Bad policy, not bad intel

I read two things this morning in an article in The Nation that shocked me: 1) CBS had a report that they chose not to air because they thought it would be too controversial, especially after the Right grilled Dan Rather for being a biased liberal, and 2) the US had recruited Hussein’s Foreign Minister as a spy, and he told the US that they had no WMD, which the US chose to ignore. The evidence that this was a policy failure, not intelligence failure, keeps piling up.

"They were enthusiastic" at first, said Drumheller, "that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis." CIA Director George Tenet reported the news that Hussein's Foreign Minister Naji Sabri was working covertly for the United States to a White House meeting attended by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Their initial enthusiasm, Drumheller says, quickly turned to cold indifference when Sabri told them the opposite of what they wanted to hear.