Congressional Quarterly reports:
Hearing horror stories about the manipulation of Iraq intelligence is like watching “The Exorcist” again and again: Each time you see something new and laugh at the parts that used to make your hair go up straight.
Patrick Lang told a hilarious story the other night, for example, about a job interview he had with Douglas Feith, a key architect of the invasion of Iraq.
It was at the beginning of the first Bush term. Lang had been in charge of the Middle East, South Asia and terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s. Later he ran the Pentagon’s worldwide spying operations.
In early 2001, his name was put forward as somebody who would be good at running the Pentagon’s office of special operations and low-intensity warfare, i.e., counterinsurgency. Lang had also been a Green Beret, with three tours in South Vietnam.
One of the people he had to impress was Feith, the Defense Department’s number three official and a leading player in the clique of neoconservatives who had taken over the government’s national security apparatus.
Lang went to see him, he recalled during a May 7 panel discussion at the University of the District of Columbia.
“He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me,” Lang recalled, “ which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers — they always had briefing papers, you know — about me.
“He’s looking at this stuff, and he says, ‘I’ve heard of you. I heard of you.’
“He says, ‘Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?’
“And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s really true.’
‘That’s too bad,” Feith said.
The audience howled.
“That was the end of the interview,” Lang said. “I’m not quite sure what he meant, but you can work it out.”
Feith, of course, like the administration’s other Israel-connected hawks, didn’t want “Arabists” like Lang muddying the road to Baghdad, from where — according to the Bush administration theory — overthrowing Saddam Hussein would ignite mass demands for Western-style, pro-U.S. democracies across the entire Middle East.
Lang’s story is merely an illumination of what the Senate Intelligence Committee said in drier language May 25, that the White House was warned before invading Iraq that creating a stable democracy there “would be a long, difficult and probably turbulent process.”
Suddenly the Cassandras are everywhere. These days you can’t drop a Blackberry between Capitol Hill and Dupont Circle without it being stepped on by a former intelligence official with prepared testimony or a book proposal.
For those of us who have been around Washington for more than awhile, it’s unprecedented.
There were defections from the Johnson administration over Vietnam, more with the Nixon administration’s invasion of Cambodia — and of course there were Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which exposed a historical record of official deceit on Indochina.
But back then intelligence officials didn’t quit one day and the next day write real-time books exposing the machinations of current, or near-current, defense and intelligence leaders.
When one did in 1974 — dissident CIA executive Victor Marchetti, who wrote “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” an expose of how the agency overthrew governments, etc. (with John Marks, a former State Department intelligence analyst), there was an uproar.
Shrugs
Today, there are fewer uproars than shrugs, weekend news blips. Even George Tenet’s memoir has already started falling down the rungs of The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.
One reason might be that readers don’t think he’s telling the truth — and too late, at that.
But another may be that the public has already concluded that, at least when it comes to the Middle East, the president and his men are — not to put too fine a point on it — dopes. Or worse.
As Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, appearing on the same panel with Lang, put it, “This is the most colossally inept and incompetent administration in American history.”
And Wilkerson spent more than three decades in the Army. Even coming from the right hand man to the Bush administration’s former secretary of State, however, who was at the center of every intelligence controversy related to Iraq, that’s hardly news anymore.
Still, with the added value of hindsight, their anecdotes still have a fresh punch.
Here’s Another From Lang
“I remember talking to [Paul] Wolfowitz, in his office, in the Pentagon, and telling him — this was after the propaganda build up had started, before the war. I said, ‘You know, these guys are not going to welcome you.’
“He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘For one thing, these guys detest foreigners, and the few who really like you are the least representative of the various breeds of people there. They’re going to fight you, then, if you occupy the place there’s going to be a massive insurgency.’”
“He said, ‘No, no, they’ll be glad to see us,’” Lang continued. “This will start the process of revolution around the Middle East that will transform everything.’
No, Lang told Wolfowitz, “that’s not gonna happen. It’s just an impossibility. They’re not like that. They don’t want to be us.”
Not everyone agrees with all of Lang’s views about the Arab world, but on this issue he was prescient, of course, as were almost all experts on the region outside of the neocon faithful.
How come we learned so much of this dispute only after the war?
Face Time
Wilkerson provides a damning clue.
In February 2003, Powell’s top aide relates, he “spent five of the most intimate days of my life, and five nights, without sleeping, as did my team, staring into . . . the face” of George Tenet, Tenet’s deputy John McLaughlin, and other top CIA officials working on Iraq, at the agency’s headquarters at Langley.
It was the eve of Powell’s now infamous speech at the United Nations detailing Iraq’s alleged biological, chemical and nuclear programs.
“One of the things Secretary Powell and I told Mr. Tenet and Mr. McLaughlin at the outset of our frenetic five or six days, trying to get ready for the U.N., was ‘multiple sources.’ We will not take anything and put it in this presentation, unless there are multiple, independently corroborated sources for the items we’re putting in the testimony,” Wilkerson said.
“That was the going-in position.”
Subsequently, he learned that there was but “a single source for the mobile biological laboratories; that his code name was Curveball; and that there were several very key dissents as to this individual’s testimony, during or before the preparation of the secretary of State.”
Curveball, an Iraqi refugee, turned out to be a liar.
“None of that, ladies and gentlemen, none of that was revealed to the secretary of State, or to me, or to any member of my team, by either John McLaughlin or George Tenet,” Wilkerson said.
Tenet says in his memoir that he never heard of any serious questions about Curveball.
As readers of this column know , however, Tenet’s chief of European operations, Tyler Drumheller, insists he sent a flurry of warnings about Curveball to Tenet’s deputies.
Both can’t be right.
“Either George Tenet is lying through his teeth, or Tyler Drumheller is lying through his teeth,” Wilkerson says, “with regard to one of the most important pillars of Secretary Powell’s presentation at the United Nations: the mobile biological laboratories.”
We’re waiting now for a third CIA official to come forth with an answer.
Duped
The other “pillar” for the invasion, of course, was Saddam Hussein’s alleged connection to al Qaeda.
Now everybody knows that, too, was bogus.
But in Wilkerson’s hands this “old news” seems fresh — like watching Tony Perkins creep up on Janet Leigh in “Psycho” again.
Wilkerson relates how he and Powell were dubious about the Saddam-al Qaeda link the White House was pushing, and were trimming back that section of Powell’s draft on the eve of the speech.
“All of a sudden, we were told that a high-level al Qaeda operative . . . had been interrogated and . . . revealed that there was major training going on by . . . Saddam Hussein’s people — of al Qaeda operatives in how to use chemical and biological weapons,” Wilkerson said.
“This was quite a revelation, and, as you can imagine, changed the secretary’s mind about how much he was going to include about contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in his presentation.”
But that, too, it turned out, was phony.
“One definition of news,” a mentor told me long ago, “is what people have forgotten.”
If that’s so, then the horror stories of Iraq can be told again and again.
And here’s one reason why they should be: CIA veterans are leaving in droves.
The other night I was talking with a recently retired top CIA operations officer, a man who had been a station chief in several foreign capitals.
“This government — what have they done to themselves?” he vented.
“They took a fine intelligence service,” he said, “and managed to destroy it in two administrations.”
I’m probably way out of step, but to me that’s still news.
Friday, May 25, 2007
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Pinpointing Crucial Moments in The History That Got Us Into The Iraq War |
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
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George Tenet cashes in on Iraq |
The former CIA chief is earning big money from corporations profiting off the war -- a fact not mentioned in his combative new book or heard on his publicity blitz.
For Salon, Tim Shorrock writes:
If you go by the book jacket of his new memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," George Tenet is enjoying the life of a retired government servant teaching at Georgetown University, where he was appointed to the faculty in 2004. The former CIA director played up the academic image when he kicked off the recent media blitz for his new book by doing an interview for CBS's "60 Minutes" from his spacious, book-lined office at the university. His academic salary, and the reported $4 million advance he received from publisher HarperCollins, should provide the former CIA director with more than enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his days and leave a substantial fortune to his children.
But those monies are hardly Tenet's entire income. While the swirl of publicity around his book has focused on his long debated role in allowing flawed intelligence to launch the war in Iraq, nobody is talking about his lucrative connection to that conflict ever since he resigned from the CIA in June 2004. In fact, Tenet has been earning substantial income by working for corporations that provide the U.S. government with technology, equipment and personnel used for the war in Iraq as well as the broader war on terror.
When Tenet hit the talk-show circuit last week to defend his stewardship of the CIA and his role in the run-up to the war, he did not mention that he is a director and advisor to four corporations that earn millions of dollars in revenue from contracts with U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense. Nor is it ever mentioned in his book. But according to public records, Tenet has received at least $2.3 million from those corporations in stock and other compensation. Meanwhile, one of the CIA's largest contractors gave Tenet access to a highly secured room where he could work on classified material for his book.
Tenet sits on the board of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software used by the U.S. to monitor terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company recently acquired two of the CIA's hottest contractors for its growing intelligence outsourcing business. At the Analysis Corp. (TAC), a government contractor run by one of Tenet's closest former advisors at the CIA, Tenet is a member of an advisory board that is helping TAC expand its thriving business designing the problematic terrorist watch lists used by the National Counterterrorism Center and the State Department.
