BUSH LIED, THOUSANDS DIED. It's almost banal to keep harping on the lying point, but this 60 Minutes story about pre-war intelligence really deserves blockbuster status. Tyler Drumheller was the CIA's top covert man in Europe. He turned Naji Sabri, Iraq's Foreign Minister, and got him working as a CIA asset. Drumheller told George Tenet who told George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice. They were excited, naturally, and wanted to know what Sabri had to say. Sabri, they were told, said that Iraq did not, in fact, have an active WMD program. They chose to . . . just ignore this. Then, as Josh Marshall points out, there was a big post-war effort to blame the whole thing on the intelligence community. Commissions were appointed. They interviewed Drumheller. He relayed all this to them. And they chose to . . . just ignore it. Can't have too many inconvenient facts in your assessments, I guess.
--Matthew Yglesias
