From Junkdrawer: The Valerie Plame/CIA leak case.
Quoting Scott McClellan: "“I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the seniormost aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,” McClellan wrote. There was one problem. It was not true. I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself."
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1107/6994.htmlFrom Stephanie and others: Mission Accomplished
QUESTION: Mr. President, if I may take you back to May 1st when you stood on the USS Lincoln under a huge banner that said, "Mission Accomplished." At that time you declared major combat operations were over, but since that time there have been over 1,000 wounded, many of them amputees who are recovering at Walter Reed, 217 killed in action since that date. Will you acknowledge now that you were premature in making those remarks?
THE PRESIDENT: Nora, I think you ought to look at my speech. I said, Iraq is a dangerous place and we've still got hard work to do, there's still more to be done. And we had just come off a very successful military operation. I was there to thank the troops.
The "Mission Accomplished" sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed some how to some ingenious advance man from my staff -- they weren't that ingenious, by the way.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/10/20031028-2.htmlThe president's image makers, Mr. Bartlett said, work within a budget for White House travel and events allotted by Congress, which for fiscal 2003 was $3.7 million. He said he did not know the specific cost of staging Mr. Bush's Sept. 11 anniversary speech, or what the White House was charged for the lights. A spokeswoman at the headquarters of Musco Lighting in Oskaloosa, Iowa, said the company did not disclose the prices it charged clients.
<snip>
The most elaborate — and criticized — White House event so far was Mr. Bush's speech aboard the Abraham Lincoln announcing the end of major combat in Iraq. White House officials say that a variety of people, including the president, came up with the idea, and that Mr. Sforza embedded himself on the carrier to make preparations days before Mr. Bush's landing in a flight suit and his early evening speech.
Media strategists noted afterward that Mr. Sforza and his aides had choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right shoulder and the "Mission Accomplished" banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. The speech was specifically timed for what image makers call "magic hour light," which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/05/16/nyt.bumillerFrom TacticalPeek, frylock, and others: "I've not made up my mind."
Today, the Spanish newspaper El Pais published a transcript of a discussion between President Bush and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar in February 2003 in which Bush told Aznar that the U.S. would go to war with Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein with or without a UN resolution:
“We must take him right now. We have shown an incredible degree of patience until now. There are two weeks left. In two weeks we will be militarily ready.”
Though Aznar asked Bush to “have a little patience” and urged, “It is very important to have a resolution,” Bush pushed for war throughout the meeting, telling the Spanish Prime Minister, “We will be in Baghdad by the end of March.”
Just a few days later, Bush insisted to the American public that war with Iraq was not a certainty:
BUSH: “I’ve not made up our mind about military action. Hopefully, this can be done peacefully.” <3/6/03>
BUSH: “We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force.” <3/8/03>
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/26/bush-aznar-talk see also:
http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/ From LanternWaste: Rumsfeld will stay with the adminstration until the end of Bush's second term.
"During his November 8 press conference, President Bush announced Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation as defense secretary and nominated former CIA director Robert Gates to take his place, even though days before the November 7 elections, Bush had said he wanted Rumsfeld to stay on through the end of his presidency. Bush explained that the reason for announcing Rumsfeld's resignation after the elections was due to the fact that he "didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign"; however, media outlets, with few exceptions, have avoided characterizing what Bush did as a "lie" or intentional misrepresentation -- this, despite Bush's own admission of a deliberate deception. Some outlets even failed to acknowledge Bush's November 1 statement that Rumsfeld would stay."
http://mediamatters.org/items/200611100005 From blackops:
"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."
Source: Interview of the President by TVP, Poland, White House (5/29/2003).
"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."
Source: President Bush, Russian President Putin Sign Treaty of Moscow, White House (6/1/2003).
"We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities which were capable of producing biological agents."
Source: President Talks to Troops in Qatar, White House (6/5/2003).
All of these statements are misleading because they claimed the purpose of the trailers was to produce biological weapons without disclosing that engineers from the Defense Intelligence Agency who examined the trailers concluded that they were most likely used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons. This was known before his comments in Poland, yet he repeated it two more times.
"The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 -- and still goes on. That terrible morning, 19 evil men -- the shock troops of a hateful ideology -- gave America and the civilized world a glimpse of their ambitions. They imagined, in the words of one terrorist, that September the 11th would be the 'beginning of the end of America.' By seeking to turn our cities into killing fields, terrorists and their allies believed that they could destroy this nation's resolve, and force our retreat from the world. They have failed."
Source: President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended, White House (5/1/2003).
This statement was misleading because by referencing the September 11 attacks in conjunction with discussion of the war on terror in Iraq, it left the impression that Iraq was connected to September 11. In fact, President Bush himself in September 2003 acknowledged that "We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th."
http://oversight.house.gov/IraqOnTheRecord/ Lies of omission from PDJane:
Little white lies:
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