The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
There was one problem. It was not true.
I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.
— An Excerpt from Scott McClellan’s upcoming book
While this excerpt has many suggestive implications, as many like Gerald Campbell have already pointed out, his publisher has tried to put a stop to them. In an interview withBloomberg News , Osnos said that Scott did not intend to suggest G.W. Bush knowingly lied to him:
“He told him something that wasn’t true, but the president didn’t know it wasn’t true,” Osnos said in a telephone interview. “The president told him what he thought to be the case.”
If this is true (it is difficult for us to really know what Bush knew and when he knew it), then a different question should be asked: did Bush keep himself uninformed willingly to save face and his conscience or was his ignorance forced upon him from others?
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In