Via Media Blog reader S.J., NBC reports that — hold on to your seats — a high-ranking member of Saddam Hussein’s government told the CIA before the war that Saddam wasn’t hiding any weapons programs:
In the period before the Iraq war, the CIA and the Bush administration erroneously believed that Saddam Hussein was hiding major programs for weapons of mass destruction. Now NBC News has learned that for a short time the CIA had contact with a secret source at the highest levels within Saddam Hussein’s government, who gave them information far more accurate than what they believed.
According to sources for the piece, the contact was Naji Sabri, Iraq’s former foreign minister under Saddam. And, you’ll never believe this: He told the CIA before the war that Saddam didn’t have WMDs. Pardon me, NBC, but this is supposed to shock me?
The story essentially defuses itself later on:
The U.S. hoped Sabri would leave Iraq and publicly renounce Saddam. He repeatedly refused, sources say, and contact was broken off.
It’s obvious why the CIA dismissed the information he was providing: This man was obviously loyal to Saddam. NBC is suggesting that proper protocol for the U.S. should have been to ignore British, French, Russian, and our own intelligence agencies, and instead rely on a member of Saddam’s inner circle.