More revelations about false WMD "intelligence"

I'm not surprised by this Blumenthal article, but it still staggers the mind when you stop to think about it. The CIA had documented information from Iraq's foreign minister that Iraq had no nuclear, chemical, or biological capability. Tenet briefed Bush on this on September 18, 2002. But the information never went anywhere:

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

If this was the case, why was Tenet sitting behind Powell during the latter's now infamous WMD speech at the U.N.? The mind boggles. Now obviously, they might not have known at the time whether the info they were getting from Iraq's foreign minister was correct. But to have it completely squelched the way it was just goes to show how deeply uninterested the Bush administration was in actually finding out what Iraq's WMD capabilities actually were.

(HT: tristero on Hullabaloo)