Tenet is also a director of Guidance Software, which makes forensic software used by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence to search computer hard drives and laptops for evidence used in the prosecution and tracking of suspected terrorists. And Tenet is the only American director on the board of QinetiQ, the British defense research firm that was privatized in 2003 and was, until recently, controlled by the Carlyle Group, the powerful Washington-based private equity fund. Fueled with Carlyle money, QinetiQ acquired four U.S. companies in recent years, including an intelligence contractor, Analex Inc.
By joining these companies, Tenet is following in the footsteps of thousands of other former intelligence officers who have left the CIA and other agencies and returned as contractors, often making two or three times what they made in their former jobs. Based on reporting I've done for an upcoming book, contractors are responsible for at least half of the estimated $48 billion a year the government now spends on intelligence. But exactly how much money will remain unknown: Four days before Tenet's book was published, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence decided not to release the results of a yearlong study of intelligence contracting, because disclosure of the figure, a DNI official told the New York Times, could damage national security.
That may be a real break for Tenet. Under his watch, according to former CIA officials and contractors I've interviewed, up to 60 percent of the CIA workforce has been outsourced. A spokesman for the CIA told me last week that that figure "is way off the mark," but wouldn't provide the actual figure, which he said is classified. But publication of that number could prove embarrassing to Tenet, particularly in light of his own deep involvement in the privatization of U.S. intelligence.
Despite making himself available for plenty of airtime of late, Tenet was not available for an interview with Salon, said Tina Andreadis, his publicist at HarperCollins. She referred me to Bill Harlow, Tenet's co-author and his former director of public affairs at the CIA, who said Tenet's work on corporate boards "is all a matter of public record."
Tenet's ties with contractors were underscored last week in a dispute between two groups of former CIA officials over Tenet's legacy. On April 28, six former intelligence officers wrote to Tenet, saying he shared culpability with President Bush and Vice President Cheney for "the debacle in Iraq," and suggesting he donate half the royalties from his book to Iraq war veterans and their families. All of the signatories had severed their ties to U.S. intelligence, although three of them, Phil Giraldi, Larry Johnson and Vince Cannistraro, work as consultants for news organizations, corporations and government agencies outside of intelligence.
A few days later, six recently retired officers responded. They called the first letter a "bitter, inaccurate and misleading attack" on Tenet and pointed out that it was drafted by officers who "had not served in the Agency for years." Tenet, his supporters said, "literally led the nation's counterterrorism fight." And three of its six signatories were directly involved in that fight -- as contractors. They included John Brennan of the Analysis Corp.; Cofer Black, Tenet's former counterterrorism director and vice chairman of Blackwater, the private military contractor; and Robert Richer, the former deputy director of the CIA's clandestine services. Richer recently left Blackwater to become the CEO of Total Intelligence, a new company formed with Black and other ex-CIA officials to provide intelligence services to corporations and government agencies.
The company with the closest ties to the CIA -- and the biggest potential financial payoff for Tenet -- is L-1 Identity Solutions, the nation's biggest player in biometric identification. L-1's software, which can store millions of ID records based on fingerprints and eye and facial characteristics, helps the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence "in the fight against terrorism by providing technology for insurgent registration [and] combatant identification," the company says. L-1 technology is also employed by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security for U.S. passports, visas, drivers' licenses and transportation worker ID cards. L-1 clearly hired Tenet for the business he could secure at the CIA. "We want the board to contribute in a meaningful way to the success of the company," CEO Bob LaPenta told analysts during an earnings conference call last year. "You know, we're interested in the CIA, and we have George Tenet."
Last fall, as part of its push into intelligence outsourcing, L-1 acquired SpecTal, a Reston, Va., intelligence contractor with at least 300 employees with security clearances, gaining instant access to several agencies where SpecTal had contracts, including the CIA, the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Just recently, L-1 picked up another intelligence contractor, Advanced Concepts Inc., where 80 percent of the 300 employees have top-secret clearances. Tenet, according to company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, was provided with 80,000 shares of L-1 stock when the company acquired Viisage, where Tenet was also a director. At the company's recent price of $19.79, those shares are worth more than $1.5 million. According to an SEC filing on April 6, in 2006 Tenet received director's compensation of $129,337, and $332,030 worth of stock. "George has amazing experience," said Doni Fordyce, L-1's executive vice president for communications. "We're in the security business, right? So he's a tremendous asset." In 2006, L-1 earned $164.4 million, up from $66.2 million in 2005.
Last October, Tenet continued to profit from the defense industry by joining the board of directors of QinetiQ Group PLC. QinetiQ, whose name draws from the fictional British spook who made the gadgets in the James Bond movies, moved aggressively into the U.S. market in 2003 after a majority of its voting stock was acquired by the Carlyle Group. (Carlyle sold off its remaining shares in February, making a $470 million profit on its original investment.)
Here, too, Tenet is profiting from involvement in Iraq and the broader war on terror. QinetiQ's recent acquisitions in the U.S. market include defense contractor Foster Miller Inc., which makes the so-called TALON robots used by U.S. forces in Iraq to neutralize IEDs. QinetiQ also controls Analex Corp., an information technology and engineering company that earns 70 percent of its revenue from the Pentagon. Among the clients listed on Analex's Web site are the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages the nation's spy satellites, and the Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office -- a secretive agency that has been criticized by members of Congress for collecting intelligence on American antiwar activists. According to QinetiQ's Annual Report and Accounts for 2006, non-executive directors like Tenet are paid a minimum of $70,000, with some paid up to more than a quarter-million dollars.
At QinetiQ, Tenet is working with Duane P. Andrews, a former assistant secretary of defense who is QinetiQ's CEO for North America. Prior to coming to QinetiQ, Andrews served for 13 years as a senior executive with Science Applications International Corp. SAIC is one of the largest U.S. intelligence contractors and a major provider of private sector analysts to both the CIA and the National Security Agency. Vanity Fair recently referred to it as a "shadow government."
There is an intriguing detail about SAIC buried in Tenet's acknowledgements in his new book: "Arnold Punaro of SAIC," he writes, "graciously provided me with a secure workspace to review and work with classified material." Punaro is identified on the SAIC Web site as the company's executive vice president for government affairs, communications and support operations, as well as general manager of its Washington operations.
Getting use of such a secure room is no small feat. In the intelligence business, such rooms are known as sensitive, compartmented information facilities, or SCIFs. To prevent eavesdroppers from picking up top-secret conversations, a typical SCIF has film on the windows, walls fitted with soundproof steel plates and white-noise makers embedded in the ceiling. Punaro must have had approval from SAIC and the CIA to allow Tenet such access. Harlow, Tenet's co-author, explained to Salon that Tenet could have used office space at the CIA to work on the book, but that he "believed it would be better not to be producing his memoirs at a government facility." It was "a matter of convenience" to use the room at SAIC, Harlow said.
In 2006, shortly after he joined TAC's advisory board, Tenet joined the board of directors of Guidance Software. One of Guidance's products, EnCase, has been used extensively by U.S. law enforcement, intelligence and military agencies to collect evidence in criminal and counterterrorism cases, including the prosecution of Enron executives and the British "shoe bomber," Richard Reid. Tenet's "years of experience fighting terrorism and extensive knowledge of potential and existing threats will expand Guidance's unparalleled expertise in computer forensics and network investigations," the company noted in a press release. According to SEC records, Tenet earned $58,112 in 2006 as a director and holds 9,700 shares of company stock. At its recent price of $12.85 per share, that would make Tenet's stock worth more than $124,000.
In his work at the Analysis Corp., Tenet has been reunited with John O. Brennan, his former chief of staff and, according to the book, one of his "closest advisers." Brennan spent 25 years in the CIA, and was deputy executive director at the time of the 9/11 attacks. In 2003, he was dispatched by Tenet to run the CIA's Terrorist Threat Integration Center. It eventually morphed into the U.S. government's National Counterterrorism Center, which Brennan ran from December 2004 to August 2005, when he retired from government. (The center, which integrates intelligence from various agencies, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, is staffed primarily by contractors.) In November 2005, Brennan joined TAC, which has contracts with the State Department, Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Brennan, the company's CEO, also declined a request from Salon for comment for this report.
In a statement TAC released when Tenet was appointed to that company's board last year, Tenet said he would help the company "address critical needs as government and industry work together to fight terrorism." Serving with Tenet on the advisory board there are Alan Wade, Tenet's former chief information officer, and John P. Young, a former CIA senior analyst. TAC is a privately held company and no public information is available regarding compensation for its board members. But between the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and 2006, the company's income quintupled, from less than $5 million in 2001 to $24 million in 2006.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
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George Tenet Slammed and Dunked: Moment of Truth or Just More Sellout? |
Colleen Rowley's letter to George Tenet:
Let's tell, let's everybody tell the truth," said our country's former Director of Central Intelligence during his interview on Sunday night's 60 Minutes. But George Tenet is over 5 1/2 years late and still seems to suffer from a terrible case of selective memory that even a $4 million book contract can't remedy.
The bulk of the job of refuting and correcting Tenet's story will have to come from former CIA and other intelligence insiders who knew him and the whole of his situation better. (See "An Open Letter to George Tenet" and Michael Scheuer's op-ed "Tenet Tries to Shift Blame. Don't Buy It.") I also have a little first-hand experience that contradicts what Tenet has pulled out to explain the post 9/11 need to torture.
