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." The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise. "We thought we had taken care of the problem," said the man who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, "but I turn on the television and there it was, again."
How did it happen? A lot of willfull ignorance and a little deliberate deceit, but you can read the rest of the article yourself for the gory details.
3 comments:
C'mon, didn't you hear we found a bunch of old chemical munitions that can't even be used anymore? Doesn't that prove to you damn liberals Saddam had WMD all along? I know I am convinced.
Yeah, well unless Saddam was close to finishing that giant cannon so he could launch them over here, that means jack shit to me.
Nah, the guy who was building it for him got assassinated. Brilliant plan though; originally he'd designed that cannon to shoot satellites into space!
Is this story about willful ignorance, or deliberate deceit? I mean, like he said, he marked the lines out and then they came back. What's that about? You can't trust people who do that.
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