Drumheller to Bu$hCo: "Stop preaching to (the Europeans)"

"We Probably Gave Powell the Wrong Speech"

The former chief of the CIA's Europe division, Tyler Drumheller, discusses the United States foreign intelligence service's cooperation with Germany, the covert kidnapping of suspected terrorists and a Bush administration that ignored CIA advice and used whatever information it could find to justify an invasion of Iraq.

Believe me amigos y 'migas, you'll want to be reading this one.

Note that Drumheller seems at least to know which kinds of questions should have been asked by Administration officials. Of course that may just be his way of covering his own arse politically and for when his own trial reaches the docket.

Drumheller: Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention. This is no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion about their value and morality.

-snip-

... The rendition teams are drawn from paramilitary officers who are brave and colorful. They are the men who went into Baghdad before the bombs and into Afghanistan before the army. If they didn't do paramilitary actions for a living, they would probably be robbing banks. Perhaps the Bush Administration deliberately created a gray area on renditions.

(emphasis mine)

In a year rife with ironic statements from folks in positions of authority, I believe that Herr Drumheller (an American, to be clear) must be well aware of his status as a contender for the Crown in that category.

This single interview of this singular person, in a position to know the details of so many of the lies used by the Bush Administration, is simply a Prime Example of so many in a long line of failures by the American MSM to discover the reality of American duplicity and wrong-headedness surrounding everything to do with the invasion of Iraq.

It's not as if Drumheller is excusing his own activities, or relieving anyone else of their responsibility for the misinformation used by the Neocon war machinery to "justify" the invasion. It's simply that the evidence, long harped upon by the progressive Left, was overwhelmingly against recommending that invasion.

A final snippet of the conversation. Then I'll leave off my own rant.

SPIEGEL: But it was your agency that was coming up with all the wrong information concerning Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. To what degree is the intelligence community responsible for the disaster?

Drumheller: The agency is not blameless and no president on my watch has had a spotless record when it comes to the CIA. But never before have I seen the manipulation of intelligence that has played out since Bush took office. As chief of Europe I had a front-row seat from which to observe the unprecedented drive for intelligence justifying the Iraq war.

[The Meatsticks in the Court of the Chimperor are suckers for the "Curveball"]

Now the United States' Congress has just got to do its job as Umpire and call out clearly and decisively, Steeerrrike Three, Mr President! Then maybe we can get back to playing by the Established Rules.