EX-CIA AGENTS FINGER CHENEY & BUSH

From the May 2nd Hardball show:

Tyler Drumheller was the CIA’s chief of operations in Europe until he retired last year. He says that the White House ignored warnings that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction.

Gary Berntsen is a former CIA field officer who served on the ground in Afghanistan. He says the military let Osama bin Laden get away because they didn’t commit the right amount of forces to get him. He’s also the author of “Jawbreaker: The Attack on bin Laden and al Qaeda.”


MATTHEWS: What did he mean when I asked him [Tenet] "why didn’t the vice president get a report back from the trip to Africa by Joe Wilson?" That would have cleared this whole thing up. He said to ask him. What does that mean?

DRUMHELLER: I think it means that George didn’t want to answer because he knew what the answer was.

MATTHEWS: Which was he [Cheney] got a report.

Why didn’t all of this intelligence work by you pros to try find out the threat about the real threat from Saddam Hussein, before, after, during the war, why didn’t it get to the American people through the president and vice president? Why was there a wall separating us from the truth?

BERNTSEN: I think that the agency was trying to provide the intelligence to policymakers, that’s our role, to policymakers, not to the American public. What the president does with that information is his business.

MATTHEWS: In this case, he didn’t give us the full scoop, right?

BERNTSEN: Apparently.