The Voice of the White House

Washington , D.C. , June 1, 2008 : “My colleague here showed me an overview, official study concerning  U.S. detainees. It is not generally knows to the public but the U.S government now has over 30,000 (31,082 as of May 19, 2008 ) people in secret custody, all over the world.

An official U.S.   program of torture and ‘rendition’ has been going on since before 9/11 and has never stopped. A number, estimated to be approximately 3,500, have been killed during these interrogations or have died as the result of them.

At the present time, the government, acting under specific Presidential orders, has a virtual fleet of prison ships scattered all across the globe and masked by a curtain of strict secrecy.

The U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency are all heavily involved in this program.

A total of 22 U.S. Navy ships ( including ten ships leased by the U.S. Navy) house prisoners who are kept chained up in the vessels very much like the conditions of the black slavers in the days when slavery was legal in the United States .

Officially, George Bush has said these practices have been stopped but they are still in full swing and the President is fully aware of them, even as I speak.

Specifically, after Bush claimed in 2006 that the rendition programs had been halted, acting under his specific orders, there were 376 new cases of rendition.

The ongoing torture is conducted, in the main, by serving CIA personnel. Since an incident in 2003 when a U.S. Navy doctor refused to give lethal injections to five prisoners kidnapped from Quatar by British special forces, now, all CIA interrogation teams are supplied with a doctor working as a special CIA employee, and under a false name. In fact, all CIA operators are routinely issued completely false American passports by the Department of State’s Passport division

It is now known that the FBI, which had originally been a party to these abductions and tortures, strongly objected to the methodology of the CIA and a number of agents flatly refused to participate any further in a deliberate program of what one FBI agent said was ‘the same as those practiced by Josef Stalin’s’ dread secret police. As a result of this revolt, the FBI are no longer involved in this program but agents with first hand knowledge of it have been warned not to discuss the subject with anyone.

The Soviet gulags were in the Siberian wasteland, far, far from prying eyes and Bush’s death gulags are floating prisons that can quickly be moved to other locations if their presence becomes known.

The depths of the ocean are excellent places to dispose of the weighted bodies of the unwanted dead. It wouldn’t do for a broken, mutilated body of a dead torture victim to float to the surface after being lethally-injected. Unpleasant questions might be asked by uninitiated foreign governments and the floating torture palaces would. find it imperative to  get  up steam, hoist their anchors and just move to another position without let or hindrance

Names of ships used for this program are known, the USS Bataan, USS Peleiu, USS Ashland and a whole fleet of Navy ACS units. Areas of detention include, but are not limited to, Somalia, the Persian Gulf, Diego Garcia, (where the British intelligence and counter intelligence now use American ships for their own kidnapped suspects) the Gulf of Aden and several areas off the south coast of Cuba, in the area of Guantánamo Bay.

The commanding officers, and their staffs, of these ships are a matter of public record which can be accessed by anyone with a computer

The legal justification for this mass torture and murder program? The office of the U.S. Attorney General has ruled that anti-torture prohibitions (deliberate murder is not a subject here) only apply within the United States and are not operational outside its geographical boundaries

Conversations with the Crow - Part 3

Editor’s note: When we ran the first conversation, there was the question of reader interest and acceptability. It is pleasant to report that our server was jammed with viewers and the only other tbrnews story that has had more viewers was our Forward Base Falcon story that had a half a million viewers in less that two days. We are now going to reprint all of the Crowley conversations, including a very interesting one on John McCain,  in chronological sequence. It is also pleasant to note that two publishers and three reporters have all expressed concrete interest in the Crowley conversations.

On October 8th, 2000 , Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA's Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer's Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley 's widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley 's CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley , died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda , Md.

