To follow up on an item from Saturday, Tyler Drumheller, the former highest ranking CIA officer in Europe, was on 60 Minutes last night, explaining that the intelligence community gave the White House plenty of reliable intelligence about Iraq before the war, but the Bush gang blew it off because they didn’t want to hear it. Drumheller explained 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.
Josh Marshall, who spoke to Drumheller last night, raised a really important point: we’ve had a couple of commissions that were supposed to look into the manipulation of intelligence. Shouldn’t we have heard about all this before? Weren’t Drumheller’s insights pretty important? Apparently not.
Did you read in any of those reports — even in a way that would protect sources and methods — that the CIA had turned a key member of the Iraqi regime, that that guy had said there weren’t any active weapons programs, and that the White House lost interest in what he was saying as soon as they realized it didn’t help the case for war? What about what he said about the Niger story?
Did the Robb-Silbermann Commission not hear about what Drumheller had to say? What about the Roberts Committee?
I asked Drumheller just those questions when I spoke to him early this evening. He was quite clear. He was interviewed by the Robb-Silbermann Commission. Three times apparently. Did he tell them everything he revealed on tonight’s 60 Minutes segment. Absolutely.
Drumheller was also interviewed twice by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Roberts Committee) but apparently only after they released their summer 2004 report.
As recently as last week, the White House was touting the results of the Robb-Silberman Commission, which Scott McClellan described as “an independent bipartisan commission,” and which reportedly concluded that the intelligence the president received about Iraq was wrong. It’s a sentiment frequently expressed by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.). Bush is blameless because the intelligence community dropped the ball.
But when Robb-Silberman and Roberts learned what Drumheller and others saw first-hand, and it contradicted the White House line, they ignored it. It’s why Democrats wanted an independent analysis from the start — Bush hand-picked the members of the Robb-Silberman Commission, and Pat Roberts is a partisan hack.
As Josh put it, “none of this stuff has yet been investigated by anyone whose principal goal is not covering for the White House.”