Fleischer Defends the Media

"But dive into Rockefeller's report, in search of where exactly President Bush lied about what his intelligence agencies were telling him about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and you may be surprised by what you find."

Hiatt notes that the report found that many key points were "substantiated by intelligence information."

And, he concludes: "[T]he phony 'Bush lied' story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong."

WHIG Watch

Walter Pincus writes in The Washington Post that the Senate committee "did not review 'less formal communications between intelligence agencies and other parts of the Executive Branch.'

"More important, there was no effort to obtain White House records or interview President Bush, Vice President Cheney or other administration officials whose speeches were analyzed because, the report says, such steps were considered beyond the scope of the report.

"One obvious target for such an expanded inquiry would have been the records of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a group set up in August 2002 by then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.

"The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular participants (many have since left or changed jobs) were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy aides led by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, as well as I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

"As former White House press secretary Scott McClellan wrote in his recently released book, 'What Happened,' the Iraq Group 'had been set up in the summer of 2002 to coordinate the marketing of the war to the public.' . . .

"WHIG's records would shed much light on whether, as Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the intelligence panel, put it: 'In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent.'"

McClellan Watch

Mark Dery writes in a Los Angeles Times op-ed: "Scott McClellan is having a 'Matrix' moment -- the moment when you wake up, with a jolt, from the reassuring fictions of the media dream world to the face-slapping reality of unspun fact.

"In 'The Matrix,' Laurence Fishburne parts the veil of illusion -- the computer-generated simulation that humanity experiences as reality -- to reveal the movie's post-apocalyptic world as an irradiated slag heap. . . .

"The former White House press secretary -- whose Secret Service code name, I kid you not, was 'Matrix' -- recounts how he and the rest of Team Dubya got caught up in a 'permanent campaign,' a nonstop propaganda war whose weapons were 'the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth and spin,' and whose goal was to stage-manage the media narrative and thus public opinion.