After Corson's death, Trento and a well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson's bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled 'Zipper.' This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley 's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The  small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento 's house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA's actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA's horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA's activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious 'Regional Interrogation Centers' in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid "historians" and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley 's survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of  highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by  DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton  conspired to  secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files our of the agency. Crowley did the same thing  right before his own retirement , secretly removing thousands of pages  of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago , Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in military intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

One of Crowley ’s first major assignments within the agency was to assist in the recruitment and management of prominent World War II Nazis, especially those with advanced intelligence experience. One of the CIA’s major recruitment coups was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler’s Gestapo who had fled to Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich and worked as an anti-Communist expert for Masson of Swiss counterintelligence. Mueller was initially hired by Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA,  who was running the Gehlen Organization out of Pullach in southern Germany . Crowley eventually came to despise Critchfield but the colonel was totally unaware of this, to his later dismay.

Crowley ’s real expertise within the agency was the Soviet KGB. One of his main jobs throughout his career was acting as the agency liaison with corporations like ITT, which the CIA often used as fronts for moving large amounts of cash off their books. He was deeply involved in the efforts by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile , which eventually got him into legal problems with regard to investigations of the U.S. government’s grand jury where he has perjured himself in an agency cover-up

After his retirement, Crowley began to search for someone who might be able to write a competent history of his career. His first choice fell on British author John Costello (author of Ten Days to Destiny, The Pacific War and other works) but, discovering that Costello was a very aggressive homosexual, he dropped him and tentatively turned to Joseph Trento who had assisted Crowley and William Corson in writing a book on the KGB. When Crowley discovered that Trento had an ambiguous and probably cooperative relationship with the CIA, he began to distrust him and continued his search for an author.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas  in 1993  when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. . In 1996, Crowley , Crowley told Douglas   that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley ’s story but only after Crowley ’s death. Douglas , for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

In 1998, when Crowley was slated to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery,  he had his son, Greg, ship two large foot lockers of documents to Douglas with the caveat that they were not to be opened until after Crowley ’s death. These documents, totaled  an astonishing 15,000 pages of CIA classified files involving many covert operations, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War.

After Crowley ’s death and Trento ’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley ’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley ’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas . No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

All of this furor eventually came to the attention of Dr. Peter Janney, a Massachusetts clinical psychologist and son of Wistar Janney, another career senior CIA official, colleague of not only Bob Crowley but Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Jim Angleton and others. Janney was working on a book concerning the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official, and later the mistress of President John F. Kennedy.  Douglas had authored a book, ‘Regicide’ which dealt with Crowley ’s part in the Kennedy assassination and he obviously had access to at least some of Crowley ’s papers. Janney was very well connected inside the CIA’s higher levels and when he discovered that Douglas had indeed known, and had often spoken with, Crowley and that after Crowley’s death, the FBI had descended on Crowley’s widow and son, warning them to never speak with Douglas about anything, he contacted Douglas and finally obtained from him a number of original documents, including the originals of the transcribed conversations with Robert Crowley.

In spite of the burn bags, the top secret safes and the vigilance of the CIA to keep its own secrets, the truth has an embarrassing and often very fatal habit of emerging, albeit decades later.

While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this.

These many transcribed conversations are relatively short because Crowley was a man who tired easily but they make excellent reading. There is an interesting admixture of shocking revelations on the part of the retired CIA official and often rampant anti-social (and very entertaining) activities on the part of Douglas but readers of this new and on-going series are gently reminded to always look for the truth in the jest!

Date: Sunday, February 25, 1996

Commenced: 1:30 PM (CST)

Concluded: 2:11 PM (CST)

GD: Good afternoon, Robert. Been to church today?

RTC: And good afternoon to you. Not today. Have you?

GD: I’ve been in many churches in my life but for the architecture, not the services.

RTC: I’ve never asked you, Gregory but are you Catholic?

GD: In taste, Robert, but not in faith. I told Bender what you had to say about the UFOs but did not credit you. I called you a senior intelligence official.

RTC: I appreciate that. What did he say?

GD: A subject that will be covered but in its place. Your point of view is that there were so-called official saucers used by the military and unofficial ones that no one knows anything about. Correct?

RTC: Correct.

GD: But by unofficial I don’t mean Russian.

RTC: Yes.

GD: I don’t suppose there’s paper on this?

