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Then two other former CIA officers confirmed this account to author Sidney Blumenthal, adding that George Tenet briefed this information to President George W. Bush on Sept. 18, 2002, and that Bush dismissed the information as worthless.Wait. It gets worse. The two former CIA officers told Blumenthal that someone in the agency rewrote the report from Sabri to indicate that Saddam Hussein was "aggressively and covertly developing" nuclear weapons and already had chemical and biological weapons.
That altered report was shown to the likes of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was "duped," according to one of the CIA officers.
The Chief of Iraqi Intelligence
Again, Colin, I am assuming you take your information from the FCM, so let me brief you, as in the old days, on what else has popped up over the past couple of weeks.
Two other CIA clandestine service officers have told author Ron Suskind that Iraqi intelligence chief Habbush had become one of our secret sources on Iraq, beginning in January 2003.
I hope you are sitting down, Colin, because Habbush also told us Iraq had no WMD. One of the helpful insights he passed along to us was that Saddam Hussein had decided that some ambiguity on the WMD issue would help prevent his main enemy, Iran, from thinking of Iraq as a toothless tiger.
Habbush, part of Saddam's inner circle, had direct access to this kind of information. But when President Bush was first told of Habbush's report that there were no WMD in Iraq, Suskind's sources say the president reacted by saying, "Well, why don't you tell him to give us something we can use to make our case?"
Apparently, Habbush was unable or unwilling to oblige by changing his story.
Nevertheless, later in 2003, when it became clear that he had been telling the unwelcome truth, Habbush was helped to resettle in Jordan and given $5 million to keep his mouth shut.
Suskind also reveals that in the fall of 2003, Habbush was asked to earn his keep by participating in a keystone-cops-type forgery aimed at "proving" that Saddam Hussein did, after all, have a direct hand in the tragedy of 9/11.
This crude forgery was not unlike the one that originally gave us the yarn about yellowcake uranium going from Niger to Iraq.
You will hardly be surprised to hear there is evidence, much of it circumstantial, that Vice President Dick Cheney was the intellectual author of both incredibly inept forgery operations.
Sorry to have to bring this up, but there is something else about Habbush that you need to know. He had actually been in charge of overseeing what was left of the Iraqi biological weapons program after the 1991 Gulf War, and reported that it was stopped in 1996.
Sabri vs. Curveball
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