TPM : Whitewashing the Intelligence

If you didn't see it, you need to stop now and go the CBS Website to review the interview with ex-CIA Europe Chief Tyler Drumheller from yesterday's 60 Minutes.

"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:

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

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has apparently done a follow-up interview with Drumheller and in it he asked the oh-so-obvious questions, did you talk to the Robb-Silberman Commission and the Senate Select Committee about what you saw the White House doing?

And he answered - "Yes."

From TPM

(snip)

I just got off the phone with Drumheller. But before we get to that, let's run down the key points in the story.

(snip)

The White House, as Drumheller relates it, was really excited to hear what Sabri would reveal about the inner-workings of Saddam's regime, and particularly about any WMD programs. That is, before Sabri admitted that Saddam didn't have any active programs. Then they lost interest. Now, if you didn't see the episode you can catch most of the key facts in this story at the 60 Minutes website. But here's an angle I'm not sure we're going to hear much about.

Drumheller's account is pretty probative evidence on the question of whether the White House politicized and cherry-picked the Iraq intelligence. 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-Silverman 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-Silverman 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.

(snip)

"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.

Although we've already heard about this exact same scenario from the Downing Street Memos for nearly a year. Although we've already had confirmation via Downing Street II (Where Bush told Tony Blair that the lack of WMD Evidence "Didn't matter").

[Updated: This IMO is even worse than Downing Street, because it shows the complicit actions of the Republican Controlled Rubber-Stamp Senate, with strong implications for 2006, and even 2008.]

Current Republican Presidential Front-Runner, Senator John McCain, who was a member of the Robb-Silberman commission has repeatedly said that he "Looked those CIA analysts in the eye and asked if they felt pressure from the White House - and they said, 'No'" - is apparently a God-Damn Liar.

[Update II From Comments: And let's not forget that the question of "Pressure" is a strong-man argument in the first place. The analysts weren't pressured to change their assesments - their assessment were simply ignored if they didn't fit the WH Spin. "The facts were being shaped around the policy"... and the Policy was War and Regime Change.]

So how's that next shot at the Presidency going to look for McCain now that he's been shown to have been involved in a cover-up to protect the Bush Administration from the consquences of manipulating intelligence information that led us into an unjust and unwarranted war?

Vyan