It was Trump himself. The oversized personality. The failure to organize. The lack of discipline. The lack of trust in others he had picked, in experts. The undermining or the attempted undermining of so many American institutions. The failure to be a calming, healing voice. The unwillingness to acknowledge error. The failure to do his homework. To extend the olive branch. To listen carefully to others. To craft a plan. Mattis, Tillerson and Coats are all conservatives or apolitical people who wanted to help him and the country. Imperfect men who answered the call to public service. They were not the deep state. Yet each departed with cruel words from their leader. They concluded that Trump was an unstable threat to their country. Think about that for a moment: The top national security leaders thought the president of the United States was a danger to the country."

"And it is just as important for the Republicans to read Jefferson's words because they are as bad and perhaps worse than the Democrats. As the decades of Democratic abuse of America's young unfolded, the Republicans have been utterly craven, seeking to save the young, the Constitution, and the republic with words alone when in opposition, and doing virtually nothing substantive to arrest the republic's decline when they hold power. Today, the Republicans cower, mumble, and equivocate when called 'extremists' by those heroic Democratic champions of murdering the unborn, they follow like murmuring sheep the shrill martial words of Senators Graham and McCain and so get young Americans uselessly killed and maimed in wars that are either unnecessary or ones they have no intention of winning, and they are barely brave enough to raise economic points and words of I-told-you-so to oppose the coming, liberty-killing indentured servitude of America's young in the name of Obamacare. Indeed, the Republicans seem increasingly like those gassy, self-righteous, and hell-bound rhetoricians."

"The President has kept all the promises he intended to keep."

"But one problem remains. How can the conspiracy-minded Modern Democratic Party Women be assured that the switch was made? It is true that not many people would see the new bills and so some doubt might arise among the Democratic sisterhood about whether Wilson was really removed and then replaced on the bill by the three ladies named above. There is only one sure-fire means of relieving the Modern Democratic Party Women of their doubts before the whining starts. That means is to have the Democratic National Committee direct its current icon, Hilary Clinton, to publicly report on who appears on the $100,000 note each time she and her husband receive a packet of those bills from one or another of the foreign governments for which they are apparently selling out American interests. After all, if you cannot trust America’s graft-taker-in-chief, who can you trust?"

"The Democrat Wilson was a dyed-in-the-wool bigot who as president tried to rid the national government of its few black employees, save, of course, those who could be cooks, waiters, drivers, or fill other kinds of menial jobs. Wilson was, indeed, as great a bigot toward blacks, as today's Democratic president is."

"The only American woman deserving a place on U.S. paper currency is, of course, Anne Hutchinson, a devout 17th century Protestant New Englander who was a fearless champion of religious liberty, family, free speech, and equality — not preference — for women in religious affairs. Perhaps a new piece of currency could be created, one to which the attachment of her portrait would do honor. Ms. Hutchinson, however, is out of contention in the Democrats’ virulent anti-Southern currency crusade because her character traits – and the fifteen children she had with one husband — just do not jive with being Modern Democratic Party Women, those who glory in, and seek legal, economic, and political preference for their talents in whining, vamping, aborting, as well as recognition for their indispensable and eagerly given help in making the United States one of the world’s industrial-scale producers of both pornography and the dismembered corpses of infants. There may be something that can be done, however. The portrait of another Democratic icon named Woodrow Wilson now adorns the $100,000 bill, which appears to be to be used mainly in transactions."

"Andrew Jackson then is a sturdy obstacle to the Democrats' ongoing and increasingly frenzied campaign to erase from America's history all the unsavory things their party has championed for most of its existence, namely, slavery, secession, civil war, segregation, socialism, and, most recently the slaughter of infants. And so their longtime hero Andrew Jackson has been, as Sam Spade once said, chosen to take the fall alongside the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia to help erase the Democrats' consistently reprehensible behavior and policies from the history books. But there is a rub. None of the women the Democrats have so far raised as General Jackson's replacement in any way merit representation in the pantheon of patriots, nation-builders, and military leaders that grace the few denominations of our paper currency."

