Scott McClellan Hits White House in New Book

McClellan and His Media Collaborators
by Jeff Cohen
No sooner had Bush's ex-press secretary (now author) Scott McClellan accused President Bush and his former collaborators of misleading our country into Iraq than the squeals of protest turned into a mighty roar.

I'm not talking about the vitriol directed at him by former White House colleagues like Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer. I'm talking about McClellan's other war collaborators: the movers and shakers in corporate media. The people McClellan refers to in his book as "deferential, complicit enablers" of Bush administration war propaganda.

One after another, news stars defended themselves with the tired old myth that no one doubted the Iraq WMD claims at the time. The yarn about hindsight being 20/20 was served up more times than a Rev. Wright clip on Fox News.

Katie Couric, whose coverage on CBS of the Iraq troop surge has been almost fawning, was one of the few stars to be candid about pre-invasion coverage, saying days ago, "I think it's one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism." She spoke of "pressure" from corporate management, not just Team Bush, to "really squash any dissent." Then a co-host of NBC Today, she says network brass criticized her for challenging the administration.

NBC execs apparently didn't complain when -- two weeks into the invasion -- Couric thanked a Navy commander for coming on the show, adding, "And I just want you to know, I think Navy SEALs rock!"

This is a glorious moment for the American public. We can finally see those who abandoned reporting for cheerleading and flag-waving and cheap ratings having to squirm over their role in sending other parents' kids into Iraq. I say "other parents' kids" because I never met any bigwig among those I worked with in TV news who had kids in the armed forces.

Given how TV networks danced to the White House tune sung by the Roves and Fleischers and McClellans in the first years of W's reign, it's fitting that it took the words of a longtime Bush insider to force their self-examination over Iraq. Top media figures had shunned years of well-documented criticism of their Iraq failure as religiously as they shunned war critics in 2003.

Speaking of religious, it wasn't until two days ago that retired NBC warhorse Tom Brokaw was able to admit on-air that Bush's push toward invasion was "more theology than anything else." On day one of the war, it was anchor Brokaw who turned to an Admiral and declared, "One of the things that we don't want to do is destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we're going to own that country."

Asked this week about the charge that media transmitted war propaganda, Brokaw blamed the White House and its "unbelievable ability to control the flow of information at any time, but especially during the time that they're preparing to go to war." This is an old canard: The worst censors pre-war were not governments, but major outlets that chose to exclude and smear dissenting experts.

Wolf Blitzer, whose persona on CNN is that of a carnival barker, defended his network's coverage: "I think we were pretty strong. But certainly, with hindsight, we could have done an even better job." Coverage might have been better if CNN news chief Eason Jordan hadn't gotten a Pentagon "thumbs-up" on the retired generals they featured. Or if Jordan hadn't gone on the air to dismiss a dissenting WMD expert: "Scott Ritter's chameleon-like behavior has really bewildered a lot of people... U.S. officials no longer give Scott Ritter much credibility."

ABC anchor Charlie Gibson, the closest thing to a Fox News anchor at a big three network, took offense at McClellan: "I think the media did a pretty good job." With the "drumbeat" coming from the administration, "it was not our job to debate them," said Gibson. He claimed "there was a lot of skepticism raised" about Colin Powell's pre-war U.N. speech. Media critic Glenn Greenwald called Gibson's claim "one of the falsest statements ever uttered on TV" - and made his point using Gibson's unskeptical Powell coverage at the time.

In February 2003, there was huge mainstream media skepticism about Powell's U.N. speech... overseas. But U.S. TV networks banished antiwar perspectives in the crucial two weeks surrounding that error-filled speech. FAIR studied all on-camera sources on the nightly ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS newscasts: Less than 1 percent -- 3 out of 393 sources -- were antiwar. Only 6 percent were skeptical sources. This at a time when 60 percent of Americans in polls wanted more time for diplomacy and inspections.

I worked 10-hour days inside MSNBC's newsroom during this period as senior producer of Phil Donahue's primetime show (cancelled three weeks before the war while the network's most-watched program). Trust me: too much skepticism over war claims was a punishable offense. I and all other Donahue producers were repeatedly ordered by top management to book panels that favored the pro-invasion side. I watched a fellow producer get chewed out for booking a 50-50 show.

At MSNBC, I heard Scott Ritter smeared -- on-air and off -- as a paid mouthpiece of Saddam Hussein. After we had war skeptic and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark on the show, we learned he was on some sort of network blacklist.

When MSNBC terminated Donahue, it was expected that we'd be replaced by a nightly show hosted by Jesse Ventura. But that show never really launched. Ventura says it was because he, like Donahue, opposed the Iraq invasion; he was paid millions for not appearing. Another MSNBC star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then lost her job after criticizing the first weeks of "very sanitized" war coverage. With every muzzling, self-censorship tended to proliferate.

I'm no defender of Scott McClellan. Some may say he has blood on his hands -- and that he hasn't earned any kind of redemption.

But as someone who still burns with anger over what I witnessed inside TV news during that crucial historical moment, I'm trying my best to enjoy this falling out among thieves and liars.

It is really cute how administration members are going after McClellan with basically the same words. They went after Joe Wilson (Plame's husband) the same way after he wrote his NYT piece on how Bush lied about yellow cake.

Do you remember Center for Public Integrity, which reported the 935 lies told by Bush and top officials to ensure that we invaded Iraq?

In a new memoir, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan became the first Bush administration official to confirm the orchestrated deception reported in the Center for Public Integrity's project, Iraq: The War Card, which highlighted 935 false statements made by President George W. Bush and seven other top officials, including McClellan, in the two years following September 11, 2001.

In his upcoming book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, McClellan writes that "top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage."