In the interview, 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley, to his credit, asked Tenet over and over about his authorizing torture. The CIA's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" that Tenet signed off on are said to include sleep deprivation, extreme cold and water boarding which causes a severe gag reflex, as water is continuously poured over the face. Tenet admitted losing sleep over his role in authorizing such "new territory" but refused to call it torture saying he didn't want to "engage in a semantic debate" with Pelley. (You know, trying to figure out what the meaning of the word "is" is or whether water boarding is torture, those type of semantic debates.) Anyway in the midst of their semantic debate, Tenet launched into an explanation of the "tension" he was under:
The context is it's post-9/11. I've got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City, apartment buildings that are gonna be blown up, planes that are gonna fly into airports all over again. Plot lines that I don't know - I don't know what's going on inside the United States. And I'm struggling to find out where the next disaster is going to occur. Everybody forgets one central context of what we lived through. The palpable fear that we felt on the basis of the fact that there was so much we did not know . . . 'Cause these are people that will never, ever, ever tell you a thing. These are people who know who's responsible for the next terrorist attack. These are hardened people that would kill you and me 30 seconds after they got out of wherever they were being held and wouldn't blink an eyelash. . . . You can sit there after, you can sit there five years later, and have this debate with me, all I'm asking you to do, walk a mile in my shoes when I'm dealing with these realities.
One little problem, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the person Tenet is discussing and who reportedly was water boarded, was not arrested until March 1, 2003, eighteen months after 9/11. His arrest and torture was post 9/11 like it will always be post 9/11. The actual context was that by March 2003, the bulk of our troops had already been diverted away from the war against Al Qaeda and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Our troops were already poised on Iraq's borders, awaiting Bush's order to commence the invasion of a country which didn't even have ties to Al Qaeda terrorism. That's the context of the actual "tension" under which Tenet signed off on torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others. When former Attorney General Ashcroft was questioned about the "post 9-11 round-up" of innocents in New York City--after the Department of Justice's Inspector General found that hundreds of innocent people had been improperly detained for 6 to 9 months--AG Ashcroft similarly refused to apologize "for protecting the American people." But at least AG Ashcroft's explanation fit better timing-wise with the confusion and fear that existed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 than the context Tenet said existed 18 months afterward.
It must also be remembered that we already had one actual 9/11 terrorist suspect, Zacarias Moussaoui, in custody over three weeks before 9/11. And George Tenet was briefed on the facts of the investigation surrounding his detention in August 2001 with a powerpoint entitled something like "Fundamentalist Learns to Fly." At the time, DCI Tenet inexplicably took no action and did not even seek to confer with the Acting FBI Director about the case. But Tenet IS reported to have immediately linked Moussaoui to the Al Qaeda attack on 9/11 as soon as he was informed at breakfast of planes flying into the World Trade Center.
Moussaoui was not tortured however. Nor were "enhanced interrogation techniques" ever used on him. In fact FBI agents could not even get permission to attempt a plain interview of Moussaoui which permission I asked for on 9/11/01 and again on 9/12/01. I tried to argue with the Acting United States Attorney as well as with Department of Justice attorneys that the "public safety exception" to the Miranda rule pertained, not of course to engage in any "enhanced techniques" that might coerce a confession or produce unreliable information but just to circumvent the prophylactic component of the Miranda Rule so that he might be questioned about other Al Qaeda plans to hijack planes or attack U.S. citizens. But they all said no, there was no emergency. I argued harder on the morning of 9/12/01 when the full scope of what had happened was more apparent. This caused DOJ attorneys to discuss the situation a little longer than the U.S. Attorney had the day before, but I was ultimately told that whatever emergency had existed, it was over. We were so flabbergasted about the fact we were told no public safety emergency existed just hours after the attacks that my boss advised me to document it in a memo which became the first document in the legal subfile of the FBI's "Penttbom" case.
Nothing changed after Moussaoui's laptop and personal effects were searched revealing the fact that he had collected data on cropdusting and wind patterns and establishing his connections to the 9-11 masterminds. In early July 2002, when Moussaoui was making overtures that he WANTED to talk and was still the only 9-11 terrorist in custody--it would be months more before the real masterminds of the attack, either Ramzi Binalshibh or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were arrested--I called to both Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff's office as well as to FBI Director Mueller's office to renew the request to attempt a plain interview of Moussaoui. (At the time Chertoff, as head of the Justice Department's criminal division and one of the chief architects of the Bush Administration's legal strategies in the War on Terror, supervised the prosecution's case against Moussaoui. Chertoff also reportedly advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the outer limits of legality in coercive interrogation sessions.) I talked to assistants for both Chertoff and Mueller, trying to impress on them the need to interview Moussaoui, someone who would likely know of plans for a second strike. I pointed to the suspicious nature of the cropdusting information found (which of course they were well aware of) and argued we needed to find out more about that to possibly prevent future attacks. But by that time Moussaoui had been charged with the death penalty and I deduced that AG Ashcroft would not allow any potential for bargaining leverage to be injected into the case.
And so it rang hollow when these same officials, including Tenet, would constantly say they were doing everything in their power to prevent another terrorist attack, when they said in early 2003 that's why we needed, of all things, to launch a brand new pre-emptive invasion of Iraq; when I had been told there was no "public safety emergency" on the day of the attacks; and when it seemed that death penalty considerations outweighed the need to find out information about possible second strikes. It rang hollow then and it still rings hollow when Tenet pulls it out to try to explain that's why we needed to begin torturing people.
In contrast to what Tenet stated about the efficacy of the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques," it's also worth repeating that the considered wisdom of expert FBI investigators is that torture doesn't work to produce reliable, timely information. Interviewing, on the other hand, is more likely to produce solid information. One of the FBI's most experienced agents in Al Qaeda terrorism and one of the few Arabic speaking ones has made this same point in discussing prior successful investigations of Al Qaeda operatives.
There are certainly other questions that arise if Tenet's description of "the palpable fear that we felt (post 9/11) on the basis of the fact that there was so much we did not know" did in fact drive his signing off--and presumably the new Director of Central Intelligence's continued signing off--on the use of torture and other illegal actions. For starters, if we allow that "palpable fear" to eliminate due process, we are opening ourselves up to real mistakes. For how do we even know we are torturing true terrorists? The use of torture or "taking the gloves off" was first suggested with regard to those swept up in the post 9-11 detentions who were later shown to be innocent. Already at least two individuals who were victims of the CIA's "extraordinary renditions" and who were subsequently tortured, Khalid El Masri and Maher Arar, have turned out innocent. CIA operatives have been or are to be indicted in both Germany and Italy for violating these allied countries' laws.
It's certainly safe to say that reversing the terrible mistakes of Bush, his neo-con ideologues and those like Tenet who knuckled under to their pressure, is going to require a lot more "truth" than George Tenet was willing to provide for $4 million and a presidential medal of freedom.
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NBC's Pentagon Reporters Confirms Tenet's Account |
In a speech before the annual Business Expo at the Rhode Island Convention Center, NBC's chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski confirmed the gist of former CIA director George Tenet's charge that Bush administration officials began talking of including Iraq in any retaliatory attack just hours after the 9/11 attacks, even though all indications pointed to Al Qaeda as being responsible.
The Providence Journal reports:
In his new book, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet says White House and Pentagon officials were determined to attack Iraq long before 9/11, and afterward spun intelligence information to build a case for war with Saddam Hussein.
Miklaszewski said that while the opening anecdote in Tenet's book is wrong - Tenet writes of having an exchange with military consultant Richard Perle at the White House a day after the attacks when, actually, Perle was in France then - the veteran television newsman says Tenet is right about the president's intentions.
"Some things are right on the mark, when he says the Bush administration appeared predisposed to attack Iraq.''
How does Miklaszewski - whom the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce paid $30,000 for his talk - know for sure?
His information, Miklaszewski told an audience of about 200 people, comes from some "off the record'' notes taken in the White House situation room in the hours after the attacks. Miklaszewski said someone gave him the notes two years ago. He did not say who nor explain why, if they were "off the record'' he was now sharing them with an audience.
However, the notes describe, Miklaszewski said, then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld vowing to avenge the terrorist attacks and voicing frustration that attacks against the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 and the attack on the Cole, in 2000, had gone unavenged.
Reading from his notes, Miklaszewski quoted Rumsfeld as saying five hours after the terrorist attacks: "My interest is to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time we go after al-Qaida.''
"We ought not to look only'' at Osama bin Laden, Rumsfeld allegedly said before holding a conference call with President Bush. During the conversation, "Rumsfeld says not to focus solely on al-Qaida, consider all those range of options. And the president's response was yes.''
Said Miklaszewski: "So there is no question that Tenet got the time wrong [with meeting Perle in the White House] but there is no question in my mind, and with subsequent conversations I had with officials in the Pentagon, that the Bush administration had their sights set on attacking Saddam Hussein and Iraq long before there was even an effort to gather any evidence … that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attack. And all the evidence says quite the opposite.''
Miklaszewski, just the latest celebrity journalist to espouse a personal opinion before the annual business gathering, also shared some inside political analysis that even the most casual follower of the news would have considered stale. Among them: that former First Lady and Sen. Hillary Clinton is "one tough cookie'' who White House staffers feared and that North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is a "loser'' for trying to defend a $400 haircut.
