Scott McClellan Jumps the Track

Scott McClellan Jumps the Track

It's the Bush intelligence – declassification shell game. They need to get their stories straight. UPDATE: TPM MUCKRAKER busts the Pentagon!

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.

I brought up with some of you earlier today some of
the reporting that was based of this Washington Post report. And I talked
to one of network about it…they 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 is important given
that they had made those statements in front of all their viewers. So we look
forward to that happening as well. (source: Think
Progress)

You have got to be kidding me?

The Bush administration wants an apology from the media, with
McClellan stating that one network has done just that?

Apologize for what, exactly?

For telling the long, sorry tale of what President Bush and the
administration did on the run up to war, which included burying a report that
said the mobile trailer labs were not only not a biological reserve, but that
this was known in a detailed report, which was ignored for a CIA and DIA white
paper that said the opposite.

What part of NOT MADE PUBLIC UNTIL NOW doesn't President Bush
and the administration understand?

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq
— not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had
nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission
transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May
27, 2003, two days before the president's statement. (source)

Note to the neocon nitwits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: This is
what happens when you bury the truth. When it finally comes out in a new report
NOT MADE PUBLIC UNTIL NOW, you're going to take a hit politically. You actually
deserve to take a hit politically because you chose not to release the findings
of a “secret fact-finding” mission, because it didn't support the
President's preemption tale.

As Josh Marshall points out, there is a real beauty in Scotty's
banter.

I think the CIA will tell you — and I
spoke to them earlier today — that a finished product like this, a white
paper like this, takes coordination, it takes debating, it takes vetting,
and it's not something that they will tell you turns on a dime. It's a
complex intelligence white paper and it's … one derived from highly classified
information takes a substantial amount of time to coordinate and to run through
a declassification process. And they will tell you this. And the intelligence
comes in many different forms — human intelligence, signals intelligence,
open source — and it's not a trickle, it's a constant flood, is what they
told me this morning. And weighing and assessing it is something that takes
a lot of time and is a technology-intensive process. So you're making an assumption
that something is immediately taken and assessed by your comments. – Josh
Marshall (emphasis Marshall's)

So, as Josh states, which is exactly how it hit me too, the president
couldn't reveal that he was actually lying about the WMD trailer hoax, because
the declassification process hadn't been completed yet. Our president thought
it better to back the bunk about the trailers, rather than speak the truth before
declassification.

Wait a minute.

Didn't Bush and the Republicans say the president's Libby leak
wasn't a classified information leak, because he declassified the documents,
thus making them okay to leak because what the president does is never illegal
by virtue that it's the president who's doing it?

If Bush can instantly declassify documents to secretly rebut a critic, why can't he instantly declassify documents that prove the biological trailer b.s. is exactly that, bunk? Maybe because declassify the trailer information wouldn't have bolstered his cause? Ya think.

But seriously, these guys really do need to get their stories straight. But as for an apology, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and the whole Bush administration are the ones who owe the American people and the U.S. military an apology. That we're seeing, yet again, how Republicans USE national security information when they see fit and only when it benefits them politically, makes the request for an apology come in the form of a righteous demand. However, we'll never hear it or see the likes of it because President Bush has no shame, no conscience and no moral authority on which to stand.