Month: April 2006

by hilzoy

Via TPM: 60 Minutes has a very interesting interview with Tyler Drumheller, the head of covert operations in Europe until his retirement last year. About the report that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from Niger:

“”Most people came to the opinion that there was something questionable about it,” he says.

Asked if that was his reaction, Drumheller says, “That was our reaction from the very beginning. The report didn’t hold together.”

Drumheller says that was the “general feeling” in the agency at that time. “

The most important part:

“Meanwhile, 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. Drumheller was in charge of the operation.

“This was a very high inner circle of Saddam Hussein. Someone who would know what he was talking about,” Drumheller says. (…)

According to Drumheller, CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high-level meeting at the White House, including the president, the vice president and Secretary of State Rice.

At that meeting, Drumheller says, “They were enthusiastic because they said, they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis.”

What did this high-level source tell him?

“He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program,” says Drumheller.

“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 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.”

Drumheller expected the White House to ask for more information from the Iraqi foreign minister.

But he says he was taken aback by what happened. “The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they’re no longer interested,” Drumheller recalls. “And we said, ‘Well, what about the intel?’ And they said, ‘Well, this isn’t about intel anymore. This is about regime change.'””

His final assessment:

The American people want to believe the president. I have relatives who I’ve tried to talk to about this who say, ‘Well, no, you can’t tell me the president had this information and just ignored it,'” says Drumheller. “But I think over time, people will look back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time.”

And Josh Marshall adds this:

“Drumheller’s account is pretty probative evidence on the question of whether the White House politicized and cherry-picked the Iran 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-Silverman 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-Silverman 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.”

My take on this below the fold.

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by hilzoy

In my fruitless attempt to keep up with at least some of the major stories that have come out while I’ve been busy (and I am still busy), here are three thoughts on the generals who have called for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, and the response to them.

[Update at end.]

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by Slartibartfast

(UPDATED, through the magic of the Internets)

I normally wouldn’t think of posting this, given that it was sort of a personal pi-radians shift in perspective about the whole WaPo semi-kerfluffle regarding purported mobile weapons labs, but rilkefan has made the suggestion, and I’m all about service.

To all-too-briefly summarize, this has been cast as administration embroidery by WaPo and by one group of experts vs two others by Confederate Yankee and Captain’s Quarters.  No, I haven’t bothered to read either of the latter in detail yet; just the ensuing discussion regarding what they have to say about the whole thing.  There’s also some discussion of this over at Protein Wisdom, where I’ve posted my one and only comment in this regard outside of the local neighborhood.

So, my question: what sort of experts were in the other two groups that thought that these were (or might be) mobile bioweapons laboratories?  II’d assume that to be considered an expert, one would have to be familiar with bioweapons manufacture and culturing of biologicals, which in turn would imply some sort of passing familiarity with the equipment necessary to do those things.  Why do I ask?  Well, because of the Duelfer Report account (suggested by frequent commentor Urinated States of America) that mentions nearly a dozen major deficiencies (page 81, Table 1) in the equipment in the more intact of the trailers that pretty much rule out utility for bioweapons manufacture.  Those are just the major ones, mind.

Given that, one wonders: just what was it about either of these trailers that said "mobile bioweapons lab", besides the mobile part?  Or, more to the point, what about the trailers didn’t say "couldn’t possibly be a mobile bioweapons lab", other than the mobility point?  To paraphrase myself: the two teams of experts who thought there was something WMD-related here ought to have Table 1, Page 81 tatooed on their collective foreheads.

Update: Protein Wisdom has a new post up regarding timeline which merits pondering and discussion, but the timeline hasn’t much to do with this post.  This post is more of a what-were-they-thinking kind of thing.

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by hilzoy

Like von, I liked this post by Greg Djerejian. He also says this:

“Democracy exportation is part and parcel of a good deal of America’s foreign policy history, and a strain of American exceptionalism that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But the democratization strategy has to be better understood as a very long generational effort, undertaken soberly and methodically with allies, and not over the barrel of a gun, or via short-term, hastily organized attempts at rather clumsily stoking revolutions via a few dollars disbursed hither dither and the like. The situation in the Middle East is very delicate at the present hour, and Islamists in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq and points beyond are in the ascendancy, at least at the present time. Therefore order and stability, at least in the short term, need to trump fanciful talk of moving the entire broader Middle East region into post-Enlightenment democratic governance modalities. The Islamic world is not yet necessarily ready for a steady diet of Jefferson and Montesquieu, yes, even if we open up consulates in remote parts of Indonesia or near the corniche in Alexandria in some essay at ‘transformational’ diplomacy. This does not mean, as the easy straw man argument goes, that Arabs are not constitutionally capable of democracy, much like some said Confucians in Asia weren’t after WWII. But the teeming Cairene masses, say, are likelier to gravitate towards the Muslim Brotherhood than Ayman Nour, alas, at least at this juncture. Let’s be cognizant of such nettlesome realities, yes?”