Miklaszewski seemed more comfortable talking about what he knows best: the military and terrorism.
Quoting from a recent public-opinion poll, Miklaszewski said while 50 percent of people still think the Iraq war is a priority, only 18 percent mentioned terrorism as a concern.
"The American people have begun to forget about 9/11,'' he said. "This is a very patient enemy. They can certainly wait out America's attention span and that troubles me.''
Monday, April 30, 2007
| [+/-] |
Transcript of Hardball with Chris Matthews, April 30, 2007 |
Guests John Harris, Lois Romano, Tony Blankley, Howard Fineman, Ron Reagan, and Russell Simmons join host Chris Matthews
Transcript:
CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: The countdown. Three days from now, the Republican presidential candidates meet to debate. The setting couldn‘t be better, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. Let‘s get our scorecards ready. Let‘s get ready for the Republicans to play HARDBALL.
Good evening. I‘m Chris Matthews. Welcome to HARDBALL. The man trusted with keeping the country‘s secrets is now spilling them in a revealing memoir. Former CIA director George Tenet, who was a Bush loyalist, is now lashing out at his administration, saying that Iraq was on the White House‘s agenda from the start and that no one at the White House ever asked him, George Tenet, the CIA director, if we should go to war with Iraq.
Why didn‘t Tenet speak out when he was at the CIA? Is this another case of, Don‘t blame me for the war? Is he trying to absolve himself from the war in Iraq? In a minute, NBC‘s Tom Brokaw‘s interview with George Tenet on the “Today” show this morning.
Plus, this Thursday is the MSNBC/Politico.com Reagan Library GOP presidential debate. I‘ll be moderating it, and MSNBC will broadcast it live beginning at 8:00 PM Eastern. That‘s this Thursday.
Let‘s take a look at Tom Brokaw‘s interview now with former CIA director George Tenet.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)TOM BROKAW, FORMER NBC ANCHOR: You had Condi Rice ignoring your warnings, Vice President Cheney exaggerating the threats repeatedly, Don Rumsfeld and the Pentagon running what effectively was a rogue CIA, his own intelligence operation. And you didn‘t threaten to resign then.
GEORGE TENET, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Well, Tom, I don‘t know that I agree with the premise of everything in your question, but let me say this.
I had a job to do. We had a war on terrorism. We had conflict in Iraq. I
I thought I could best serve my country by continuing to do my job every day. A director of central intelligence is agnostic on policy because we have to become objective and give them the best data possible, and I thought it was best to serve my country by staying in my job.
BROKAW: But if the country was not getting the true story, which it‘s fairly clear from your book that it was not, that the vice president had one clear view of what was necessary in Iraq, that the Defense Department had its own intelligence operation going on, and Condoleezza Rice was not responding with alacrity to your warnings, very clear warnings in July of 2001 that an attack was imminent, doesn‘t the country deserve to know that?
TENET: Well, Tom, I chose to do my job in a way where you stay inside the system, you do your best, you push your objective analysis, you make people aware of what you believe to be true. While people think, Well, why are you talking now? Why have you been silent so long? I certainly wasn‘t silent within the purview of my job and in the councils of the administration in terms of what we said and how we said it.
BROKAW: There‘s an anecdote in your book. In August, 2001, just before 9/11, you went out to Crawford, Texas, to make sure the president was seeing all that he should be seeing, given the warnings and the briefings that had been coming from the CIA. You ride around the ranch in his pickup and talk, as you describe it, about the flora and the fauna. Did he ever stop the pickup and turn to you and say, Mr. Director, what is going on here? What do we have to worry about?
TENET: Well, Tom, throughout that summer, we had those kinds of conversations with the president. The irony is, is that by the end of July, the intelligence went fairly silent. We weren‘t seeing the same kind of eruptive threat reporting we had been seeing May, June, July, August. So in that time period, we were in a quiescent time period.
The president is the one, in concert with our own work, when he was apprised of the imminence of what we were predicting, asked a very important question. Is it possible that they‘re coming here? That was the result of an August 6 President‘s Daily Brief that said he is determined to strike inside the United States, a strategic warning, not a tactical warning. So August was a quiet period.
BROKAW: But at the end of July, one of your very best people within the agency has said they are coming here.
TENET: Tom, it was eerily quiet that day, as we had just exhausted the list of threats we were dealing with, and I suspect he was ruminating and said, They‘re coming here, and he turns out to be quite prescient.
BROKAW: You were with Colin Powell when he went to the United Nations, the centerpiece of the administration‘s attempt to sell this country on the war. You were sitting behind him when he made that presentation. Was there ever a moment that day when you thought to yourself, We‘re way out on a limb here?
TENET: No, there wasn‘t. Subsequently, of course, we learned that much of what we gave the secretary to say had turned out not to be accurate. And I‘ll say it‘s an awful thing to reflect on. The secretary of state represents the United States of America, and we did not help him and we did not help ourselves.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MATTHEWS: Well, that was Tom Brokaw, of course, interviewing former CIA director George Tenet this morning.
HARDBALL correspondent David Shuster is here with me right now. You know, the latest—let‘s put this interview in perspective. The latest NBC/”Wall Street Journal” poll showed that 55 percent, a clear majority, don‘t think victory is achievable in Iraq. Is this all covering their butts? Is this—everybody‘s got a book out now saying, I didn‘t do it.
DAVID SHUSTER, HARDBALL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Absolutely. I mean, you‘ve got George Tenet has already been asked by six former CIA officials to return the Medal of Freedom that he was given. He‘s been asked to take his $4 million that he got in advance for a book deal and give it to Iraqi veterans who‘ve been wounded. I mean, this is an administration...
MATTHEWS: Are we going to hear from Cheney next? Is Cheney going to say, I wasn‘t part of this thing? Let‘s take a look at—here‘s Rumsfeld. This is an interesting pattern, how these people are peeling off right now. Three years ago, I asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld if he ever advised President Bush to go war in Iraq. A fascinating exchange followed.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)MATTHEWS: Did you advise the president to go to war?
DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: He did not ask me the question.
And to my knowledge, there are any number of people he did not ask...
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Did that surprise you, as secretary of defense?
RUMSFELD: Well, I thought it was interesting. He clearly asked us, Could we win? And I said, obviously, that the military are sure that they can prevail in that conflict in terms of the—changing the regime.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MATTHEWS: Tenet was asked—George Tenet—last night on CBS‘s “60 Minutes” if the White House ever asked him on whether or not we should go to war in Iraq. Let‘s take a look at that exchange.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did anyone at the White House, did anyone in the Defense Department ever ask you whether we should go to war in Iraq?
TENET: The discussions that are ongoing in 2002, in the spring and summer of 2002, are how you might do this, not whether you should do this.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nobody asks?
TENET: Well, I don‘t remember sitting down at a principals committee meeting and everybody saying, OK, there‘s a deep concern about Iraq. Is this the right thing to do? What are the implications? I don‘t ever remember that galvanizing moment when people sit around and honestly say, Is this the right thing to do?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MATTHEWS: So here we are with history being made, or at least being reported from the people inside for the first time. Rumsfeld said he was never asked. Tenet now says he was never asked if we should go to war. But Tenet also says in this book, which I think is the big story, that Cheney came to office determined to attack Iraq. It had nothing to do with 9/11. He was going to do—nothing to do with WMD, nuclear, all that stuff. That just came out later to make the case.
So that gets Tenet off the hook, in a sense. But it‘s also making the case against Cheney, that Cheney came out and said there was a nuclear reasoning to and all these other reasons, when, in fact, he already had his reason. Cheney wasn‘t telling us that it was on his agenda, at least according to Tenet here.
SHUSTER: Right. And one of the things that‘s so intriguing about this book, Chris, is in it, Tenet talks about how—that the weapons of mass destruction case—that was just the public face of the war. He suggested that everybody within the administration seemed to know that the largely unarticulated view about spreading democracy in the Middle East, that was what was driving Vice President Cheney.
MATTHEWS: Right. That‘s the neoconservative point of view. It wasn‘t what they sold to the public, in fact, if you listened very attentively during this case for the war. And by the way, the American people were very hard to sell on this. About half the people went along with it eventually. But they went along with it, smart people, because they feared that this guy had a nuclear weapon he could use against us. It wasn‘t about Middle East politics. And that was what Cheney sold so successfully on programs like “Meet the Press.”
SHUSTER: Right. And that‘s where the controversy comes in because as Tenet is suggesting, look, it wasn‘t the weapons of mass destruction case that was the reason for the war. He was out there allowing Vice President Cheney, Scooter Libby, the president, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was then the national security adviser, to talk about the mushroom cloud. And the criticism now of Tenet is that by his silence, by his working within the channels, within the administration...
MATTHEWS: The guy‘s sitting behind Colin Powell at the U.N. while a lot of the middle-of-the-road people who decide everything in this country the middle road decides it—the middle road said, You know, if Colin Powell, who we trust, one of the great men of our time, believes in the WMD case, and there‘s George Tenet, the CIA director, sitting right behind him, backing him up, there must be a WMD case. The vice president of the United States, who has an avuncular style, he comes on and says, “Meet the Press,” they got a nuclear weapon they‘re working on. We say—the middle-of-the-road people—not me, of course, but the middle-of-the-road people said—because I was always skeptical of this crowd. But let‘s go on.
