If you missed “60 Minutes” last night, you can catch part of Ed Bradley’s interview with Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s Europe division online. It’s pretty compelling stuff… Here’s a clip from the transcript:
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: 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?
DRUMHELLER: Yes.
BRADLEY: There’s no doubt in your mind about that?
DRUMHELLER: No doubt in my mind at all.
BRADLEY: It directly contradicts, though, what the President and his staff were telling us.
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.
If I had the energy, I’d go back into the MM.com archives and find some of the old comments left by trolls about how “fucking insane” we were for suggesting that the Bush administration could have been selective in choosing the evidence it used to justify going to war. It’s taken a few years, but I don’t think that an intelligent, objective observer could now come to any other conclusion.
The full transcript of the “60 Minutes” interview can be found at Think Progress. (And, if you have time, check out what Josh Marshall has to say about Drumheller and the implications of his statements.)
13 Comments
What happened to your trolls anyway? Did you forget to feed them?
It was the pictures of Clementine. Showing a baby picture to a troll is like showing a crucifix to a vampire.
“Clementine Kills Trolls Dead”
I’ll put that on the box when I start marketing the Clementine dolls.
My recollection is that the trolls started slinking away once Shanester came on the scene — making rational, coherent points from a conservative perspective, and doing so in a respectful manner. I think they were just terribly outclassed by someone from their own ideological camp.
Ted, yeah…whatever. It was actually death threats from me that I actually made good on. Shanster is actually an alias I assumed to put off the search for the bodies. Couldn’t you tell from the lack of conviction behind my right wing arguments no matter how eloquent?
I am esp. impressed w/ fights I got into w/ myself over grammer and misspellings (sp?).
Unrelated but related in a way is the movies “3 Days of the Condor” that I just had the pleasure of watching.
Don’t blame me. I miss the kooks. I wish Abraxas Incontinent would come back. What about John Galt? He probably has something to add, like the fact that we (Cheney) and other nations gave/sold Iraq WMD back in the 80s. Where’d they all go (the weapons, not the trolls)?
Don’t answer that, I just read something by Scott Ridder, that most of the bio weapons stuff has/had already turned to harmless goo. I believe that there could have been WMDs and that they could have been removed during our ‘rush’ (5 months from authorization to actualization) to war.
Ted, see what I mean? oooh I’m good.
Clearly the WMDs were moved to Syria. Perhaps we can wage war with them after we nuke Iran.
We could just keep claiming that the WMDs are constantly on the move and track them to the next country we’d like to forcibly democratize.
Someone in the Pentagon should get busy putting together artists’ representations of what the WMD convoy might look like.
If not for the diversion in Iraq, we might have been able to effectively deal with North Korea and Iran, countries that make no secret of their nuclear projects. But, we chose instead to pound our credibility, our moral authority, and everything else, down a rat hole in Iraq.
Over the past six years, our nation has jumped every shark on the planet – multiple times.
Quick! I think I saw them hiding the WMDs under Neil Young’s house!
No, they moved them to Stephen Colbert’s basement! Quick!