"Well, the New York Times editorial board, that reliable abettor of all the liars, haters, and fantasists, aka Democrats, who detest the American South and lust to rewrite America's history into party-serving fiction, has endorsed dumping Andrew Jackson in favor of rewarding a woman with his place on the twenty dollar bill. So fundamentally important to the nation is this switch that the Board’s reputedly adult members have decided that the only group sober and knowledgeable enough to decide how to destroy another piece of American history and further persecute the South is 'the nation's schoolchildren' who should be made to 'nominate and vote on Jackson’s replacement. Why not give them another reason to learn about women who altered history and make some history themselves by changing American currency?' Why of course, what geniuses! And, then, why not let these kids — who cannot figure out that the brim of baseball cap goes in the front — go on to decide other pressing national issues. Maybe they can replace General Washington on the $1 bill with a Muslim woman and thereby end America's war with Islam. As the saying goes, you could not make this stuff up. Now Andrew Jackson was not the most unblemished of men, but he risked his life repeatedly for his country; killed its enemies; expanded U.S. territory in North America; defeated the British at New Orleans; was twice elected president; and faced down and was prepared to hang the South Carolina nullifiers when he believed they were seeking to undermine and break the Union. Jackson is one of those southern fellows, and so he is now a target for banishment from our currency and eventually our history because he did not treat slaves and Indians as if they were his equals and, indeed, inflicted pain on both. But he also was, along with Thomas Jefferson, another insensitive chap toward blacks and Indians, the longtime icon of the Democratic Party and its great self-praising and fund-raising feast, the annual 'Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner', which was, of course, a fervent tribute to those that General Jackson would have hanged without blinking."

"The Army of Northern Virginia. Under the superb command of Marse Robert that army's battle flag came close to being a national flag of an independent Confederate States of America. Thank God it did not. But neither were those who fought under that banner executed, imprisoned, permanently disenfranchised, or exiled, as the losers in most other civil wars have been. As Lincoln advised, U.S. Grant, and William T. Sherman 'let 'em up easy'. Thereafter, the battle flag was flown for some bad purposes, as the emblem of the Klan and the Democratic Party's southern wing."

"The national Democratic Party and its southern affiliates labored mightily to re-subjugate the newly free blacks, eventually succeeding by implementing Jim Crow laws, motivating the birth of the Klan and then protecting it, establishing separate-but-equal schools and public facilities, and enacting codes of lawful segregation, all of which Democrats defended in a fight to the death until the 1960s. In U.S. history, from the ratification of the Constitution to the economic devastation wrought by Obama on contemporary black Americans, the men and women who run Democratic Party, from Jefferson and Jackson forward, have been the ferocious enemy of black Americans entering the mainstream of American life, to this day bending every tool of political power to keep them angry, unemployed, mired in poverty, and politically and economically dependent in a manner that approaches quite near to re-enslavement."

"If there is a hereafter, the Democrats will burn because they were the Doers that killed the republic, the Republicans because they were the Talkers who abetted its murder. And such will be a well deserved fate for both. It is enough to make an agnostic hope there is a God."

"Those in the Ivy League, Hollywood, the media, the leftist rich, and most schools and universities who, like Obama, consider themselves superior intellectuals earmarked by some demented destiny to implement their pagan, socialist, and anti-human ideology in the United States. They first mean to destroy the Second Amendment, and then, safe to be tyrants, though cowards all, they intend remake in their own worthless image those Americans who still work hard, who believe in and are willing to fight to defend liberty, and who have learned the Founders' key lesson, namely, that the federal government must always be seen as an enemy of freedom and therefore must be kept in check and opposed to the hilt whenever necessary. Perhaps it would be best if Obama and his Ivy-League elite studied the words of a man they hail an icon of their party and with whom they share a liking for slavery, but who actually is a man they do not in the least understand."

