Bush duped on Iraq intel?

[delldude]

Garfield approved source

More than a hundred summaries of his debriefings were sent to the CIA, which then became a pillar - along with the now-disproved Iraqi quest for uranium for nuclear weapons - for the U.S. decision to bomb and then invade Iraq. The CIA-director George Tenet gave Alwan’s information to Secretary of State Colin Powell to use at the U.N. in his speech justifying military action against Iraq.

Tenet gave the information to Powell despite a letter - a copy of which 60 Minutes obtained - addressed to him by the head of German intelligence stating that Alwan appeared to be believable, but there was no evidence to verify his story.

Through a spokesman, Tenet denies ever seeing the letter. "[Tenet] needs to talk to his special assistants if he didn’t see it," says Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA senior official. "I am sure they showed it to him and I am sure ... it wasn’t what they wanted to see," he tells Simon.

Interesting behind the scenes diorama unfolds....plausible deniability for Tenet out the window?
Was Bush a pawn in an inside game with CIA from Clinton administration leftovers?

Tenet embarked on a mission to regenerate the CIA, which had fallen on hard times since the end of the Cold War. The number of agents recruited each year had fallen to an all-time low, a 25-percent decline from the Cold War peak.
On September 15, 2001, at Camp David, Tenet presented the Worldwide Attack Matrix, an outline of an anti-terrorism campaign in 80 countries. However, after the September 11 attacks, many observers criticized the Intelligence Community for numerous "intelligence failures" as one of the major reasons why the attacks were not prevented.

Was Tenet grinding his own axe for Clinton years of dwindling CIA influence and being hung out to dry over the terrorism intel failures??

Should be an interesting 60 minutes.

 

[delta777]

How you managed to bring former President Clinton's name into this story shows how delusional some of you right-wing neo-cons truly are. You try the same tactic for each of little W's follies, be it foreign affairs or domestic. Blame Clinton, that's the ticket!!! Not once in that article did i see Clintons name mentioned, yet, like the good little neo-con that you are, you managed to find a way to insert it into the conversation. Sometimes i wonder if and your fellow right-wingers don't have a man-crush on 'ol Bill. 9/11 happened on little W.'s watch, end of discussion. At what point does this become "W.'s" Presidency? I guess you're gonna say post-9/11? Take the blame just as you would take the credit.

 

[delldude]

Say what?

Clinton Responsible for Unpreparedness

The Clintons were supported vociferously by the media through the worst imaginable scandals.

During that time I was one of the lead reporters opposing the Clintons. I was mocked and vilified by my colleagues for doing so. I said throughout that period that Bill Clinton's personal corruption was wholesale and mirrored how he was corrupting America's national security.

I wrote articles and said repeatedly that America, sadly, may end up paying a heavy price for Bill Clinton and the major media's complicity.

I don't believe the worst has passed with the incidents of today.

During eight years, Clinton decimated America's military. Our forces were cut almost in half under his stewardship. Research and development on all new weapons systems were brought almost to a halt as other nations continued to build. Clinton destroyed nearly our entire arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons. Monsters like Saddam flourished as Clinton bombed aspirin factories, tent cities in Afghanistan and worthless radar stations in the Iraqi desert.

Clinton, the Ever-Clever Bastard

But Clinton, the ever-clever bastard, was more insidious. Little, systematic changes were undertaken to destroy America's intelligence agencies.

Let me explain. A regular NewsMax reader, "Roger," was a CIA spy in the Mideast.

I met him almost two years ago. Roger wanted to tell me why a gung-ho American quit the CIA in disgust. Roger said the CIA was not interested in recruiting spies.

Clinton and company knew they could not just tell the CIA to stop recruiting spies. That would look stupid and embarrassing.

So they just changed the rules of how spies are recruited, raising the bar on requirements to such a high degree that the most valuable spies could never meet CIA standards and couldn't work for us.

Previously, I wrote how Clinton effectively stopped the recruitment of Chinese nationals by demanding that only high-ranking embassy officials could be recruited – knowing this is almost impossible.

Roger told me that. Roger reminded me again of this today. He noted that Clinton policies reached their zenith under CIA Director John Deutch and his top assistant, Nora Slatkin. The pair ran Clinton's CIA in the mid-1990s and implemented a "human rights scrub" policy.

