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."
They were mobile Baby Milk Factories. Bush lied, people died. Cindy Sheehan told me so. It was all a plot so the neocons at Halliburton could take over baby-milk production for all of Iraq.
Who reads the Wash Post? Who watches ABC News?
Can you tell I hate the media? Maybe it clouds my judgement. LOL
I just don't know what to do about them anymore. They have the power to start a war and know it and although their ratings are down, they still have too much darned power.
I heard about Rummy telling that reporter he had a day job. LOL. He handles the press beautifully and that's one reason they hate him so much.
I'm going by a comment on the PowerLine Blog, which was picked up by Michelle Malkin yesterday and posted here. I've read it at Malkin and Powerline, but not at the WaPost. Still, these are both reliable sources. Neither is likely to misrepresent something like that.
The idea that Saddam would purchase a whole bunch of trailers to manufacture hydrogen is ludicrous. What, do they think he was a Green?
When the first stories came out disputing the trailers the MSM was claiming it was for making fertilizers then that changed when someone with a brain questioned, why would someone fertilize a desert? Now it's weather balloons but my question is, why would someone need a weather balloon in the desert when the weather is 95% hot and/or dry? Was Saddam planning on building an ark? Why did Saddam have them in military trailers, was weather balloon making against the UN resolution? There is no other explanation to me that would explain the use of the trailers except for weapons.
bttt
Iraqi General Sada who was a top General in the Iraqi Air Force said the WMD was smuggled to Syria during a humanitarian airlift 12 months before the war. They were put in 50 civilian 727s and truck convoys. He was Saddamns most trusted Generals because he never feared telling Saddamn the truth no matter how bad.
The Stone Age Press will never admit that he knows more about the WMD than Michael Mooreon does.
Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters
Plus they also reiterate as "fact" the complete fiction that there were 'multiple debunkings' of the labs as WMD labs.
Weather Balloons. Right...where have we heard that before....?
That flies in the face of his 'bipartisan' 'new tone'.
But it would be wonderful to have the Secret Service usher Helen Thomas out on a rail...
"There is no other explanation to me that would explain the use of the trailers except for weapons."
Game, set, match?
With so many REAL problems in the world, why do they keep resurrecting old resolved history which has no chance of changing anything?
Oh, I get it, a decoy action!
At his point, what Saddam had, or didn't have is pretty unimportant unless it gets into the wrong hands.
Find it or forget it!
bump
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