From CBS News
Dated Friday April 21A Spy Speaks Out
A CIA official who had a top role during the run-up to the Iraqi war charges the White House with ignoring intelligence that said there were no weapons of mass destruction or an active nuclear program in Iraq.
The former highest ranking CIA officer in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, also says that while the intelligence community did give the White House some bad intelligence, it also gave the White House good intelligence — which the administration chose to ignore . . . .
"(Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, with whom the CIA had made a deal) told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs," says Drumheller. "The (White House) group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested. And we said 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.' "
They didn't want any additional data from Sabri because, says Drumheller: "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy."
* * *
In debates I've had over at the website of
The Nation with die hard Bush supporters about the
Downing Street memo, I have consistently asserted that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" means that facts were fabricated while Bush's defenders have claimed that it means that the facts were genuine or believed to be genuine, even if erroneous, and simply being added to the reasons for the war.
The argument presented by the Bush defenders has always been precarious. The Downing Street Memo points out that the case against Saddam was "weak" and that the policymakers in Washington were aware of it.
A more recently revealed memo from the British government shows that Bush himself was aware of the tenuous nature of the case for war against Iraq based on claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Bush was looking for an excuse for war and came up with the bizarre idea of provoking an Iraqi attack on US plane flying UN identification, an idea of which it can truly be said could only have been hatched by an idiot.
Throughout the run up to the war, spokespeople for the Bush regime behaved like liars. We know that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were making frequent trips to Langley and that CIA analysts complained of feeling
pressured to write reports conforming to what the policymakers wanted to hear. We know that Douglas Feith headed the
Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, where defense intelligence reports were cherry picked and edited to make the case for war sound stronger than the known facts warranted. We know that the
National Intelligence Estimate that supported the case for war was based on this cherry picked and extorted intelligence. We know that sixteen words about Saddam's alleged efforts to purchase yellow cake in Africa found their way into the 2003 State of the Union address although former Ambassador
Joseph Wilson had reported to the CIA as early as February 2002 that there was never any such deal. People who have any real confidence in their case don't cherry pick facts or tell those gathering facts for them what they want or don't want to hear. That is the behavior of liars.
They have continued to behave like liars. When Ambassador Wilson came forward with his story, he was personally attacked with a
barrage of lies and half-truths and his wife's career at the CIA crippled by unmasking her as an employee of the CIA. If Wilson was wrong, the White needed only to say he was wrong and present the facts that proved him wrong. That is the one thing those in the White House Ministry of Truth or their surrogates at the Republican National Committee have not done.
Intelligence on matters of national security should be treated like scientific facts. The facts are there, they should all be reported and conclusions drawn from them. If the facts had supported the hypothesis that Saddam had a large biochemical arsenal, that he had an active nuclear weapons program or that he was giving active aid and support to international terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, then an invasion of Iraq for the purpose of ousting the Baathist regime could have been justified. However, the facts were inconclusive. The best thing to do was to try to gather more facts, which the United Nations did by sending weapons inspectors back to Iraq to see if anything could be found. The inspectors found nothing, but the policymakers in the Bush regime asserted, without presenting anything to support the assertion, that Saddam had just become very good at hiding his arsenal. They would never admit to the more obvious explanation that the inspectors found nothing because there was nothing to find. The most obvious explanation of that behavior, like the rest of their behavior, is that they had decided to go to war independent of the facts and were asserting not facts, but empty talking points. The facts be damned. They would not be denied their war.
The policymakers of the Bush regime have no more respect for national security intelligence than they have for scientific facts. It is just something with which to play politics. Whether it is climate change or war, it is a very dangerous game of charades that they play.
Mr. Drumheller's account is further confirmation of what is already known. He was told point blank that the intelligence didn't matter. The war was the thing. The reasons could be whatever the policymakers wanted.
If there is something new in this, it is that Mr. Drumheller may be the first member of the intelligence community to come forward with a first hand story of how his work was made irrelevant by policymakers bent on war. On the other hand, his story only differs from that of Ambassador Wilson's only in the breadth of the facts presented to the policymakers. Wilson's revelations by themselves could not have undermined the regime's case for war. He merely showed that, in at least one instance, facts that weren't facts were used in public statements supporting the case for war. Moreover, it was only one small facet in the case for war. Wilson admitted in his article in
The Times that he at first assumed that Mr. Bush talking about something else of which he knew nothing; it was only later that he found out that it was not. If it had been the only thing the case for war the policymakers got wrong, it would have been written off as human error and no one would have cared. Unfortunately for the Bush regime, they had everything wrong. There were no weapons; there was no nuclear program; and there were no working ties to international terrorists. Iraq was not a threat in any way, shape or form.
However, Mr. Drumheller's revelations show that the policymakers didn't even want to hear anything about Saddam's weapons unless it made a case for war. They knew very well that there was as much or more evidence refuting their case as confirming it. They knew very well that they had no solid case. They went into Iraq perhaps hoping they would find something UN weapons inspectors did not that would justify their policy after the fact. They only admit now that they were wrong and attempt to make the CIA the fall guy for their lies.
The facts the policymakers had were at best inconclusive and they knew that they were inconclusive. They lied to Congress, the United Nations and directly to American people and the people of the world when stating with such confidence and certainty as they did that they had solid, inconvertible proof that Saddam was a threat to American security. When General Powell went to the Security Council and spoke of how much of what chemical agents Saddam had stored, he was lying. When Mr. Rumsfeld spoke of weapons in the neighborhoods of Baghdad and Tikrit, he was lying. When Dr. Rice spoke of spoke in poetic images of smoking guns and mushroom clouds, she was lying. When Mr. Cheney spoke of a reconstituted nuclear program, he was lying. When Mr. Bush spoke of attempts by Saddam to buy yellow cake in Africa, he was lying.
Mr. Drumheller was told that facts were irrelevant. It is no longer a tenable position to argue that Bush and his policymakers simply made bad decisions based on bad intelligence. They made bad decisions because they may as well have not even looked at the intelligence. The White House spin is just more lying.
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