Here's how Roger described it in an e-mail Tuesday evening: "Deutch and Nora, Clinton's anti-intelligence plants, implemented a universal 'human rights scrub' of all assets, virtually shutting down operations for 6 months to a year. This was after something happened in Central America (there was an American woman involved who was the common law wife of a commie who went missing there) that got a lot of bad press for the agency.

"After that, each asset had to be certified as being 'clean for human rights violations.'

"What this did was to put off limits, in effect, terrorists, criminals, and anyone else who would have info on these kinds of people."

Roger says the CIA, even under new leadership, has never recovered from the "Human Rights Scrub" policy.

Perhaps that was the intention.

But we, the American people, Congress, and honest media need to examine all of these issues, now and quickly. If we don't, we risk even more grave dangers than those that we just lived through.

 

[NewHampshire Black Bears]

To,... who it may concern.

(Title); "HUBRIS........the inside story of SPIN, SCANDAL, and the SELLING of the IRAQ WAR" !

(Authors); Michael Isikoff and David Corn


(Note); Readers should take note that author ..Michael Isikoff ,,is a Pulitzer prize winning author from Newsweek.

Michael Isikoff was the reporter that brought to light the Monica Lewinsky Scandal, and is feverishly pursuing the "papers" from the Clinton library.

It could NEVER be REMOTELY Suggested that Michael Isikoff was in anyway, a Clinton(s) ally !!!!!!

"HUBRIS"...........is the BIBLE(so to speak) with regard to responsibility for the IRAQ War.

There is "ZERO" mention, that former CIA director George Tenant, did Anything to Shift responsibility from himself, to Bush/Cheney/Rice/Wolfowitz and (sadly) Powell !!



(Jack Webb) "Sgt. Joe Friday"..........."Just the FACTS M'aam, ......Just the FACTS"

 

[delta777]

Wow, all this from "Roger" a regular NEWSMAX reader and CIA spy in the Mideast. He's about as objective about the Clintons as Michael Savage or Rush "pill-popper" Limbaugh. And we all know Newsmax doesn't have an agenda either. As far as "decimating" the military, would this be the same military that "decimated" Iraqs Armed Forces in about 8 weeks? Surely el chimpo couldn't have rebuilt this "decimated" force in only his first 10 months in office could he? That's a hell of a turn-around. Remember, Bush himself said he wasn't in the business of "nation-building", then what the hell would call our presence over there? Guess what costs $720 million a day???

"The war is costing $720 million a day or $500,000a minute, according to the group's analysis of the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes. The estimates made by the group, which opposes the conflict, include not only the immediate costs of war but also ongoing factors such as long-term health care for veterans, interest on debt and replacement of military hardware."

The president of the war that never needed to happen, the economy that is a house of debt cards, the balloning national debt, the shame of Katrina, the cronyism, the no-bid contracts, the million dollar screws (literally), the most vacations ever, and the worst health care. Yes, please campaign with Rudy, Fred, Newt, and Tom, Dick and Mitt. Go for it or as you would say, bring it on.

Bill Clinton George W. Bush


Average annual GDP growth 3.6% 2.6%
Non-farm employment added 22.7 million jobs added 3 million jobs
(worst record of any US president in 70 years)
Unemployment 7.3% -> 4.2% 4.2% -> 4.7%
Real median household income grew by $5,825 fell by $1,273
poverty rate fell 3.5% (6.4 million fewer people) rose 1.3% (5.4 million more people) .
Federal Spending as % of GDP 22.1% (fiscal 1992) to 18.4% in 2000 back up to 20.8% (fiscal 2006)
total executive branch employment
does not include classified numbers for CIA, DIA, NSA, & other intelligence agencies; does not include outsourced jobs down by almost 450,000 (2.225 million -> 1.778 million) up by almost 100,000 (to 1.872 million).
Federal Debt deficit of $290 billion —> surplus of $236 billion (fiscal 2000) increased by almost $3 trillion
Public Debt as % of GDP -16.4% +4.4%

 

[NewHampshire Black Bears]

Dear...EL CHIMPO;

In fairness, your due an "attaboy" for your "INITIAL" action in Afganistan,against Osama Bin-Laden.

