60 Minutes: Bush, Cheney, Rice Told Iraq Had No WMD Program Before War

From Think Progress, more evidence that the administration dismissed any evidence suggesting there were no WMDs in Iraq prior to the war, even very good evidence [Update: Another General wants Rummy to go ... developing]:

Think Progress: 60 Minutes: CIA Official Reveals Bush, Cheney Rice Were Personally Told Iraq Had No WMD in Fall 2002: Tonight on 60 Minutes, CIA analyst Tyler Drumheller revealed that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program. Watch it:

Transcript:

BRADLEY: [In October 2002,] the CIA had made a major intelligence breakthrough on Iraq’s nuclear program. Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, had made a deal to reveal Iraq’s military secrets to the CIA. Tyler Drumheller was in charge of the operation.

DRUMHELLER: This was a very high inner circle of Saddam Hussein, someone who would know what he was talking about.

BRADLEY: You knew you could trust this guy?

DRUMHELLER: We continued to validate him the whole way through.

BRADLEY: According to Drumheller, CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high level meeting at the White House.

DRUMHELLER: The President, the Vice President, Dr. Rice…

BRADLEY: And at that meeting…?

DRUMHELLER: They were enthusiastic because they said they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis.

BRADLEY: And what did this high level source tell you?

DRUMHELLER: He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program.

BRADLEY: So, in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam’s inner circle that he didn’t have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?

DRUMHELLER: Yes.

BRADLEY: There’s no doubt in your mind about that?

DRUMHELLER: No doubt in my mind at all.

BRADLEY: It directly contradicts, though, what the President and his staff were telling us.

DRUMHELLER: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.

BRADLEY: Drumheller expected the White House to ask for more information from the Iraqi foreign minister. He was taken aback by what happened.

DRUMHELLER: The group that was dealing with preparations for the Iraq war came back and said they’re 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.”

BRADLEY: And if I understand you correctly, when the White House learned that you had this source from the inner circle of Saddam Hussein, they were thrilled with that.

DRUMHELLER: The first we heard, they were. Yes.

BRADLEY: But when they learned what it was that he had to say, that Saddam did not have the capability to wage nuclear war, weapons of mass destruction…?

DRUMHELLER: They stopped being interested in the intelligence.

BRADLEY: The White House declined to respond to Drumheller’s account of Naji Sabri’s role, but Secretary of State Rice has said that Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister-turned-U.S. spy, was just one source, and therefore his information wasn’t reliable.

DRUMHELLER: They certainly took information that came from single sources on uranium, on the yellowcake story and on several other stories that had no corroboration at all, and so you can’t say you only listen to one source, because on many issues they only listened to one source.

BRADLEY: So you’re saying that if there was a single source and that information from that source backed up the case they were trying to build, then that single source was okay, but if it didn’t, then the single source was not okay because he couldn’t be corroborated.

DRUMHELLER: Unfortunately, that’s what it looks like.

UPDATE: More at CBS News.

Comments

[Richard]

So, with seven months till midterm elections, but a growing realization and internal testimony that W. slanted the evidence to back the "invade Iraq" policy, and on the brink of similarly generating evidence to back some sort of intervention in Iran, do the Republicans

a) Call for hearings and investigations

b) Deny the claims, back the administration, hope for the best

c) Ask for Rumsfeld's resignation

d) All of the above

e) None of the above

[No Name]

You forgot f) attack Iran

[donna]

g.) Swiftboat Drumheller...

[ilsm]

The paradigms used are misunderstood.

First paradigm, the negative must be absolutely proven. In other words, I believe there are WMD's I must have 100% proof they do not exist. It is too easy to miss them.

Did they look in every van and motor home in Iraq?

Never mind that it is almost impossible to prove a negative.

Second paradigm: Diplomacy is for chickens, the chicken hawks would rather sned the expensive toys in and show them off.

Third it is unpatriotic to allow Saddam to remain in power.

Fourth, do not look atthe real agenda. War is good for suppressing popular liberties.

[beeb]

Let it not be forgotten that we are talking about the people who've essentially tried to reinvent reality in every area that they've touched from scientific research, climatology, economics, fiscal finance, the Geneva convention, lobbying, the judiciary, political ethics, and diplomacy, to mention but a few. That the crucial intelligence was similarly twisted or ignored comes as no surprise to critical thinkers, but it should be used as the basis to remove these idiots from office. Such breach of trust for the purpose of "selling" a dubious war is a far far more serious transgression than the "Dirty Tricks" campaign that ultiamtely led to Nixon's resignation.

It's a shame there is no equivalent in American politics of a "vote of no confidence", rather than having to suffer through impeachment hearings.

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/opinion/24herbert.html

April 24, 2006

35 Years Later
By BOB HERBERT

Presidents and politicians may worry about losing face, or losing votes, or losing their legacy; it is time to think about young Americans and innocent civilians who are losing their lives.

— John Kerry on Iraq

Boston

Saturday was the 35th anniversary of John Kerry's appearance as a young Vietnam veteran before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. During his testimony, Mr. Kerry called for an end to the war in Vietnam and famously inquired: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

He marked the occasion Saturday with an important and moving speech before an audience crammed into historic Faneuil Hall. The speech took on even more poignancy as it became known over the weekend that at least eight more American G.I.'s had been killed in Iraq.

