Drumheller Summary

I just want to sum up the craziness of this 60 Minutes story. I've posted a bit about it today and it's been disjointed and confusing.

1. Drumheller says Bush should have listened to Tenet in the fall of 2002 when Tenet told Bush that a high-level Iraqi official told us Iraq had no WMD. Drumheller uses this to support his statement that this was failed policy, not intelligence. However, Drumheller and reporter Ed Bradley do not mention the fact that Tenet told Bush in January 2003 that the WMD case was a "slam dunk," and was pushing hard for that case in January and February.
2. Drumheller says that in the fall of 2002, he was told, "This isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change," even though Bush said it was about regime change in the summer of 2002.
3. Bradley spends most of the story saying that the intelligence based on forged documents was flawed, which we already knew.
   1. Bradley and Drumheller incorrectly state that the intelligence based on the forged documents made its way into the State of the Union.
   2. Drumheller attempts to explain this by saying, essentially, "yes, Bush and the British claim it was based on separate intelligence, but I don't believe them." He offers no evidence or reason for this, and, indeed, has none.
   3. Bradley does not mention the fact an in-depth investigation with the explicit purpose of showing where the intelligence went wrong -- resulting in the Butler Report -- has backed up the British claim, instead only mentioning in passing that the British still maintain the intelligence is accurate.
4. Bradley states that on July 8, Scooter Libby did not reveal to reporters that the White House had been warned to not use the Niger uranium claim.
   1. We have no reason to think he could possibly know that, as Libby isn't talking, and there's no evidence Miller said so, and there's been talk that maybe Libby talked to other reporters on that day.
   2. News reports were already coming out on July 9 about these warnings, including some from "senior Bush adminisration officials," so there's no reason to think this is in any way relevant, even if true.
   3. The White House had notified the entire public about these warnings on July 18, rendering the whole point moot anyway.

There are other minor errors in the article, but these are the big ones I found. Am I missing anything? Is anything unclear? I want to interview Ed Bradley. I'd ask him:

• If Bush should have listened to Tenet in the fall of 2002, should he have ignored Tenet in January 2003?
• Do you have any evidence at all that the British intelligence is false?
• Have you read the Butler Report?
  • Have you heard of the Butler Report?
• Why do you think we should care about what one guy says he "thinks" (conceding he doesn't know) as opposed to what many other people say they know?
  • It's because they are British, isn't it?
• How do you know Libby didn't tell reporters about the warnings?
  • If he asked the reporters Libby talked to:
    • What, exactly, did they say to support your claim?
    • How do you know he talked to no other reporters?
  • If he meant not on that day specifically, but just in general, in the release of the NIE:
    • Have you read the NIE on Iraq?
    • Really?
    • So how did you miss the last sentence of it?
• Since we know that the White House did tell everyone that they had been warned about the uranium claims, of what significance is Libby's alleged omission, anyway?