In a way, veteran CIA officer [tag]Tyler Drumheller[/tag]’s revelations about pre-[tag]war[/tag] [tag]intelligence[/tag] aren’t news anymore, but at the same time, they never really generated the attention they deserved when the first came to the public’s attention. In a very real way, [tag]Drumheller[/tag] should be a household name — it’s his perspective that utterly and completely undermines the [tag]Bush[/tag] gang’s defense for why they got everything wrong.
Just as a refresher, Drumheller, the former highest ranking [tag]CIA[/tag] officer in Europe, was on 60 Minutes in April, explaining that the intelligence community gave the White House plenty of reliable [tag]intelligence[/tag] about Iraq before the war, but the Bush gang blew it off because they didn’t want to hear it. Drumheller made clear that the White House was told directly that there were no WMDs, but Bush had already decided to go to war and needed information “to fit into the policy.” In case anyone needed more evidence about cherry-picked intelligence, here it is.
Yesterday, the WaPo followed up with a front-page article that adds some details to the now-infamous “Curveball,” the obvious liar the White House chose to believe.
In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration’s case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell’s speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.
Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.
A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: “We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails.”
The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise. “We thought we had taken care of the problem,” said the man who was the CIA’s European operations chief before retiring last year, “but I turn on the television and there it was, again.”
Frankly, this isn’t terribly new, except for the fact that Drumheller was speaking on-the-record to the Post. But the story does add some context and details that should settle certain lingering questions once and for all.
To this day, the White House line is that Congress saw the same intelligence the president did, and that there was a systemic breakdown that led to unreliable information. It’s not Bush’s fault, the argument goes, that he relied on intelligence that turned out to be flawed.
But for the umpteenth time, Drumheller makes clear that this argument is a fraud. Bush and other top administration officials were warned, repeatedly, to reject nonsensical information from highly unreliable sources, but the White House simply didn’t care. Accurate warnings were ignored, obvious lies were embraced. It’s the difference between a mistake and a lie — the Bush gang’s falsehoods were deliberate.
It’s also why it’s frustrating to hear congressional Republicans, particularly hacks like Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), dismiss concerns like these as “old news” or incidents “from the past.” I agree that policy makers should emphasize looking ahead, but Drumheller’s insights are not only devastating for the Bush White House, they’re also compelling evidence of an intentional fraud perpetrated by the administration to lie their way into a war. To say that no longer matters is to argue that accountability and responsibility have no place in American government.