Following former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay’s admission pre-war intelligence was practically “all wrong,” officials in the Bush administration came forward with announcements everyone was, ostensibly, “shocked.”
Staff members ranking as high as the vice president and “president” issued statements on how “shocked” (quote-unquote) everyone in government was about the lack of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Press secretary Scott McClellan said the president himself sort of “dismayed” and “curious” about the “failure” of prewar intelligence. When asked by reporters if the White House planned a probe into the intelligence problem, McClellan restrained a smile and promised someone would get on that “right away.”
Conservative news agencies posed questions to McClellan on how the president viewed intelligence and homeland security in the wake of the discovery, while more liberal news agencies questioned the press secretary on the legitimacy of the Iraq war if intelligence has proven faulty. Meanwhile, in the back of the room, one man screamed at the top of the lungs that the president knew, of course he knew, goddammit, everyone in the administration had to have known and they rode into the fucking White House looking for the first excuse to head into Iraq with guns blazing just like daddy did, Jesus Christ, has everyone else on the fucking planet gone so deaf and blind they can’t even see the president’s a lousy fucking liar? But McClellan did not take questions at that time.
Statements from the White House were seen by many as damage control after Kay’s Wednesday admission to a congressional committee early Iraq intelligence claiming Saddam Hussein was developing a program of weapons of mass destruction (or WMD, as the kids are saying) was incorrect. Kay described the “lapse” as a massive intelligence failure, and painted the president as much a victim of the fuck-up as the hundreds of Iraqis lying dead under rubble and blown up by landmines.
“Boy, did we screw the pooch on this one,” laughed Kay, to an unforgiving congressional audience. “Yikes. Tough room. But seriously, folks, you know who we should give it up for? Mr. Bush. That’s right, the president. I know it’s not popular to say so, but I think he’s doing a bang-up job and plainly he just wanted to do the right thing and had no idea how shitty this intelligence was. Really, we’re talking Pig Latin intelligence or something. Waaaay off, no kidding. I think they were even in Iceland—hey! You gotta give me that one. C’mon. Show the love.”
Friday Bush followed the administration’s campaign for getting over this as quick as possible by releasing an official statement ripe with quotation marks.
“Obviously we would have done things ‘differently’ if the intelligence had been more accurate. Assuming that it was accurate—I still say, really, there’s no way of telling if anybody’s got weapons of mass destruction on them or not. You can hide them anywhere. I’ve got mustard gas, hidden in a tree house from when I was 12 years old, little gift from dad, nobody ever found it. You telling me Saddam can’t hide something in all of Iraq? But I’m getting off message here. We’re obviously facing a ‘failure’ of intelligence here. Everybody here in this administration wants ‘peace,’ no one more so than me. But if I had it all to do over again, knowing the ‘threat’ Saddam Hussein poses to the world, I would have done things very much the same. Our ‘coalition’ in Iraq is ‘ready’ to ‘hand over’ the ‘country’ in the ‘next few months,’ give or take two or three years.”