Having said that however, You have plunged this country into ENORMOUS Debt, Squandered a healthy Treasury, and have become a "SCOURGE" to virtually every LOW to(Former) MIDDLE CLASS citizen in this country, through your THEOCRATIC MISMANAGEMENT !

You have become the Equivalent of a Case of "INCURABLE...........GENITAL HERPES" !!

Though you are not an EVIL man(To be calculating EVIL, would mean that you are "INTELLIGENT"), you have Enabled your EVIL VP DICK Cheney, to wreck Havoc upon this country, and the MAJORITY of it's citizens.

In short,.....You should be ASHAMED of yourself !!!!!!!!!!!


Signed;

NewHampshire Black Bears

 

[delta777]

Iraqi weapons 'expert' unmasked as a fraud
By Sadie Gray
Published: 03 November 2007
The Iraqi defector whose claims regarding Saddam Hussein's biological warfare capabilities were central to the US government's case for the 2003 invasion, despite repeated warnings that they were dubious, has been unmasked by a television documentary.

The informer, codenamed Curveball was Rafid Ahmed Alwan who, in 1999, turned up at a refugee centre in Germany seeking political asylum. He went on to convince the Pentagon he was a brilliant chemist who had helped develop mobile biological warfare laboratories.

His role in the build-up to war was exposed in a detailed investigation by the Los Angeles Times, in which he was dismissed as an "out-and-out" fabricator who should have aroused scepticism in the CIA. The LA Times said Curveball was the brother of a senior aide to Ahmed Chalabi, then leader of the Iraqi National Congress, and reported that neither the Pentagon nor the CIA knew exactly who he was.

But he is named for the first time in an edition of the US network CBS's documentary 60 Minutes to be broadcast tomorrow. The report is already on the programme's web pages. The documentary assumes he is still living in Germany, under a false name.

Mr Alwan claimed to have been a highly-regarded chemical engineer working on the production of mobile biological weapons at a plant in Djerf al-Nadaf.

Curveball's claims were discredited in 2002 by senior officials in the German intelligence service, the BND, who wrote to the CIA warning his account was vague, second-hand and impossible to check. They also thought he was psychologically unstable.

But, in January 2003, President Bush told Curveball's story in his State of the Union address and it was repeated by the Secretary of State Colin Powell a month later when he put the US the case for invasion before the UN.

The senior BND officer in charge of the case later spoke of his horror as he heard Mr Powell exaggerate Curveball's tale. "We had always told them it was not proven. It was not hard evidence," he said.

In January 2004, Vice-President Dick Cheney was maintaining that discovery of the germ warfare labs would provide "conclusive" proof that Iraq had developed WMDs. But US investigators sent into Iraq after the invasion to find evidence of WMDs uncovered Curveball's file in Baghdad. In his late 20s when he arrived in Germany, he had been a low-level trainee engineer and not the project chief as the CIA had claimed.

He had been sacked in 1995, which was when he claimed to have started work on the mobile germ labs. He had also been jailed for a sex offence and had worked as a Baghdad taxi driver. His marks for his university course in chemical engineering were low.

The information was passed to Mr Powell by the CIA director George Tenet, who, in the documentary, denies ever having seen the German letter. A former senior official in the CIA, Tyler Drumheller, tells 60 Minutes: "It was a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth."

 

[delldude]

Iraqi weapons 'expert' unmasked as a fraud
By Sadie Gray
Published: 03 November 2007
The Iraqi defector whose claims regarding Saddam Hussein's biological warfare capabilities were central to the US government's case for the 2003 invasion, despite repeated warnings that they were dubious, has been unmasked by a television documentary.

The informer, codenamed Curveball was Rafid Ahmed Alwan who, in 1999, turned up at a refugee centre in Germany seeking political asylum. He went on to convince the Pentagon he was a brilliant chemist who had helped develop mobile biological warfare laboratories.

