Check Your Own Facts

Looking at this post, it appears that Scott McClellan took the media to task for Newsweek Qu'ran-desecrating fiasco. This, as is pointed out, is hypocrisy:

Remember when we learned that the evidence for Iraq’s supposed mobile biological weapons labs came from an unrel iable source? What was McClellan’s response then?

QUESTION: Does it concern the President that the primary source for the intelligence on the mobile biological weapons labs was a guy that U.S. intelligence never every interviewed?

MCCLELLAN: Well, again, all these issues will be looked at as part of a broad review by the independent commission that the President appointed… But it’s important that we look at what we learn on the ground and compare that with what we believed prior to going into Iraq.

[White House Press Gaggle, 4/5/04]

There you have it. When confronted with an anonymous source who provided faulty intelligence that the President relied upon to go to war, McClellan chose not to talk about standards of accountability that should be met. Instead, the White House passed the buck to an independent commission and suggested that it didn’t matter what subsequent information they learned about Iraq’s intelligence because they didn’t know it when they went to war. Newsweek has taken responsibility by retracting its story. Will President Bush take responsibility for his own errors?

Remember the White House's pre-war intelligence? Remember how they used any bit of hearsay, looked at any satellite photo and saw weapons? If the inability to predict 9/11/01 was a so-called "failure of imagination" then the pre-war "intelligence" was surely a dictatorship of imagination. The White House saw things and didn't for once stop to consider what they were looking at. Look, a camper van, it must be a mobile lab! Bulldozers? They're hiding weapons with them! I heard from some guy that another guy said that Saddam was going to buy some uranium or something from Niger!