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."
Nope, nothing short of calling them out in the middle of a presser and telling them to turn in their credentials on the way out will slow them down. They should have been responding in a much harsher manner from the beginning.
It's all relative. Today was "vigorous" in comparison with the last 5 years' responses.
Just don't misspell the word misspell.
Excellent point.
My defintion of "hot babe" changes from the time I walk into the bar at 8:00 pm and when I'm stumbling thru it at 1:30 am.
lol!
September 1998 Document: Secret Research Programs Related to WMD http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1613509/posts
It is a memo from September 16 1998 that talks about Saddam regime Secret Research Program related to WMD or in other word Secret WMD Programs. Not only they have these Secret Programs but the memo was advising on keeping it secret and not to be leaked to the outside because of the dangerous implications of this happens.
This is yet another document that proves without any doubt that Saddam Regime never stopped working in his WMD programs and Research and they were just waiting for the opportune moment to produce these WMD again on a large scale. Also please remember that in September 1998 the UN inspectors were still in Iraq and they were kicked later on that year after some US air and missile strikes. So most definitely these Secret Research Programs related to WMD were still in existence and may have reached a more advanced stage from late 1998 to late 2002 where during this period of time there were no UN inspectors in Iraq. This document is another proof that we could have never trusted Saddam and that we had all the right to remove his brutal and terrorist regime after 9/11/2001.
This document will be the antidote to the Washington Post latest LIE that there were no biological programs and a it is a very powerful proof against all the lies spewed by liberals and their media for the last three years.
As far as I could tell, no one was apologizing.
Bastards, it's past time to take them out, one by one.
"Editor & Publisher manages not to mention that two other investigative teams found that these WERE mobile biological facilities. That raises obfuscation to the level of a lie, in my opinion. The Washington ComPost merely buried that little fact at the end of the column. Editor & Publisher, springing to their defense, omits it entirely."
Exactly.
Golden words.
or a whackjob like me!
This, along with all the "domestic spying", "outting of valerie flame", dan rather fraudulent Bush story, etc.,etc., is much more than just misreporting. This is an attempt to destroy the Bush administration, whom the MSM does not believe was duly elected, and are willing to bring down America with it. They are all part of the "We hate America crowd", and there are more of them out there than we realize.
Okay, once more, for the media:
ROFL!
That was kinda my first thought when I saw the headline.
I'm pretty sure that I saw some sugar sprinkled on top of all the pathetic rhetoric.
Willie Wonka is a 'rat!
Yep, they should all be fired, starting with the lead henchmen at CNN.
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I'm so very glad to read this. It is the only way to stop the media from their (deliberate) misreporting.
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Well, there *is* the muslim way. But that requires dynamite.
Really, who?
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