Posted by The Crux |
Most Americans seem to think President Bush was wrong when claiming as a reason to invade Iraq that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Now, according to two newly outspoken former CIA officers, President Bush had been told about Iraq's lack of WMDs but chose to ignore the intelligence.
Reportedly, the intelligence was hidden from Congress (and others) before the invasion -- intelligence that might have compelled officials to make different choices. Sydney Blumenthal reported (in part):
"On April 23, 2006, CBS's '60 Minutes' interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. 'We continued to validate him the whole way through,' said 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.'
"Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller's account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri's intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell...."
One of the ex-officers summed it up this way: "Bush didn't give a fuck
about the intelligence. He had his mind made up."
The rest of the article is worth reading (see Salon).
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