I think that it is quite likely that democratization in the Middle East will produce results that are not to our liking, in the short run; and I very much hope we have the patience to let it proceed without interfering. But while I share Djerejian’s caution in this regard, I also think it’s worth adding one point:

When I ask myself which political unit has done the most to promote democracy since the fall of the Berlin wall, the answer seems clear: it’s the European Union. The EU has helped immeasurably in the transformation of Eastern European countries into (mostly) functional democracies. Moreover, it is responsible for the one clear success story about democracy promotion in the Muslim world: the enormous changes that have occurred in Turkey over the last fifteen years or so.

When I spent time in Turkey, in the late 80s, it was an utterly repressive state. Villages were razed, people were taken prisoner and tortured for no reason, and freedom of thought was so completely absent that when I arrived for the first time, wearing (by chance) a T-shirt with pictures of Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Karl Marx, with the words ‘Sure, I’m a Marxist!’, all sorts of people took me aside to warn me that I could be jailed for wearing it. Now it is a functioning democracy: obviously imperfect, but still completely, absolutely different from the state I knew. And that is an enormous achievement.

The EU did this by being willing to offer these countries something they wanted — EU membership — and by insisting that they meet fairly rigorous conditions in order to get it. This was not easy for the EU: imagine if we, for instance, proposed trying to achieve economic integration across the Americas. Integrating much poorer economies with one’s own carries real risks (“giant sucking sound”, anyone?) But it was the means by which the EU managed to help a lot of countries make themselves over into functioning democracies, for which, in my view, they deserve a lot of credit.

(Preemptive note: I am not trying to argue that the EU is somehow perfect in this regard. It isn’t. (Cough, former Yugoslavia, cough.) All I want to claim is that it has done a lot in the way of democracy promotion, and that it has thereby done real and lasting good.)

It’s not clear what analogous steps the US could or should take, and I am not suggesting here that we should try anything like this. The point is just that this is also democracy promotion, and that it has been more successful, in more countries, than our invasions.

There’s a reason for this, I think.

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Djerejian:

I want to stress that there are aspects of neo-conservative doctrine that cannot be dismissed out of hand. The world has seen impressive waves of democratization through the 19th and 20th Centuries, and it’s not implausible in the least to hope for further progress on this score, as many neo-conservatives hope and trust. But we have to move forward keenly aware of the resources available to bring to the fore, and we have to inject common sense and realism into our liberty exportation exercises. Spouting on about ending tyranny in the world, in toto, and arrogantly assuming people are clamoring for the American way of life in Damascus and Teheran and Caracas and Le Paz, strikes me as idiotic in the extreme. Let me be plainer: people who are chanting off the roof-tops for another regime change adventure (they know who they are) need to, quite simply, and put somewhat crudely, STFU. And not a moment too soon.

Some serious folk like George Will and William Buckley and Henry Kissinger understand this, but others, like, say, the merry gang of profoundly unserious commentators (a select few aside) at places like The Corner are still in la-la land, where the big issues of the day are enshrining an American right to torture, or buying Danish ham, or talking about the rice pilaf at Gitmo, or so very cheaply beating up on Jill Carroll’s supposed Stockholm syndrome, and other such low-brow fare. WFB is above this inanity, and privately is likely embarrassed, to the extent he even pays attention, when the likes of Derbyshire revel in alerting us that he doesn’t give a damn that 1,000 Egyptians are dead in a ferry disaster. But there are not many left like WFB around to chide, let alone develop, the next generation of conservative commentators, who have become increasingly cretinized in a climate rife with Coulterisms and obscenely dim clowns like Sean Hannity, so as to regain the sobriety and seriousness this country needs in elite policymaking and other opinion-making circles (perhaps George Kennan’s elitism, often derided, isn’t as unworthy as it may appear given this sorry state of affairs). We are in desperate need of advice that isn’t but warmed-over faux Churchillianism a la VDH, or screw the A-rabs, all of ’em, a la Frank Gaffney/Charles Johnson types (Gaffney’s stance on the Dubai ports deal was woefully hysterical), or the oft-exuberant kinda Brit-style neo-colonialist fervor of the Ferguson’s and Hitchen’s (this last too often revealing the excessive zeal of the convert, when it comes to Mesopotamian happenings, anyway).

‘Tis tempting to leave it simply at:  "indeed."  Alternatively, you could read the whole thing.

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