December 10, 2003. Woodward interviews Bush for his book, and asks him, where are the WMD. Bush evades, answers different questions. Woodward presses.
- "Why do you need to deal with this in the book?" he asked. "What's this got to do about it?"
I said that I had to cover the aftermath of the war. This was a key question.
The president said he wanted to make sure that his acknowledgement that no weapons of mass destruction had been found so far would not be published in The Washington Post until the book was released. "In other words, I'm not going to read a headline, 'Bush Says No Weapons.'"
I promised that he would not, though less than two months later he would effectively make that acknowledgement, saying on February 8, 2004, on NBC's Meet the Press, "I expected there to be stockpiles of weapons" and "We though he had weapons."
Plan of Attack 423-24.
So he acknowledged there were no WMD, but insisted on misleading people for another couple of months.
