You Do It To Yourself, You Do

You've probably heard about this, but 60 Minutes last night had on Tyler Drumheller, former CIA chief of European operations, who pulled a Gap Ban (i.e., he dropped a bomb):

BRADLEY: [In October 2002,] 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.

[...]

BRADLEY: According to Drumheller, CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high level meeting at the White House.

DRUMHELLER: The President, the Vice President, Dr. Rice…

BRADLEY: And at that meeting…?

DRUMHELLER: They were enthusiastic because they said they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis.

BRADLEY: And what did this high level source tell you?

DRUMHELLER: He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program.

[...]

BRADLEY: Drumheller expected the White House to ask for more information from the Iraqi foreign minister. He was taken aback by what happened.

DRUMHELLER: The group that was dealing with preparations for the Iraq war came back and said they’re no longer interested. And we said, “Well, what about the intel?” And they said, “Well, this isn’t about intel anymore. This is about regime change.”

BRADLEY: 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.

DRUMHELLER: The first we heard, they were. Yes.

BRADLEY: But when they learned what it was that he had to say, that Saddam did not have the capability to wage nuclear war, weapons of mass destruction…?

DRUMHELLER: They stopped being interested in the intelligence.

Check out the video of this portion of the segment and its transcript over at ThinkProgress and see even more at the CBS News/ 60 Minutes site.

Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo provides an interesting follow-up:

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-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.

[soundtrack to this post: Just by Radiohead]