"Next we have Obama's murderous use of America's military young for his and his party’s partisan political purposes. He kept U.S. soldiers in Iraq, a war which should never have been started, long after he had announced the war was un-winnable but just long enough to pile up heaps of dead and maimed American youngsters in order to make their withdrawal timely and useful for electoral purposes. Now we see Obama and his team keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan long after he decided to surrender to the Islamists in that that war, and thereby knowingly enhance the strength, lethality, self-confidence, and ambitions of America’s most dangerous enemies by returning to them their key safe haven. Our troops are the cream of America's young and they ought not to be used by any president as if he was their owner. Obama, however, seems to regard them, as he does the unborn, as chattel to be disposed of as he and his advisers see fit to advance Democratic Party political prospects. Finally, we have Obama and his advisers seeking to financially enslave this generation of young Americans, and each generation that follows it, in order to pay for his health care program. Obama and his lieutenants are starting slow in this area, but the evidence of coming coercion, beyond the mandatory fine young people pay if they prove not to be servile, can be seen in West Virginia, where university students reportedly will not be allowed to matriculate unless they enroll in Obama Care This amounts to a 4-year term of indentured service for the privilege of paying extortionate tuition for a mediocre education offered by anti-American ideologues of Obama’s stripe. And make no mistake, these young people are not being threatened and ultimately coerced to forfeit their salary, savings, and future for the elderly and sick. They are being used to fund health care for the core groups, dare I say 'plantations', of the Democratic Party."

"The history of the Democratic Party can be concisely captured by referring to its steadfast allegiance to the four Ss. Slavery, Secession, Segregation, and Socialism. During the Obama presidency we have seen how hard old habits die, even for a black man whose race was the long-time victim of Democratic Party's bone-deep authoritarianism. Under this Democratic president we have seen a war waged on several fronts against America's young. Indeed, the Democrats' historic taste for and belief in slavery have resurfaced with a vengeance and indiscriminately under the Obama administration, whether white, black, yellow, red, male, or female America's young are dying and being forced to work for Obama and his lieutenants as they seek to maintain their party's hold on political power. How so? Well, America has never had a president and administration so eager to kill unborn Americans. Even with post-1973 science having proved irrefutably that the unborn are human beings, and even though American law always has defined them as U.S. citizens, Obama and his colleagues have strengthened at every point they could the absurd notion that unborn humans are the chattel property of the woman who bears them, and so can be disposed of, that is, murdered, at her whim. And, in what must be considered a masterpiece of Orwellian language, Obama and his team, and most Democrats since 1973, describe this federal government-issued license to kill as a woman's 'right', a means by which she manifests her equality with men. They then damn any one who questions the logic, sanity, or justice of this argument as an 'extremist'. Only in an America in which a political entity as devoted to the four 'Ss' as the Democratic Party could opposition to the cold-blooded murder of fellow citizens unable defend themselves be identified by the country’s best-educated as 'extremism'. If this is indeed a right, it is a right gives each woman the right to be a slave-owner and a Nazi. Such a 'right' really is no different than the rights sanctioned by the Dred Scott decision and the Nuremberg laws, each of which legally defined certain categories of people out of the human race in order to enslave or kill them. Since 1973, the application of this 'right' has produced precisely the same results as Dred Scott and the Nuremberg laws, though in numbers so immense, 55 million and climbing, that they make those acts seem rather tame and minimally destructive of humans."

"The test of an intelligence officer is not so much the ability to accumulate information; it's to judge between different pieces of information, and not to take a piece of information and use it in a piece of analysis simply because it fits your case, but to use it because it either comes from a reliable source like signals intercepts, from a human source that has been vetted over time as a reliable person, or it comes from documentary information -- papers you've stolen from another government or some other organization. The work that came out of Feith's shop that I saw, especially on Al Qaeda and Iraq, was simply ... finding pieces of information in the world of intelligence information that fit the argument they wanted to make. Tenet, to his credit, had us go back 10 years in the agency's records and look and see what we knew about Iraq and Al Qaeda. I was available at the time, and I led the effort. We went back 10 years. We examined about 20,000 documents, probably something along the line of 75,000 pages of information, and there was no connection between [Al Qaeda] and Saddam."

"I happened to do the research on the links between al Qaeda and Iraq. (MATTHEWS: And what did you come up with?) SCHEUER: Nothing."

"You know, I was born at night but not last night, sir. There is no operation at the CIA that is conducted without approval of lawyers. It is the bane of our existence, and it is a detriment to the defense of America, but, nonetheless, that is the fact."

"His motive—his motive is to change our policies, sir. Notwithstanding what the president or Mr. Kerry said during the campaign, he really doesn't give a darn about our democracy or our society. He is after a change in policies which he views as lethal to Muslims."

