‘This isn’t about intel anymore. This is about regime change.’

April 22, 2006

Stop me if you heard this one … top intelligence officials told the White House before the war that [tag]Iraq[/tag] had no [tag]WMD[/tag], but [tag]Bush[/tag] officials ignored the warnings, cherry picked the information it wanted to believe, and blew off anyone who disagreed. It’s a story we’ve heard so many times, it does, after a while, start to sound like a broken record.

The latest is a CBS report on a top former CIA official who wants the country to know the truth.

A CIA official who had a top role during the run-up to the Iraqi war charges the [tag]White House [/tag]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, [tag]Tyler Drumheller[/tag], 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. […]

[tag]Drumheller[/tag], who retired last year, says the White House ignored crucial information from a high and credible source. The source was Iraq’s foreign minister, [tag]Naji Sabri[/tag], with whom U.S. spies had made a deal. When CIA Director George Tenet delivered this news to the president, the vice president and other high ranking officials, they were excited — but not for long.

“[The source] 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.’ “

Drumheller saw that the White House had already decided to go to war and needed information “to fit into the policy.”

Condoleezza Rice has said that single-sourced insights, such as Sabri’s, were less reliable, but Drumheller noted, of course, that the administration embraced single sources all the time, as long as the sources were telling officials want the White House wanted to hear. “They certainly took information that came from single sources on the yellowcake story and on several other stories with no corroboration at all,” he says.

Drumheller will tell his story tomorrow on 60 Minutes. And Drumheller will be labeled a “disgruntled former employee” in 3…2…1…

I used to view Bush’s impeachment as a wildly impractical waste of time. Now? !t seems like the only responsible thing to do.

  • I dunno . . . I’ve been reading on other websites (conservative ones) recent translations of captured Iraqi government documents that confirm that Saddam was actively pursuing a WMD program and was all set to implement them as soon as sanctions were lifted.

  • Fallenwoman,

    These conservatives know Arabic? How is it that they aren’t offering their badly needed services to the U.S. military? I can’t believe they wouldn’t jump at the chance to do their patriotic duty and fight the “Islamofacists” face to face.

  • Oh, I’m sure if you dig through the mountains of documents, you’ll find the words “build”, “weapons”, “of”,”mass”, “destruction”, “program”. Not as one sentence, but the words at least.

    You know what they say about putting a thousand chimps with typewriters together in one room, and eventually you get Shakespeare

  • ALSO: Saddam often used the illusion of military strength to maintain control in Iraq and intimidate his domestic enemies as well as his neighbors (Iran, Syria, etc.). Like any bully, Saddam used bluff and bluster to maintain his power. The point being that internal Iraqi documents could be as phony as the Niger yellowcake piffle was.

  • I’m sure that Saddam did want “weapons of mass destruction”. I mean, what dictator wouldn’t? But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Sanctions were clearly doing a good job of keeping these kinds of weapons out of his hands, but even if he had been able to get a hold of some form of WMD, he still would have had trouble delivering it to a target in the US.

    The term “WMD” is more crafty marketing from Bush Inc. It encompasses everything from low tech ricin to high tech nukes and blurs them all together quite neatly. “Implementing” ricin would have been pretty easy to do, probably even with ongoing sanctions, but “implementing” a nuke would have taken decades at best. Delivering most of those WMD takes something more sophisticated than a Ryder truck (see McVeigh, Timothy) and made it even more unlikely that a free Saddam would have done anything more serious than lob nasty comments at the U.S.

  • Condoleezza Rice has said that single-sourced insights, such as Sabri’s, were less reliable,…

    Aren’t we kind of up to our necks in it partly because ShrubCo made a big deal out of the never credible tales of a single source/joker named Curveball?

  • i hope i live long enough to she the entire “9-11” story revealed.

  • It’s time to “flip the finger of guilt” at the lying, thieving, murdering tyrants of this administration, and say: “THIS is about regime change!” And, the Gods be willing, that is exactly what will happen—beginning in November of this very year….

