Scoop!

Oh boy does Sidney Blumenthal ever have the goods on George Bush and the war!

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

In other words, two anonymous officials told Sidney Blumenthal that a Ba'ath Party bureaucrat told George Tenet that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and therefore the war is a sham. I'm going to go way out on a limb here to suggest that, of all the things the administration did and failed to do in order to hasten this war, not listening to Saddam Hussein's foreign minister when Saddam Hussein's foreign minister came to say in private what Saddam Hussein had said in public wasn't one of them.

Obviously it didn't help at all that the administration had convinced itself (or at least agreed to lie to itself) that an advanced weapons program existed in Iraq, had existed for some time, and was growing rapidly. But I don't see at all why George Bush and George Tenet were remiss to ignore this sort of thing. It's just a tragic irony that the self-interested-sounding pronouncements of the entire Ba'ath party happened to be correct. Or at least it would have been a tragic irony if the case for war hadn't been so trumped up in other ways.