His role in the build-up to war was exposed in a detailed investigation by the Los Angeles Times, in which he was dismissed as an "out-and-out" fabricator who should have aroused scepticism in the CIA. The LA Times said Curveball was the brother of a senior aide to Ahmed Chalabi, then leader of the Iraqi National Congress, and reported that neither the Pentagon nor the CIA knew exactly who he was.

But he is named for the first time in an edition of the US network CBS's documentary 60 Minutes to be broadcast tomorrow. The report is already on the programme's web pages. The documentary assumes he is still living in Germany, under a false name.

Mr Alwan claimed to have been a highly-regarded chemical engineer working on the production of mobile biological weapons at a plant in Djerf al-Nadaf.

Curveball's claims were discredited in 2002 by senior officials in the German intelligence service, the BND, who wrote to the CIA warning his account was vague, second-hand and impossible to check. They also thought he was psychologically unstable.

But, in January 2003, President Bush told Curveball's story in his State of the Union address and it was repeated by the Secretary of State Colin Powell a month later when he put the US the case for invasion before the UN.

The senior BND officer in charge of the case later spoke of his horror as he heard Mr Powell exaggerate Curveball's tale. "We had always told them it was not proven. It was not hard evidence," he said.

In January 2004, Vice-President Dick Cheney was maintaining that discovery of the germ warfare labs would provide "conclusive" proof that Iraq had developed WMDs. But US investigators sent into Iraq after the invasion to find evidence of WMDs uncovered Curveball's file in Baghdad. In his late 20s when he arrived in Germany, he had been a low-level trainee engineer and not the project chief as the CIA had claimed.

He had been sacked in 1995, which was when he claimed to have started work on the mobile germ labs. He had also been jailed for a sex offence and had worked as a Baghdad taxi driver. His marks for his university course in chemical engineering were low.

The information was passed to Mr Powell by the CIA director George Tenet, who, in the documentary, denies ever having seen the German letter. A former senior official in the CIA, Tyler Drumheller, tells 60 Minutes: "It was a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth."

Yeah...if you open your eyes there was a thread started on the subject while you were sleeping this AM.

Tenet gave the information to Powell despite a letter - a copy of which 60 Minutes obtained - addressed to him by the head of German intelligence stating that Alwan appeared to be believable, but there was no evidence to verify his story.

Oh....i'm feeling delusional again...Oh..... :blink:

 

[delldude]

The president of the war that never needed to happen, the economy that is a house of debt cards, the balloning national debt, the shame of Katrina, the cronyism, the no-bid contracts, the million dollar screws (literally), the most vacations ever, and the worst health care. Yes, please campaign with Rudy, Fred, Newt, and Tom, Dick and Mitt. Go for it or as you would say, bring it on.

You talking of Bush or the Democrats?

Cronyism-Bill Clinton pardons ring a bell?

No bid contracts- Rich Lowry, editor of The National Review, draws a revealing parallel to the Clinton administration. He mentions that the administration awarded Halliburton with a no-bid contract to continue helping support troops in the Balkans. Unlike in Iraq, however, Halliburton did not hold the LOGCAP contract. Yet, nobody claimed that Clinton was giving unfair preference to the Halliburton Corporation.

Million dollars screws-got me here ,Pal..must refer to those financial doings with Bill and Hillie,you know.

Most vacations-Bush gave Pelosi the idea of the four day workweek?

Worst health care-Since when is it the gov't job to provide health care?

 

[delta777]

You talking of Bush or the Democrats?

Cronyism-Bill Clinton pardons ring a bell?

No bid contracts- Rich Lowry, editor of The National Review, draws a revealing parallel to the Clinton administration. He mentions that the administration awarded Halliburton with a no-bid contract to continue helping support troops in the Balkans. Unlike in Iraq, however, Halliburton did not hold the LOGCAP contract. Yet, nobody claimed that Clinton was giving unfair preference to the Halliburton Corporation.

Million dollars screws-got me here ,Pal..must refer to those financial doings with Bill and Hillie,you know.

Most vacations-Bush gave Pelosi the idea of the four day workweek?

Worst health care-Since when is it the gov't job to provide health care?

There you go again with your clinical case of clinton-on-the-brain. Admit it, you have a man-crush. Unfortunately my friend, W. was the one attempting to dupe people, read on if you dare...

Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

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."