RTC: The Air Force would have it but we don’t. We had nothing to do with it but it was common knowledge that there were visitors not from this world.

GD: I don’t want to spend much time on this because if I do, the critics will jump on it and claim I’m a Flying Saucer Nut. They already hate me and this would only give them more ammunition.

RTC: When I read your first book, didn’t I tell you this would happen? You can’t claim you were surprised.

GD: Yes, but they are so fucking stupid, pardon the French. ‘Oh hello Mr. Douglas! My name is Edgar Quince and I’m a reporter for TIME magazine. We were really thrilled to read your landmark book on the Gestapo fellow and we want to do an interview with you. Do you have any documents proving he worked for the CIA? We could put you on the cover of TIME! Wouldn’t that be exciting? We could fly a team out to see you tomorrow. And we want to see any CIA papers. By the way, what’s your home address?’ When I said stupid, that’s a typical example.

RTC: Well, they really aren’t all that bright, unfortunately. Don’t forget, Gregory, I had to deal with the media for years. Cord and Frank did the publishing companies and I worked with media corporate. We had a death grip on them. Couldn’t and wouldn’t print a word if we told them not to or ran puff pieces we wanted out.

GD: My late grandfather told me that once a newspaper man, always a whore.

RTC: Let’s call them sluts, not whores. We rarely paid them and they just did it to make us happy.

GD: That’s a difference without much of distinction, Robert. Did you have to take a shower after each and every meeting? Use Lysol to get off the stench?

RTC: I’ve had to work with business executives, Gregory, and they’re worse. Believe me, the Mafia are more to be trusted. Don’t forget I was raised in Chicago and my father was a cog in the Kelly-Nash machine so I got to know some of the mob people.

GD: My grandfather was a Chicago banker and I remember him saying once that the Ambassador belonged in Alcatraz along with his crime partner Capone.

RTC: Your grandfather was right. Kennedy was tied up with the Chicago mob in the liquor business. Capone got crossed by Kennedy and put out a hit on him. Kennedy took the next train to Chicago with a satchel filled with large denomination bills. Paid Capone back the money with great interest and Alfonso forgave him.

GD: Some history we have never heard before.

RTC: How did your grandfather know about this? Was he involved?

GD: No. He was involved with the Merchandise Mart and I guess that’s where he met Kennedy. Grandfather said he was an unconvicted bootlegger.

RTC: True enough. Joe wanted to run his oldest for the White House but Roosevelt put a spoke into that plan. Franklin wanted to die in office…

GD: Which he did…

RTC: And the eldest son had a fatal accident in England .

GD: I know. I covered that in the first book.

RTC: The kid was supposed to pilot a plane full of explosives to a German V bomb base, parachute out and let the plane blow it up. Churchill, ever a good friend when Franklin was alive and giving him support, arranged for a radio station near the airfield to send out a trigger code and blew young Kennedy into cat meat. One hand washes the other, doesn’t it?

GD: Bloodthirsty amoral shits, all of them. Mueller told me once that when a man has achieved a certain elevation, morality goes down the tube. I remember his exact words. ‘Morality and ethics are excellent norms but not effective techniques.’

RTC; I met him several times. An impressive man to be sure. Speaking of Mueller, I ran into someone several days ago at the National Archives. A wonderful man and a great supporter of your book.

GD: I didn’t think I had great friends inside the Beltway. Who was it? Corson?

RTC: No, that butt-licking Wolfe. Sidled up to me and went on about how evil you were and how much damage you were doing to his friends at the CIA. And probably were a secret Nazi who longed to shove Jews into the ovens. He wants to think that the CIA loves him but he’s just another stool pigeon to them. They give gift pens to ones like that.

GD: He’s always so nice to me but I trust him as far as I could throw him by his ears.

RTC: I wouldn’t. Anything you say to him, goes straight to Langley .

