A Radiant Cage Of Thunder

BUSH PRESS SPOKESMAN - "It Was ALL Lies"

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The spokesman who defended President Bush's policies through Hurricane Katrina and the early years of the Iraq war is now blasting his former employers, saying the Bush administration became mired in propaganda and political spin and at times played loose with the truth.

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Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan blasts President Bush and advisers in a new book.

In excerpts from a 341-page book to be released Monday, Scott McClellan writes on Iraq that Bush "and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war."

"[I]n this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security," McClellan wrote.

McClellan also sharply criticizes the administration on its handling of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

"One of the worst disasters in our nation's history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush's presidency," he wrote. "Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush's second term."

Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino said the White House would not comment Tuesday because they haven't seen the book.

Frances Townsend, former Homeland Security adviser to Bush, said advisers to the president should speak up when they have policy concerns.

"Scott never did that on any of these issues as best I can remember or as best as I know from any of my White House colleagues," said Townsend, now a CNN contributor. "For him to do this now strikes me as self-serving, disingenuous and unprofessional."

Fox News contributor and former White House adviser Karl Rove said on that network Tuesday that the excerpts from the book he's read sound more like they were written by a "left-wing blogger" than his former colleague.

In a brief phone conversation with CNN Tuesday evening, McClellan made clear that he stands behind the accuracy of his book. McClellan said he cannot give on-the-record quotes yet because of an agreement with his publisher. Video Watch further details emerge from McClellan's book »

Early in the book, which CNN obtained late Tuesday, McClellan wrote that he believes he told untruths on Bush's behalf in the case of CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose identity was leaked to the media.

Rove and fellow White House advisers Elliot Abrams and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were accused of leaking the name of Plame -- whose husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, had gone public with charges the Bush administration had "twisted" facts to justify the war in Iraq.

Libby was convicted last year of lying to a grand jury and federal agents investigating the leak. Bush commuted his 30-month prison term, calling it excessive. At the time, McClellan called the three "good individuals" and said he spoke to them before telling reporters they were not involved.

"I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood," he wrote. "It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the president effectively."

McClellan wrote he didn't realize what he said was untrue until reporters began digging up details of the case almost two years later.

A former spokesman for Bush when he was governor of Texas, McClellan was named White House press secretary in 2003, replacing Ari Fleischer. McClellan had previously been a deputy press secretary and was the traveling spokesman for the Bush campaign during the 2000 election.
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He announced he was resigning in April 2006 at a news conference with Bush.

"One of these days, he and I are going to be rocking in chairs in Texas talking about the good old days of his time as the press secretary," Bush said at that conference. "And I can assure you, I will feel the same way then that I feel now, that I can say to Scott, job well done."

Scott McClellan's Confession
May 28, 2008 10:46 a.m.

Scott McClellan worked as a loyal press spokesman for George W. Bush for eight years, ultimately becoming White House Press Secretary . He resigned from that position in 2006, in the wake of the controversy over the Valerie Plame leak scandal.

In his new book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," he offers a harshly critical portrait of the president and his administration. Going to war in Iraq was a mistake, he concludes. But an even more fundamental mistake was the administration's decision "to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed."

What follows are excerpts from his book:
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As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided. In these pages, I've tried to come to grips with some of the truths that life inside the White House bubble obscured.

My friends and former colleagues who lived and worked or are still working inside that bubble may not be happy with the perspective I present here. Many of them, I'm sure, remain convinced that the Bush administration has been fundamentally correct in its most controversial policy judgments, and that the dis-esteem in which most Americans currently hold it is undeserved.

Only time will tell. But I've become genuinely convinced otherwise.
* * *

Most of our elected leaders in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, are good, decent people. Yet too many of them today have made a practice of shunning truth and the high level of openness and forthrightness required to discover it. Most of it is not willful or conscious. Rather, it is part of the modern Washington game that has become the accepted norm.

As I explain in this book, Washington has become the home of the permanent campaign, a game of endless politicking based on the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth, and spin. Governing has become an appendage of politics rather than the other way around, with electoral victory and the control of power as the sole measures of success. That means shaping the narrative before it shapes you. Candor and honesty are pushed to the side in the battle to win the latest news cycle…

Ironically, much of Bush's campaign rhetoric (in 1999-200) had been aimed at distancing himself from the excesses of Clinton's permanent campaign style of governing. The implicit meaning of Bush's words was that he would bring an end to the perpetual politicking and deep partisan divisions it created. Although Washington could not get enough of the permanent campaign, voters were seemingly eager to move beyond it.

Bush emphasized this sentiment during the campaign. He would "change the tone in Washington." He would be "a uniter, not a divider." He would "restore honor and dignity to the White House." He would govern based on what was right, not what the polls said. He would, in short, replace the cynicism of the 1990s with a new era of civility, decency, and hope. There would be no more permanent campaign, or at least its excesses would be wiped away for good.

But the reality proved to be something quite different. Instead, the Bush team imitated some of the worst qualities of the Clinton White House and even took them to new depths.

Bush did not emulate Clinton on the policy front. Just the opposite – the mantra of the new administration was "anything but Clinton" when it came to policies. The Bush administration prided itself in focusing on big ideas, not playing small ball with worthy but essentially trivial policy ideas for a White House, like introducing school uniforms or going after deadbeat dads.

But a significant aspect of the Clinton presidency that George W. Bush and his advisers did embrace was the unprecedented pervasiveness of the permanent campaign and all its tactics. In hindsight, it is clear that the Bush White House was actually structured to emulate and extend this method of governing, albeit in its own way.

