CIA Warnings on WMD Ignored

It is shocking to me that the CIA is blamed for the intelligence failure when the CIA, or at least elements within the CIA, got most of the intelligence correct - the CIA knew much of the "intelligence" on WMD was bogus.

It really is the "big lie" of the Bush administration, a lie that is not challenged nearly enough by the press. It is kind of like the Karl Rove campaign strategy of attacking your enemy’s strength as his weakness.

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."

Washington Post