Grounds for Impeachment. Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction Salon exclusive: Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq. By Sidney Blumenthal Sept. 6, 2007 | 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." 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. 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 fissible material, which they didn't, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons," one of the former CIA officers told me.... http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/
this is a new subject never discussed. i think its reasonable that there was some uncertainty but i also tend to believe that wmd was a loophole used to go into iraq for a much more broad agenda. And no, not oil and making haliburton rich, but rather long term regional and political positioning...more or less
I always thought he knew they were not there Rocket River "It's not what you know. . it is what you can prove." - Alonzo "Training Day"
I thought we all knew there was no WMD threat in Iraq. I thought the 'lie' was that somehow Iraq was responsible for 9-11. Well whatever all the lies were, we weren't fooled, at least we shouldn't have been fooled.
I still find it ludicrous to know for a fact there were no WMD's after this was located. "30-40 jets found buried in the sand." http://www.snopes.com/photos/military/sandplanes.asp
It's been long known Bush shaped the intelligence to fit his agenda instead of shaping his agenda to fit intelligence. But if he actually understood Iraq had no WMDs he needs to step down from office. Reading this makes me sick to my stomach that I once defended Bush's motives about invading Iraq after WMDs weren't found. What a disaster of a president. Let's see where this goes before making any final judgments.
This? it is going no where, no one will care. Bush will just be a duck for the last 15 month of his presidencey anyway.
I would agree that the WMD argument was used to primarily push an invasion that the Admin. wanted for many other reasons but there still is a matter of accountability. If Congress and the public had been told that it was unlikely that Saddam had WMD the authorization to invade might not have happened.
i dont think its possible to be 100% whether they had them or not...whether they were working on getting them or not. given the secrecy in his regime and the several months before hand of disposal/hiding/transering of materials/research before inspectors got there, it could very well have been possible to get rid of any evidence that suggested foul play
It is a fact that Saddam did have chemical agents but most of those were destroyed and / or lost in the following years after Gulf War 1. The WMD claim for authorizing the invasion was that Saddam had an active program going. Nothing has been proven that there was such an active program. It was also know that Saddam had squirreled away fighter jets prior to Gulf War 1, even going so far as to fly them to Iran. Those jets though aren't considered WMD.
Maybe YOU won't care but it would have a profound effect on the country. It would set political debate on fire and affect how profoundly Democratic the next congress is. Plus it would basically end any hope of the Republicans winning the presidency because all the candidates have drunk Kool-Aid and still support the war. A loon like Howard Dean could beat whatever token candidate the GOP nominated. The anger against Bush, his minions and diehard supporters in congress would be intense.
I'm not saying the jets were. What I am saying is if he could bury jets in the sand right next to the airport and it took us over a year to find them, what is to say he couldn't have easily done this with much smaller weaponry, buried anywhere in Iraq?
What's disturbing about this piece is not only did he know (which we all assumed, but until now was just conjecture), but when he did find out, that info went nowhere. The administration did their best to keep it away from Congress, out of NIEs, from the CIA, out of the hands of State, and from the military planners drawing up the invasion plans. Not only did he know, but he obviously went out of his way to make sure others didn't know he knew. Another example of cherry-picking intelligence, but also a cynical attempt to keep the country moving towards war and an absolute corruption of our system of government. Criminal. Say what you want about the French, but it has always appeared to me that in the case of Iraq, they were trying to get us to save ourselves, and this article makes that point again. Also, the article once again addresses the administration's lie that Congress had the same info as the WH. The whole thing is just another reminder of how much this administration has screwed up my country and the world.
