[NYTr] Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by tsimonds (activ-l)

Salon Exclusive - Sep 6, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/index_np.html

Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction

Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret
intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before 
invading Iraq.

By Sidney Blumenthal

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in
the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not
have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA
officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi
foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned
out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate
of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No
one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no
WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after
the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military
Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the
CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam
had WMD.

On April 23, 2006, CBS's "60 Minutes" interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the
former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed
that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri,
Saddam's foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. "We continued
to validate him the whole way through," said 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."

Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller's account
to me and provided the background to the story of how the information
that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to
justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of
WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri's
intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to
the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the
senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to
receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear
protective uniforms in the desert.

Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a
report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD
programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard
Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who
briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for
war.

Secretary of State Powell, in preparation for his presentation of
evidence of Saddam's WMD to the United Nations Security Council on Feb.
5, 2003, spent days at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and had Tenet
sit directly behind him as a sign of credibility. But Tenet, according
to the sources, never told Powell about existing intelligence that
there were no WMD, and Powell's speech was later revealed to be a
series of falsehoods.

Both the French intelligence service and the CIA paid Sabri hundreds of
thousands of dollars (at least $200,000 in the case of the CIA) to give
them documents on Saddam's WMD programs. "The information detailed that
Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told
him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had
fissile material, which they didn't, and that they had no chemical or
biological weapons," one of the former CIA officers told me.

On the eve of Sabri's appearance at the United Nations in September 2002
to present Saddam's case, the officer in charge of this operation met in
New York with a "cutout" who had debriefed Sabri for the CIA. Then the
officer flew to Washington, where he met with CIA deputy director John
McLaughlin, who was "excited" about the report. Nonetheless, McLaughlin
expressed his reservations. He said that Sabri's information was at odds
with "our best source." That source was code-named "Curveball," later
exposed as a fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as
a chemical engineer.

The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. "Tenet told me he
briefed the president personally," said one of the former CIA officers.
According to Tenet, Bush's response was to call the information "the
same old thing." Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to
think. "The president had no interest in the intelligence," said the
CIA officer. The other officer said, "Bush didn't give a fuck about the
intelligence. He had his mind made up."

But the CIA officers working on the Sabri case kept collecting
information. "We checked on everything he told us." French intelligence
eavesdropped on his telephone conversations and shared them with the
CIA. These taps "validated" Sabri's claims, according to one of the CIA
officers. The officers brought this material to the attention of the
newly formed Iraqi Operations Group within the CIA. But those in charge
of the IOG were on a mission to prove that Saddam did have WMD and
would not give credit to anything that came from the French. "They kept
saying the French were trying to undermine the war," said one of the
CIA officers.

The officers continued to insist on the significance of Sabri's
information, but one of Tenet's deputies told them, "You haven't figured
this out yet. This isn't about intelligence. It's about regime change."

The CIA officers on the case awaited the report they had submitted on
Sabri to be circulated back to them, but they never received it. They
learned later that a new report had been written. "It was written by
someone in the agency, but unclear who or where, it was so tightly
controlled. They knew what would please the White House. They knew what
the king wanted," one of the officers told me.

That report contained a false preamble stating that Saddam was
"aggressively and covertly developing" nuclear weapons and that he
already possessed chemical and biological weapons. "Totally out of
whack," said one of the CIA officers. "The first [para]graph of an
intelligence report is the most important and most read and colors the
rest of the report." He pointed out that the case officer who wrote the
initial report had not written the preamble and the new memo. "That's
not what the original memo said."

The report with the misleading introduction was given to Dearlove of
MI6, who briefed the prime minister. "They were given a scaled-down
version of the report," said one of the CIA officers. "It was a summary
given for liaison, with the sourcing taken out. They showed the British
the statement Saddam was pursuing an aggressive program, and rewrote the
report to attempt to support that statement. It was insidious. Blair
bought it." "Blair was duped," said the other CIA officer. "He was shown
the altered report."

The information provided by Sabri was considered so sensitive that it
was never shown to those who assembled the NIE on Iraqi WMD. Later
revealed to be utterly wrong, the NIE read: "We judge that Iraq has
continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of
UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological
weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions;
if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this
decade."

In the congressional debate over the Authorization for the Use of
Military Force, even those voting against it gave credence to the
notion that Saddam possessed WMD. Even a leading opponent such as Sen.
Bob Graham, then the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, who had instigated the production of the NIE, declared in
his floor speech on Oct. 12, 2002, "Saddam Hussein's regime has
chemical and biological weapons and is trying to get nuclear capacity."
Not a single senator contested otherwise. None of them had an inkling
of the Sabri intelligence.

