Progressive Minds

Required reading courtesy of the Washington Post today.

Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA aide, says that warnings about frabricated information on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq were ignored.

Shortly before then Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to give his presentation to the United Nations, making the Bush Administration's case for war in Iraq, Drumheller reviewed a classified draft of Secretary Powell's speech, to look for any errors.

And one error in particular stood out at him.  There was a line in Powell's speech, about mobile labs built in Iraq, for germ warfare.

Drumheller says he instantly recognized the source of that fabricated information.  He says it was an Iraqi defector who was suspected of being mentally unstable, and a liar. (The defector went by the code name of "Curveball").  Drumheller took his pen and removed the paragraph about the mobile labs from Powell's speech.

Somehow, the information made its way back into Powell's speech. Drumheller was surprised when he heard Powell utter them during his presentation to the U.N.

The false information about the mobile labs supposedly used for germ warfare, also made its way into George Bush's State of the Union speech, along with those "16 words" that the Administration KNEW were a lie, about Iraq supposedly wanting enriched uranium from Africa.

So the next time you hear a Bush apologist say that "everyone thought" Sadaam Hussein had WMDs, know that they are not telling the truth.  Know that there were those within the intelligence community who sounded the alarm about false information.

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