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Should Cheney Be Next?
Miers Stays -- for Now
Lame duck press secretary Scott McClellan, who generally avoids speculation about personnel moves, minced no words on Friday in slapping down that morning's story by Elisabeth Bumiller and Jim Rutenberg . They reported that Bolten had raised the possibility of firing Harriet E. Miers from her job as White House counsel.
At Friday's gaggle , McClellan said: "First of all, I think Harriet Miers is a valued and trusted advisor. Secondly, Josh Bolten told the senior staff that the story is not accurate. Josh is not considering any such action, and more importantly, it's not something that is under consideration by the President."
Another Spy Speaks
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On CBS News's 60 Minutes last night, former top CIA official Tyler Drumheller told correspondent Ed Bradley the real failure in the run-up to war in Iraq was not in the intelligence community but in the White House.
"Drumheller was the CIA's top man in Europe, the head of covert operations there, until he retired a year ago. He says he saw firsthand how the White House promoted intelligence it liked and ignored intelligence it didn't.
" 'The idea of going after Iraq was U.S. policy. It was going to happen one way or the other,' says Drumheller."
For example, Drumheller said that Naji Sabri, Iraq's foreign minister, had made a deal to reveal Iraq's military secrets to the CIA.
"According to Drumheller, CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high-level meeting at the White House, including the president, the vice president and Secretary of State Rice.
"At that meeting, Drumheller says, 'They were enthusiastic because they said, they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis.' "
That changed completely when Sabri said Saddam had no active weapons of mass destruction programs.
Said Drumheller: "The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they're no longer interested. . . . And we said, 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said, 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.' "
Drumheller's view is reminiscent of last month's Foreign Affairs article by a fellow former CIA official, Paul R. Pillar . He wrote: "It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized."
The White House (Non) Response
CBS reports that the White House declined a request for an interview for their story. Presidential counselor Dan Bartlett wrote: "The President's convictions about Saddam Hussein's possession of WMD were based on the collective judgment of the intelligence community at that time. Bipartisan investigations . . . found no evidence of political pressure to influence the pre-war intelligence assessments of Iraq's weapons programs."
