McClellan's Warning on Iran

top! Please. Get beneath the hype over former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. Don't miss the forest for the trees.

Not since John Dean told the truth about President Richard Nixon's crimes have we had an account by a very close aide to a sitting president charging him with crimes of the most serious kind.

McClellan writes that George W. Bush abandoned "candor and honesty" to wage a "political campaign" that led the nation into an "unnecessary war."

The chief U.S. prosecutor of senior Nazi officials at the post-World War II Nuremberg Trials, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, labeled such action – more correctly termed a war of aggression – the "supreme international crime."

In other words, President Bush used propaganda and deception to lead the United States into what an earlier generation of American leaders judged not just a war crime, but the "supreme" war crime.

And, in all this, Bush had an eager cast aiding and abetting – from careerists in the U.S. intelligence community to the fawning corporate media (FCM) whom McClellan referred to as "deferential, complicit enablers."

As for the role of intelligence, McClellan tells of "shading the truth." In the effort to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, the president used "innuendo and implication" and intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary.

Water over the dam, you say? No way.

White House spinners are at it again – "fixing" the intelligence around the policy, this time on Iran. The fixing is obvious, but don't expect to hear about it from the FCM.

An exception is MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. His antiquated approach is to ask relevant questions – like, for example, will the White House do an encore in preparing us for an attack on Iran? More