  • Fallenwoman,
    This is the second time I’ve asked this, but would you PLEASE verify your factual claims with something like a source? It is one thing to merely express an opinion, it is one thing to make a supported argument, but it is something else entirely to report a factual claim without proofs. As others have noted here, Republican sites are prima facie suspect. It doesn’t make their claims untrue, but it does mean that someone reporting evidence from their sites is obliged to support the arguments with something beside assertion.

  • There was a discussion over at DailyKos recently about the documents that FallenWoman is referring to. The diarist who wrote about the alleged documents had a pretty convincing argument that they were BS and that this was a low-level method of pushing propoganda into the subconscious of the public.

    If FallenWoman will source her stuff it would give me a starting point to search for the diary over at Kos. If memory serves me correctly this story may have come from RedState, but I didn’t make the allegation so I won’t take responsibility to back up the claim.

    FWIW — If there was any validity to these documents then it seems as though it would get major play in the media. Especially if it was being pushed by a White House that is in dire straits with the public and desperate to save its ass.

  • Going back through the comments it looks like rege has a better reference than I could have come up with. I retract the offer to search for the counter-argument.

  • Unfortunately, Falllenwoman’s post side tracked this discussion away from BushCo’s true motivation for the Iraq invasion. I’ve been doing a little research on the question of regime change vs. WMD as the reason for the Iraq war.

    One interesting piece which I ran across was Congressional Research Office paper from April of 2003 shortly after the first phase of the Iraq invasion came to an end. It notes that the Bush policy toward Iraq prior to the war had three distinct periods. The first period ran from the inauguration up to 9/11. It was essentially a continuation of Clinton policies under the guidance of Powell. The next period began with 9/11 and came to an end in the late summer of 2002. During this period Cheney was running the show and regime change in Iraq became the policy. The final pre-war period began was the WMD justification period.

    Sy Hersh wrote an article in April of 2002 in which BushCo’s desire for regime change is discussed in detail. Here is what Hersh had to say about BushCo’s manipulation of the weapons inspection issue,

    The American plan, officials agreed, is to make so many demands—complete access to palaces, for example—that it will be almost impossible for Saddam to agree.

    Here what Bush said during his October 2002 Cincinnatti speech,

    Some believe we can address this danger by simply resuming the old approach to inspections, and applying diplomatic and economic pressure. Yet this is precisely what the world has tried to do since 1991. The U.N. inspections program was met with systematic deception. The Iraqi regime bugged hotel rooms and offices of inspectors to find where they were going next; they forged documents, destroyed evidence, and developed mobile weapons facilities to keep a step ahead of inspectors. Eight so-called presidential palaces were declared off-limits to unfettered inspections. These sites actually encompass twelve square miles, with hundreds of structures, both above and below the ground, where sensitive materials could be hidden.

    There should have been little doubt before we went to war that regime change was our motive. There is no doubt now.

  • Regime change! Ha!

    Bush said it himself, in the breathy, ah-shucks Texan voice of his when his is letting the truth slip out to spite his handlers.

    The war against Saddam was because Saddam tried to kill his father in Kuwait.

    The rest is just BS to convince America to go along for the ride. Eventually, to gin up enough support, they had to say that Saddam was going to get nuclear weapons and blow up an American city (“I don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” ????).

    How many times do we have to point this out for people to get it?

  • Fallenwoman is just another example of the REAL WMD.

    Weapons of Mass Distraction… that the Bushites deploy so well in a society largely born, bred and educated (or is that brainwashed) to believe they hold a special place in Creation, let alone the world.

    Bush may be the villain of the hour, but the US has a long history of overthrowing legal governments for corporate gain. Time to consider a complete overthrow of the system that get s the US public to ignore, if not actively support, these types of misadventures.

    from http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=10139

    “Hawaii
    Cuba
    Philippines
    Puerto Rico
    Nicaragua
    Honduras
    Iran
    Guatemala
    South Vietnam
    Chile
    Grenada
    Panama
    Afghanistan
    Iraq

    What do these 14 governments have in common?

    You got it. The United States overthrew them. And in almost in every case, the overthrow can be traced to corporate interests.”

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