 

[delta777]

But wait delldude, it gets better, or i suppose in your case, it would be worse...

Now 2 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. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.



Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war.

Secretary of State Powell, in preparation for his presentation of evidence of Saddam's WMD to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, spent days at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and had Tenet sit directly behind him as a sign of credibility. But Tenet, according to the sources, never told Powell about existing intelligence that there were no WMD, and Powell's speech was later revealed to be a series of falsehoods.

Both the French intelligence service and the CIA paid Sabri hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least $200,000 in the case of the CIA) to give them documents on Saddam's WMD programs. "The information detailed that Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had fissile material, which they didn't, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons," one of the former CIA officers told me.

On the eve of Sabri's appearance at the United Nations in September 2002 to present Saddam's case, the officer in charge of this operation met in New York with a "cutout" who had debriefed Sabri for the CIA. Then the officer flew to Washington, where he met with CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, who was "excited" about the report. Nonetheless, McLaughlin expressed his reservations. He said that Sabri's information was at odds with "our best source." That source was code-named "Curveball," later exposed as a fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as a chemical engineer.

The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. "Tenet told me he briefed the president personally," said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush's response was to call the information "the same old thing." Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. "The president had no interest in the intelligence," said the CIA officer. The other officer said, "Bush didn't give a #### about the intelligence. He had his mind made up."

But the CIA officers working on the Sabri case kept collecting information. "We checked on everything he told us." French intelligence eavesdropped on his telephone conversations and shared them with the CIA. These taps "validated" Sabri's claims, according to one of the CIA officers. The officers brought this material to the attention of the newly formed Iraqi Operations Group within the CIA. But those in charge of the IOG were on a mission to prove that Saddam did have WMD and would not give credit to anything that came from the French. "They kept saying the French were trying to undermine the war," said one of the CIA officers.

The officers continued to insist on the significance of Sabri's information, but one of Tenet's deputies told them, "You haven't figured this out yet. This isn't about intelligence. It's about regime change."

The CIA officers on the case awaited the report they had submitted on Sabri to be circulated back to them, but they never received it. They learned later that a new report had been written. "It was written by someone in the agency, but unclear who or where, it was so tightly controlled. They knew what would please the White House. They knew what the king wanted," one of the officers told me.

That report contained a false preamble stating that Saddam was "aggressively and covertly developing" nuclear weapons and that he already possessed chemical and biological weapons. "Totally out of whack," said one of the CIA officers. "The first [para]graph of an intelligence report is the most important and most read and colors the rest of the report." He pointed out that the case officer who wrote the initial report had not written the preamble and the new memo. "That's not what the original memo said."

The report with the misleading introduction was given to Dearlove of MI6, who briefed the prime minister. "They were given a scaled-down version of the report," said one of the CIA officers. "It was a summary given for liaison, with the sourcing taken out. They showed the British the statement Saddam was pursuing an aggressive program, and rewrote the report to attempt to support that statement. It was insidious. Blair bought it." "Blair was duped," said the other CIA officer. "He was shown the altered report."

The information provided by Sabri was considered so sensitive that it was never shown to those who assembled the NIE on Iraqi WMD. Later revealed to be utterly wrong, the NIE read: "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

 

[delta777]

Looks like the only one who threw a curveball was W., i await your attempt at a response, delldude...

In the congressional debate over the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, even those voting against it gave credence to the notion that Saddam possessed WMD. Even a leading opponent such as Sen. Bob Graham, then the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had instigated the production of the NIE, declared in his floor speech on Oct. 12, 2002, "Saddam Hussein's regime has chemical and biological weapons and is trying to get nuclear capacity." Not a single senator contested otherwise. None of them had an inkling of the Sabri intelligence.

The CIA officers assigned to Sabri still argued within the agency that his information must be taken seriously, but instead the administration preferred to rely on Curveball. Drumheller learned from the German intelligence service that held Curveball that it considered him and his claims about WMD to be highly unreliable. But the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) insisted that Curveball was credible because what he said was supposedly congruent with available public information.