SHUSTER: Well, and the language was always one of certainty. You always had Vice President Cheney saying “we know.” You have Donald Rumsfeld saying “we know.” You have the president saying the evidence is clear, “we know.”
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: I wish somebody would write a book and tell me when President Bush, who‘s not an ideologue, why he went along with this war, with the neocons, with Tenet, with all the rest of them. I‘ve never heard that really good account. Have you?
SHUSTER: No, but...
MATTHEWS: We don‘t know why he took us to war. We know Cheney wanted to go from day one, according to Tenet.
SHUSTER: No, but what you pick up, Chris, especially with Tenet, is you pick up that there were series of people like George Tenet who were enablers. For whatever reason, the president wanted to go to war, there was George Tenet, the head of the CIA, providing information, allowing the president to make his case and saying, You know what? I‘m going to be the team player. Even though he now says he personally felt that the wrong case was being made, that the evidence didn‘t support what the administration was saying, he enabled the president through his silence, and that‘s where the criticism is coming in.
MATTHEWS: You know, I‘m skeptical of ideology all the time. Anyway, thank you, David Shuster. Thank you. George Tenet will be our guest next Monday on HARDBALL.
Coming up: Tony Snow returns to work at the White House. David Gregory interviewed him today, and he‘s going to join us to give us that interview.
And this Thursday, by the way, again, the first-in-the-country Republican debate. The 10 GOP presidential candidates meet at the Reagan Presidential Library in California. I‘ll moderate live at 8:00 PM Eastern. And you can see it right here only on MSNBC and our on-line partner, Politico.com.
You‘re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL. Today was Tony Snow‘s first day back at work at the White House as press secretary to the president after recovering from cancer surgery. And with a veto showdown looming over the Iraq war spending bill, he‘s returning to a full workload, obviously.
NBC White House correspondent David Gregory interviewed Snow upon his return today—David.
DAVID GREGORY, NBC CORRESPONDENT: Chris, interesting day here, an emotional one at the White House. You‘re right, Tony Snow‘s return got a full round of applause in the press room, an unusual reaction for a press secretary, especially when times are as intense as they are. But it got one because Tony Snow has gone through a lot and faces an uncertain future. He‘s back before his chemotherapy starts for his new bout with colon cancer, cancer cells also attached to his liver. So the future is uncertain. The treatment starts, but he got a good reception today.
We did have a chance to talk a little bit later in the day, and I started by asking him what I think is an awkward question for people when they encounter somebody with cancer, and that‘s the very simple question of, “How are you?”
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)TONY SNOW, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I‘m doing fine. You know, it‘s funny, it shouldn‘t be that awkward. One of the things I‘ve learned the last couple years is people get so scared when they hear the word cancer that they immediately let fears dominate them and they let their imaginations run wild.
You know, as you know, I lost my mom to cancer when I was a kid. She didn‘t really stand a chance, but now you‘ve got amazing research that is moving at incredible speed. So a lot of conditions that weren‘t treatable years ago are now curable, or people are racing toward cures. So you see more and more people—Elizabeth Edwards is one of them, who‘s out leading a full life while getting cancer treatment. And it‘s possible now to do that sort of thing.
GREGORY: I remember talking to you before you took this job. And one of the things that you really hit home was, Look, I‘m going to get a clean bill of health...
SNOW: Yes.
GREGORY: ... before I take this job at the White House.
SNOW: Yes.
GREGORY: And you got that.
SNOW: Yes. You know, it‘s interesting that—I did. And even before I went in for this surgery five weeks ago, it was pretty much anticipated that I was clean. The problem you have is that some of the very best diagnostic stuff you have is still fairly imprecise, so there are some things that you can‘t see. I mean, my PET scan was clean. My CAT scan was clean. My blood work was good. And I‘m really glad that we decided to go ahead and be aggressive. We had what we thought might have been an enlarged lymph node, and lo and behold, it was a cancer.
Having said that, you go back now and ask, OK, so what‘s a clean bill of health? Are you going to be able to do your job? And the answer is yes. One of the interesting things I‘ve learned just in the last five weeks is how many people are walking around now who have cancer, who are getting regular treatments, and who are doing what I‘m hoping we‘re going to be able to do, which is to knock this into remission and then basically do regular treatment to make sure we keep it there.
GREGORY: It‘s a pretty intense time for this administration. What was it like sitting on the sidelines with all this going on?
SNOW: I was spending more of my time—I was watching, but I was sort of distanced from it in the sense that I would (INAUDIBLE) my Blackberry and read the news every day. But for me, the last four weeks, really, since I came back from the hospital, I‘ve been driving the kids to school, picking them up from school. And it‘s been, in many senses, a wonderful time. I‘ve written a magazine article. Somebody asked me to write one about my faith, and I did that. I‘ll be doing a commencement address coming up, and I‘ve worked on that a little bit.
You know, it‘s a time to think about the things that are really important for you. And in some ways, it was stimulating to do that.
The other thing is, I was really proud of the staff. I mean, Dana Perino is just great, and so were all the other people in the press office. And they all pulled together and they didn‘t miss a beat. They didn‘t need me. I think I need them more than they need me.
GREGORY: What was the president‘s reaction like, and what kind of communication did you have with him over the last...
SNOW: He—at the very—I mean, he called right away. And for the first couple of days, was calling and wanted—he encouraged me to call him as often as possible. But on the other hand, I thought, you know, You‘re busy. And so it was really nice. It‘s the kind of—he knows how to handle these things. He was very friendly. He wanted to know how I was doing, offered any support, said, you know, If you want to be phone buddies, we‘ll be phone buddies. And that‘s all I needed. I didn‘t need to take his time, but it was wonderful and nice.
And again, people may not realize, it doesn‘t take much just to give somebody that little extra bit of strength and happiness, a little phone call, an e-mail. And people did that. So it was nice hearing from him.
GREGORY: What matters to you most now?
SNOW: Same things that always have, my family and my faith, you know, trying to live—what I‘ve always told my kids is, I want you to be good. And I think, ultimately—well, no, something has changed a little bit in that there‘s more of a determination on my part to do things of service. I mean, I‘m really lucky. I‘ve got a platform. I‘ve got some experience, so I can help people. And so that is something—I talked to people before about doing that after I left the White House. It‘s even stronger. I don‘t know what I‘m going to do. I don‘t know quite how to do it. But you got a chance to do something that‘s good for people.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GREGORY: I was struck today, Chris, talking to Tony—obviously, a lot of people focus on reporters like me, who have tough exchanges with him in the briefing room, but this is really a day to step back and focus on some bigger issues that he‘s got to deal with. He‘s got three young kids, oldest of which is 14. And he‘s in a mode now, day in and day out, with his wife, leveling with these kids about what he‘s going through, the ups and the downs. And they are at an age where, you know, they‘re really going to conflicted by it. And so no follow-up necessary on all of that, just a lot of support for him.
MATTHEWS: Isn‘t it amazing, David, how the cynicism of our lives slips away...
GREGORY: Yes.
MATTHEWS: ... and we all sound like cornballs when we‘re telling the truth about life.
(LAUGHTER)
GREGORY: Right.
MATTHEWS: I mean, the best of life is corny in a way, to use an old expression, and he talks like that.
Let me ask you about the big story developing. Is there a chance for the Democrats who run the Congress now, our legislature, who‘ve declared they want to end this war, and the president—can they reach an agreement on this war?
GREGORY: Well, you hear within the White House and talking to Republicans outside, as well, that there is a bit of theater that has to play out here. They have to pass this supplemental with the deadline. The president feels he has to veto it. And certainly, Democrats need this for their own party‘s base. The president has his base of support behind him for the veto. And then they get down to any kind of real negotiation.
The president is not going to give in, in the sense that he is not going to allow a deadline for troop withdrawal. But he has said all along privately that the kind of pressure the Democrats are putting on, in some way, helps him...
MATTHEWS: Yes.
GREGORY: ... because it helps him keep the pressure on the Maliki government to do more. Now, whether that bears fruit is anyone‘s guess at this point. And there‘s a lot of pessimists out there.
My sense is that they want to get to a place where there can at least be the articulation of some goals for the withdrawal of troops, or benchmarks, which has become the new kind of term that‘s been coined here...
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: I like goals better.
GREGORY: Right.
MATTHEWS: I think goals is great, because, if this country can reach a consensus on how many years we are going to put into that war...
GREGORY: Right.
MATTHEWS: ... what we are going to really try to achieve before we leave, I think the country could get united again, if—if they all agree to something, it seems to me.
GREGORY: Right.
And I think—I think there—there is room for that. But, obviously, things have gotten bad enough publicly, that that‘s going to be a difficult goal to meet, just in terms of getting that deal. But I think that that‘s where the—that‘s where the room is on the White House side.
MATTHEWS: Hey, thank you very much, David Gregory.
GREGORY: Sure.
MATTHEWS: Great interview.
Up next: The Republican presidential candidates debate this Thursday. We‘re three days and counting here. And, when we return, how can you get involved in this debate? This is going to be interactive.
You‘re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.
