Claims in a recently uncovered British memo that intelligence was "being fixed" to support the Iraq war as early as mid-2002 are "flat out wrong", White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Monday.McClellan insisted the process leading up to the decision to go to war was "very public" -- and that the decision to invade in March 2003 was taken only after Iraq refused to comply with its "international obligations".
"The president of the United States, in a very public way, reached out to people across the world, went to the United Nations and tried to resolve this in a diplomatic manner," McClellan said.
"Saddam Hussein was the one, in the end, who chose continued defiance. And only then was the decision made, as a last resort, to go into Iraq."
Difficult to believe McClellan's insistence, given that:
• The official British reaction to the "Downing Street Memo" was that the its contents were "nothing new".
• The White House's initial response was to not comment. Apparently it expected the media's tepid response to the memo's leaking indicated that the story would die a quick death. Or, perhaps it -- much like the British government -- didn't see anything shocking or revealing in the memo's contents. There's some merit for this line of thinking, really: for those that've been paying attention, the memo is merely the confirmation of what we've known since Andy Card "rolled out" the Iraq War "product" in September of 2002 (or even, really, since Dubya declared the "Axis Of Evil" in early 2002).
• The memo corroborates similar revelations from Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke.
• "...a former senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, called it 'an absolutely accurate description of what transpired'."
• A look at the Administration's actions leading up to the invasion are enough to confirm that what was patently obvious to everyone else (viz., that Iraq had no WMD or facilities in which to create them, and that any minimal stocks that it might have retained since 1998 would have long-since passed their shelf-life) was also patently obvious to the Bush Administration.
So, McClellan is lying. No news there: McClellan lies more frequently than he does any other thing. But it's kind of an interesting lie. Sort of.
In lying to cover his President's ass, he tells such a blatant whopper that no media outlet will probably even bother to comment. To wit, he claims that Saddam "chose continued defiance" -- months after the Administration has officially called off the search for any hint of a trace of WMD stocks, programmes, or facilities; coming up empty-handed, save for the assertion that it was Saddam's "intent" to at some future date re-start his banned weapons programmes.
So, in denying that the White House planned to "fix" reality around its goals, McClellan is, in essence, arguing that WMD actually were found in Iraq -- but if that were the case, there would, of course, be no need to deny the memo's contents.
And the sonofabitch is not going to be called upon it by a single reporter! Sometimes, you've got to hand it to the motherfucker.
Maybe McClellan is referring to how Saddam refused to let the inspectors in, just like his boss said *twice* in 2003.
Posted by: dack on May 18, 2005 09:24 AMQuote of the Day:
"I've made it very clear... the use of federal money, taxpayers' money, to promote science which destroys life in order to save life, I'm against that," he told reporters.
- Bush in response to stem cell bill in the US
Friday, 20 May, 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4567253.stm
If Scott McClellan is the official voice of the President isn't he as responsible for the lies? The press corps has been spineless. No wonder they silenced Helen Thomas!
Posted by: Rob K on May 22, 2005 08:35 PM