Bush Rules

"On Wednesday night, they stood glumly -- more like caged cats -- in the Rose Garden with President Bush, who had invited them to the White House for dinner and a little talking-to."

Here's the text of Bush's statement before the dinner.

Just Not True

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball , writing on Newsweek.com yesterday, catch the White House fibbing.

"Only two days ago, while attempting to knock down stories by The New York Times and other publications about the NIE , White House Press Secretary Tony Snow insisted to reporters that the document's conclusions were entirely consistent with the public statements of the president and other Bush administration officials.

"News reports on the NIE 'contain nothing that the president hasn't said,' Snow told reporters in Riverside, Conn. 'Obviously, we're not going to go into what the classified report does say, but . . . the substance is precisely what the president has been saying.'

"But the actual wording of the NIE contains sobering conclusions that, in tone and substance, are very different from what Bush and other administration officials have recently been saying about the government's progress in the war on terror. . . .

"Even yesterday, after four pages of the NIE were declassified and released, White House counterterrorism adviser Frances Fragos Townsend continued to insist that the NIE tracked with other public statements from the administration.

"In a briefing at the White House, she pointed reporters to a section of the administration's ' National Strategy for Combating Terrorism '-- released the same day as the president's Sept. 5 speech on the subject -- which warned that 'terrorist networks today are more dispersed and less centralized.' Yet that document too gave no hint that the terrorist movement was now judged by the U.S. intelligence community to be larger than it was five years ago."

And, looking ahead, Isikoff and Hosenball write: "The potential for political misrepresentations may become even greater in the coming months as the U.S. intelligence community completes two more documents with a potential bearing on the Bush administration's approach to terrorism and related national-security issues. One of the studies is a broad overview of the military and political situation in Iraq; the other is an up-to-date assessment of the progress -- or lack thereof -- that the government of Iran is making in its alleged efforts to develop nuclear weapons."

About That NIE

The NIE was a major topic of Snow's briefing yesterday.

Greg Miller and Peter Wallsten write in the Los Angeles Times: "Snow said Bush's position that Americans were safer now was not undermined by the intelligence estimate's assertion that the number of jihadists had grown. Instead, Snow argued that militants were less organized than before, and that, as a result, the U.S. was less likely to be hit.

"Bush 'has not tried to say there are fewer,' Snow said. 'He has not tried to say that they haven't been winning propaganda victories. What he has said is: We've got a different kind of enemy, and we have kept America safe, and we will continue to do it.'"