McClellan goes on to claim that his own comments in the White House briefing room were "badly misguided." According to The War Card's database, McClellan made 14 false statements, including: "We do not need any more proof that Saddam Hussein possesses and is willing to use chemical and biological weapons," and "We are confident that we will uncover the full extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program." Click here to read more from The War Card.

Although the White House previously dismissed the Center's report as not "worth spending any time on," calling it "flawed in terms of taking anything into context," McClellan's new comments prove that the Center's work is not only incisive, but essential to understanding this "culture of deception."

The Center will continue to deliver transparent and comprehensive reporting

We confess that here at McClatchy, which purchased Knight Ridder two years ago, we do have a dog in this fight. Our team - Joe Galloway, Clark Hoyt, Jon Landay, Renee Schoof, Warren Strobel, John Walcott, Tish Wells and many others - was, with a few exceptions, the only major news media organization that before the war consistently and aggressively challenged the White House's case for war, and its lack of planning for post-war Iraq.

Here are Bill Moyers and Michael Massing on the media's pre-war performance.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html

Enough self-aggrandizing trumpet-blowing. OK, Scott, What Happened?

Here's what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents:

* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on this point).

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/reports/intelligence/story/16300.html

* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (Yes, we reported that at the time).

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/reports/intelligence/story/16310.html

* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in speeches and reports that not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods. Indeed, some of that material was never vetted with the intelligence agencies before it was peddled to the public.

* Dissenters, or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored, excluded or punished. (Note: See Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson and all of the State Department 's Arab specialists and much of its intelligence bureau).

* The Bush administration didn't even want to produce the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs that's justly received so much criticism since. The White House thought it was unneeded. It actually was demanded by Congress and slapped together in a matter of weeks before the congressional votes to authorize war on Iraq.

* The October 2002 NIE was flawed, no doubt. But it contained dissents questioning the extent of Saddam's WMD programs, dissents that were buried in the report. Doubts and dissents were then stripped from the publicly released, unclassified version of the NIE.

* The core of the administration's case for war was not just that Saddam was developing WMDs, but also that, unchecked, he might give them to terrorists to attack the United States. Remember smoking guns and mushroom clouds? Inconveniently, the CIA had determined just the opposite: Saddam would attack the United States only if he concluded a U.S. attack on him was unavoidable. He'd give WMD to Islamist terrorists only "as a last chance to exact revenge."

* The Bush administration relied heavily on an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who had been found to be untrustworthy by the State Department and the CIA. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress were given millions, and produced "defectors" whose tales of WMD sites and terrorist training were false, fanciful and bogus. But the information was fed directly to senior officials and included in official White House documents.

* The same INC-supplied "intelligence" used in the White House propaganda effort (you got that bit right, Scott) also was fed to dozens of U.S. and foreign news organizations.

* It all culminated in a speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 making the case against Saddam. Virtually every major allegation Powell made turned out later to be wrong. It would have been even worse had not Powell and his team thrown out even more shaky "intelligence" that Cheney's office repeatedly tried to stuff into the speech.

* The Bush administration tried to link Saddam to al Qaida and, by implication, to the 9/11 attacks. Officials repeatedly pushed the CIA for information on such links, and a separate intel shopwas set up under Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith to find "proof" of such ties. Neither the CIA nor anyone else ever found anything resembling an operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* An exhaustive review of Saddam Hussein's regime's own documents, released in March 2008, found no operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* The Bush administration failed to plan for the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, as we were perhaps the first to report. The White House ignored stacks of intelligence reports, some now available in partially unclassified form, warning before the war about the possibilities for insurgency, ethnic warfare, social chaos and the like.

We could go on, but the rest, as they say, is history.

That's what happened.

http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/nationalsecurity/

Scott McClellan never seemed to be very bright, but it looks like he is smart enough to know that he was on a bad team. I get the sense that he is trying to salvage some shred of decency for his legacy, but this will not help much. Had he quit the team in disgust and then written this book soon after it would have had the effect that he wants it to have, I think.

BBB, thanks for the excellent piece. However, it omits the real reason that Bush and Cheney decided to invade. That reason was to grab Iraq's oil. This is covered by the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch, which published maps prepared long before the invasion by the administration dividing up the country among the US oil companies. As we know, Bush and Cheney even screwed that up.

All this talk about McClellan really misses the whole point. It doesn't matter how long it took him to get to where he is. He has exposed what a good number of people already knew, the corruption, the lies, the venality, the criminality that still sits there like a ticking time bomb.

All the big criminals and people are focusing on the little guy. What's wrong with this picture?

McClellan is voicing this view only after it became the conventional wisdom. Only now that it is becoming clear how this administration will be judged by history is McClellan trying to get on the right side. I am not very impressed, though I suppose it is better late than never to get a clue and come clean. Over all McClellan is a peon, he is not in a position to bear witness to the behind the scenes chicanery that almost all of us are sure took place. There are about eight guys, and maybe one woman (Rice) who can do this, we need one of them break.

Scott McClellan is confirmation of "I told you so" but now it is too late, the check has cleared and the body bags are filled.

Wow, another brilliant rebuttal by Tico.

Tico, I bet even YOU do not know the real reason for the invasion.

Excuse me... the occupation

For the Kool aid?

Is that what that means?

The Republicans are going friggin nuts.

Everyone knows it was for revenge, gus. Bush wanted to get back at Saddam for dissin pops.

Oh, and Cheney wanted his Haliburton stock to go up.

Wrong. You apparently have been influenced by liberals.

It's all about the camel ****, my friend. Look no further.

I disagree. Bat guano is the next big energy source.

Are there bats in Iraq?

No ... plans to invade a whole host of Pacific islands are being drawn up as we speak.