Ignorance Was White House Bliss In Runup To War

Another report confirming what we already suspected all along...

Washington Post: Warnings on WMD 'Fabricator' Were Ignored, Ex-CIA Aide Says

In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.

Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.

A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."

The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise.

"We thought we had taken care of the problem," said the man who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, "but I turn on the television and there it was, again."...

[Bold added by moi for emphasis]

Ignoring the facts makes it easier to lie.

Sen. Reid has promised that if the Democrats take the Senate in the elections, he will open a bipartisan committee to look at the pre-war intelligence and how it was handled. I think we need this badly. He's been trying to start one now, but the Republican leaders obviously have not allowed it. Whether one supports the war or not, getting to the bottom of all of this is absolutely necessary.

Given all we have learned, one might be inclined to conclude that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".

[See also earlier Curveball revelations from last November:
New Report Throws White House A Curveball]