"I don't consider Osama Bin Laden to be a terrorist. I consider him to be a resistance fighter."

"[Bin Laden has] already said publicly that you can have all the oil you want. I can‘t drink it. We‘re going to sell it to you at a marketplace."

"I think the 9/11 Commission, report, for example is wrong. The 9/11 Commission report identifies bin Laden and his followers as takfiris, who kill Muslims if they don‘t agree with them. They‘re not takfiris. They‘re just very devout, severe Salafists and Wahhabis."

"I think that – you know – we just encountered – America encountered – a brilliant man, and in terms of being a noble cause, it wasn't that many centuries ago that killing in the name of God, or waging war in the name of God, was a major thing in Christianity."

"It's always been hard for me to understand how we say people who supports Osama Bin Laden or someone else like him – who are willing to give their lives to destroy the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia – how we can describe those people as people who hated freedom. It seems to me that their definition of freedom might be different than ours, but to oppose a dictatorship, one must want freedom in some kind of way."

"He (Osama bin Laden) doesn't want to fight this war forever. A lot of people mistake him as someone who can't get along without fighting. But that's not clearly the case."

"Musharraf has bent over backwards, sir. Quite frankly, I would have bet my pension that Musharraf would not have done half of what he's done. He's done a tremendous amount for us."

"Right now, the choice isn't between war and peace. It is between war and endless war."

"I wasn't in the room with the president and Mr. Tenet. But I can tell that you that the people who were working against Osama bin Laden were assured from the first day that much of the work we had done in the last decade would be undone by that war."

"Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress--that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find--I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries."

"I hope that Israel flourishes, I just don't think that Israel is worth ‘an American life or an American dollar’"

"We know for certain that bin Laden was seeking CBRN [chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear] weapons . . . and that Iraq and Sudan have been cooperating with bin Laden on CBRN weapon acquisition and development."

"Regarding Iraq, bin Laden, as noted, was in contact with Baghdad's intelligence service since at least 1994. He reportedly cooperated with it in the area of chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear [CBRN] weapons and may have trained some fighters in Iraq at camps run by Saddam's anti-Iran force, the Mujahedin al-Khalq."

"In Sudan, Bin Laden decided to acquire and, when possible, use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons against Islam's enemies. Bin Laden's first moves in this direction were made in cooperation with NIF [Sudan's National Islamic Front], Iraq's intelligence service and Iraqi CBRN scientists and technicians. He made contact with Baghdad with its intelligence officers in Sudan and by a [Hassan] Turabi-brokered June-1994 visit by Iraq's then-intelligence chief Faruq al-Hijazi; according to Milan's Corriere della Sera, Saddam, in 1994, made Hijazi responsible for "nurturing Iraq's ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors. Turabi had plans to formulate a "common strategy" with bin Laden and Iraq for subverting pro-U.S. Arab regimes, but the meeting was a get-acquainted session where Hijazi and bin Laden developed a good rapport that would "flourish" in the late 1990s."

"There is information showing that in the 1993-1994 period bin Laden began to work with Sudan and Iraq to acquire a CBRN capability for al Qaeda."

"Before the [1990 Iraqi] attack [on Kuwait], bin Laden angered Saudi authorities by making a public "prophesy ... [that] Saddam was going to invade Saudi Arabia." Sa'd al-Faqih claims bin Laden also sent "secret confidential letters to the King" about the Iraqi threat; according to al-Faqih, "he [bin Laden] was giving talks about it in the mosques. He was giving speeches in the mosques and talking about the dangers of the Ba'ath ... having ambitions to invade Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. And then his prophesy was correct. And he was never respected or rewarded for that. Instead he was advised to stay in Jeddah; he was put in sort of house arrest."

"The data in the public domain suggest the truth about bin Laden's activities in Afghanistan is much closer to the picture of him as 'the great freedom fighter of the Islamic world" than to the Western experts' description of him as an Islamic do-gooder or an immature, irrational youth."

""Bin Laden, of course, learned his military skills in Afghanistan, not on the Iran-Iraq border, and, as a result, his methodological approach to waging jihad is marked by a measured manner stressing patience, preparation, and professionalism."

