McClellan: At first, I believed president

Bush ignored intelligence that didn’t fit the war picture, McClellan said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan defended his bombshell book about the Bush administration on Thursday, saying he didn’t speak up against the overselling of war in Iraq at the time because he, like other Americans, gave the president the benefit of the doubt.

“My beliefs were different then. I believed the president when he talked about the grave and gathering danger from Iraq,” McClellan, who was deputy press secretary during the lead-up to the war, told NBC’s “Today” show.

McClellan, who had worked for Bush since he was Texas governor, said his initial misgivings about a rush to war were offset by his affection for the president and respect for his foreign policy team. It was easy to believe Bush, he said, because the president wasn’t consciously trying to inflate the threat of Iraq’s unleashing weapons of mass destruction.

“He came to convince himself of that,” McClellan said of Bush.

In hindsight, McClellan says he came to view the war as a mistake by a president and advisers swept up in a grand plan of seeding democracy in the Middle East by overturning Saddam Hussein’s regime. McClellan says Bush and his aides became so wrapped up in pushing the argument for war that they ignored intelligence that didn’t fit the picture.

McClellan said he grew “increasingly dismayed and disillusioned” during his final year as White House press secretary, and pinpointed the unfolding of the CIA leak case — and what it revealed about Bush’s role in releasing classified information about Iraq to the press — as his tipping point. McClellan was elevated to press secretary in July 2003 and left the White House in April 2006.

As his book — “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” — vaulted to No. 1 on Amazon.com’s best-seller list, Republican critics dismissed him as a turncoat, a sellout and a disgruntled former employee. The White House called the book puzzling and sad.

Former White House counselor Dan Bartlett offered an immediate rebuke to McClellan’s interview and his allegations of pro-war propaganda.

Rejecting complaints that he penned a sensational book to cash in on his White House service, McClellan said he had “a higher loyalty” to the truth.

He identified the CIA leak case as a personal revelation.

He was ordered to say from the press room podium that White House aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby were not involved in leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity to the press. Later a criminal investigation revealed that they were.

And he recalled a day in April 2006, when the unfolding perjury case against Libby had revealed that Bush secretly declassified portions of a 2002 intelligence report about Iraq’s weapons capabilities to help deflect criticism of his case for war. High-profile criticism was coming from Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, in those days before the war.

The president was leaving an event in North Carolina, McClellan recalled, and as they walked to Air Force One a reporter shouted a question: Had the president, who had repeatedly condemned the selective release of secret intelligence, enabled Libby to leak classified information to The New York Times back then to bolster the administration’s arguments for war?

McClellan took the question to the president, telling Bush: “He’s saying you yourself were the one that authorized the leaking of this information.”

“And he said, ’Yeah, I did.’ And I was kind of taken aback,” McClellan said.