Drumheller: 'Caught up in the march to war'

Chris Matthews Host of 'Hardball' • Profile

Did President Bush lead our country to war based on faulty intelligence, or did his administration twist and cherry-pick the information for a war they had already decided to start?

Somebody is responsible for this war.  Is it the president, the politicians in Congress who voted to authorize the war, the military who saluted Bush three years ago when the war was popular who are now calling for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s resignation, or was it cooked intelligence from the administration? 

Two high-ranking CIA operatives who were actively involved in the run-up to the war answered this question and more.

Tyler Drumheller was the CIA’s chief of operations in Europe until he retired last year.  He says that the White House ignored warnings that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. 

Gary Berntsen is a former CIA field officer who served on the ground in Afghanistan.  He says the military let Osama bin Laden get away because they didn’t commit the right amount of forces to get him.  He’s also the author of “Jawbreaker: The Attack on bin Laden and al Qaeda.”

This is a transcript of their conversation. 

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST, "HARDBALL":  The case made by the president of the United States in his State of the Union in 2003, was that Saddam Hussein was purchasing uranium materials in Niger in order to build nuclear weapons to use against us. 

We were warned by Condi Rice and others there would be a mushroom cloud if we waited around for a smoking gun.  The case was made to smart people in this country, and they bought the case.  We faced a nuclear threat.

Then afterwards, the administration outed Valerie Plame Wilson, because they wanted to punish, apparently, Joe Wilson for coming out and outing them and saying there never was a deal with Niger.  Am I right on that? 

TYLER DRUMHELLER, FMR. CIA EUROPEAN OPS. CHIEF:  That’s the way it appears.  You’re certainly right on the fact that the information that was in the State of the Union Address was inaccurate, and that the yellowcake reporting from Niger, the reports that had come in on the issue of yellowcake were well-known to have been discredited as far back as September and October. 

MATTHEWS:  When I asked the CIA director, the former director, George Tenet, this same question, I said, if the vice president raised the question about a possible deal in Africa by Saddam Hussein to buy nuclear materials, uranium yellowcake, as you put it, and the report turned out that there wasn’t such a deal and the report went back to the vice president, how could that have happened because the president subsequently gave a State of the Union Address?

And when I ask that, making that very point that there was a threat from a deal in Africa, you know what the former director said?  He said ask Vice President Cheney.  In other words, it’s like high school, this circle that goes around.  Did we or did we not know at the highest levels of this government there was not a deal to buy uranium in Africa by Saddam Hussein? 

DRUMHELLER:  Oh absolutely.  They knew that that was not the truth. 

MATTHEWS:  But why did the president say so in his State of the Union to make the case for war? 

DRUMHELLER:  They were making the case for war.  There was a drive in the administration from the beginning to settle the issue of Iraq for a variety of reasons, which I think they were very sincere about. 

MATTHEWS:  So WMD was the case they made, but it wasn’t the reason?

DRUMHELLER:  Right, no, because they knew by the fall of 2002, they had evidence from good reporting that both the yellowcake reporting was bad, that the reporting on the “Curveball” case, which was a big thing was bad, and that we had a good source that was telling us that they didn’t have this.  

MATTHEWS:  That’s the aluminum tubes.  OK.  In other words, it’s your belief that they misled the American people.  They gave us a case for WMD, especially nuclear. That wasn’t honest? 

DRUMHELLER:  Right. 

MATTHEWS:  Gary, your assessment is the same.  Go back again, before the war, the case they made about a nuclear threat from Iraq and later how they dealt with Valerie Wilson. 

GARY BERNTSEN, FMR. CIA OFFICER:  Clearly here, the administration recognized that Iraq was a threat.  We all recognized that Iraq was a threat.  The question was how do we deal with it?  You know, Saddam himself was considered a weapon of mass destruction.  The point was, they used intelligence to make the case for them. 

MATTHEWS:  Why did they do that? 

BERNTSEN:  Paul Pillar has written in “Foreign Affairs” and he wrote in the “Harvard Review” recently, and he was the national intelligence officer for the Middle East.  He stated this all quite clearly, and he was the man that was probably closest to this in the agency that, you know, the administration turned this process on its head.

It’s unfortunate.  I supported the administration’s effort to remove Saddam, because I thought Saddam was that dangerous.  I’m not happy with the way things have been handled since then. 

MATTHEWS:  Let’s talk about the way they were handled.  As we know from the evidence here, the vice president and Scooter Libby, his chief of staff, made a half a dozen trips to Langley, the CIA headquarters, and pushed the case for a nuclear threat from Iraq, right?

DRUMHELLER:  Yes, they were trying to build public support, clearly.

BERNTSEN:  Right.

MATTHEWS:  And were they basing that upon on a clear, open-eyed look at the evidence available to them, or were they cherry-picking? 

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