UPDATE: White House Demands Apology for 'Labs' Scoop

[mia]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002343371


NEW YORK 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....


"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."


Old news can have a whole different meaning now that the average American knows that Bush lied about leaks.

[Canuckistanian]

1. Uh, oh. They're trying to pull another Dan Rather

I do hope the WaPo stands by THIS story. A little reality once in a while is a good thing.

[MadisonProgressive]

2. I'd tell em to blow it outa their ass!

[marmar]

3. Scotty the human helium balloon can go f..k himself...

or have Jeff Gannon/Gluckert do it for him. :loveya:

[Mind_your_head]

4. Perhaps the reporting is 'true'....

....and Snotty is just 'posturing'?????

Notice the absence of any FACTS from Snotty....just a DEMAND for an apology :eyes:

[Neil Lisst]

5. this is a scream! the chutzpah of this white house!

I'm sure we are seeing this because Bush told them to go out there and lecture the press!

This is sooooooo Nixon.

[unblock]

9. ya really gotta marvel at these people sometimes.

i think they could nuke iran and scotty would be up there yelling at the press as irresponsible for reporting it.

[Neil Lisst]

15. I can see Bush shoving little Scottie out there and telling him

YOU TELL THEM TO APOLOGIZE TO THE PRESIDENT!!

[ChiciB1]

6. Nervy Bastids, HUH???

When will it stop?? Hypocrisy abounds and they believe they're LIES!!

It should hit the fan soon, one would think. It's gone way past stupidity!!

[Erika]

7. Bush has no credibility

He is simply a liar. The right wing and the MSM built him up as the war president and great protector of the American people. His mouthpiece, Faux News, tried to paint anyone with the traitor brush if they dared question him, his policies, his decisions.

The chickens have now come home to roost.

[mia]

14. "Bush's bogus document dump" adds to the deception.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/04/13/document_dump/

The administration seeded its new public archive of Iraq documents with jihadist materials completely unrelated to Saddam.

By Fritz Umbach


April 13, 2006 | While the world has watched claim after claim about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction dissolve like a mirage, the Bush administration has never deviated from one assertion in its shifting case for war: that there was an operational connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. As evidence of the manipulation of prewar intelligence keeps surfacing, the administration has now taken that equally dubious claim and made it virtual.

Lacking evidence of a real-world link between Saddam and the perpetrators of 9/11, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed by Bush appointee John Negroponte, has apparently decided to create one in cyberspace -- by seeding its new online Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents archive with suggestive jihadist materials, and by linking the site to an entirely unrelated database of al-Qaida materials....


Despite the suspicious interlopers, the vast majority of the Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents do in fact shed more light on prewar Iraq. Documents detailing the Russian ambassador's efforts to pass information about U.S. war plans to Saddam's regime on the eve of the invasion, Iraqi attempts to deceive weapons inspectors, and furtive if tenuous contacts between Iraq and Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s have all sparked serious and worthwhile discussions. While these debates have rightly ignored the interlopers, they have also publicized the site, drawing visitors who do not read Arabic and who, like the righty bloggers, are likely to assume that Abu Zubaydah's claims about dirty bombs -- summarized on a U.S. government site purportedly about prewar Iraq -- confirm the Bush administration's views of an Iraq-al-Qaida-WMD nexus.

But the 40 interlopers on the Operation Iraq Freedom Documents site are hardly the telltale smoke that points to fire. They look more like a smokescreen, concealing either an egregious error of attribution or a conscious attempt at deception. In this, at least, the new virtual link between Saddam and al-Qaida is of a piece with the Bush administration's earlier claim of a real link. Not because the virtual confirms the original, but because it gives off the same waft of incompetence and duplicity, and raises the same questions of motive and means.

[kitkat65]

8. Well didn't Bush SUGGEST their were WMDs?

"NEW YORK The White House on Wednesday hit back at The Washington Post for its front-page story this morning which <B>suggested <B> 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."

[YouthInAsia]

10. McClellan = WHORE. n/t

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

11. Getting grabbed by the balls is only a good thing if you WANT it

I have a feeling it's rather uncomfortable for them to know this is being read and discussed by the world.

[YouthInAsia]

12. If I were on in the white house press corps, i would get up

and ask McClellan "How it tastes" and when he sayd "How what tastes?" Id say" Bu$h's dick. You suck it so much and so hard you must know the taste by now."

[ArbustoBuster]

13. Update: The White House can blow me.

I think the country now knows that nothing said by the White House can be believed.

[norml]

16. Bite me Scotty!

Bite me hard!

[greenbriar]

17. I demand an apology for this

http://nobravery.cf.huffingtonpost.com/

[Mind_your_head]

20. How BEAUTIFUL each one of us are.....

.....that's what I see in these pics.

We are 'told' that we "don't agree"....but yet 'we do'....we all want to live in peace and understand....and, well, those 'totally insane relatives that we all have.....peace bgins with 'me'.

[mia]

21. I demand an apology for this.

Do you ever Wonder What 2000 looks Like?
2365 and counting...

Thanks for the idea and the link to the "No Bravery" film.

[gristy]

18. apologize????

:rofl:

[Ilsa]

19. Only after Bush apologizes for killing all those soldiers and Iraqis.nt