Yes, he had no ACTIVE weapons program. The conflation by the hearing ran by the Bush Protection Agency is quite clear. Moreover those reports where created by the Office of Special Plans, the one that the agents had so much heartburn with because of one sided vetting of intelligence and the one that created the NIE report. So of course they're going to match. It's like using a forgery to authenticate a forgery.From the article:
"This was a very high inner circle of Saddam Hussein. Someone who would know what he was talking about," Drumheller says. "You knew you could trust this guy?" Bradley asked. "We continued to validate him the whole way through," Drumheller replied. 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. From the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report (pages 146 and 147 of the PDF):
The 60 minutes story focused on the account of the former Chief of CIA’s Europe Division(Chief/EUR) who claimed that the source described above “told us that [Iraq] had no active weapons of mass destruction program”. This story was followed by numerous other media appearances by the former Chief/EUR such as, CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight and Anderson Cooper 360 degrees, and MSNBC’s Hardball, in which he claimed that the source said Iraq had no WMD programs.
Concerned that something might have been missed in our first Iraq review, the Committee began to request additional information from the Intelligence community and to question current and former CIA officers who were involved in this issue. As noted above, the Committee has not completed this inquiry, but we have seen the operational documentation pertaining to this case. We can say that there is not a single document related to this case which indicates that the source said Iraq had no WMD programs. Both the operations cable and the intelligence report prepared for high-level policymakers said that while Saddam Hussein did not have a nuclear weapon “he was aggressively and covertly developing such a weapon”. Both documents said that ‘Iraq was producing and stockpiling chemical weapons” and they both said Iraq’s weapon of last resort was mobile launched chemical weapons , which would be fired at enemy forces and Israel. The sources comments were consistent with the nuclear, chemical and missile assessments in the October 2002 WMD NIE. The only program not described as fully active was the biological weapons program which the source described as “amateur”, and not constituting a real weapons program.
The former Director of Central Intelligence testified before the Committee in July 2006 that the former Chief/EUR “had mischaracterized [the source’s] information” and said the former Chief/EUR never expressed a view to him, as the former Chief/EUR has claimed publicly, that the source’s information meant Iraq did not have WMD programs. The Committee is still exploring why the former Chief/EUR’s public remarks differ so markedly from the documentation.
Naji Sabri's statments about Saddam having nothing is consistent with what he had always maintained, why would he tell the CIA different and where's the quotes? Moreover, it has been proven that he was right all along.
There are just far tooo many people saying the same thing, but, please, please I hope they conduct investigations as to the Whitehouses and their admins manipulation of evidence as promised some 3 years ago.
As far as Tenet saying he wasn't told? I mean, what's the point, here's the Niger issue that Drumheller voiced concerns about to Tenet:
What's the point? They were going to fix the facts around policy and Tenet was well on board.On the eve of the U.N. speech, Drumheller received a late-night phone call from Tenet, who said he was checking final details of the speech. Drumheller said he brought up the mobile labs.
"I said: 'Hey, boss, you're not going to use that stuff in the speech . . . ? There are real problems with that,' " Drumheller said, recalling the conversation.
Drumheller recalled that Tenet seemed distracted and tired and told him not to worry.
The following day, Tenet was seated directly behind Powell at the U.N. Security Council as the secretary of state presented a detailed lecture and slide show about an Iraqi mobile biological weapons program.
Upvote
0