I’m still rubbing my eyes over this.
Former senior CIA official Tyler Drumheller appeared on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” last night to talk about what he knew of the Niger uranium fiasco. As Drumheller tells it, nobody at the CIA believed Iraq was buying uranium from Niger to begin with. The forged documents were considered inconsequential to the facts of the matter — until the White House wanted to use them as evidence.
Drumheller says he told the same story to the White House-appointed WMD Commission. This morning I glanced back at its report, and compared bits of its Niger discussion with Drumheller’s revelations last night.
Here’s a sampling of what I found. In its best light, the panel appears to have engaged in some subatomic-level hair splitting that — coincidentally — points the blame at the intelligence community for the president’s use of the Niger claims:
From last night’s “60 Minutes”:
[I]n early January 2003, the National Intelligence Council, which oversees all U.S. intelligence agencies, did a final assessment of the uranium rumor and submitted a report to the White House. Their conclusion: The story was baseless. . .
Just weeks later, the president laid out his reasons for going to war in the State of the Union Address — and there it was again.
From the White House WMD Commission report:
The Intelligence Community failed to authenticate in a timely fashion transparently forged documents purporting to show that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from Niger.
From last night’s “60 Minutes”:
Drumheller says many CIA analysts were skeptical [of the Niger uranium story]. “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.
From the White House WMD Commission report:
At the time of the State of the Union speech, CIA analysts continued to believe that Iraq probably was seeking uranium from Africa, although there was growing concern among some CIA analysts that there were problems with the reporting.
And, of course, this, from “60 Minutes”:
“It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it’s an intelligence failure. It’s an intelligence failure. This was a policy failure,” Drumheller tells Bradley.
Vs. the White House WMD Commission report:
The [Intelligence] Community’s failure to undertake a real review of the documents — even though their validity was the subject of of serious doubts — was a major failure of the intelligence community.”
The Commission simply didn’t listen to the guy, it seems. Instead, the Commission hung the blame on the intelligence community not for failing to knock down the rumors of the Niger uranium deal — which it did in January 2003 — but for failing to authenticate the documents on which those rumors were based.
Because the intelligence community had debunked the Niger rumors, but not the forged Niger papers specifically, the White House used those documents as evidence (even if they were sourced to the Brits) in the State of the Union address. So the WMD Commission’s reasoning goes.
Forget that Tenet and others had pleaded with the White House to remove references to Niger in an earlier speech, and the White House had done so. Forget that the National Intelligence Council — which speaks for the Intelligence Community as a whole — had told the White House it did not believe the Niger claims.
Perhaps the men and women of the WMD Commission, steeped as they were in facts and experience, can line these up so that nobody looks like they’re twisting facts. I confess I cannot. And if Drumheller’s allegations contain any degree of truth — and I think they do — it causes me to doubt greatly the accuracy of the WMD report.
