Posted on 04/29/2006 1:02:21 PM PDT by visitor
Robert Scheer: Top Spy’s Story on Prewar Intel Is Finally Told
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060425_prewar_intel_iraq_iran/
Posted on Apr. 25, 2006
By Robert Scheer
“The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy.” —Tyler Drumheller, formerly CIA’s top spy in Europe
Confession time: In fall 2004, during a crucial presidential election campaign, I made the mistake of playing by corporate media rules that amount to self-censorship.
Specifically, I joined other journalists in denying the public the right to learn of a definitive investigative report by CBS’ “60 Minutes” on President Bush’s disregard for the truth concerning the weapons-of-mass-destruction threat allegedly posed to the United States by Iraq. Having received an advance copy of the devastating segment, I honored CBS’ proprietary request not to write about the news it carried until after it aired.
Only, it never aired. CBS got cold feet, probably because of Dan Rather’s troubles over an unrelated story critical of the president. The suppressed story was solidly reported and, by exposing the Bush administration’s utter disregard for the truth concerning Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, should have been made available to the public before the November election. Now, no one seems to care.
The segment finally aired this past Sunday, in a more robust form. Unfortunately, the response has been tepid; it seems the media, at least, have become jaded with all the endless examples of the president’s perfidy. But the CBS story remains very important as further evidence of the depths of the Bush administration’s deception.
Perhaps most damning is an interview, added for the broadcast version, with Tyler Drumheller, a CIA veteran of 26 years’ service who was the agency’s top spy in Europe until his retirement a year ago. According to him, before the war Hussein’s foreign minister had been “turned” and was talking secretly to U.S. intelligence. At first excited by this rare inside look at Hussein’s regime, the top dogs at the White House dropped the issue like a hot rock as soon as his information contradicted their overheated rationale for “preemptive” war. “The policy was set,” Drumheller told CBS correspondent Ed Bradley. “The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”
That’s how more than three years later, after at least two major governmental investigations into prewar intelligence on Iraq and countless journalistic post-mortems, we are only just now finding out that a highly placed double agent in Iraq was poking a huge hole in the Hussein-as-WMD-bogeyman story.
“They were enthusiastic” at first, said Drumheller, “that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis.” CIA Director George Tenet reported the news that Hussein’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, was working covertly for the United States to a White House meeting attended by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Their initial enthusiasm, Drumheller says, quickly turned to cold indifference when Sabri told them the opposite of what they wanted to hear.
“He told us that they had no active weapons-of-mass-destruction program,” said the ex-CIA official. “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.’ ”
The White House refused to comment for the “60 Minutes” report, but CBS noted that Rice has said Sabri was just one source, and therefore not reliable. It was ironic, considering how heavily the Bush administration relied on the now infamous Iraqi defector “Curveball,” whose statements so informed the main administration allegations concerning Iraq’s biochemical weapons.
Drumheller was in contact with the German intelligence agency CIS, which had detained the man with the apt code name, and says he himself informed the top CIA officials that Curveball was an outright fraud.
“They certainly took information that came from single sources on the yellowcake story and on several other stories with no corroboration at all,” Drumheller said.
No wonder this man, who risked his life gathering intelligence for our country, has become a critic of the Bush administration. He is clearly unwilling to allow what the president has described as a permanent war to destroy our democracy. True patriotism is not the blind acceptance of presidential deceit.
Imperial ambition turns truth-tellers into enemies, by default, because their goal is not the exaltation of the leader’s power. No wonder so many national security professionals, be they top generals or intelligence officials, have gone public recently to denounce how the Iraq war has been sold and fought: The Bush administration’s willful ignorance and buck-passing mock their dedicated service to the nation.
“It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it’s an intelligence failure,” Drumheller said. “This was a policy failure.”
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved. Web site design & development by Hop Studios
the truth is, this story's been out for over a year. Do a search on here for CBS. The night they ran the show, freepers were all over it.
The drive-by media is rehashing old news to make it look new; this stuff is just about worn-out!
Progressive Journal of News and Opinion is a real collection of puke.
I stopped reading. Why waste time on lies, distortion and propaganda?
Well, you'd think that DrumHeller would have spoken to one of the investigations which found the intelligence wasn't manipulated, and was bad.
Why his first discussion of the matter would come in a CBS sixty-minutes interview also seems suspect for a "truth-teller".
On the other hand, the facts might be accurate. I imagine that if the foreign minister of Iraq professed to be a "double agent" and told us that Iraq didn't have any WMD, we'd probably figure he wasn't really on our side, unless he gave us real actionable intelligence.
So let's go full-conspiracy mode here. Let's say Bush wanted to ignore the guy, but figured he'd take ONE chance on his accuracy. So he asks the guy, "Where will Saddam be on a day in Mid-march?
In other words, maybe we used the guy for that "surgical strike" the day before the invasion. And when it was clear we didn't get Saddam, we figured the guy was blowing smoke and so we invaded.
See, nice thing about spinning tales is that they are easy to do.
Ah I see. NOT even our fraud plaged "News Media" would touch this losers story. Considering the dozens of fraudlent stories reported by the Junk Media, his must be pretty wack out there nuts for them to shoot it down. Of course the fact that 3 seperate Congressional investigations have ALL found this to be without ANY basis in truth should not stop the Tin Foil Hate crowd at Moveon.org from pushing this garbage. Just another set of lies told by another Political Bigot who cannot stand his boy lost in 2000 and 2004.
Any truth here is that there is a run up to the 06 election cycle and this is a revisionist article. The democrats are fighting the last war as usual and this is part of their looking down the barrel of the gun, IMHO.
The fact is this is an ELECTION Year again.
And Bush allowed Wilson/Plame to go unpunished for their LIES. And he allowed Kerry to get away with not signing FORM 180, which Kerry promised to do and still has not done!
And, Bush allowed Richard Clarke to get away with his LIES, so the the BUSH LIED crowd got the communist base going.
And that is what this is about. And until Bush has McCarthly arrested and Dana Paris and the lot of them, this will continue.
Notice how the enemy within operates?
They coordinate their lying attack stories beforehand with the other hate-filled left-wing anti-American dregs of the MSM in order to maximize the timing of the attack.
LMBO!!!!
Yeah, there's an honest outfit for "investigative reporting"!
HAHAHAHAhahahahaaaaa....! (This is too much!)
One suspects our enemies find it laughably easy to feed disinformation to the CIA.
If I told a CIA analyst that the word "gullible" does not appear in Webster's Dictionary, would he run to his dictionary to check?
I'm surwe thankful I'm not paying for this pig's meals....or am I?
Robert Scheer............Wouldn't bother to read...
Notice how the enemy within operates?
There is no doubt in my mind that this story was also coordinated with Democrat Party operatives.
Remember how Mary Mapes and CBS coordinated the "National Guard" story ("Rathergate") with the Democrats? And how ABC coordinated the "missing ammo" story with the Democrats soon after that, right before the election?
It's the modus operandi of the dying dinosaur, old liberal news media.
The simple reality, now 3 years old is:
What's the number of US troops killed by the Iraq military in 2004, 2005 and 2006 combined?
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