Today in the White House briefing room, I asked Scott McClellan this question:
Scott, last week you said that claims in the leaked Downing Street memo that intelligence was being fixed to support the Iraq War as early as July 2002 are “flat-out wrong.” According to the memo, which was dated July 23, 2002, and whose authenticity has not been disputed by the British Government, both Foreign Minister Jack Straw and British Intelligence Chief Sir Richard Dearlove said that the President had already made up his mind to invade Iraq. Dearlove added that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Do you think these two very senior officials of our closest ally were ‘flat-out wrong?’ And if so, how could they have been so misinformed after their conversations with George Tenet and Condoleezza Rice?
His response:
Let me correct you on the — let me correct you on the characterization of the quote you attributed to me. I’m referring to some of the allegations that were made referring to a report. In terms of the intelligence, the — if anyone wants to know how the intelligence was used by the administration, all they have to do is go back and look at all the public comments over the course of the lead-up to the war in Iraq, and that’s all very public information. Everybody who was there could see how we used that intelligence.And in terms of the intelligence, it was wrong, and we are taking steps to correct that and make sure that in the future we have the best possible intelligence, because it’s critical in this post-September 11th age, that the executive branch has the best intelligence possible.
Note that Scott is now saying that what was “flat-out wrong” was not the claims in the memo, but claims made about the memo. My source for the “flat-out wrong” statement was this May 17 article from CNN, which reported the first on-the-record White House response, made the previous day during a presidential trip to West Virginia, to the release of the memo. A transcript of Scott’s May 16 statement is not available, so I can’t say for sure exactly what the context was, but the CNN article certainly suggests that Scott was objecting to Dearlove’s assertion that intelligence was being “fixed” to support an invasion.
The second official response from the White House relating to the memo occurred on May 17, according to this New York Times article dated the 19th. It quotes McClellan as telling reporters that there is “no need” for the White House to respond to the May 5 letter written to the White House by eighty-nine House Democrats, asking President Bush whether the statements in the memo accurately represent the administration’s thinking at the time.
Now, apparently, we know that they did.
Bush’s Press Poodle, Scott McClellan, is a skilled equivocator.
Hahahahhahahahahahahaha!!!!
This is awesome!
Now maybe we’ll finally see some real coverage by the State…I mean…Mainstream Media, but probably not.
All of those fools are probably still afraid an anthrax envelope will show up on their doorstep if they speak out against Bush. They might be right, since I think Bush is guilty of everything from stolen elections, to 9-11, to anthrax, to rigged Iraqi intelligence, to God-knows-what-else. I’m embarassed that Americans aren’t more outraged by all of this crap. Any respectable country would have had mass rioting in the streets a long time ago.
M Paulding … yeah, Scott dances well but in this instance, not saying that Straw and Dearlove were wrong is pretty much akin to saying they were right. Makes one wonder what else is floating around out there.
Matt, I don’t know what to expect from the press. Not answering the question in the way Scottie didn’t seems tantamount to an admission, and his comments on the intelligence certainly left a big hole for reporters to walk through if they want to; he pretty much invited everyone to take a stroll through the bullshit extant at the time, and Walter Pincus did that in his story on Sunday. Whether anyone else will pursue it and whether they’ll badger Scottie about it or entirely different questions.
Remainders: Stuck in the Middle with You Edition
• Deft Senate centrists craft a filisaving deal that disappoints everyone equally. The compromise: three out of the ten nominees in question are assured of getting up-or-down votes. Bill Frist, who had planned to say “up-or-down votes” at least …
Weldon, you are right. I’ve no doubt there’s more where this came from. There always is. A few brave souls, like retired USAF LTC Karen Kwiatkowski, are writing about the Israeli connection. It’s my understanding that she worked with some of the players in the run-up to the war, like Franklin, who was arrested recently in connection with the FBI’s AIPAC investigation.
Nice. Very nice.
When I read the transcript I noticed that you seem to have been the only reporter asking about the Blair minutes (“the Downing Street memo”).
Am I reading carefully enough? Are the others really not asking any questions about this?
– Dog, etc.
Joe, so far as we know none of the other “reporters” at the briefings have raised the question. A CNN reporter asked McClellan about it last week sometime — that’s where Eric got the “flat out wrong” quote — but it wasn’t at a briefing, and the NY Times quoted McClellan with respect to the letter COnyers and other House Dems sent to the White House, but nobody else has brought it up even tangentially.
What really, truly pisses me off is that neither the Times nor the Post White House correspondents, both of whose papers have now published fairly lengthy stories on the memo, bothered to follow up.
I start from a position of having no confidence in the press, but even to me this is frickin’ unbelievable.
I don’t know whether you saw the “readers’ forum” post by the new public editor, Barney Calame? He said, more or less, that the Washington bureau chief simply didn’t see this as Times-worthy — at least, that’s how I read it — because they had nothing to add to the bare facts of the memo.
If they don’t bother to follow up, it’s hard to see how that could change for them.
The whole thing makes me look at their blueprint of credibility campaign related program activities, or whatever they’re calling it, with a somewhat more jaundiced eye.
– Dog, etc.
Stop referring to it as a “memo” – you’re just helping to trivialize it by glomming onto that little bit of verbal misdirection.
They were MINUTES – an actual transcription of what was actually said at an actual meeting. Which is hugely different from a “memo,” and is, in fact, only a step away from, oh, say… tape-recording your conversation.
Downing Street may shed a bright shining light on the Niger forgeries.
Cheney’s daughter was director of near east affairs at the time so the Niger and Nigerian connections would fall under her auspices.
France and germany provided the subcontractors for those countries’ nuclear facilities and that it is why they confirmed the niger claims were lies.
The facilities didn’t run for full power the entire time this claim was being cited.
Kind of hard to get yellowcake when you don’t run… one facility closed down the other at 15% capacity…
Look close at the British leads(especially business) with any details involving African business at those locales and in any shared vetnrues with any Italian firms since that country became the mouthpiece for US-sourced disinformation.
Ledeen and Hitchens, along with Chalabi’s female horse whisperers Miller and Mylroi all seem to share some interesting observations on the timeline. They knew of things that lend their proximity to it. AEI seems to have shared contact with all of these media sopurces.