Scottie in Denial: White House Still Clinging to “Same Intelligence” Myth

[rodeodance]

http://thinkprogress.org/?tag=Iraq


Scottie in Denial: White House Still Clinging to “Same Intelligence” Myth

Yesterday, the final nail was placed in the coffin of the White House myth that Congress saw the same prewar intelligence as President Bush. A Congressional Research Service report found that the Bush administration had access “to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information, including information regarding intelligence sources and methods.”

But today, when asked about the CRS report, Scott McClellan pushed the same spin on “same intelligence”:

MCCLELLAN: We provide the Congress a lot of intelligence information, and they did have access to the same intelligence that we saw prior to making the decision to go into Iraq.

In fact, even the White House admits this isn’t true. As McClellan went on to acknowledge a moment later, Congress did not have access to the Presidential Daily Briefs (the intel summaries President Bush receives each morning). The White House says this fact is irrelevant, however, because those briefs were found to be even “more alarmist” and “less nuanced” than the intelligence Congress had:

MCCLELLAN: I saw there’s a reference to the Presidential Daily Brief, where the Silberman-Robb commission already addressed that issue and said that, if anything, that the Presidential Daily Brief was less nuanced than the intelligence that members of Congress saw and that we saw as well.........

[rodeodance]

1. it hard work keeping track of lies!

[Spinzonner]

2. What does it matter if the PDB's are "Less nuanced"

The idiot doesn't read or pay attention to them anyway.

Maybe they ought to wrap them around a rubber mallet.

[mike_c]

3. scottie hasn't been told what the new spin is yet...

...and he'll keep pushing the old spin out the door until Rove or Cheney tells him to change the tune.

[Kagemusha]

4. The PDB is not the only intel the President sees, ever.

And it's stupid to argue otherwise. Very stupid.

[justgamma]

5. Scottie's not lying

of course they saw the same intelligence the Shrub saw. The difference is Shrub or somebody up there also saw the reports with the doubts and questions about the intel. This is the part that Congress wasn't allowed to see. It was most definately cherry-picked.