Tyler Drumheller, retired CIA officer, is on Sixty Minutes telling Ed Bradley that the Bushies didn’t really care what the intelligence community said about WMDs in Iraq. The policy, to invade Iraq, was set long before the invasion, and the Bushies only accepted intelligence that supported the policy. I don’t believe any new information was presented. But the segment seemed to me to be a good, succinct summation of the prewar intelligence / Joe Wilson / Niger uranium / forged documents / Scooter Libby intrigue.
Update: Apparently there’s some new information after all. Josh Marshall spoke to Tyler Drumheller and learned that Drumheller was interviewed three times by the Robb-Silverman Commission, yet his testimony is not reflected in the final report. And he was interviewed twice by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Roberts Committee) but not until after they released their summer 2004 report.
What happened to the Congressional investigation that was supposed to look into the intelligence failures leading up to the invasion of iraq..The one that Harry Ried tried to get the republicans to stop their footdragging on? By some inkling, I don’t think the search for answers will end until Congress holds open hearings with subpoena power..hopefully when the republican lock on Congress is broken in November, we’ll get the truth.
And if anybody is interested…we have another eight American families who will be having their loved ones coming home from Iraq in a box after this past weekend. I sure do apprieciate their dying for my freedom. Maybe this Memorial Day i’ll dust off old glory and let her catch a breeze from the front porch, she has’t flown or seen the light of day for over a year now.
I saw the 60 minutes interview and it confirms to me what was said in the Downing Street memo and what Wilson was saying all along about the Niger unranium. In other words Bush and Co were lying about Iraq all along. It was not a failure of intelligence,but finding those pieces of information to fix aroud a policy for invading Iraq. The argument that Bush and Co said they did not want war is a lie and they are liars. There is know doubt that Bush and Co should be impeached for lying to the American people and the congress.
Yep, nothing new. I appreciate that they’ve laid it all out again, just in case some folks haven’t been listening. But wait until the smear campaign starts up against the poor CIA guy…unless nobody is listening anymore. These days, all you have to do is say is “60 Minutes” and people wave the program off as too left-wing to take seriously. Another bastion of exellent reporting going down for the count.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
Josh Marshall : “I just got off the phone with Drumheller…..”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/23/AR2006042301027_pf.html
The torture continues……
Chuck Robb has a lot of explaining to do. This story just indicates that Democrats turned a blind eye to everything Bush wanted to do. Why? How did this administration hold sway over all those Democrats who voted for the war resolution, who went along with the reports (Robb), who went along with the committee reports (Jane Harmon)? Are these Democrats just incompetent and stupid? I think it is time for Democrats to elect intelligent people on the order of Durbin and Feingold. Hopefully the missteps of Obama won’t continue or he is a lost cause.
Bush Administration OUTED for lying us into war, politics-motivated leaking, illegal torture, illegal secret renditions, and illegal domestic spying, outed by whistleblowers still believing in American values.
Bush Administration responded to being OUTED with smearing, threatening, tightening and extending secrecy, coordinating whitewash ‘investigations’ [the domestic spying issue was ‘investigated’ by Helgerson who was appointed by Bush to head the CIA’s internal inspector general office], appointing new Bush-friendly secrecy enforcement/take no action goons like Albert Gonsales and Peter Goss, and issuing [too many to count] cover-up lies.
One sentence from today’s NYT article by Scott Shane: “He [Goss] has taken up the cause of tightening information controls across the board, partly in response to calls from the White House, the Congressional intelligence committees and the presidential commission on weapons of mass destruction.”
This sentence may be exposing those involved in cover-ups and/or those hoping for a cleared-of-whistleblowers field to do a new snow job, this time about war with Iran.
As for the
There’s a good update at TPM Muckraker site on the ‘presidential commission of WMD’ ignoring Drumheller and then issuing some spinning-to-protect-Bush conclusions.