GD: Tell me I’m surprised. Wolfe’s as subtle as a fart in a spacesuit but I keep filling him full of entertaining stories. I should send him a box of dignity pants before every phone session. Did you know that he got a top secret document for me out of the Archives? It was a ’48 Army General Staff report on top Nazis, listed as war criminals, that they and your people hired and brought over here?

RTC: Could you give me chapter and verse on that one?

GD: I’ll have to dig it out but I will.

RTC: Top secret you say?

GD: Release forbidden by presidential order.

RTC: Probably Truman’s doing. Yes, would appreciate a copy.

GD: No problem.

RTC: What do you plan to do with it?

GD: Publish the contents. Why not?

RTC: Oh somewhere out there a George Brown, actually a top Gestapo official who ran a death camp, is an analyst for the Rand people. You’ll shock his neighbors.

GD: The Gestapo didn’t run any camps but I take your meaning.

RTC: Ah the images of Gestapo men in black overcoats with Dobermans, rounding up screaming Jews and shoving them into the showers is pretty well fixed in the American mind. If it ever gets out the degree and extent of those types we gratefully used, the Jewish community here will scream for months and, worse, use their papers to blast government types.

GD: I doubt that. They don’t want to kill the goose that lays their golden eggs. I see them turning on me as the announcer of matters they would rather ignore. Money and weapons have that effect on people.

RTC: You knew their Stern gang tried to kill Truman once? Harry may have gotten their ball rolling but he stopped shipments of explosives over there to stop the wave of bombings and so on. So they decided to kill him. As I remember, they sent anthrax to Harry in a letter but someone else got it. Kept very quiet. The secret service tracked the doers to Montreal and turned it over to us. We found five of them living in a safe house and nailed all of them. Ironically, they got rid of the bodies by dumping them into a local hog farm where the pigs ate them.

GD: Pigs will do that. I heard a farm person, who raised pigs, once say that his uncle disappeared. He said he went to shit and the hogs ate him. When I worked in Northern California , I could see that that was not really a joke. The outhouses are built on the side of a hill and open in the back. The pigs run wild up there and when they see someone going to the outhouse with a newspaper, they flock to the site. For them, it’s manna from heaven.

RTC: Have you no shame, Gregory? And the other one has escaped to Cuba so we got Batista’s people to ice him. By the way, did you know that the CIA put Castro in office? No? We were tired of Batista and some moron thought Castro would cooperate better with our business interests. He did not and both big business, Alcoa mostly, the mob and the Company tried for years to kill him. You don’t need to write about that if you please.

GD: Fine.

RTC: And the JCS was planning to fake Cuban attacks on American targets to justify a military attack? I didn’t think so. Eisenhower thought it was a wonderful idea but Kennedy killed it. Considering that his father was such a crook, it’s amazing how uncooperative his son was.

GD: You don’t have any paperwork on that on, do you?

RTC: No but believe me, it’s true.

GD: Did that have anything to do with the Kennedy business?

RTC: A contributory factor.

GD: Perhaps sometime we can discuss this.

RTC: Perhaps later.

GD: Eisenhower was a shit after all. He would have let tens of thousands of German POWs starve to death after the war but Truman saved them.

RTC: I went to the Point and under Ike’s picture in the yearbook, it referred to him as a Swedish Jew. I think they were German but you can see why he might have been upset with the Germans.

GD: Well, long ago, the Roosevelt family were Jewish. The name was Campo Rosso, changed to Rosenfeld and then to the Dutch Roosevelt. I mean that was back in the 1600s but Franklin had a second cousin who was Orthodox until he died. If you dig back far enough, it’s amazing what you find.

RTC: Where did you dig that up?

GD: The Congressional Record, German genealogical agencies and so on. I do dig, Robert, don’t forget that. I never accept anything as fact until I’ve checked it out. The Costello business is an example.  Murdered by the Russians? Try his black boyfriend he kept in a flat in Soho . Costello’s own brother was a British naval officer and he refused to take custody of the body. They probably cremated John and shipped the remains back to London . The boyfriend went to the post office and hauled John’s ashes for the last time.

RTC: (Laughter)

GD: Well, it’s apt.