This Thursday, the Republican presidential candidates will join MSNBC and Politico.com for the first GOP presidential debate of 2008. You‘re going to get to see them answer important questions, the candidates, and you will get to gauge for themselves what you think of these people.
Here now to talk about the big debate, John Harris, editor of ThePolitico.com.
John, I keep looking at the polls. I am always impressed by the fact that Rudy Giuliani keeps doing well in the polls. Everybody says, oh, Bernie Kerik is going to kill him, that suggestion to make him Homeland Security—or the fact that he‘s been married three times is going to kill him, or that he is pro-choice is going to kill him.
And, the more people say, that is going to kill him, this is going to kill him, his numbers keep going up. How do you figure this race?
JOHN HARRIS, EDITOR IN CHIEF, POLITICO.COM: That‘s right. It‘s been going on...
MATTHEWS: Hmm?
HARRIS: Look, it‘s been going on for three, four months now. The conventional wisdom is saying, look, this—these numbers aren‘t real, as you point out. But they stay pretty high.
The gap has narrowed a little bit in some of these polls. But, unambiguously, in the polls, he is the front-runner. I imagine, on Thursday, at the—at this Reagan Library debate, we are going to see the other candidates treating him like a front-runner. That means they are going to be taking shots.
MATTHEWS: Do you think that John McCain—well, I like to ask questions I think I know the answer to—is John McCain, who has been slipping a bit, but has come back roaring hard last week, taking shots already at—at Mitt Romney, on the—bin Laden, the importance of catching bin Laden, taking shots of Rudy Giuliani on the New York police and firemen not being on the same frequency, do you expect him to do a little free-firing on Thursday night?
HARRIS: I think he wants to show that, look, he is the most commanding figure in this race. He wants to prove that he is now what we all thought he was three, four months ago, sort of the almost prohibitive favorite in this race, by saying: Look, I had a bad spring—or bad winter, but now here is the spring. And I‘m ready to show that I‘m the class of this field.
MATTHEWS: How do people get involved in this? This debate, I think, will be the first time that, in real time, someone watching MSNBC or plugged into the computer and watching Politico—how do they get into this, and say, if they have got a brilliant question—let‘s assume they got the perfect question. How do they get that to you and to us?
HARRIS: Yes, what a softball question, Chris. This is not HARDBALL with this question.
MATTHEWS: I know. I—but somebody just asked me...
(CROSSTALK)
HARRIS: Thank you for asking. Thank you for asking, Mr. Matthews.
MATTHEWS: Do you want—you want to know the honest answer, in the interest of candor?
HARRIS: Oh, we...
(LAUGHTER)
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Somebody just told me to ask that question in my ear, OK?
It wouldn‘t naturally come to mind. Go ahead, John.
HARRIS: I knew this did not sound like you. This does not sound like a classic Matthews question.
MATTHEWS: I know.
(CROSSTALK)
HARRIS: I appreciate your asking it.
If people go to Politico.com, www.Politico.com, they can send us suggested questions. We are going to let audience—the audience vote on these questions. And we‘re committed, in our interactive round on this debate on Thursday, to asking the questions that viewers want us to ask in three distinct segments within that 90-minute debate.
MATTHEWS: How many do you expect to get through by the end of the hour-and-a-half? How many live questions from live audience people do you expect they will get on the table? Ten? Five?
HARRIS: Well, the—yes. No, I think we will get—we will get 20 30, we hope, by the end of it.
MATTHEWS: Really?
HARRIS: These will be quick questions, no filibusters in these questions. This is—some people call it the lightning round, 30 seconds to answer. So, these are going to be quick questions. We‘re going to try to get as much in as we can.
MATTHEWS: Who is your momma, that kind of question?
(LAUGHTER)
HARRIS: Exactly so.
MATTHEWS: I‘m waiting to see what the censure board is going to come up with, because...
HARRIS: Specificity.
MATTHEWS: ... it‘s interesting. A lot of people who are partisan, as you know, John, will be calling in...
HARRIS: Right.
MATTHEWS: ... hot questions for their rivals, the candidate they don‘t want to see do well. So, it will be interesting to see how this gets competitive from the various candidates‘ corners, don‘t you think?
HARRIS: I suppose, yes. And—but the—it‘s not just who sends the questions. It‘s who votes on them, because we will—are going to be tallying the response to these.
We have had several thousand questions so far, and they are quite good. Some of these—these reader questions, whether they are from ordinary folks or maybe from the opposition research teams with the candidates, they are—they are dead on, some very good questions waiting for us on Thursday.
MATTHEWS: How are we going to know who won this debate? Do we wait to read the AP, “The New York Times” the next day?
Jack Germond is in semi-retirement. How do we...
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS: And David Broder might tell us. How do we know—does the great mentioner have to tell us who won, or what?
HARRIS: You know, what I have noticed in these debates is, there is almost immediately kind of a vague, tentative sense that somebody did not so well, somebody did—did a little better.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
HARRIS: And, then, within 24 hours, that gets amplified.
So, it was a knockout for...
MATTHEWS: Right.
HARRIS: ... for Smith, and Jones flopped.
We see the—these early very sort of slight judgments...
MATTHEWS: Yes.
HARRIS: ... become really dramatic in the space of a couple of news cycles.
MATTHEWS: I have always figured the safe way to do this, as a journalist—or a pundit—is to go walking through the—in front of the print people, the newspaper people, and just sort of walk around there right afterwards, and listen very intently...
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS: ... to the huddles, and see if you can get the word on who won.
Hillary Clinton, I guess, won the Democrats.
We will be right back with John Harris. He is staying with us.
And, when we return, we will talk about which of the Republican candidates will make the biggest splash Thursday night. There‘s a prediction. Will there be a splash?
You‘re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
TRISH REGAN, CNBC CORRESPONDENT: Hello. I‘m Trish Regan with your CNBC “Market Wrap.”
And three straight days of record closings end on Wall Street—the Dow losing 58 points today, to close at 13062. Analysts say investors sold off stocks for profit-taking. For the month of April, the blue chips index gained a healthy 708 points. The S&P 500 today lost nearly 12 points, to close at 1482. And the Nasdaq ended the day off 32 points lower, to the 2525 level.
Well, American workers racked up a seventh straight month of income growth in the month of March, income up seven-tenths-of-a-percent. However, consumer spending did slow.
Delta Air Lines comes out of bankruptcy after 19 months. Delta eliminated 6,000 jobs during the $3 billion restructuring.
And it may be finger-licking good, but it‘s healthier, too. Yum!
Brands-owned KFC says it‘s no longer using trans fats to cook its chicken. Yum!‘s Taco Bell chain has also gone mostly trans fat-free—now back to HARDBALL.
MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.
This Thursday, the Republican candidates for president will debate each other, all together for the first time, 10 of them. I will be moderating the big debate at the Reagan Library, beautiful place. You are going to see it Thursday night out in California at Simi Valley.
Here now to size up the field, it‘s very—very—we should be wearing blazers here...
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS: ... the challenges, the expectations, are John Harris of “The Politico.” He‘s just been with us. Our debate partners, Lois Romano, of course, of “The Washington Post,” is joining us, and Howard Fineman, of course, of “Newsweek” and our own effort here.
Let me ask you, Howard, do you think—this is the question. Will they embrace the president? Will the people who seek to succeed him as president, the Republicans, will they be Bush supporters, or will they begin to what we call in politics become trimmers?
HOWARD FINEMAN, NBC CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, embrace might be a little strong, because, if the numbers are like they were for the Democratic debate, there are going to be lots of people watching, not all of them dyed-in-the-wool, hard-core base Republicans.
MATTHEWS: So, they will be looking for the general election independent?
FINEMAN: They are going to be looking for the general election independent.
This is not the place—your debate will not be the place to speak only or solely to a room of 50 hard-core Republican base supporters.
MATTHEWS: Lois, do you think they will all be trooping in line, trying to show their party loyalty by showing Bush loyalty? Or how do you think they are going to nuance this thing?
LOIS ROMANO, “THE WASHINGTON POST”: I—I—well, I think, obviously, they—they have to play a little bit to the base, because they need to win the nomination first.
But they are facing an extremely unpopular war. So, they have to thread a very narrow needle on how they want to deal with the war, and still, you know, basically embrace Bush a little bit. I mean, I think what you‘re going to hear them saying is, we don‘t think this is a good war, but we don‘t think we should surrender.
MATTHEWS: John, what‘s your thinking? Are they going to hew to the Bush line, or are they going to try to show some distance, in a way, say, for example, without being cruel about it, George Bush Sr., the first President Bush, was able to run in 1988 and win sort of as a Reagan third term. But, also, he said, I‘m going to be kinder and gentler, a little nuance from the hard line of Reagan.
Do you think that they will try something like that, along that line?
HARRIS: You know, I‘m guessing what they will say is: Look, I don‘t want to get in an argument about the last eight years. I‘m talking about the next four years, the next eight years. So, it is going to really be up to—to us to frame questions that don‘t allow them to hedge like that.
Where do they stand on many of the key Bush issues and key Bush decisions?
MATTHEWS: Yes.
HARRIS: Do they agree, or would they do things differently?
MATTHEWS: Well, that won‘t be so hard, it seems, with some of the outlying candidates.
