The ‘watering down’ campaign begins.

From Thinkprogress:

The Bush administration is already in full spin mode regarding the “strikingly harsh” GAO report on Iraq. An individual leaked the GAO report to the Washington Post because the source feared that the administration would try to “water down” its conclusions. As predicted, the Pentagon has begun the watering-down campaign:

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said that after reviewing a draft of the Government Accountability Office report — which has not yet been made public — policy officials “made some factual corrections” and “offered some suggestions on a few of the actual grades” assigned by the GAO. … “We have provided the GAO with information which we believe will lead them to conclude that a few of the benchmark grades should be upgraded from ‘not met’ to ‘met,’” Morrell said.