McClatchy's Landay and Strobel push back -- HARD

on the blithering of the Winter Palace chattering classes over Little Scotty McClellan's Bombshell Tell-All Book:

May 29, 2008

Memo to Scott McClellan: Here's what happened

Until now, we've resisted the temptation to post on former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book, which accuses the Bush White House of launching a propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq.

Why? It's not news. At least not to some of us who've covered the story from the start.

That's just getting warmed up.

After a bit of background history they unleash the big guns. If it got any coverage outside the blogosphere, it would demolish -- forever -- the notion that the White House wasn't fully involved in a propganda operation to foist its war of choice on the American People, the Iraqis, and the World, and it would by itself be sufficient to taint the memory of this repugnant regime for the rest of time. Read the whole thing. But here are a couple of key excerpts:

Here's what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents:

* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on this point).

* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (Yes, we reported that at the time).

* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in speeches and reports that not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods. Indeed, some of that material was never vetted with the intelligence agencies before it was peddled to the public.

* Dissenters, or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored, excluded or punished. (Note: See Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson and all of the State Department 's Arab specialists and much of its intelligence bureau.

The disgraceful spectacle of the White House/Winter Palace and its sychophants in the Media scrambling to cover their own asses at Little Scotty's "revelations" has been very entertaining on one level, but the fact remains that the Truth is yet to be accepted by our nation's power elites, who consistently run from it like the cockroaches they are.

Millions are dead, injured or displaced. Chaos ensues. All for lies. That is the legacy of this putrid period of history.