RTC: You are a mean person, Gregory, very mean.

GD: Yes, I am. I once poured water on a drowning man, Robert. I have devastated small children by my revelations about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Cruel.

RTC: You’re a social Darwinist, Gregory, just like the rest of us.

GD: I agree but let’s not get the religious freaks exercised by mention of that awful name. The world is only 6,000 years old according to Bishop Ussher, and we dare not even question Holy Writ. I keep away from that when I write because God hath no fury like a Jesus freak deluded. Anyway, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof and on that uplifting note, I have to take the dog out or he will desecrate the carpet. Regards to the wife.

RTC: Always happy to hear from you, Gregory.

(Concluded at 2:11PM CST )

Falling Out With The President: The Devious World of George Bush

May 29, 2008

by Rupert Cornwall

The Independent/UK

He was the most plodding, the most robotic, and - until this week - apparently the most loyal of presidential spokesmen. But now Scott McClellan, White House press secretary for George Bush between 2003 and 2006, has delivered the most wounding critique yet of this unhappy administration by one of its erstwhile senior officials

What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington ’s Culture of Deception is no falsely touted insider memoir, jazzed up with a few titillating anecdotes to boost sales. It is a 341-page disquisition on Mr Bush, on his misbegotten war in Iraq , and on his entire conduct of the presidency, which Mr McClellan says was built on the use of propaganda, and on the technique of government as permanent campaign.

“History appears poised to confirm,” he writes in arguably the most damning paragraph of a book full of them, “that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now … What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”

And those are not the words of a disgruntled outsider, summoned to the colours and then casually tossed aside. Mr McClellan largely owes his career to Mr Bush. He was spokesman for Mr Bush and part of the “Texas Mafia” along with the likes of Karl Rove and Karen Hughes.

A man with deep political connections in the Texan capital, Austin , Mr McClellan first worked for then governor Bush in early 1999. He was travelling press secretary for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000 before becoming chief deputy White House spokesman in the first Bush term. In July 2003, he took over from Ari Fleischer, and served as press secretary for almost three years.

It was a wretched period. True, his boss did win a narrow re-election in 2004 but, thereafter, it was downhill all the way. The draining CIA leak affair (in which Mr McClellan claims he was misled by both Mr Rove, Mr Bush’s closest adviser, and by Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff who was ultimately convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice) was followed by Hurricane Katrina and the administration’s disastrously botched response, and by ever growing public disenchantment with the war. By the time Mr McClellan was eased out in April 2006, Mr Bush had become one of the most unpopular US presidents of recent times, and has remained so ever since.

In its own words, What Happened is a chronicle of “how the presidency of George W Bush veered terribly off course”. Its longer term impact may be limited, by dint of the fact that the Bush presidency has sunk so low that it can hardly fall further. Mr McClellan’s “revelations” moreover merely confirm what all but the most blinkered supporters of the 43rd President have long since realised. But the immediate reaction of the Bush camp has been predictably bitter. Officially, the White House brushes off the book. Unofficially however, the President’s men are vitriolic, claiming he did not know what was going on but has turned upon his former boss to boost his book royalties.

“It shows how out of the loop he was,” Mr Rove, the man once known as “Bush’s Brain”, said on Fox News where he is now a commentator. “This doesn’t sound like Scott, it sounds like a left-wing blogger. I don’t remember him speaking up [about the concerns laid out in the book] at the time.”

In fact, Mr McClellan’s portrait of the President - a man he says he still respects and admires - is far more nuanced. Which of course only makes it more telling. Mr Bush comes across in now familiar guise, as a skilled politician, possessed of charm and an engaging wit, who is, “plenty smart enough to be President”. On the other hand, he is utterly incurious and uninquisitive on policy matters, preferring to rely on gut instinct than a detailed sifting of the arguments.

For the 43rd President, a decision once taken is always right. The approach reflects not only Mr Bush’s ingrained stubbornness but his ability to deceive not only others, but also himself. Mr McClellan offers as illustration a moment on the campaign trail in 1999, when he heard the governor/candidate talking on the phone to a friend about reports that he had used cocaine in his youth. Apparently, Mr Bush remarked that … “the media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumours. The truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back then, and I just don’t remember.”

