The Left Coaster: McClellan Lied At Press Gaggle Yesterday

It looks like Scott McClellan was caught in a lie yesterday, during his impromptu press briefing to pile on Newsweek:

Q: Can you 100 percent say for sure that it is wrong, that there were no incidents of American interrogators putting Korans in the toilets?

MR. McCLELLAN: I know of no such incidents. And the Department of Defense said last week that they could find no credible evidence of it either. They have looked into it.

Really? That's not what the Pentagon actually said last week Scott, on May 10th:

Snip

Q: This is -- I believe this is an investigation that was sparked by allegations by FBI officials --

MR. DIRITA: Oh, right. That was an investigation that because of these FBI e-mails that we learned of, the commander down there asked for it to be pursued. I know that the investigators down there have coordinated with the FBI, which apparently is doing its own separate investigation. The Department of Justice inspector general is involved because there are FBI interrogators as well as other -- as well as military.

So I think where we are is that the commander is coordinating closely with the Department of Justice so that we have -- we can be as linked together as we need to be. He, I think, received some -- the commander received some initial assessments early, asked for some additional inquiries, and those have not been completed.

And I think we're probably -- because of the desire to make sure that we're working closely with other agencies, it's a little bit more complicated. And I think we're probably several weeks away from being able to say that the commander has made his final assessments there.

So, as of last Tuesday, May 10th, (the day after the story broke) we were "several weeks away" from the Guantanamo commander being able to make his final assessments as to whether or not the "Korans down the toilet" stories were credible.

Semper Fi