MR. McCLELLAN: 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. And the assessment that the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is the arm of the Pentagon, made initially was that those -- in this report that was released on May 28, 2003, was that the labs that were found were for producing biological weapons. And that assessment remained in place for quite some time, as you just pointed out.
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.
McClellan's better moments. Scott, you need to skewer the lying press more often.