In 2000 voters - battle-hardened by having to confront Bill Clinton’s marijuana use (”I did not inhale”) and explain to their curious children the finer points of the Monica Lewinsky affair - did not seem greatly bothered. They assumed Mr Bush might indeed have indulged in cocaine, just as he had indulged in the bottle which he had emphatically given up. But Mr McClellan drew a different lesson from the episode. “I remember thinking to myself, how can that be?” he writes. “How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn’t make a lot of sense.”

On the other hand, Mr Bush wasn’t, “the kind of person to flat-out lie.” So, Mc McClellan concludes, “I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine … I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true. And his reason for doing so is fairly obvious - political convenience.” And thus, by implication at least, it was with Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

What Happened may throw new light on the enduring mystery of the war: why exactly did Mr Bush decide to invade a country that even he knew had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks that triggered his “war on terror?”

In a 2003 interview with Vanity Fair, Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Secretary of Defence and intellectual architect of the war, gave a hint when he suggested that WMD were only one reason for the invasion - “something everyone could agree on”. Mr McClellan goes significantly further. The administration’s real motive for war, he declares, was the neoconservative dream of creating a democratic Iraq that would pave the way for an enduring peace in the region.

But the White House had to sell the war as necessary because of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. They accordingly took a different tack, not of “out-and-out deception”, but of “shading the truth”. This was achieved by “innuendo and implication”, and by “intentionally ignoring intelligence to the contrary”.

But, one might ask, what else is new? An identical conclusion after all was reached as early as the summer of 2002, in the celebrated Downing Street memo in which British officials just back from a visit to Washington said US intelligence was being shaped to fit a decision to go to war .

It is, however, astounding to hear this critique from the man who spent the best part of three years doggedly defending the war and its consequences from a press corps that (as he writes in the book) had given the administration far too easy a ride in the run-up to the war - and was bent on making up for that omission when Mr McClellan succeeded Ari Fleischer as press secretary in summer 2003, when no WMD had been found, and it was all but certain none would be.

Even more astounding is his assertion that, contrary to everything the President continues to insist (aided no doubt by that talent for self-deception) Mr Bush would take his war back if he could. “I know the President pretty well,” Mr McClellan writes. “If he had been given a crystal ball in which he could have foreseen the cost of war, more than 4,000 American troops killed, 30,000 injured, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, he would never have made the decision to invade, whatever he says or feels he has to say publicly today.”

Blame does not belong with Mr Bush alone. What Happened delivers tough criticism of the President’s once vaunted national security team. One member of it of course was Dick Cheney, referred to by Mr McClellan as “the magic man” who somehow “always seemed to get his way” on every issue that mattered to him, be it the war, boosting the executive power of the presidency, or the harsh treatment of detainees.

Even more damning is his verdict on Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser in the run-up to the invasion. Her main talent, Mr McClellan suggests, was a Teflon quality. Whatever went wrong, “she was somehow able to keep her hands clean,” even when the problems related to areas for which she was responsible, such as the WMD rationale for war (including the infamous “16 words” in the 2003 State of the Union address about Saddam seeking uranium in Africa, that led to the CIA/Valerie Plame affair) and the planning for post-war occupation. History, he predicts, will not be kind to Ms Rice. But “she knew well how to adapt to potential trouble, dismiss brooding problems and always come out looking like a star”.

That is more than could be said for Mr McClellan himself, with his consistently gloomy demeanour and lack of the eloquence or sense of humour required to extricate himself from tight corners in the press room.

Rarely did he come out looking like a star. Equally rarely however did he look like a man secretly thirsting for revenge, even when he was replaced in spring 2006 by the conservative broadcaster Tony Snow (who, whatever else, was never lost for words).

Today Mr McClellan has found his words, in print. He professes still to like and admire his old boss. To which Mr Bush can only conclude, with friends like this, who needs enemies?

