{"id":1532,"date":"2007-09-06T18:19:25","date_gmt":"2007-09-06T23:19:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2007\/09\/06\/not-in-the-cards\/"},"modified":"2007-09-06T20:17:45","modified_gmt":"2007-09-07T01:17:45","slug":"not-in-the-cards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2007\/09\/06\/not-in-the-cards\/","title":{"rendered":"not in the cards…"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n
Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq<\/sup><\/div>\n
By Sidney Blumenthal <\/strong> <\/div>\n

\"NajiOn 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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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." <\/p>\n

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. 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.<\/p>\n

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…<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The C.I.A. had turned the Foreign Minister of Iraq, Naji Sabri<\/strong>, working with the French Intelligence Agencies [and had paid him well]. His information was clear – No WMD’s, No Chemical-Biological Weapons. That information was over-ridden by the opposite story from "Curveball<\/strong><\/a>" – a taxicab driver posing as a Chemical Engineer. <\/div>\n
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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. <\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

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 fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up."<\/strong><\/font><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Please take a Maalox and read this whole article. It’s just like today [this today we’re living in right now]. The facts are plain as the nose on your face – the Surge is ridiculous! It’s not making a difference. In fact, it was supposed to give the Iraq government a breather to get its act together. The Iraq government wouldn’t know "together" if it were on a spelling test! So we can say with confidence, "Bush doesn’t give a fuck about the facts<\/em>. He has his mind made up."<\/strong><\/font><\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n
I take no pleasure in the fact that a lot of us knew this from the beginning, and have known it in spades for literally years. I take no pleasure in reading the wealth of evidence that proves that we have sacrificed our children, our wealth, our Constitution, and our credibility based on the crackpot ideas and impetuous "hunches" of a bunch of incompetent people playing soldier hiding behind the walls of some neofascist think tank or our own halls of government. I take no joy because knowing it then and now can’t undo the past, and isn’t even assuring us that our future will be any better. And I take no pleasure in finding that my Senator, the one who beat Max Cleland<\/strong> by questioning his patriotism, is on the Senate Intelligence Committee – and actually participated in trying to hush this now solid exposure of Bush’s ignoring good intelligence from the Iraq Foreign Minister! … the Iraq Foreign Minister!<\/strong><\/font><\/div>\n
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\"SaxbyOn Sept. 8, 2006, three Republican senators on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — Orrin Hatch, Saxby Chambliss<\/strong><\/font> 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." <\/div>\n

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." <\/p>\n

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."<\/strong><\/font><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq By Sidney Blumenthal On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}