Free Republic

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...

Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi Weapons Despite Evidence to Contrary By Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, April 12, 2006; A01 On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the...

... "The lead suggested that what the president was saying was based on something that had been debunked, and that is not true," McClellan said. "In fact, the president was saying something that was based on what the intelligence community - through the CIA and DIA - were saying." ...

April 12, 2006 More deception from the Washington Post While the Washington Post frets about a U.S. military "propaganda campaign" against Zarqawi that consists of spreading true information reasonably calculated to save American lives, the Post conducts a propaganda campaign against the administration that's based on distortion. The latest instance is today's story on the Bush administration's statements that certain Iraqi trailers were biological laboratories. As Ed Morrissey shows, the Post's report is highly deceptive. While trumpeting the fact that a team of experts concluded after the invasion that, contrary to the administration's claim, the trailers were not bio labs,...