Bush's fury as ex-spokesman twists the knife

Scott McClellan's memoir of his years as a White House insider is the most wounding book yet on the President.

June 1, 2008

by  Rupert Cornwell

The Independent/UK

What happened? Not What Happened, the simple and declarative title of the political memoir that last week set Washington afire – but, what on earth happened? How did an outwardly meek, loyal and somewhat undistinguished White House spokes-man named Scott McClellan come to write a book that demolishes George Bush and his administration more woundingly than any published so far?

Most recent presidential spokesmen have burst into print after leaving office. Some are bent on settling scores, others indulge in unrestrained hero worship. But none has ever turned on his former boss as comprehensively as McClellan, saddened but, he says, at last wiser as he takes apart the Iraq war and "a presidency that veered terribly off course".

Democrats have been delighted, Republicans and the Bush administration have been enraged and appalled. But their fury, and the sensation the book has caused, arises not so much from what is in the book – its critique basically merely confirms what has become conventional wisdom about Bush and his war – but from the identity of the author.

For Scott McClellan is no outsider. Like Bush's closest advisers Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, he was part of a Texan praetorian guard that accompanied the 43rd President from the Governor's mansion in Austin to the most powerful job in the world.

He joined the team in early 1999, and at the White House was first deputy spokesman and then spokesman for the best part of three draining years until he was shunted aside in April 2006. That he was planning a memoir had long been known – but no one could have imagined the blockbuster that was in store.

The big publishers showed little interest. The advance from the small PublicAffairs imprint that took the plunge did not exceed five figures. By Wednesday, however, it had leapt to No1 on the Amazon list, and such was the public demand that that evening it was in the bookshops, even though it was not due to be published until tomorrow.

By Thursday, its author was doing the round of TV and radio talk shows. McClellan these days has lost a little weight and his sideburns are longer – but otherwise it was the same round-faced, robotic and relentlessly on-message figure of the middle Bush years. Except that his message had changed.

What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington 's Culture of Deception, to give it its full title, is no dazzling read, gushing with anecdotes. Nor is it an undisguised hatchet-job, cutting down former rivals and enemies. McClellan was a PC Plod at the spokesman's rostrum, and as a writer he is still a plodder. Only 40, he comes across as earnest, disillusioned, but above all sincere.

Yes, he is bitter, mostly at being left to dangle in the CIA leak affair. In 2003, he says, he was falsely assured by leading figures in the administration that they were not involved in the leak to the press of the name of the CIA officer Valerie Plame.

When it became clear two years later that McClellan's denials were "inoperative", his credibility was destroyed. When he was eased out of office in 2006, it came as a surprise to no one, not even McClellan.

Maybe resentment of his treatment led him to toughen the language of his book. But ultimately the CIA imbroglio is a sideshow. The crux of McClellan's book is his apostasy on Iraq , the issue that will come to define the Bush presidency. As he tells it, he first went along with the invasion, trusting – like most Americans – a President guided by a highly experienced national security team.

Now, he describes the war as "unnecessary" and a "strategic blunder". Bush had made up his mind to attack Saddam Hussein early on. He and his team (including McClellan) sold it by "propaganda", abandoning "candour and honesty" for the distortions of the permanent political campaign. Indeed one of Bush's hallmarks, according to his former spokesman, is an ability to deceive himself – in the case of Iraq , to convince himself that the case for war was far stronger than it was.

The tone is less angry than sad. McClellan recounts the realisation of the trusty retainer, as the scales drop from his eyes, that both the cause and the man he served were deeply flawed. The disclosure will undoubtedly make McClellan a rich man (not that, as scion of a noted Texas political family, he was ever on his uppers). It will also be ammunition to his critics, both Republican and Democratic. This is no bid for absolution, they say, but a cynical effort to boost sales.

For they are asking, why did he take so long to see the light? Why didn't he resign if he was so miserable? As it was, he displayed not the slightest qualms when defending a manifestly failed Iraq policy. McClellan's answer is that he experienced no epiphany, only a slow and painful disenchantment. Only gradually did he realise how the obsession with secrecy created "a large black hole in my understanding of what was really going on inside the administration".

