"BOOM, THERE IT WAS"

After this week's "shocking announcement" from Rick Santorum that useless (pre-1991) WMD was found in Iraq, I thought this story might give some good insight into our pre-war build-up. This may also explain why some in the CIA feel the need to "leak" instead of trying to change minds within the government.

An excerpt:

In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.

Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.

A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."

The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise.

"We thought we had taken care of the problem," said the man who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, "but I turn on the television and there it was, again."

Read the rest of the story HERE... please.

And here's some video from Drumheller's "60 Minutes" interview (broadcast April 2006):

CLICK PICTURE TO PLAY

Hopefully history will expose these actions completely.

THANKS TO THINKPROGRESS.ORG FOR THE VIDEO