Mercury Rising

Josh Marshall (via Atrios) was on the phone with Tyler Drumheller yesterday evening. Drumheller is the former CIA officer who was on 60 Minutes last night, explaining that the CIA knew, and kept telling the Bush Administration, that Saddam didn't have squat as far as WMD went. They knew that the Niger yellowcake story was bogus, and told Bush's people -- who then went on as if they hadn't been told. Furthermore, Drumheller brings up the case of Naji Sabri, Iraq's Foreign Minister under Saddam, who the CIA had managed to convert into an operative just before the US invaded in 2003. The Bush Administration was very interested in what such a high-value prize had to say -- that is, until he confirmed what the CIA, UNSCOM, and every other group that actually knew what it was doing had already stated: Saddam had used up all the WMD that Reagan and Rumsfeld and Cheney had given him in the 1980s, and never replaced it. As Marshall says:

Drumheller's account is pretty probative evidence on the question of whether the White House politicized and cherry-picked the Iraq intelligence. So why didn't we hear about any of this in the reports of those Iraq intel commissions that have given the White House a clean bill of health on distorting the intel and misleading the country about what we knew about Iraq's alleged WMD programs? Think about it. It's devastating evidence against their credibility on a slew of levels. Did you read in any of those reports -- even in a way that would protect sources and methods -- that the CIA had turned a key member of the Iraqi regime, that that guy had said there weren't any active weapons programs, and that the White House lost interest in what he was saying as soon as they realized it didn't help the case for war? What about what he said about the Niger story? Did the Robb-Silbermann Commission not hear about what Drumheller had to say? What about the Roberts Committee? I asked Drumheller just those questions when I spoke to him early this evening. He was quite clear. He was interviewed by the Robb-Silbermann Commission. Three times apparently. Did he tell them everything he revealed on tonight's 60 Minutes segment. Absolutely. Drumheller was also interviewed twice by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Roberts Committee) but apparently only after they released their summer 2004 report. Now, quite a few of us have been arguing for almost two years now that those reports were fundamentally dishonest in the story they told about why we were so badly misled in the lead up to war. The fact that none of Drumheller's story managed to find its way into those reports, I think, speaks volumes about the agenda that the writers of those reports were pursuing. "I was stunned," Drumheller told me, when so little of the stuff he had told the commission's and the committee's investigators ended up in their reports. His colleagues, he said, were equally "in shock" that so little of what they related ended up in the reports either. What Drumheller has to say adds quite a lot to our knowledge of what happened in the lead up to war. But what it shows even more clearly is that none of this stuff has yet been investigated by anyone whose principal goal is not covering for the White House.

# posted by Phoenix Woman @ 4/24/2006 05:42:00 AM