Promoted by Steven D.
Watching the White House try to spin their way out of the recent revelations about the so-called “rolling laboratories” of death found in Iraq, one cannot help thinking of the tangled web the administration has woven for itself. Yesterday, Scott McClellan was in full damage-control mode:
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…
Choosing the righteous indignation route, McClellan also called the reports “reckless” and “wild accusations.” He pointed to an intelligence community report released the day before Bush made his remarks, and said:
…that the labs that were found were for producing biological weapons.
Well, there you have it. So on May 29, 2003, when George W. Bush said:
“We have found the weapons of mass destruction”
…his words were simply a reflection of the combined assessment of the intelligence community, or…the White House is getting really bad at lying.
Time and again, McClellan emphasized that it takes time to assess and process intelligence as it comes in, and pointed out that:
…the President’s statements were based on the joint assessment of the CIA and DIA that was publicly released the day before. So this was publicly provided to the American people, it’s what the White House had. That was the assessment of the intelligence community.
He suggested that the reporters go back and look at what was being said at the time. But on the off chance that none of the reporters took McClellan up on his suggestion, I did it for them.
But before we get to that, a quick reminder of some of the comments that were made after a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report “concluded that the trailers weren’t biological weapons labs.”
Ari Fleischer: “…we have found the bio trucks that can be used only for the purpose of producing biological weapons.”
Dick Cheney: “We’ve found a couple of semi-trailers at this point which we believe were in fact part of [a WMD] program…I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction.”
George W. Bush: “Here’s what — we’ve discovered a weapons system, biological labs, that Iraq denied she had, and labs that were prohibited under the U.N. resolutions.”
So, what else was being said at the time? Remember that the Pentagon-appointed team of experts had reported to the DIA on May 27, 2003, that they “strongly rejected the weapons claim.” And on that May 27th, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held several interviews where he was asked about WMD in Iraq. In one interview he said:
Colin Powell if you may recall at the UN mentioned the existence of these mobile biological laboratories and two of those are now in our custody and they seem to look very much like precisely what Colin Powell said would exist.
And in a second interview, Rumsfeld said:
Weapons of mass destruction, the Secretary of the State, Colin Powell mentioned there would be a biological laboratory — mobile biological laboratories, it looks like two of those are now in the custody of the teams and survey teams that are out investigating various suspect sites. Whether they’ll turn out to be exactly the same I don’t know, but clearly the intelligence community is impressed that they are worth testing and examining and determining.
So on the same day a report is filed by his own experts rejecting the claims made about the alleged biolabs, Rumsfeld hedges with “look very much like” and “I don’t know.” And the next day it is the combined assessment of the intelligence community that the labs “were for producing biological weapons”?
Yesterday, McClellan also mentioned the Iraq Survey Group, the:
…1,400-member international team organized by The Pentagon and CIA to hunt for suspected stockpiles of WMD.
And what were they saying at the time? On May 30, 2003, the director for operations of the DIA held a joint press conference with Stephen Cambone specifically to discuss the Iraq Survey Group. And rolling biological labs that had been determined to be for “producing biological weapons” wasn’t mentioned. Not once. But there were certainly many questions about the search for such weapons. Some excerpts:
Q: U.S. military commanders, having been given intelligence that they were likely to face chemical or biological weapons on the battlefield, are continuing to express surprise…that they neither encountered them on the battlefield nor have any been found in the two months or so since then. What do you think is the explanation for that?
Dayton: I honestly don’t know. […]
Dayton: Do I think we’re going to find something? Yeah, I kind of do, because I think there’s a lot of information out there…This is not necessarily going to be quick and easy, but it will be very thorough. […]
Dayton: Oh, I think we’ve learned something in the past couple of months. The fact that we’ve gone to a lot of these sites and haven’t found anything that is of value tells us that, okay, we took the top priority sites, didn’t find them, so now, before we go to other sites…
On May 27, 2003, the day the report rejecting the weapons claims was delivered to the Defense Intelligence Agency, Donald Rumsfeld won’t definitively say that the trucks are for producing biological weapons. Three days later during a Defense Department briefing on the search for WMD, the trucks are never mentioned and it is admitted that no WMD have been found. But yesterday Scott McClellan insisted that, at the time, “the labs that were found were for producing biological weapons.” So of course it was perfectly reasonable for George Bush to proclaim that WMD had been found.
The White House needs to work on their lies because they just can’t tell them like they used to.
Crossposted at ePluribus Media and Daily Kos