First of all, in the interest of truth-telling, let me say this is not the article I began to write yesterday. My judgment with regard to the time factor should not have permitted my turning on the TV and sitting in on the hearing in which Eric Holter, Attorney General, answered questions on budget funding for Justice Department programs.

The discussion questions were so probing, and Holter’s responses so relevant, I stayed glued to the set for almost two hours. Democracy in action. It was the kind of program that should have been slated for prime time, with the same advance notice as the Rose Bowl without half-time entertainment.

Memory fails me as to who made this pertinent statement years ago. Evangelists, to serve their people, must read Scripture every morning for both wisdom and inspiration. Then, they should turn to the morning papers to learn what is happening in the real world needing God’s wisdom and inspiration. Another spiritual writer has stated that the most important virtue required by leaders today, including religious leaders, is courage.

From those ruminations, I couldn’t help but continue on to: Are young people sufficiently steeped in Scripture today to find nourishment for their minds and hearts, to encourage their companions on the day’s journey? Are they adequately literate to read the morning papers with understanding? Furthermore, does not the diminishment of newspapers, national and local, threaten our very democracy and open the way to Fascist totalitarianism?

But I digress. The subject on hand is Scott McClellan’s memoirs as President Bush’s press secretary, in his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. He begins by assuring us that Bush is a man of charm, wit, and enormous political skill. ( No word about sterling personal integrity.)

The episode that prompted Scott’s penning his memoirs as President George W. Bush’s press secretary was the scandal over the leaking of classified national security information – the so-called Plame affair, in which Valerie Plame, a covert CIA official, had had her cover blown.

President Bush made the case that Saddam Hussein represented a “grave and gathering danger that needed to be eliminated.,” and insisted that Niger could supply Iraq with yellow-cake for uranium.

At the October 10th White House briefing, McClellan tried to extricate himself from the question of who had blown Plame’s cover by leaking her identity to several reporters, and for what purpose? McClellan speculated: In order to punish Plame? To discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson, for having allegedly declared that the administration had deliberately led the country into war?

At the press conference on October 10, McClellan pushed back the notion that the White House was behind the leak, deliberately exonerating Texan Karl Rove, and the president’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Yet, McClellan wasn’t allowed to get off the hook so easily, as a liberal talk show host posed the question: “Scott,” Jones asked, “Earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliott Abrams, nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wondered if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?”

McClellan answered . “I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that’s where it stands.”

The problem was, the answer wasn’t true.

McClellan goes on to say: “I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, Vice- President Cheney, the president’s chief of staff Andrew Card, and the president himself.

“..... I thought the mentality of political manipulation had been largely the creation of our predecessors in the Clinton White House and that the leader I placed great hope in, George W. Bush, was dead set on changing it. ...Instead, his own White House became embroiled in political maneuvering that was equally unsavory, if not worse, much of it related directly to his most consequential decision as president – the decision to invade Iraq.”

In the fall of 2002, Congress requested a national intelligence estimate about the status of Iraq’s WMD program. In October,of 2002, the NIE stated in a report titled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction” that Iraq had been “vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake (the reference to the Niger claim). Based partly on this claim, Congress voted on October 11, 2002, to authorize military action against Iraq by the commander in chief.

Because of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s enormous popularity, unquestioned honor and integrity, he was chosen to speak before the UN Security Council, but he did not include in his address the sixteen words regarding the the African matter:

“The British government has learned that Sadddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’

In his May, 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Iraq war opponent, Nicholas Kristof, wrote in his column, “Missing in Action: Truth,”

Kristof quoted a “reliable source” to suggest that the president had deliberately led the nation into war. McClellan asserted:

The idea that the Bush administration might have been part of its argument for a controversial war on inaccurate intelligence was one thing. Most Americans would be inclined to forgive an honest mistake, especially if it stemmed from an excess of caution about a perceived threat in a dangerous, post-9/11 world. But if administration leaders deliberately chose to ignore the facts when assembling the case for war, and, even worse, if they knowingly dissembled in order to make the case appear stronger than it was, Americans might not be so forgiving.

Kristof had written that the unnamed envoy reported to the CIA and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

Before leading up to war, dissidents in our streets, on talk-show programs, in letters, e-mails, telephone calls, etc. had bombarded the White House with anguished cries against the war.

No wonder George Bush has never allowed caskets bearing the sacred bodies of our men and women to be viewed publicly at airports. Perhaps, just perhaps, even his conscience could not support the anguish he has perpetrated upon the United States and the entire world. And the war goes on and on and on. And the dying. And the maiming.

Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy. Amen.

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