Let‘s talk about some of the candidates, Lois, who may not be in the top of the list right now: Ron Paul, a libertarian U.S. congressman from Texas for years now who has been involved in Republican politics and sometimes in independent politics. You have got Tom Tancredo, very tough on the border, very anti-illegal immigration.
Some of these people—Brownback—have their own approaches to the war in Iraq that aren‘t necessarily the party line so far. Will they be the ones taking shots at the front-runners?
ROMANO: I think so. I think you will see Ron Paul develop as the Kucinich of this group. He is very anti-war. And—and he will do that.
And then you will see Tom—you know, from Colorado...
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Tancredo, yes.
ROMANO: Tancredo, right.
ROMANO: He is going to after them on immigration. I mean, that‘s his
his big thing, border control. He is probably going to go after McCain for flip-flopping a little bit or hark back to McCain‘s alliance with Ted Kennedy. We probably will hear the big Kennedy name there.
So, I think—I think—yes, I think they will try to show that—and Brownback also—that they are individuals; they are different. And I think, for Brownback, he is going to basically try to carve out a little bit of the base for himself. I mean, he believes that there is still some room in this whole big group of 10 for somebody with really core conservative values.
MATTHEWS: Yes, well, I think that‘s very true, because there isn‘t really a—quote—“easy conservative sell” out there. A lot of these people have mixed records.
Let me go to Howard.
It seems to me that there are some opening here for these folks. You can go after Giuliani, because he is pro-choice, and says so. He is for funding of abortion for poor people. I mean, they could go after him on that, right?
They could go after—they could go after Mitt Romney for his record as a more moderate, or more liberal, even more tolerant, governor of Massachusetts than most conservatives are on issues like gay rights and abortion rights.
FINEMAN: Well, I think they could, and—but I‘m not sure that they will, unless you ask them the questions that require them to.
The reason is that nobody is so far ahead in this...
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: You mean I have to play hardball?
FINEMAN: Yes, you have to play hardball.
MATTHEWS: OK. I‘m just asking.
FINEMAN: But nobody is so far ahead in this race that the others on the Republican side, that the Republicans have to gang up on them and drag them down be—lest—lest they run away with it.
MATTHEWS: OK. Let me challenge you, Howard.
FINEMAN: OK.
MATTHEWS: Let‘s have a debate here.
FINEMAN: OK.
MATTHEWS: Giuliani is at 39 percent in our poll, the NBC poll, which is godlike here.
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS: OK? We—we like that...
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: ... “The Wall Street Journal” poll.
McCain is at 24.
FINEMAN: Yes.
MATTHEWS: He slipped a bit, but he is still way ahead of—Romney is at 12. Now, he has broken into double digits. That‘s interesting.
The people who say none of the above or haven‘t figured out are only 11 percent.
FINEMAN: Mm-hmm.
MATTHEWS: A lot of these people—John Harris, you pick up—these people have become committed already. It seems like, even though it‘s way early, there are not that many undecideds floating out there.
HARRIS: Well, I would guess that some of that support is fluid. And, so, there are going to be people watching this debate. These are tentative judgments that people have made, getting behind these candidates.
MATTHEWS: Right.
HARRIS: They are not final judgments. But that‘s why events like this are important.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: I just wonder whether we‘re going to see a real fight between the backbenchers and the leaders tomorrow—Thursday night.
FINEMAN: Well, it‘s—you know, the 39 percent for Rudy is impressive in such a large field—large field. I grant you that.
And maybe one way that you impress the base is by attacking Rudy on some of those issues. So, that could happen. I agree with you that could happen.
But it‘s not like he is running away with the thing right now. The feel of it out there is that he is dropping back into the pack just a little bit, and there is plenty of time to take him down.
MATTHEWS: Who would you bet now?
FINEMAN: Plenty of time to take him down.
MATTHEWS: Who can you bet on now that might come from the back, somebody who is a—a comer? Who can come from the back and break into the top three, make it a top four?
FINEMAN: Well, I hate to mention any of the people who aren‘t going to be on the stage on Thursday night, but you still have at least three more candidates who could get in this thing—Fred Thompson, Newt Gingrich, and I still think Chuck Hagel, who is the really anti-war candidate.
MATTHEWS: He would shake things up.
FINEMAN: He would shake things up enormously. It‘s only May of the year before.
MATTHEWS: Let me give you a reason. Not that I want to bring an extra added attraction beyond what we can present Thursday night. But the latest polling in Iowa, the first in the nation test, says that 50 some percent of Republicans, who are going to vote in that caucus, think we should be out of Iraq in six months. They are more in tune with Hagel than the others.
FINEMAN: There has to be somebody other than Ron Paul, with all due respect to Ron Paul, to pick up that standard.
MATTHEWS: As they once said in an old Walt Disney movie, it‘s what you do with what you got that counts. Anyway, thank you John Harris. Thank you Lois Romano. Thank you Howard Fineman. Remember that one; what you do with what you got that counts.
Anyway, up next, which Republican candidate best carries the mantle of President Ronald Reagan? That‘s a question for us this Thursday night. HARDBALLers Tony Blankley and Ron Reagan join us next. This is HARDBALL, only on MSNBC.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL. The president is digging in, saying he will veto a war funding bill with a timetable for getting U.S. troops out of Iraq. How will the 10 Republicans who want to be the next president deal with an unpopular war as they debate each other for the first time this Thursday here on MSNBC? And how much distance will they put between themselves and the president, if any?
For a preview, let‘s go to HARDBALLers MSNBC political analyst Ron Reagan and Tony Blankley of the “Washington Times.” Ron, we‘re going out west. Your mother is going to be there. It will be an interesting home game for the Reagans. What‘s your view of this as a television drama this Thursday night?
RON REAGAN, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, it should be very dramatic. Of course we have a very dramatic moderator for the event. That will help a little bit. It‘s going to be interesting to watch if any of the second or third tier candidates can actually make a move on the top three, the Romney, Giuliani, and McCain group, and whether any of those top three stumble a bit. I think McCain has the most to lose here, but that might be just my opinion.
MATTHEWS: Tony, I think he also has the most to want the same thing as Ron just said. I think he really wants to turn it on. My hunch is the last week or so he has been revving up.
TONY BLANKLEY, “THE WASHINGTON TIMES”: I have no idea what McCain is
planning to do. I take these early primaries -
MATTHEWS: That‘s no reason why you can‘t speculate. That‘s no excuse.
BLANKLEY: I think these early primary debates are sort of like the opening of a chess game. It‘s not like a general election debate in September, where 50 million people are watching, and you either make a huge mistake or you confirm a trend. Here, it‘s less the big mistake that any of us are going to comment on in the first weeks, an opening that you may provide another opponent. Little statements that may not seem like a big deal to any of us, but the clever opponent—
MATTHEWS: Rate the last week of Democrats. Did somebody do something that was lethal?
BLANKLEY: Not lethal, but Obama opened up a little opportunity, which Hillary quickly got into on toughness, on—
MATTHEWS: He didn‘t say retaliate fast enough.
BLANKLEY: And you saw Hillary then go out and saw people putting out a message on that. You saw John Edwards show an absence of moral certainty.
MATTHEWS: So well said. Tony, so well said. If you are asked who your moral advisor is or leader, you should have an answer.
BLANKLEY: You should. That‘s going to be exploited in many little ways. So it‘s more a question of did you give little openings. This is not going to be a decisive debate. They never are decisive at this point. And you can write off—I mean, Tancredo is going to obviously hit the immigration issue on polls, libertarian isolationists. He will hit no spending and no foreign policy.
That won‘t matter. It will be interesting, I think, to see how they try to, as you were discussing in the previous segment, separate themselves a little bit from Bush. The problem is that 2/3 of Republicans support the president, support the war, and 2/3 of the country don‘t support the president and don‘t support the war. So they can‘t show much separation. They can sort of confess that mistakes have been made. I don‘t think you‘re going to see a whole lot of separation going on.
MATTHEWS: It‘s interesting, Ron, that this test of mettle is a TV test. Your father was an expert on television. He really was. I grew up with him in the 1950‘s, watching “G.E. Theater.” Just apart from ideology, this medium was his medium, his ability to communicate by the millions. Do you sense any of these candidates, if you want to stick your neck out, who has anything like the power of the Great Communicator?
REAGAN: Well, Rudy Giuliani is probably the most charismatic of them, but you mentioned it before the break, that the Republicans have been looking for a new Ronald Reagan. The problem for them is there just isn‘t one out there. Yes, Rudy Giuliani is somewhat charismatic. He is a good speaker. But he has got a lot of problems with his candidacy.
McCain, he‘s hot and cold. You never know quite which John McCain is going to show up. This is why people are excited about Fred Thompson. There are Republicans who think that Fred Thompson, maybe because he works in television, can be a guy who can come in and seal the deal for them. He has to get in the race first, of course.
MATTHEWS: And we have to see whether he can turn a crowd on or not.
REAGAN: That‘s right. I don‘t think Fred Thompson is another Ronald Reagan either, to tell you the truth.
MATTHEWS: I wonder whether—let me ask you this, because you lived with your dad. This is again apart from politics. Don‘t you have to have the bug? Don‘t you have to really want to run for president? Your dad ran in, I believe, 1968 and lost to Nixon. He was kind of a long shot. Then he ran again in 1976 against a sitting Republican, Gerry Ford. Then he finally won on the third try. You have to really want it enough to keep going for it. To have to be talked into it the way Fred Thompson is, I have never seen that before. Maybe Adlai Stevenson was talked into it. That didn‘t work.