The CIA officers assigned to Sabri still argued within the agency that
his information must be taken seriously, but instead the administration
preferred to rely on Curveball. Drumheller learned from the German
intelligence service that held Curveball that it considered him and his
claims about WMD to be highly unreliable. But the CIA's Weapons
Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC)
insisted that Curveball was credible because what he said was
supposedly congruent with available public information.

For two months, Drumheller fought against the use of Curveball, raising
the red flag that he was likely a fraud, as he turned out to be. "Oh,
my! I hope that's not true," said Deputy Director McLaughlin, according
to Drumheller's book "On the Brink," published in 2006. When Curveball's
information was put into Bush's Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union
address, McLaughlin and Tenet allowed it to pass into the speech. "From
three Iraqi defectors," Bush declared, "we know that Iraq, in the late
1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs ... Saddam Hussein
has not disclosed these facilities. He's given no evidence that he has
destroyed them." In fact, there was only one Iraqi source -- Curveball
-- and there were no labs.

When the mobile weapons labs were inserted into the draft of Powell's
United Nations speech, Drumheller strongly objected again and believed
that the error had been removed. He was shocked watching Powell's
speech. "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories
on wheels and on rails," Powell announced. Without the reference to the
mobile weapons labs, there was no image of a threat.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, and Powell himself
later lamented that they had not been warned about Curveball. And
McLaughlin told the Washington Post in 2006, "If someone had made these
doubts clear to me, I would not have permitted the reporting to be used
in Secretary Powell's speech." But, in fact, Drumheller's caution was
ignored.

As war appeared imminent, the CIA officers on the Sabri case tried to
arrange his defection in order to demonstrate that he stood by his
information. But he would not leave without bringing out his entire
family. "He dithered," said one former CIA officer. And the war came
before his escape could be handled.

Tellingly, Sabri's picture was never put on the deck of playing cards of
former Saddam officials to be hunted down, a tacit acknowledgment of his
covert relationship with the CIA. Today, Sabri lives in Qatar.

In 2005, the Silberman-Robb commission investigating intelligence in the
Iraq war failed to interview the case officer directly involved with
Sabri; instead its report blamed the entire WMD fiasco on "groupthink"
at the CIA. "They didn't want to trace this back to the White House,"
said the officer.

On Feb. 5, 2004, Tenet delivered a speech at Georgetown University that
alluded to Sabri and defended his position on the existence of WMD,
which, even then, he contended would still be found. "Several sensitive
reports crossed my desk from two sources characterized by our foreign
partners as established and reliable," he said. "The first from a
source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle" -- Naji
Sabri -- "said Iraq was not in the possession of a nuclear weapon.
However, Iraq was aggressively and covertly developing such a weapon."

Then Tenet claimed with assurance, "The same source said that Iraq was
stockpiling chemical weapons." He explained that this intelligence had
been central to his belief in the reason for war. "As this information
and other sensitive information came across my desk, it solidified and
reinforced the judgments that we had reached in my own view of the
danger posed by Saddam Hussein and I conveyed this view to our nation's
leaders." (Tenet doesn't mention Sabri in his recently published
memoir, "At the Center of the Storm.")

But where were the WMD? "Now, I'm sure you're all asking, 'Why haven't
we found the weapons?' I've told you the search must continue and it
will be difficult."

On Sept. 8, 2006, three Republican senators on the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence -- Orrin Hatch, Saxby Chambliss and Pat
Roberts -- signed a letter attempting to counter Drumheller's
revelation about Sabri on "60 Minutes": "All of the information about
this case so far indicates that the information from this source was
that Iraq did have WMD programs." The Republicans also quoted Tenet,
who had testified before the committee in July 2006 that Drumheller had
"mischaracterized" the intelligence. Still, Drumheller stuck to his
guns, telling Reuters, "We have differing interpretations, and I think
mine's right."

One of the former senior CIA officers told me that despite the certitude
of the three Republican senators, the Senate committee never had the
original memo on Sabri. "The committee never got that report," he said.
"The material was hidden or lost, and because it was a restricted case,
a lot of it was done in hard copy. The whole thing was fogged up, like
Curveball."

While one Iraqi source told the CIA that there were no WMD, information
that was true but distorted to prove the opposite, another Iraqi source
was a fabricator whose lies were eagerly embraced. "The real tragedy is
that they had a good source that they misused," said one of the former
CIA officers. "The fact is there was nothing there, no threat. But Bush
wanted to hear what he wanted to hear."