I've felt all along that Democratic politicians, including Senator Kerry, have hurt themselves with their muddled messages on Iraq. Most elected Democrats have been petrified almost to the point of paralysis by their fear of being seen as soft on national security. So they've acquiesced to one degree or another in a war that in their heads and in their hearts they knew was wrong.

In his speech on Saturday, Senator Kerry, who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, gave the impression of a man who had found a voice he'd been seeking through trial and error for a long time, perhaps since that springtime day in Richard Nixon's Washington in 1971.

"I believed then," he said, "just as I believe now, that the best way to support the troops is to oppose a course that squanders their lives, dishonors their sacrifice and disserves our people and our principles."

He repeated his call for a complete withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq by the end of this year, and offered an uncompromising defense of the right of all Americans — including retired generals — to engage in "untrammeled debate and open dissent" on the war.

"I come here today," he said, "to affirm that it is both a right and an obligation for Americans to disagree with a president who is wrong, a policy that is wrong and a war in Iraq that weakens the nation."

He described the war as "rooted in deceit and justified by continuing deception." ...

[dilbert dogbert]

Anne,
You post frequently and have commented on how one would protect one's assets from the on coming economic meltdown. In somewhat of that vein, I have wondered if you have thought about what you would do if the worst would happen and bush would go nuclear on Iran. It struck me that I had not really thought out what my reaction would be. Now that the possibility of that happening seems to have died down, maybe it is time to think hard about what one would do to protect one's self, family and assets if worst comes to worst. It is better to have a plan rationally thought out than to react irrationally and in panic.

[calmo]

CBS airs this --not some foreign network. Is the media turning on their boy?

[Michael Cain]

I recently read both The Pinochet File and The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History based on the large collection of documents obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Three years seems to be about the length of time that an administration can "keep the lid on" a project that implements policy based on one set of goals and runs a public relations campaign to convince the public about an entirely different set of goals. Based on those previous episodes, we have just about reached the point in time that one might expect the wheels to come off of such an undertaking in the case of Iraq.

[groucho]

You can only blame the Clintons, for the mess that we are currently witnessing. Bill's shenanigans in the WH(and Hillary's acquiescense) was the opening the neo-cons needed to slip a "compassionate conservative" into the WH. It is truly an amazing story, folks. One we will be living with for the rest of our lives.

[Devang]

It's a shame there is no equivalent in American politics of a "vote of no confidence", rather than having to suffer through impeachment hearings.

So true. This was mentioned in the Harper's magazine's forum on impeachment. Which country was it where a vote of no-confidence was passed when russia threatened to cut off natural gas? Granted, we'd lose some political stability,

You can only blame the Clintons, for the mess that we are currently witnessing. Bill's shenanigans in the WH(and Hillary's acquiescense) was the opening the neo-cons needed to slip a "compassionate conservative" into the WH. It is truly an amazing story, folks. One we will be living with for the rest of our lives.

I'm an advocate of the butterfly effect, and you just strengthened that particular conviction of mine.

[Bruce Wilder]

Atrios summarized nicely: "The real point isn't the actual revelation, it's that he's revealed it before to people tasked with investigating this stuff, who promptly filed it in the circular filing cabinet."

Josh Marshall summarizes at:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/008284.php

Basically, both the Robb-Silbermann commission and the Senate Select Committee chose to cover this up, in service to the Bush Administration.

The mendacity and incompetence of Bush is hardly news, but the corruption and incompetence and apathy, outside the Bush Administration, is also revealed here, and its scope if truly frightening.

[Robert]

It's a shame there is no equivalent in American politics of a "vote of no confidence", rather than having to suffer through impeachment hearings.

It is a rather significant flaw in the American democracy. It provides the benefit of a certain stability (in comparison to Italy, for example), but what are the people to do when the "the people" make a grave error of judgement, elect (or re-elect, as the case may be) a ninny, coming to the realization only after the fact??
Simple impeachment would leave us an even worse problem, unless the popular revolt was so strong that "the people" could somehow manage to get a "two-for-one"impeachment (like Skilling & Lay).

I would personally like to see a 2nd "Continental Congress" where "the people" can voice and address many such short-comings of our representative democracy (and incorporate innovations from elsewhere in the world) including things like proportional representation, mandatory voting, preferential voting; campaign finance reform, jurisdictional consolidation and rationalization; unifying electoral technology; etc.

Finally, increasingly bitter and extreme left/right polarization does not seem to be limited to the US (Italy Germany latest victims). Does anyone have any ideas on why this phenomena is seemingly accelerating?

[Devang]

Finally, increasingly bitter and extreme left/right polarization does not seem to be limited to the US (Italy Germany latest victims). Does anyone have any ideas on why this phenomena is seemingly accelerating?

Jimmy Carter's recent book made a lot out the rise of fundamentalism, religious and otherwise.

The media has definately played a part in this (amplifying the polarization, if not starting it), at least in the US, which most people would agree. Italy's media is even worse, Berlusconi has a monopoly there. What're the media ownership rules like in Germany?