For two months, Drumheller fought against the use of Curveball, raising the red flag that he was likely a fraud, as he turned out to be. "Oh, my! I hope that's not true," said Deputy Director McLaughlin, according to Drumheller's book "On the Brink," published in 2006. When Curveball's information was put into Bush's Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address, McLaughlin and Tenet allowed it to pass into the speech. "From three Iraqi defectors," Bush declared, "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs ... Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them." In fact, there was only one Iraqi source -- Curveball -- and there were no labs.

When the mobile weapons labs were inserted into the draft of Powell's United Nations speech, Drumheller strongly objected again and believed that the error had been removed. He was shocked watching Powell's speech. "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," Powell announced. Without the reference to the mobile weapons labs, there was no image of a threat.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, and Powell himself later lamented that they had not been warned about Curveball. And McLaughlin told the Washington Post in 2006, "If someone had made these doubts clear to me, I would not have permitted the reporting to be used in Secretary Powell's speech." But, in fact, Drumheller's caution was ignored.

As war appeared imminent, the CIA officers on the Sabri case tried to arrange his defection in order to demonstrate that he stood by his information. But he would not leave without bringing out his entire family. "He dithered," said one former CIA officer. And the war came before his escape could be handled.

Tellingly, Sabri's picture was never put on the deck of playing cards of former Saddam officials to be hunted down, a tacit acknowledgment of his covert relationship with the CIA. Today, Sabri lives in Qatar.

In 2005, the Silberman-Robb commission investigating intelligence in the Iraq war failed to interview the case officer directly involved with Sabri; instead its report blamed the entire WMD fiasco on "groupthink" at the CIA. "They didn't want to trace this back to the White House," said the officer.

On Feb. 5, 2004, Tenet delivered a speech at Georgetown University that alluded to Sabri and defended his position on the existence of WMD, which, even then, he contended would still be found. "Several sensitive reports crossed my desk from two sources characterized by our foreign partners as established and reliable," he said. "The first from a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle" -- Naji Sabri -- "said Iraq was not in the possession of a nuclear weapon. However, Iraq was aggressively and covertly developing such a weapon."

Then Tenet claimed with assurance, "The same source said that Iraq was stockpiling chemical weapons." He explained that this intelligence had been central to his belief in the reason for war. "As this information and other sensitive information came across my desk, it solidified and reinforced the judgments that we had reached in my own view of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and I conveyed this view to our nation's leaders." (Tenet doesn't mention Sabri in his recently published memoir, "At the Center of the Storm.")

But where were the WMD? "Now, I'm sure you're all asking, 'Why haven't we found the weapons?' I've told you the search must continue and it will be difficult."

On Sept. 8, 2006, three Republican senators on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- Orrin Hatch, Saxby Chambliss and Pat Roberts -- signed a letter attempting to counter Drumheller's revelation about Sabri on "60 Minutes": "All of the information about this case so far indicates that the information from this source was that Iraq did have WMD programs." The Republicans also quoted Tenet, who had testified before the committee in July 2006 that Drumheller had "mischaracterized" the intelligence. Still, Drumheller stuck to his guns, telling Reuters, "We have differing interpretations, and I think mine's right."

One of the former senior CIA officers told me that despite the certitude of the three Republican senators, the Senate committee never had the original memo on Sabri. "The committee never got that report," he said. "The material was hidden or lost, and because it was a restricted case, a lot of it was done in hard copy. The whole thing was fogged up, like Curveball."

While one Iraqi source told the CIA that there were no WMD, information that was true but distorted to prove the opposite, another Iraqi source was a fabricator whose lies were eagerly embraced. "The real tragedy is that they had a good source that they misused," said one of the former CIA officers. "The fact is there was nothing there, no threat. But Bush wanted to hear what he wanted to hear."

 

[Garfield1966]

This entire scenario has been gone over and over. It has been fairly well established that W and Cheney had the the answer they wanted and were accruing information to make their answer correct. All information that discredited their plans were discarded and those who stepped in the way were steam rolled.

 

[delldude]

And so trip seven you have unwittingly proved my point beyond a shadow of a doubt....

 

[delta777]

And so trip seven you have unwittingly proved my point beyond a shadow of a doubt....

Is that a conclusion or simply the place where you got tired of thinking? I've done nothing but present you with the facts, do with them what you'd like.