Here’s fresh, invaluable fodder to counter those GOP/White House talking points! On Friday evening, Keith Olbermann interviewed longtime intel reporter Richard Sale, who has contributed his reports and analyses to BoomanTribune.com via his friends Larry Johnson and Patrick Lang. (I’ve listed Richard’s contributions here at the end of the interview.)
Here is that important interview. And, by the way, I’ve e-mailed John at Crooks & Liars who hopes to get us the video soon; I’ll post his link when available.
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OLBERMANN: Our fourth story on the COUNTDOWN, somebody is not telling the truth here. Either Congress got all the same information as the administration did, meaning a mixture of facts, fancy, and repeated doubts about key informants and dubiousness about the authenticity of various documents, or they did not.
For some clarity in all this, let‘s bring in Richard Sale, an intelligence consultant, formerly an intelligence reporter for United Press International.
Mr. Sale, thanks for your time tonight.
RICHARD SALE, UPI INTELLIGENCE CONSULTANT: Thank you.
OLBERMANN: Laying aside for the moment the ultimate accuracy of it, and whether what was wrong was already known to be wrong, or it wasn‘t, would any congressman or senator of any party have seen and had the exact same access to the same intelligence that Mr. Bush and the administration did?
SALE: No, absolutely not. The statement is inaccurate, because Congress is actually a consumer of intelligence, it isn‘t an analyst of it. It would not have access to the raw data on which certain summaries and conclusions would be based. And it would have—not have the means to determine what it was being told—if what it was being told were accurate or inaccurate.
OLBERMANN: In October of 2002, Congress got to share in the National Intelligence Estimate, which detailed what the U.S. agencies believed about Saddam‘s weapons capabilities. That one mentioned the Niger documents, which we now know were forgeries, which the Italians now say they warned us were forgeries at some point in—around then, and the mobile biological labs, which was information from an informant called Curveball, whom the Germans called a drunken liar.
Would Congress have known any of the background on where this information came from, or those warnings from the Italians and the Germans about the two sources?
Continued below … and it includes this stunning, must-read section, “For example, in February of 2002, when George Tenet was testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee about worldwide threats, he mentions Iraq only on page 10 of his 18-page testimony, … Then on August 26, 2002, you have Vice President Cheney saying that Iraq is in possession of biological and chemical weapons …”
SALE: Probably not. You‘re—what you‘re basically asking, when you raise that question, is that Congress act as a counterintelligence group, that it would (INAUDIBLE), it would somehow be spurred to question and test the veracity of sources. That‘s really not what it‘s supposed to do.
OLBERMANN: One more example of this. Would someone—somebody in Congress, or the entirety of the group, know, have known about the doubts on this man al-Libi, the al Qaeda operative, who apparently lied to his interrogators about the supposed connections between Iraq and al Qaeda? Would they have been aware before the administration used his information as an argument for war that the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, had said, We think he‘s making this stuff up?
SALE: It would depend on (INAUDIBLE) the way the information was circulated. Certainly, it would have gone through the office of the vice president, and gone to the National Security Council. It really would depend on whether the White House was forthright in warning the Hill, cautioning the Hill about its misgivings, or about the flaws in the data that they had been informed of.
OLBERMANN: Assess for me this quote from the president‘s speech today in Pennsylvania. “A bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community‘s judgments related to Iraq‘s weapons programs.” Is that a final verdict on this issue?
SALE: I don‘t believe so. I think in many cases, what the government did was, they set up parallel centers of intelligence, whose actual task was not to determine substantial fact-based conclusions, but they were designed to cull fragments from uncorroborated data in order to bolster preordained—you know, preordained conclusions, yes.
OLBERMANN: In terms of Congress being briefed on this, and being kept in the know, as the president suggested today, and the Democrats who voted in favor of authorizing the use of force if necessary in 2003, could you compare this to what, for instance, President Kennedy would have done when he briefed the congressional leaders about the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, in terms of relative amount of information that was shared?
SALE: I think it‘s astounding to watch the way the Iraq threat grew, and it grew to the dimensions it did because intelligence was driven by statements by senior policymakers. For example, in February of 2002, when George Tenet was testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee about worldwide threats, he mentions Iraq only on page 10 of his 18-page testimony, and only then to make the observation that Iraq may be continuing to build infrastructure that could produce WMD.
Then on August 26, 2002, you have Vice President Cheney saying that Iraq is in possession of biological and chemical weapons. I mean, there are no qualifications. There is, you know, there‘s just—suddenly, it‘s a huge threat. Where‘s the substantiation? Where are the qualifiers? They—you know, it‘s entirely an effort to move the mind of the public.
OLBERMANN: Ironically enough, there were no qualifiers in the president‘s speech today. either. Richard Sale, an intelligence consultant for UPI, great thanks for your time tonight, sir.
SALE: Thank you.
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Richard Sale’s commentaries at BoomanTribune.com:
- Habakkuk on “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence”
- Key Rove Aide May Testify
- The Office Space Question (And More)
- State Told Libby of Agent’s Identity
- THE NIGER FORGERIES
- Update/Leak indictments
- Aides To Be Indicted, Probe to Continue