Wednesday Hodgepodge

Iraq WMD red flags ignored, ex-CIA aide tells paper

A former CIA officer says he made repeated efforts to alert top agency officials to problems with an Iraqi defector’s claims about the country’s mobile biological weapons labs but he was ignored, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

CIA officer Tyler Drumheller said he personally crossed out a reference to the labs from a classified draft of a U.N. speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell because he recognized the source as a defector, code-named Curveball, who was suspected to be mentally unstable and a liar.

Drumheller told the Post he was surprised when a few days later, on February 5, 2003, Powell told the U.N. Security Council that “we have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and rails.”

Bullshit alert! After watching George Bush and Dick Cheney weep and wail over the “damage” done by the New York Times for reporting that financial data is being dumped into the CIA as part of an effort to find terrorist networks, I kept waiting for Darryl Hannah to pop up and say, “Live, from New York, it’s Saturday Night”. Does George have Alzheimer’s Disease? Has he forgotten that he used to love the New York Times?…

[W]ho can forget that Vice President Cheney instructed his Chief of Staff, the intrepid Scooter Libby, to leak misleading portions of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to the New York Times’ Judith Miller. NPR’s David Greene reported that:

Former vice presidential aide Lewis Libby, indicted for leaking a CIA agent’s identity, has testified that any classified information he may have leaked to a reporter was authorized by President Bush through the vice president. The claim is included in court documents released Thursday.

Libby told a grand jury that classified information he may have leaked to a New York Times reporter was authorized for use by President Bush, acting through Vice President Dick Cheney. Lewis is awaiting trial on charges that he lied to the grand jury, which was investigating the leak of the agent’s identity to the media.

We should also remember that the New York Times was not the only friendly outlet for planting “news”. White House officials turned to Time Magazine and the Chicago Sun Times in shopping information about Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA officer. For this White House, leaking classified information that damages national security is okay as long as it can be used to save the President’s political reputation.