WHO DID THE WHIG GROUP RELY ON?

'WHIG" stands for White House Iraq Group and it was responsible for selling the Iraq War to Americans. Walter Pincus in "Records Could Shed Light on Iraq Group" thinks that we should take a long, hard look at the records of its meetings because that's where the selling of the war began, according to Scott McClellan:

The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular participants (many have since left or changed jobs) were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy aides led by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, as well as I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

As former White House press secretary Scott McClellan wrote in his recently released book, "What Happened," the Iraq Group "had been set up in the summer of 2002 to coordinate the marketing of the war to the public."

Note that Libby often talked with Judith Miller of the NY Times and was most likely one of the sources for this Times article:

The New York Times
September 8, 2002 Sunday
Late Edition - Final
THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE IRAQIS;
U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS
BYLINE: By MICHAEL R. GORDON and JUDITH MILLER
SECTION: Section 1; Column 6; Foreign Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 3569 words
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 7

A key part of this article is the aluminum tubes story which at the time was doubted by the Dept. of Energy and the Dept. of State but Miller and Gordon didn't find that out until it was too late to stop the war.