Policy Failure, not Intelligence Failure

"“The idea of going after Iraq was U.S. policy. It was going to happen one way or the other."

60 Minutes (video) reports that the CIA's former top covert official in Europe has spoken out against the way the Bush Administrations ignored evidence that Saddam Hussein didn't have Weapons of Mass Destruction.

"It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it'’s an intelligence failure. It'’s an intelligence failure. This was a policy failure," Drumheller tells Bradley.

Drumheller was the CIA's top man in Europe, the head of covert operations there, until he retired a year ago. He says he saw firsthand how the White House promoted intelligence it liked and ignored intelligence it didn't.

[...]

Meanwhile, the 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 was a very high inner circle of Saddam Hussein. Someone who would know what he was talking about," Drumheller says.

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 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."

At some point, this evidence has to reach a critical mass. Though many people, conservatives and liberals alike, would like to believe that the United States government would never start aaggressiongression, let alone a President lie to get us into one, the signs pointing that way are starting to pile up.

Add to this the fact that this isn't the only questionable thing done by the Bush Administration, a growing dissatisfaction, possibilityssiblity of Democrats retaking one of the branches of Congress, and some real truth just might come to light before Bush leaves office.

Tyler Drumheller George W. Bush War in Iraq Bush Lied