In interviews (video available) with the man who headed CIA's European covert operations, Tyler Drumheller, during that pre-war period and with former Ambassador Joe Wilson who had been sent to Niger to investigate the claims and discovered they were baseless (and whose wife, Valerie Plame, was summarily outed as a covert CIA agent by authorized WH leaks to the press in 2003), 60 Minutes was able to get one simple message across to its viewers: the policy to invade Iraq was fixed and the administration cherry-picked the intel to support its claims, as was also revealed in the now infamous Downing Street Memo.
The White House, which refused to supply an interview for this show, responded to 60 Minutes with this:
"The President’s convictions about Saddam Hussein's possession of WMD were based on the collective judgment of the intelligence community at that time. Bipartisan investigations … found no evidence of political pressure to influence the pre-war intelligence assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs." And he added: "Saddam Hussein never abandoned his plan to acquire WMD, and he posed a serious threat to the American people and to the region."
Lies.
Bush's convictions were based on his collective neocon fantasies of global domination.
Those "bipartisan investigations" were never charged to even look into possible political interference.
Hussein did not pose an immediately "serious" threat to the American people or the region.
For those Bush/Iraq war supporters out here who still believe that Bush's motive was to free or protect the Iraqi people, you'll note that the White House statement quoted above makes absolutely no mention of such a thing. So, while you find comfort wrapped in the delusion that Bush is some sort of Mother Theresa with guns who went blasting into Iraq on some sort of supreme humanitarian mission from God to rescue the suffering hordes from their tyrant - think again. Don't take my word for it. It's their official statement and it's quite clear to me that bombing in the name of compassionate conservatism certainly wasn't part of their justification for going to war.
Why the White House continues to peddle this bull is beyond me. It simply looks like yet another desperate effort to hang on to whatever it can in order to justify its continuing presence there after three very long years and thousands of deaths that could well have been avoided if diplomacy had been given more of a chance.
To those who would argue that there simply was no time left for diplomatic measures, even in the face of the lack of evidence we now have about Hussein's WMDs, I would ask them to ponder this: there is absolutely no doubt that North Korea actually has the technology that is a very real threat to the United States. Why has the Bush government insisted on diplomacy in that instance? Doesn't North Korea have a mad tyrant for a dictator who has also long suppressed his people to the point where many are starving to death on a daily basis? If humanitarian concerns were the real reason for the invasion of Iraq, why has Bush not acted similarly to save the people of North Korea?
No matter how Bushco continues to try to spin this, the majority of Americans no longer support his crusade and even his Republican-led congress is finally using the power of the purse to scale back Iraq war spending without proper accountability and a coherent long-term plan from the Pentagon.
I'll leave the final word on all of this to Tyler Drumheller:
"The American people want to believe the president. I have relatives who I've tried to talk to about this who say, 'Well, no, you can’t tell me the president had this information and just ignored it,'" says Drumheller. "But I think over time, people will look back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time."
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