Dan Bartlett and the White House did it again! The damn liars! How many times are they going to pull out the same blatant falsehoods?! Rrrr, I was literally pounding the arm of my chair after I saw this, going, "No! No! No, Dan Bartlett! You're an L-I-A-R!! Liar!!" They are going to KEEP LYING RIGHT TO THE BITTER END.
In a written response to tonight's 60 Minutes Tyler Drumheller story, in which the former CIA head of covert ops in Europe says that Bush knew damn well there were no WMDs before he invaded Iraq, Bartlett has the nerve to pull this out. AGAIN!!
There's no transcript yet, but he essentially said, "Bipartisan investigations have found no evidence that the White House exerted political pressure on the intelligence community to alter their findings to support the president's views."
Arrrrrgh!! This lame answer, A DELIBERATE LIE, was dismissed long ago, even by the likes of Soledad O' Frickin-Brien, for piss sakes:
(From CNN, November 2005)
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: Well, actually, there's only one committee in the Senate that's charged with determining if there was misleading and that committee hasn't yet done its work yet, right?
[White House spokesperson Dan] BARTLETT: Well, Soledad, they did an investigation to see if any analysts were pressured, to see if there was any changes made to the intelligence. And the [Silberman-Robb] Commission, an outside bipartisan investigation, found there was no pressure put on it either. Now the public comments the president made at the time and the administration made at the time were very, very similar to the comments made not only by Democrats in the House and Senate, but also by the Clinton administration. So every step of the way, there has been no evidence whatsoever that the president deliberately misled the American people. And the fact that Democrats are willing to advance this type of argument I think shows a deeply irresponsible behavior.
SOLEDAD O'[FLIPPIN']BRIEN: I'm going to stop you right there because actually the jury's not in yet. The [Silberman-Robb] Commission, which you mentioned, actually they said very explicitly that it wasn't their job to determine the scope of that investigation that you mentioned. No misleading. That was not the job of that commission. It's stated in the report. So they're still waiting for the select committee on intelligence to come back with their report is really where it stands.
They didn't even LOOK at that aspect, Dan! OF COURSE they found no evidence of political pressure. Because they WEREN'T ALLOWED TO.
Why, let's check Section 1: INTRODUCTION to the Silberman-Robb report, shall we?
Finally, we emphasize two points about the scope of this Commission's charter, particularly with respect to the Iraq question.
Yes, we EMPHASIZE them, so nobody will misquote us.
First, we were not asked to determine whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That was the mandate of the Iraq Survey Group; our mission is to investigate the reasons why the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments were so different from what the Iraq Survey Group found after the war. Second, we were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community. Accordingly, while we interviewed a host of current and former policymakers during the course of our investigation, the purpose of those interviews was to learn about how the Intelligence Community reached and communicated its judgments about Iraq's weapons programs--not to review how policymakers subsequently used that information.
Now close your mouth, Dan Bartlett, 'cause you're stone-cold busted. And you've already BEEN called on it, several times.
It's one thing to pull this stuff in an off-the-cuff reply to an interviewer in desperation because they've caught you flat-footed. But in a written response, the subject matter of which you've had months and months to think about? That you could pass on to your staff so they could make sure there were no inaccuracies? Something you knew was going on the prime-timiest of the prime time spots?
That one little false Bartlett disclaimer is enough to give people pause, so that they think, "Ohhh, maybe this story's not true after all."
How can the administration say with a straight face (or a smirk, anyway) that it does not manipulate facts to fit its own agenda? Dan Bartlett, irony of ironies, JUST DID THAT right here in front of you.
These guys are going to go down lying, right to the end. Even with the same lies over and over again. It's the bread and butter that's gotten them this far, and they're going to go down with the ship, lying. Right to the end. Page out of Herrmann Goehring's playbook. Keep repeating the same lie, and eventually the people will come to believe it.
These fuckers have got to go.
If you ever read my diaries, you know I rarely get this worked up. But I haven't been so incensed with this administration in some time. Even in the wake of all the scandals and the "outrage fatigue", this just chapped my ass. There's no blurriness here. This is a brazen LIE.
UPDATE: The Bartlett quote is up now, thanks to BarbinMD's TiVo! It goes, "Bipartisan investigations...found no evidence of political pressure to influence the pre-war intelligence assessments of Iraq's weapons programs." Again, they WEREN'T ALLOWED TO. Damn liars!