As noted earlier, the Washington Post reported today that the [tag]mobile[/tag] “[tag]biological laboratories[/tag]” the White House touted as proof of an Iraqi [tag]WMD[/tag] program were bogus. Inspectors knew these trailers had nothing to do with bioweapons, and told administration officials, but [tag]Bush[/tag] and others repeated the claim anyway.
Howard Dean spoke to The American Prospect this morning and said the report that exposes the Bush White House’s lie is so important, it naturally needs to be declassified.
He wouldn’t say whether he had already spoken to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi about this strategy, but one source said that such conversations would commence today, and that Dean would likely appear on television this afternoon to press the claim. “If the [Post] story is accurate,” Dean said, “…then the onus is on the president to prove that he did not mislead the country.” [Dean] sharpened this point later, saying that if the Post was correct, then Bush did mislead the country, and it was either a case of “incompetence, or it was deliberate. And those are both very, very serious.”
Quite right. As Tim Tagaris noted, the president seems to be fond of declassifying intelligence reports when he thinks it’s “important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches.”
Well, in one of those speeches, Bush claimed we found proof of a WMD program based on trailers that had nothing to do with WMD. Now would be a perfect time for the president to use his sweeping declassification power to help all of us get “a better sense” of what he was talking about, right?