When the Congressional Research Service became the latest non-partisan entity to conclude that Bush and Congress did not have access to the same intelligence before the war began, Knight Ridder asked the Bush gang for a response. At least at first, they declined.
On Friday, however, Scott McClellan explained the White House’s take on the CRS report. In fact, McClellan dismissed the report as wrong.
Q: Scott, do you have a reaction to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service’s study that rejects the President’s frequent assertions that the Congress had access to the same intelligence — pre-war intelligence that he had? Apparently in this report it says Congress was routinely denied access to intelligence sources, collection, analysis methods, raw, lightly-evaluated intelligence, PDBs.
McClellan: I don’t think it’s an accurate reflection.
Q: That Congress does not get the same intelligence the President gets.
McClellan: We provide the Congress a lot of intelligence information, and they did have access to the same intelligence that we saw prior to making the decision to go into Iraq. And some have chosen to play politics with that now, people that had previously supported the efforts to go in there, and saw the same intelligence, the intelligence that other agencies around the world used.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but McClellan occasionally astounds me. The White House, confronted with new information that conflicts with their spin, simply ignores the new information.
Presented with a comprehensive, non-partisan report showing that Congress did not have the same intelligence as the president, the Bush gang’s response, in essence, is “nuh uh.” Amazing.