McClellan stands by barnburner book

OLBERMANN:  How did the vice president fit into this?  How did—is the vice president responsible for the utiliazation of weapons of mass destruction in this kind of innuendo, I didn't really say that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, but I left you with that impression?

MCCLELLAN:  Well, I think there were a couple of times that he walked very close to that. He went further out than anybody else in the administration.  I think the president was very careful not to make that in a direct way.  But it's not the only issue where the vice president went further then others in the administration.

He also went further on the nuclear intelligence when he started asserting with certainty that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.  So what happened was, that the intelligence was packaged together in a way to make it sound more ominous  and more grave and more urgent than it really was.  I don't think that this was some deliberate, conscious effort to go and mislead American people, but it was part of this permanently campaign mentality that exists in Washington too often today and it was taken from other policies, and brought into the issue of war and peace where it becomes especially problematic and especially troubling.

And that's why I think what I get to in this book is so important for people to understand, so we that can learn from this and not make these kind of mistakes again where we're rushing into a war that now is very clearly one that was unnecessary.

OLBERMANN:  To that point, there is, I think, actual poetry in here, and I don't mean to veinly flatter you here.  But let me read something

else: “Although I didn't realize it at the time, we launched our campaign to sell the war, what drove Bush toward military confrontation more than anything else was an ambitious and idealistic post -9/11 vision of transforming the Middle East through the spread of freedom. 

This view was grounded in a philosophy of coercive democracy, a belief that Iraq was ripe for conversion from a dictatorship into a beacon of liberty through the use of force and a conviction that this could be achieved at nominal cost.”

A philosophy of coercive democracy—it's a marvelous phrase, but is it an oxymoron?  Can you have coercive democracy and sort of extrapolating from that?

MCCLELLAN:  That's a very good question.

OLBERMANN:  But is that why we had—your choice of words here—“enhanced interrogation or torture at Abu Ghraib, at Gitmo,” and maybe at other places?

MCCLELLAN:  In terms of—I don't know on that.  I didn't go —  don't know the full policy details behind some of those issues, but certainly those have tarnished the reputation of the United States in a very negative way.  And I think that has been harmful over the long term.

But in terms of the coercive democracy, that was—and you bring up a very good point about the oxymoron there—but that was always the strategy for going into Iraq in first place.  And I think that is what really drove the president's motivation to push ahead and rush into this.

When I think that there were probably other options—there were definitely other options available to him.  He didn't have to box himself in.  But when he went to the United Nations he said, either he disarms and the U.N.—if he doesn't, then the U.N. goes in, or the security council authorizes it, or we will do it ourselves.

OLBERMANN:  All right.  Let me jump ahead to where we started, I with Plame.  There's so much detail in the book and your role in it—the kind of make or break moment that it represented for you.  If—you point out that day that the president confirmed that he was involved in declassifying parts of the NIE.  In classifying parts of the National Intelligence Estimate, about Iraq and to use against Joe Wilson, is he, do you think, did he in essence or legally OK the leaking of Valerie Plame's CIA identity?

MCCLELLAN:  Well, that's a question that I raise in the book.  I don't know the truth behind it.  But it did set in motion the chain events that led to the leak and to Valerie Plame's identity.   I do not believe that the president was any way in—directly involved in the leaking of her identity.

But that was a very disillusioned moment when I found out—when it initially hit the press and we were I believe it was North Carolina, if I remember correctly.  And the reporter shouted out to the president, is it true that you authorized the secret leaking of this previously classified information that the president does have the legal authority to walk on Air Force One?

And the president asked, what was the reporter asking.  And I said, he asserted you were the one that authorized Scooter Libby leaking this information.  And he said, yes, I did.  And it really took me back.  I could tell he didn't want to sit there and talk about it.  And I walked back to the senior staff area on Air Force One, where I usually sit, and it took a while for that to sink in.

But that was just before I left.  And at that point, I had made a decision that I could no longer continue in this administration.  Now, there were changes coming in soon.  I talked about this and Josh Bolton was looking to make some changes too.  So my time frame was moved up a little bit from what I preferred.  But that was the second defining moment that really caused me a lot of dismay and disillusionment.

OLBERMANN:  Did you go into this kind of detail and the kind of detail that was in the book about the outing of Plame and what you knew or what you suspected with special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald?

MCCLELLAN:  This is all consistent with I told the FBI investigators, the prosecutors — and I don't believe Patrick Fitzgerald was at my grand jury testimony.  I testified—I think it was early February of would have been 2004 and—what I knew—and all of this information is very consistent with what I told them.

But I did tell White House reporters when the revelations came out that Rove and Libby were both involved when they said they weren't, that my hands were tied by the White House Council's office.  They said, we can't comment on this.  So it put me in a very tough situation.  I had been undermined by these two fellow colleagues and senior staffers, and I told the White House reporters at that time that some day I look forward to talking about this when this is behind us.

And I think they really knew that I was expressing my sincere desire to do so.  And in this book I go into great detail, every detail, about what I know.

OLBERMANN:  Was that a sort of warning that this book was coming? 

Did you know even that that was what you meant by that?

MCCLELLAN:  I'm sorry?

OLBERMANN:  When you were going to—that you look forward some day to talking about it.  Did you mean the book?

MCCLELLAN: The book, no.  I wasn't thinking about it at this point. 

I was still at the White House.  But as I left the White House—I think you need some time to kind of step back from being in that bubble to really be able to reflect on events and try to understand and make sense of them.  Because, when I went to work for the president, I had all of this great hope like a lot of people that he was going to come to Washington and change Washington, as he had governed in Texas, as bipartisan governor who had 70 percent approval.

It didn't happen and I wanted to go back and look, why didn't that happen?  Why did things go so terribly off course from what he promised?

He assured people he was going to be a bipartisan leader, a person of honor and integrity, restore honor and integrity to the White House. 

Where did things go wrong?  That's really the overall narrative in the book, but certainly the Plame episode was a defining moment for me that is a central part of the book.

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