Deny through ignorance

via Think Progress

Finally! Fifteen days after the Downing Street memo broke in a London Sunday Times story, eleven days after Representative John Conyers and 87 other congressmen wrote a letter to the White House asking for an explanation, and ten days after Knight Ridder wrote the first story on the British memo, some courageous reporter finally took the dive and asked the White House whether it disputed the veracity of the leaked memo.

After succesfully ducking the question for eight straight gaggles/briefings, the White House press secretary was forced to give an off-camera response yesterday. And what an amazing response it was. CNN.com reports:

Claims in a recently uncovered British memo that intelligence was “being fixed” to support the Iraq war as early as mid-2002 are “flat out wrong,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Monday.

“Flat-out wrong.” Good - that clears it up, right? Not exactly.

However, McClellan also said he had not seen the “specific memo,” only reports of what it contained.

So we’re back to playing this game again. It’s a familiar pattern we see from the White House when it comes up against information it doesn’t want to talk about: Deny through ignorance.

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And Tom Delay for that matter...