At yesterday’s White House press briefing, Scott McClellan responded to a series of questions about the president’s claim that the feds have “disrupted at least ten serious al Qaeda terrorist plots” since Sept. 11, 2001. Needless to say, some of press corps were skeptical.
Q: Scott, more on the speech. First, on that issue, obviously, after the “16 words incident” sometime ago, we are more interested than usual in having — seeing the footnotes that go with the speech. So just as a matter of maintaining credibility, it would be good if we could get at least outlines of the brief —
McClellan: I just pointed out some that are public, David, as a matter of record.
Q: Of those — you pointed out two.
McClellan: It’s unfortunate that you make such a comparison.
Those might be the most fascinating eight words McClellan has ever uttered.
It’s “unfortunate,” he says, that a reporter would draw a comparison between one outlandish presidential claim, which turned out to be false, and another outlandish presidential claim, which may yet turn out to be false.
One gets the impression that McClellan would prefer that we forget about Bush’s previous lies altogether and pretend they don’t exist. Long memories are just so darn inconvenient to this White House. McClellan seems to genuinely believe that the president not only has credibility on national security issues, but should have his claims taken at face value. For a reporter to point out the significance of “maintaining credibility,” hinting that the days that everyone can just take Bush’s word for it are over, is, in McClellan’s mind, “unfortunate.”
McClellan is pining for the days (let’s call them “2002 and 2003”) when these pesky questions didn’t arise and Bush could simply claim progress against al Queda and watch his approval rating go up. The president said we’re disrupting terrorist plots — so it must be true!
Better yet — surprise, surprise — it turns out that the skepticism is well-founded.
Bush cited 10 “serious al Qaeda terrorist plots,” but offered no details, whetting reporters’ appetites. Asked for support materials, the White House said initially that it couldn’t prove any. The Bush gang, in the words of the WaPo, “scrambl[ed] all day.”
What did they come up with? Nothing that helped their case.
The White House later issued a list of the foiled plots, citing potential Sept. 11-style airliner attacks on both coasts, a plan to blow up apartment buildings and surveillance of gas stations, bridges and tourist sites nationwide. But several senior law enforcement officials interviewed later questioned whether many of the incidents on the list constituted an imminent threat to public safety and said that authorities had not disrupted any operational terrorist plot within the United States since the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. (emphasis added)
It’s breathtaking to think anyone still finds Bush’s claims credible at all. Anyone who trusts this president’s word just isn’t paying attention.