Presidential spokesman Scott McClellan vigorously denied suggestions that Bush was making claims that had been debunked when he said two small trailers seized in Iraq were mobile biological laboratories.
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.
McClellan dismissed the Post article and a report based on it that aired on ABC News Wednesday morning as irresponsible. He said ABC News should apologize and took issue with the way the Post story was written.
"The lead suggested that what the president was saying was based on something that had been debunked, and that is not true," McClellan said. "In fact, the president was saying something that was based on what the intelligence community - through the CIA and DIA - were saying."
McClellan said information for public reports from the CIA comes from many sources and takes time to vet.
"It's not something that, they will tell you, turns on a dime," McClellan said.
No comments:
Post a Comment