The vicious attacks from Bush loyalists and others who worked with McClellan that he was out of the loop and thus doesn't know what he's talking about, only confirm the obsession. For if the very spokesman of the President is not told what the President is thinking and doing, then how on earth is the country to be told the truth?

What Happened paints a familiar picture of Bush. He is a talented politician, who possesses charm, wit and much shrewdness. But he is also utterly incurious – not stupid, as his most blinded critics would claim, but ignorant. "Is he dumb?" Barbara Bush, the former first lady, once mused about her son. "Dumb, yes, he's dumb as a fox."

As President, McClellan writes, Bush has been impatient of policy detail. He prefers to go with his gut, most dangerously on foreign affairs, about which he knew next to nothing when he took office. Since then, more perhaps than any president since Ronald Reagan, he has inhabited "the bubble" that entrapped McClellan as well, severing him from the real world. As McClellan put it in one interview last week, "only as you leave the White House bubble, can you take off your partisan hat and take a clear-eyed view of things".

Two individuals in particular will not be happy with this "clear-eyed view". One is Condoleezza Rice, who occupied the crucial post of national security adviser in the run-up to the war. Rice, says McClellan, was "more interested in accommodating the President's instincts and ideas than in questioning them or educating him".

As for Rove, the man hailed by Bush as "the architect" of his re-election in 2004, he did not create the excesses of government by permanent campaign (the Clinton administration had mastered that art) but he took it to a new level. "Rove's role was political manipulation, plain and simple," McClellan declares. In the end, this mentality "crippled" the Bush White House.

Washington now awaits the fall-out from the book. It's one more piece of bad news for Republicans in an election year full of it. Its impact on the 2008 campaign itself may be modest, given that John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, was already distancing himself from Bush. For the 70 per cent of Americans who disapprove of Bush, it merely confirms their views. The remaining minority of true believers will be convinced that McClellan is fit only for public lynching.

And between Bush and his former aide, the bonds are surely broken for ever. "One day he and I are going to be rocking on chairs in Texas talking about the good old days and his time as press secretary," Bush said as he publicly thanked McClellan in April 2006 for "a job well done". It's hard to imagine these two putting up their feet together on the porch any time soon.

Controlling the News

Was Press a War ‘Enabler’? 2 Offer a Nod From Inside

May 29, 2008

by Brian Stelter

New York Times

In his new memoir, “What Happened,” Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, said the national news media neglected their watchdog role in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, calling reporters “complicit enablers” of the Bush administration’s push for war.

Surprisingly, some prominent journalists have agreed.

Katie Couric, the anchor of “CBS Evening News,” said on Wednesday that she had felt pressure from government officials and corporate executives to cast the war in a positive light.

Speaking on “The Early Show” on CBS, Ms. Couric said the lack of skepticism shown by journalists about the Bush administration’s case for war amounted to “one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism.” She also said she sensed pressure from “the corporations who own where we work and from the government itself to really squash any kind of dissent or any kind of questioning of it.” At the time, Ms. Couric was a host of “Today” on NBC.

Another broadcast journalist also weighed in. Jessica Yellin, who worked for MSNBC in 2003 and now reports for CNN, said on Wednesday that journalists had been “under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation.”

On Thursday, she clarified her comments in a blog post, writing that her producers at MSNBC had wanted their coverage to reflect the patriotic mood of the country.

A spokeswoman for General Electric, which owns NBC and MSNBC through its division NBC Universal, declined to speak about the specifics of the comments but said, “General Electric has never, and will never, interfere in the editorial process at NBC News.”

The opinions of Ms. Couric and Ms. Yellin were hardly universal among journalists. Ms. Couric made her comments in an unusual on-camera tour of network morning programs — along with her two evening news competitors, Brian Williams of “NBC Nightly News” and Charles Gibson of “World News” on ABC — to promote a cancer research telethon.