April 24, 2006

"Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American people, than with your image in the history books." - Gen. Buck Turgidson.

This was no boat accident...
Whoa - wrong movie.
"This was no intelligence failure. This was a policy failure."

When no weapons of mass destruction surfaced in Iraq, President Accountabilitude insisted that all those WMD claims before the war were the result of faulty intelligence. But a former CIA official, Tyler Drumheller - a 26-year veteran of the agency and the CIA's top man in Europe - has decided to do something CIA officials at his level almost never do: speak out.

Last night he told 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley the real failure was not in the intelligence community but - surprise surprise - in the White House. He says he saw how the Bush administration, time and again, welcomed intelligence that fit the president's determination to go to war and turned a blind eye to intelligence that did not.

"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 Decider - THAT asshat 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."

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