The most obvious evidence that the Bush White House embraced the permanent campaign is the expansive political operation that was put in place from day one. Chief political strategist Karl Rove was given an enormous center of influence within the white House from the outset. This was only strengthened by Rove's force of personality and closeness to the president.
* * *

The permanent campaign also ensnares the media, who become complicit enablers of its polarizing effects. They emphasize conflict, controversy and negativity, focusing not on the real-world impact of policies and their larger, underlying truths but on the horse race aspects of politics – who's winning, who's losing, and why…

The press amplifies the talking points of one or both parties in its coverage, thereby spreading distortions, half-truths, and occasionally outright lies in an effort to seize the limelight and have something or someone to pick on. And by overemphasizing conflict and controversy and by reducing complex and important issues to convenient, black-and-white story lines and seven-second sound bites the media exacerbate the problem, thereby making it incredibly hard even for well-intentioned leaders to clarify and correct the misunderstandings and oversimplifications that dominate the political conversation. Finally, it becomes much more difficult for the general public to decipher the more important truths amid all the conflict, controversy and negativity. For some partisans, that is fine because they believe they can maneuver better in such a highly politicized environment to accomplish their objectives. But the destructive potential of such excessively partisan warfare would later crystallize my thinking.
* * *

When Bush was making up his mind to pursue regime change in Iraq, it is clear that his national security team did little to slow him down, to help him fully understand the tinderbox he was opening and the potential risks in doing so. I know the president pretty well. I believe that, if he had been given a crystal ball in which he could have foreseen the costs of war – more than 4,000 American troops killed, 30,000 injured, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens dead – he would have never made the decision to invade, despite what he might say or feel he has to say publicly.

And though no one has a crystal ball, it's not asking too much that a well-considered understanding of the circumstances and history of Iraq and the Middle East should have been brought into the decision-making process. The responsibility to provide this understanding belonged to the president's advisers, and they failed to fulfill it. Secretary of State Colin Powell was apparently the only adviser who even tried to raise doubts about the wisdom of war. The rest of the foreign policy team seemed to be preoccupied with regime change or, in the case of Condi Rice, seemingly more interested in accommodating the president's instincts and ideas than in questioning them or educating him.

An even more fundamental problem was the way his advisers decided to pursue a political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people. It was all part of the way the White House operated and Washington functioned, and no one seemed to see any problem with using such an approach on an issue as grave as war. A pro-war campaign might have been more acceptable had it been accompanied by a high level of candor and honesty, but it was not. Most of the arguments used – especially those stated in prepared remarks by the president and in forums like Powell's presentation at the UN Security Council in February 2003 – were carefully vetted and capable of being substantiated. But as the campaign accelerated, caveats and qualifications were downplayed or dropped altogether. Contradictory intelligence was largely ignored or simply disregarded. Evidence based on high confidence from the intelligence community was lumped together with intelligence of lesser confidence. A nuclear threat was added to the biological and chemical threats to create a greater sense of gravity and urgency. Support for terrorism was given greater weight by playing up a dubious al Qaeda connection to Iraq. When it was all packaged together, the case constituted a "grave and gathering danger" that needed to be dealt with urgently.
* * *

To this day, the president seems unbothered by the disconnect between the chief rationale for the war and the driving motivation behind it, and unconcerned about how the case was packaged. The policy is the right one and history will judge it so, once a free Iraq is firmly in place and the Middle East begins to become more democratic.

Bush clung to the same belief during an interview with Tim Russert of NBC News in early February 2004. The Meet the Press host asked, "In light of not finding the weapons of mass destruction, do you believe the war in Iraq is a war of choice or a war of necessity? "

The president said, "That's an interesting question. Please elaborate on that a bit. A war of choice or a war of necessity? It's a war of necessity. In my judgment, we had no choice, when we look at the intelligence I looked at, that says the man was a threat."

I remember talking to the president about this question following the interview. He seemed puzzled and asked me what Russert was getting at with the question.

This, in turn, puzzled me. Surely this distinction between a necessary, unavoidable war and a war that the United States could have avoided but chose to wage was an obvious one that Bush must have thought about in the months before the invasion. Evidently it wasn't obvious to the president, nor did his national security team make sure it was. He set the policy early on and then his team focused his attention on how to sell it. It strikes me today as an indication of his lack of inquisitiveness and his detrimental resistance to reflection, something his advisers needed to compensate for better than they did.

Most objective observers today would say that in 2003 there was no urgent need to address the threat posed by Saddam with a large-scale invasion, and therefore the war was not necessary. But this is a question President Bush seems not to want to grapple with.
* * *

I still like and admire George W. Bush. I consider him a fundamentally decent person, and I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people. But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. Had a high level of openness and forthrightness been embraced from the outset of his administration, I believe President Bush's public standing would be stronger today. His approval ratings have remained at historic lows for so long because both qualities have been lacking to this day. In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.

All the president can do today is hope that his vision of Iraq will ultimately come true, putting the Middle East on a new path and vindicating his decision to go to war. I would welcome such a development as good for America, good for Iraq, and good for the world. Bush knows that posterity has a way of rewarding success over candor and honesty. But as history moves to render its judgment in the coming years and decades, we can't gloss over the hard truths this book has sought to address and the lessons we can learn from understanding them better. Allowing the permanent campaign culture to remain in control may not take us into another unnecessary war, but it will continue to limit the opportunity for careful deliberation, bipartisan compromise, and meaningful solutions to the major problems all Americans want to see solved

Adapted from the book WHAT HAPPENED: INSIDE THE BUSH WHITE HOUSE AND WASHINGTON'S CULTURE OF DECEPTION by Scott McClellan. Copyright 2008 by Scott McClellan. Reprinted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group

Posted at 09:18AM May 28, 2008 by Douglas Lee Bryenldson in General  |  Comments[0]