At this point, I’m afraid that veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller’s revelations about pre-war intelligence just aren’t surprising anymore. That said, I’d argue that his perspective never really generated the attention it deserved the first it came to the public’s attention. Drumheller should be a household name — it’s his perspective that utterly and completely undermines the Bush gang’s defense for why they got everything pre-war Iraq intelligence wrong.
I mention this, of course, because ABC News has tracked down “Curveball,” the Iraqi defector who told U.S. officials bogus stories about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent arsenal, including WMD, “mobile biological weapons labs,” aluminum tubes, etc. Curveball’s claims were the centerpiece of Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations, the crux of which has since been exposed as false. In this new ABC report, the network turns its attention back to Drumheller.
“People died because of this,” said Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of European operations at the CIA, who has written about it in a new book, “On the Brink.” “All off this one little guy who all he wanted to do was stay in Germany.” Drumheller says he personally redacted all references to Curveball material in an advance draft of the Powell speech.
“We said, ‘This is from Curveball. Don’t use this,'” Drumheller says…. Drumheller also says he met personally with the then-deputy director of the CIA, John McLaughlin, to raise questions about the reliability of Curveball, well before the Powell speech.
“And John said, ‘Oh my, I hope not. You know this is all we have,’ and I said, ‘This can’t be all we have.’ I said, ‘There must be another, there must be something else.’ And he said, ‘No, this is really the only tangible thing we have.'”
Admittedly, this isn’t entirely new, but once in a while, I’ll still hear someone claim that there were “intelligence failures,” which led the White House to get the entire basis for the war wrong. What this explanation neglects to mention is that these “failures” were practically intentional. Officials had a source, they were told the source was unreliable, but they believed what they wanted to believe.
As Kevin Drum summarized, “They knew Saddam didn’t have a nuclear program. They knew he didn’t have mobile bio labs. They knew he didn’t have drones. They knew.”
History will not be kind.