Posted on 04/12/2006 7:26:55 PM PDT by West Coast Conservative
The White House on Wednesday hit back at The Washington Post for its front-page story this morning which suggested President Bush in 2003 cited the discovery of mobile biological weapons labs in Iraq as "weapons of mass destruction" just after the Pentagon received a top-level report revealing this was not true.
Press Secretary Scott McClellan called the account "reckless reporting" and asked media outlets who carried it to apologize. He said Bush made his statement based on multiple sources.
Appearing on MSNBC Wednesday night, the Post reporter who wrote the piece, Joby Warrick, stood by the reporting, and said he had never stated that Bush "knowingly" ignored the report. That left open why the president did not know about it, and why he and others in the administration continued to press the WMD mobile lab angle for months afterward.
On May 29, 2003, Bush said, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction,” after the finding of the mobile labs. However, the Post today said a Pentagon-sponsored fact-finding mission had already concluded and submitted a report finding that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons.
McClellan said the Post story was "nothing more than rehashing an old issue that was resolved long ago. " He singled out ABC for featuring report. "This is reckless reporting and for you all to go on the air this morning and make such a charge is irresponsible, and I hope that ABC would apologize for it and make a correction on the air," he said.
Later, without naming any network, he said, "I talked to one network about it and they have publicly -- well, they've expressed their apologies to the White House. I hope they will go and publicly apologize on the air about the statements that were made, because I think it's important, given that they had made those statements in front of all their viewers. And so we look forward to that happening, as well."
McClellan did not explain why the 122-page final report was classified and kept on the shelf. Despite debunkings from various sources, the Post noted, for nearly a year the Bush administration continued to assert that the trailers were biological weapons factories.
Talking to reporters today, McClellan said: “You know, I saw some reporting talking about how this latest revelation — which is not something that is new; this is all old information that’s being rehashed — was an embarrassment for the White House. No, it’s an embarrassment for the media that is out there reporting this....
"First of all, intelligence is -- when an assessment is made, it looks at a lot of different intelligence and it takes time to vet that intelligence, go through it, debate it, discuss it with the intelligence community, look at all the different intelligence coming in, whether it's human intelligence or signals intelligence or open-source intelligence. And they pull that all together and the intelligence community makes the assessment. The White House is not the intelligence-gathering agency....
"Now, I will point out that the reporting I saw this morning was simply reckless and it was irresponsible. The lead in The Washington Post left the impression for the reader that the President was saying something he knew at the time not to be true. That is absolutely false and it is irresponsible, and I don't know how The Washington Post can defend something so irresponsible."
I'm so very glad to read this. It is the only way to stop the media from their (deliberate) misreporting.
Editor & Publisher manages not to mention that two other investigative teams found that these WERE mobile biological facilities. That raises obfuscation to the level of a lie, in my opinion. The Washington ComPost merely buried that little fact at the end of the column. Editor & Publisher, springing to their defense, omits it entirely.
This is getting dangerous. They are flat out making stuff up willy-nilly......because they are so deranged with hate.
I've been reading your posts on FR for over 7+ years.
I know that you're not that naive.
Do you really think that the media gives a flying &^%$ about what the WH might have to say about their latest misrepersentaion/lie/propoganda?
The WH should go further. It should DEMAND an apology and if one is not given discontinue allowing access to that news agency. I fail to understand why they don't play hardball with these SOBs. What do they have to lose right now? I'll bet their poll numbers would move up.
Don't be so harsh on Peach.
Ah yes, the Stalinist ComPost returns to business as usual, after a semi-positive Sunday editorial.
This is a new low for the media..
Peach has a long history of sound and reasonable thought and judgement.
How Peach comes to the conclusion that a simple request by the WH for an apology is what's needed to put the media in it's place is puzzling to me.
They need to be smacked.......full fisted and hard.
I have come to agree with Peach, although I have long argued with her about this. I used to think that it ws better to ignore this junk because answering it gave it some validity. As we can see from the poll numbers, this was the wrong strategy, and the White House is apparently changing course.
Scott's fighting back does two things:
1. It gives us a story, even if it is only in a trade paper and buried on the back of the Post.
2. It encourages the Republicans who have been slogging away in the trenches for so long, wondering why the President doesn't answer.
The White House needs to keep calling out the press by name, citing specific reporters, and keep hammering away. It isn't that hard to get the public riled up against the press, most thinking people have an instinctive dislike for it anyway.
lets see... the trailers exist and CAN do the job they are accused of, but the RATS say there's NO EVIDENSE that they were used so they are fake. But... the FAKE documents dan RATher used are REAL???
Various sources such as NY Times sources Miss Anonymous, Mr. Anonymous, Mrs. Anonymous, etc... at least one of whom if not all of them hadn't even seen the trailers.
Sure, Iraqis on the eve of war thought it an effective use of their remaining free time to scrub, bleach and paint the inside of a mere redneck hydrogen plant to make it presentable for the preinvasion looters. Wouldn't want a looter to cut himself and get tetanus or something, right?.
that is precisely what's happening.
Yes, it is and the President needs to keep on fighting the MSM with hard, cold FACTS!
'Course I guess we should forget about the non-mobile labs where bio and chem were tested on prisoners, bio seed stocks found in scientists' refrigerators, mustard and nerve gas munitions that were found, prohibited missles and uav's, enriched uranium at al-tuwaitha and parts and plans for enrichment centrifuges buried in a scientists' back yard.
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