"In 1993 Osama bin Laden began speaking in detail to Muslim and Western journalists about his beliefs, goals, and intentions, and began publishing commentaries on these matters in the media.... While bin Laden's words have not been a torrent, they are plentiful, carefully chosen, plainly spoken, and precise. He has set out the Muslim world's problems as he sees them; determined that they are caused by the United States; explained why they must be remedied; and outlined how he will try to do so. Seldom in America's history has an enemy laid out so clearly the basis for the war he is waging against it."

"Bin Laden's long-standing support for the Palestinians against Israel also appears to have been learned at his father's knee."

"On balance, the Islamic media's taste for what the West terms sensationalizing and conspiracy mongering is less than meets the eye. Based on my research, it is apparent that the Islamic media's correspondents and editors work harder, dig deeper, and think more than most of their Western counterparts. This is not to say that the Islamic media do not suffer from sensationalized conspiracy theories, but they probably are no more prone to those faults than their Western colleagues."

"The Afghan jihad confronted the theoreticians of democratic Islam with a hard reality. The Red Army was not defeated by a democratic revolution, but by an Islamist revolution grounded, guided, and steeled by God's words as found in the Koran and explained by the Prophet. Driven by their faith, the mujhadein [sic] uses bullets, not votes, to win one for Allah, and by so doing revalidated jihad as Islam's normative response to attack."

"The period between 9/11 and [the invasion of] Iraq was not a good time for America. There wasn't a robust discussion of what we were doing. If we stop trying to figure out the other side, we've given up. The person on the other side is not evil. They just have a different perspective. The smartest people understand the enemy's point of view, because they understand what's driving them."

"There's actually a network that I could think of that [does not ask difficult questions] for a living, which is tell the people at home the same answer all the time, because it makes them feel good. And they don't like hearing arguments on that network, the people that watch it. There are people out there that — there was a great scene at the end of Carnal Knowledge — remember that old movie — where Jack Nicholson is going to the hooker, and he wants it exactly the same every time. And when she— when Rita Moreno, who played the hooker, said something just a little bit different in their normal sort of business they did, and he couldn't do it. They want it exactly the same way, these people who watch Fox. Every night they want it the same way. They can't do it if it's not exactly the same way."

"The long view: when we were living in Greece, we used to go to this beach at Marathon — just think of it .... And there was a little museum there, a little tiny museum from well before the Battle of Marathon that you've studied, with artifacts from 7000 years ago. And you looked in these cases, and there were buttons, there were frying pans, there were mirrors, there was jewelry — and it was remarkable to look at. You could open them and put on — you could put it on and use it right away! It was totally recognizable to the lives of women today. For men, what was in those cases? Well, there were some bows and arrows, and there were some articles of worship, so if you were a soldier or a priest there was something. But if you just went about leading your daily lives, there wasn't something terribly recognizable for you. That's what we have: we have this wonderful, wonderful continuum. So I say to you, young women of Wellesley, open up those cases. Take up the tools and put on the jewels — of your foremothers and sisters. Go out into this world and take good care of it."

"Life is long. You have many opportunities ahead of you. You have so many more opportunities than so many people. You are privileged and blessed. And you will have the opportunity to say "Yes" to many different things, but you also will have the opportunity in the saying of "Yes" to say "No" sometimes, to say "No, it's not right for me, and my family, right now, to take this great job offer." And you know what? Another one will come along. I'm living proof of that. You can do it all. There are times when you have to not do it all at once. There are times when you don't sleep. But you can do it if you have some sense about saying, "This is what's right now, this is where I am now, and this is the care I need to take right now." I think that it is important to look at the long view as you go out of here and realize that there's a long time ahead, and there is time to see it all, to do it all, and to do it in ways that make you proud and happy in the end."

"I have to tell you I don't just see this role of women as caretakers in the world that I cover, I see it in the world I live in. Slowly, slowly, slowly but definitely, the workplace is becoming a more humane place because of the presence of women. The idea that time can be taken for family, whether it's having children or caring for sick people or elderly people in your family. That is becoming more possible for the men in the work place as well as for the women in the work place because of the fights that we have fought over the last several decades."

"I say, in politics, it is the women who are constantly bringing the civilizing issues to the forefront, the caretaking issues, the issues of concern to families and children."