Tyler Drumheller on Torture
By SusanUnPC on April 25, 2009 at 11:05 AM in Bush/Cheney, CIA, Current Affairs, Intelligence, Torture
Tyler Drumheller had a distinguished career in the CIA and was chief of the CIA’s covert operations in Europe at the time that the Bush administration was cooking the facts to justify going to war against Iraq. Since he was in Europe, he had intimate knowledge of the infamous “Curveball,” being held in Germany, and who the Bush administration chose to believe. Drumheller was in direct contact with the German operatives who were holding Curveball, and knew about the unreliability of his information. Last year, Drumheller appeared on the “60 Minutes” feature on Curveball. He is also a good friend of Larry Johnson’s. Here he is Friday on Hardball:
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Tyler Drumheller wrote a hell of a book on the infamous “Curveball,” the Iraqi who supposedly had the goods on Saddam’s WMDs. I have his book, and it is a GREAT READ.
I was astonished by the story of Drumheller’s efforts — he was then head of the CIA’s operations in Europe — to prevent the White House and CIA from making the disastrous mistake of using Curveball’s made-up information in Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations. He sent urgent cables to all involved. Then he listened to Powell speak, and was sickened by what he heard.
On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence
Review: The highest ranking CIA official yet to write a book about the current war in Iraq, retired officer Drumheller looks back on his 25 years in intelligence to lay bare the Bush administration’s push toward invasion and its long-term impact on U.S. intelligence gathering capabilities. Central to Drumheller’s argument is the familiar story of the White House’s reliance on the testimony of an Iraqi defector (who came to be known as “Curveball”) in making its case for war; to that effect, there’s much here that simply reiterates the critical chorus that “policy was shaping the intelligence and not the other way around,” as do numerous recent Iraq war exposés. More interesting are the glimpses of well-known milestones in the run-up to the war, including a late-night call from CIA Director George Tenet the night before Colin Powell’s infamous UN address, at which he presented Curveball’s testimony on an Iraqi bioweapons program. With this story and others, Drumheller illustrates how the Bush administration left the CIA scrambling to clean up the ensuing mess when they should have been pursuing new threats: “The biggest difference between the current transition period and those in the past is that we are facing the added challenge of fighting off abuse and being made scapegoats by our political masters.” Drumheller’s book is a lucid account of the Bush administration’s intelligence breakdown, hobbled only by its late arrival to the shelf.
by Ronald Scott
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