[T]he CIA had made a major intelligence breakthrough on Iraq’s nuclear program. Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, had made a deal to reveal Iraq’s military secrets to the CIA. Drumheller was in charge of the operation.This is a pretty amazing revelation, particularly given that the Bush Regime and its co-conspirators in Congress have been claiming for the last two years that the Iraq Failure was due to faulty intelligence. Now we know that a high-ranking Iraqi minister -- a member of Saddam's inner circle no less -- was telling us one year before the invasion that Saddam had no WMD and that Bush, Cheney, and Rice had direct knowledge of this.
"This was a very high inner circle of Saddam Hussein. Someone who would know what he was talking about," Drumheller says.
"You knew you could trust this guy?" Bradley asked.
"We continued to validate him the whole way through," Drumheller replied.
According to Drumheller, CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high-level meeting at the White House, including the president, the vice president and Secretary of State Rice.
At that meeting, Drumheller says, "They were enthusiastic because they said, they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis."
What did this high-level source tell him?
"He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program," says Drumheller.
"So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam's inner circle that he didn't have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?" Bradley asked.
"Yes," Drumheller replied. He says there was no doubt in his mind at all.
"It directly contradicts, though, what the president and his staff were telling us," Bradley remarked.
"The policy was set," Drumheller says. "The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."
Drumheller expected the White House to ask for more information from the Iraqi foreign minister.
But he says he was taken aback by what happened. "The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they're no longer interested," Drumheller recalls. "And we said, 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said, 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.'"
"And if I understand you correctly, when the White House learned that you had this source from the inner circle of Saddam Hussein, they were thrilled with that," Bradley asked.
"The first we heard, they were. Yes," Drumheller replied.
Once they learned what it was the source had to say — that Saddam Hussein did not have the capability to wage nuclear war or have an active WMD program, Drumheller says, "They stopped being interested in the intelligence."
The White House declined to respond to Drumheller's account of Naji Sabri’s role, but Secretary of State Rice has said that Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister turned U.S. spy, was just one source, and therefore his information wasn’t reliable.
"They certainly took information that came from single sources on uranium, on the yellowcake story and on several other stories with no corroboration at all and so you can’t say you only listen to one source, because on many issues they only listened to one source," says Drumheller.
"So you’re saying that if there was a single source and that information from that source backed up the case they were trying to build, then that single source was ok, but if it didn’t, then the single source was not ok, because he couldn’t be corroborated," Bradley asked.
"Unfortunately, that’s what it looks like," Drumheller replied.
No wonder Drumheller felt compelled to come forward with this. He supervised a major intelligence victory for the CIA with regard to Iraq, only to have the White House (1) disregard it because it didn't fit in with BushCo's plans for regime change and then (2) blame the CIA for "faulty intelligence" when everything started to go sideways. It makes me wonder how many other Drumhellers are out there with a similar story to tell.
What I find particularly remarkable is that the folks planning the invasion of Iraq didn't want to talk to Foreign Minister Sabri about anything, despite the fact that he undoubtedly had extensive knowledge with regard to Iraq's military capabilities. Sabri could have given these planners information that might have saved American lives during our invasion and subsequent occupation, but for some reason these planners weren't interested in saving American lives.
But it gets worse. Josh Marshall did a follow-up on all this:
Drumheller's account is pretty probative evidence on the question of whether the White House politicized and cherry-picked the Iraq intelligence.My conclusion from all this? Expect massive GOP-fueled election fraud this Fall. There is no way the Republicans can afford to lose either the Senate or the House in November. The last thing Bush needs is someone doing a real investigation into these issues.
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.
Crooks and Liars has video of the Drumheller interview here.
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