New White House Policy; Everybody Makes Mistakes
Topic: Politics

This has been a day filled with political news, be it President Bush's falling approval ratings or new admission of incompetence by the White House. Well, in light of that second breaking story, WH Spokesman Scotty Mac unveiled the new policy for dealing with reporters; everybody fucks up.

“The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency.”

He stopped here, only a nano-second short of saying "It's an intelligence ignoring agency."

It would appear that President Bush and his administration did indeed ignore or not even notice statements by scientists that the trailers Bush claimed were used for making nerve gas and chemical weapons in Iraq weren't actually used for that at all. We're going to let the Washington Post explain, because we seem to have a way of wrapping a rant around the facts.

Bush declared in a May 2003 television interview, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.” The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was cited at the time as supporting evidence for the decision to go to war.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that experts on a Pentagon-sponsored mission who examined the trailers concluded that they had nothing to do with biological weapons and sent their findings to Washington in a classified report on May 27, 2003.

One day later, the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency publicly issued an assessment saying the opposite — that U.S. officials were confident that the trailers were used to produce biological weapons. The assessment said the mobile facilities represented “the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.” On May 29, 2003, the president repeated the claims from the public intelligence report.

Of course, Scotty Mac, master of the legendary move called "The Brush Off," did in fact brush this off. Damn he's good.


MSNBC