During an interview with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), CBS Evening News host Katie Couric noted that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) said recently that “there might have been improved security [in Iraq] even without the surge” and asked McCain, “What’s your response to that?”

After first calling Obama’s claim “a false depiction of what actually happened,” McCain proceeded to falsely claim that the surge “began the Anbar awakening“:

McCAIN: I don’t know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.

But in a puzzling move, the CBS Evening News did not actually televise McCain’s false claim tonight. As MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann reported, “CBS curiously, to say the least, left it on the edit room floor. It aired Katie Couric’s question, but in response, it inserted part of McCain’s answer to another question instead.”

CBS’s full interview with McCain (with video) appears online. CNN aired the portion that CBS edited out. Watch it:

In fact, the Sunni revolt against Al-Qaida in Iraq’s Anbar province — commonly referred to as “The Awakening” — “began” long before Bush even announced his “surge” policy in January 2007. As the New York Times noted in April 2007:

The turnabout began last September [2006], when a federation of tribes in the Ramadi area came together as the Anbar Salvation Council to oppose the fundamentalist militants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

But also, President Bush himself noted this fact in a speech to the Naval War College in June, 2007:

Last September [2006], Anbar was all over the news. It was held up as an example of America’s failure in Iraq. The papers cited a leaked intelligence report that was pessimistic about our prospects there. [...]

About the same time some folks were writing off Anbar, our troops were methodically clearing Anbar’s capital city of Ramadi of terrorists, and winning the trust of the local population. In parallel with these efforts, a group of tribal sheiks launched a movement called “The Awakening” — and began cooperating with American and Iraqi forces.

Spencer Ackerman notes that the colonel McCain cited is “now a one-star general” and had explained the “Awakening” to a reporter in September 2006 “before it even had a name.” “For McCain to say that the Anbar Awakening is the product of the surge is either a lie or professional malpractice,” added Ackerman.

On Sunday, after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki indicated support for a 16-month U.S. withdrawal, the U.S. military distributed a statement from Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh saying Maliki was “misunderstood and mistranslated.” But The New Republic reports that “Maliki actually got a copy of the interview before it was printed and had the option to make any changes.” A writer at Der Spiegel sent TNR the following statement:

The reason the magazine scores so many high level interviews is that the editors agree to allow the subjects to “authorize” the interviews before they go to press. It wasn’t just a slip of the tongue, in other words: Maliki not only endorsed Obama’s plans for withdrawing from Iraq, but his office then explicitly approved the endorsement before it was printed. The denials, then, were doubly facetious.

At 2 PM tomorrow, rap star Nas will deliver a petition — organized by Color of Change and Move On.org and signed by 600,000 people — to Fox News’s Manhattan headquarters, calling on the network to “stop its racist smears against the Obamas and other Black Americans.” Nas also takes the network to task in a new song, “Sly Fox,” which includes the lyrics, “I pledge allegiance to the fair and balanced truth/Not the biased truth/Not the liar’s truth/But the highest truth.” Last year, Brave New Films released a video exposing Fox’s attacks on black America. Watch it:

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Earlier this month, former EPA official Jason Burnett wrote to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) with explosive revelations on how the White House has neutered climate change science to protect corporate interests. For example, OMB general counsel Jeffrey Rosen asked for multiple memos on whether carbon dioxide (CO2) from cars and plants could be regulated differently.

In a Senate hearing today, Burnett further explained that under the Clear Air Act, “after a pollutant is a regulated pollutant, controls are required on a variety of sources.” During the “inter-agency process,” Burnett said, OMB officials looked for ways to define CO2 from power plants as different from CO2 from automobiles, in order to shield industrial power plants from regulation under the landmark Supreme Court decision Massachusetts v. EPA:

BURNETT: There was quite a bit of effort and interest to see whether the Supreme Court case itself and regulation of CO2 and other greenhouse gases from automobiles be restricted to just automobiles. … So there’s an interest to determine whether we could define CO2 from automobiles as somehow different than CO2 from power plants, for example –

SEN. KLOBUCHAR: Do you think that’s possible?

BURNETT: Clearly it wasn’t supportable.

Watch it:

It is common knowledge that carbon dioxide is the same chemical regardless of what source emits it. But for the White House, which unabashedly asserts its anti-environment agenda, the definition of CO2 can change to help big polluters.

“I must say that it was sometimes somewhat embarrassing,” Burnett admitted, “for me to return to EPA and ask for my colleagues to explain yet again that CO2 is a molecule and there is no scientific way of differentiating between CO2 from car and a power plant.”

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