REAGAN: You have to be ready and eager to give up any semblance of a normal life forever, because if you win, that‘s it. Your regular life is over. You really have to embrace that.
MATTHEWS: Your campaign slogan can‘t be get my slippers.
BLANKLEY: You know, there is an interesting—there is an interesting aspect of this field of Republicans. We all observed there is no other Reagan out there, and clearly there isn‘t. In an odd way, this gives the Republican party an opportunity, because this is not 1980 or 1984. I wish it was. It‘s not. The issues set that could win then can‘t be replicated now.
MATTHEWS: Here‘s the question, why aren‘t they looking for another George W. Bush? Isn‘t that a problem. No, I‘m being serious. Isn‘t that part of our conversation that‘s a problem. They don‘t really want to emulate entirely or in large part—
BLANKLEY: Other than an FDR or Reagan, you don‘t usually—the country is tired of the president. They were tired of Truman.
MATTHEWS: So well said. They were tired of Truman. They were tired of Ike even. And Ike was immensely popular. Anyway, thank you. Tony, you get wiser every time I get older. Any way, thank you Ron Reagan. Great report tonight. Thank you Tony Blankley.
When we return, race in America. How much has the Don Imus incident changed what we can and cannot say, if anything? Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons has a new book out. That‘s a heck of a book, by the way, he has come out with. It‘s not an ethnic thing. It‘s for everybody, this book, from what I can tell. You‘re watching HARDBALL, only on MSNBC.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL. Russell Simmons is a music mogul, is one of the most influential figures in hip hop music and in our economy. His book is called “Do You, Twelve Laws to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success.” First of all I love the concept. This should be a gradation speech, to tell the kids who graduate to do you.
RUSSELL SIMMONS, HIP HOP MOGUL: It is meant to inspire you to look inside. The truth is, when you look inside, there is a piece of god in you. If you can access that, anything you can imagine is yours. There is no secret without god. And the idea is that all the scriptures tell you the same thing. This book is based mostly on the Yoga Sutras, but all the scriptures run parallel.
And the real truth is when you look inside any business idea or anything you want to imagine, you can create. The book is about that. The title is a very funny story, because it was the 12 laws of success and I gave the book to Oprah. She read the book and it was the funniest thing. She called me and told me I had a corny title. So she tells me I have a corny title, and then she told me the name, which is the title of the second chapter. The book is about the inner voice.
MATTHEWS: She thought this was corny?
SIMMONS: No the 12 laws of success was corny. She renamed the book.
MATTHEWS: To?
SIMMONS: To “Do You.”
MATTHEWS: Oh, she did that.
SIMMONS: Yes, it‘s kind of funny. But I would have thought that her naming my book would be out of the question.
MATTHEWS: Are you giving her a cut?
SIMMONS: No, she doesn‘t need it, I don‘t think.
MATTHEWS: This is graduation time, and I think one message to kids graduating—I always say to them, I hung out with a kid who knew all about music. Today he‘s Curt Loder. I hung out with another guy in college. He‘s from Buffalo. That all he did was talk about sports. Now he is a sports reporter for the “Buffalo News.” People do end up doing well what they had a hunch about.
SIMMONS: Every success I‘ve had—my first rap record was made before there were rap records. The Def Comedy Jam was a joke for HBO. The Def Poetry Jam is the longest running show they have, and that was a favor. The Reverend Run TV Show, for instance, is a show about a reverend and five kids. It‘s not popular at MTV, but now it‘s the number on show there.
So, my success has come from listening to my voice and having the courage to live up to what it promises me. And I think that it‘s a very obvious formula and it make you happy. And the idea that you want to connect to that thing that makes you happy, the thing that is the unity in all of us. And that is what the book is about.
MATTHEWS: OK, let me go into a problem area. I was writing a while ago, and I was going to put it into a book, but I decided not to for the following reason: it seemed to me that the guys in this business of talk, like Limbaugh and O‘Reilly and Imus took years to get their act right. For years they tried to be something else and they finally became themselves and they got good at it. Limbaugh couldn‘t get guests up in Sacramento, so he did the show without guests. O‘Reilly, people could stand, but he said, fine, a lot of people will like me, even though I‘m a little bit difficult to deal with. They‘re going to like me. You know, a couple million people is all it takes.
Now Imus, what was your view on Imus, what happened?
SIMMONS: Well, the you I refer to is the higher self. It‘s that thing, that Christ consciousness, that Somati (ph) the Yogis refer to, Nirvana the Buddhists call, you know, the toxic life-style that the Jews refer to, that is the you I am referring to. When you are disconnected and you don‘t realize that you are a part of, you know, all of mother Earth and you are a part of all of those things, that is the you I refer to. Not the one‘s that separate or isolated.
MATTHEWS: It‘s not egotistical?
SIMMONS: No, it‘s not at all. It‘s about letting go of the ego and looking for the strength that comes when you are really connected. That is where even—people who you might think are not spiritual, not connected, that is where their strength comes from. That‘s the law. The cosmic laws are unbreakable. So if you want to promote happiness, then you can receive it. If you want to give something that‘s lasting and stable and good, then you get back a lasting and stable and good result. So that‘s what the book is about.
MATTHEWS: What about Imus? What happened there.
SIMMONS: The Imus story is—I am the chairman of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding. And Rabbi Snyder, who is the chairman of the World Jewish Congress, is the president. And our first response was that is Imus and maybe there is something we can do, some dialogue behind the scenes, that would promote something better. But America‘s response to him was good. It gave us a chance to talk more about race. It was very good. I was happy with not so much what happened to him, but the fact that we are discussing this now in such a meaningful way.
MATTHEWS: One candidate for reelection in Virginia, George Allen, was coasting to reelection as a senator until he called a kid Macaca, which is a North African reference to a black kid. Do you think we‘re changing, that we‘re getting more sensitive, or are we just being politically correct? Are we getting better or just more careful?
SIMMONS: You know, rappers talk often about things that bring up things in us, the misogyny—I wouldn‘t say racism, but homophobia, the violence, the truth. The truth about us is that we like to sweep things under the rug. And the lack of consciousness on the part of all the smart people, the sophisticates, is everywhere.
MATTHEWS: Was it good to put it out?
SIMMONS: I think it was good that they discussed it publicly.
MATTHEWS: Yes, but he got fired for it. Rap singers don‘t get fired for incitive language.
SIMMONS: They have a certain poetic license that they should enjoy.
I think we have to protect that.
MATTHEWS: But not talk show hosts?
SIMMONS: I don‘t think so. I think those words should be removed from mainstream television and radio.
MATTHEWS: The words he used?
SIMMONS: Yes.
MATTHEWS: I think they have been removed, Mr. Simmons. There‘s nothing like a noise like that to get fired. Anyway, thank you. I do like the title. Oprah, as always, is a genius. “Do You,” it‘s a great book. It‘s going to be high on the Amazon list tomorrow morning. Thank you very much Mr. Simmons. The name of the book is “Do You.”
SIMMONS: It already is.
MATTHEWS: Sorry, it will be higher. Tomorrow on HARDBALL, Bill Maher. And don‘t forget, the first Republican presidential candidates‘ debate coming up this Thursday. The countdown is on. Three days to go. Right night it‘s time for Tucker.
| [+/-] |
Transcript of George Tenet on 60 Minutes - April 29, 2007 |
Transcript:
As director of the CIA, George Tenet has kept America's most important secrets. And until now, his lips were sealed.
Tenet's CIA has been blamed for failing to stop 9/11, praised for the fall of the Taliban, and vilified for predicting that Iraq held chemical and biological weapons.
Now, three years after leaving the CIA, Tenet has written a book, aptly named, "At the Center of the Storm." This month, correspondent Scott Pelley sat down with Tenet. 60 Minutes wanted to know how he got "weapons of mass destruction" wrong. Are we using torture in the war on terror? And who was it at the White House who finally put the knife in his back?
60 Minutes found him passionate, combative, apologetic, defiant, and fiercely loyal to the people of the CIA and their fight against terrorism.
"People don't understand us, you know, they think we're a bunch of faceless bureaucrats with no feelings, no families, no sense of what it’s like to be passionate about running these bastards down. There was nobody else in this government that felt what we felt before or after 9/11. Of course, after 9/11, everybody had that feeling. Nobody felt like we felt on that day. This was personal," Tenet tells Pelley.
His story erupts after a silence of three years. 60 Minutes spoke with Tenet at Georgetown University.
In a sense, his career began and ended there. He's a professor now, but he first came as a student from Queens, New York. After college, he worked on Capitol Hill and in the Clinton White House, rising to lead the CIA at the age of 44. Tenet served seven years, all that time hunting Osama bin Laden.
"I still lie awake at night thinking about everything that could have been, that wasn’t done to stop 9/11. To the 9/11 families, I said, you deserve better from your entire government. All of us," Tenet says.
If he lies awake, men like Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, two of the 9/11 hijackers, are among the reasons. Before 9/11, Tenet’s CIA headquarters knew that they were al Qaeda and in America. But the information was filed, not passed to the FBI.
Scott Pelley remarks, "Two of the 19 hijackers, in your files, in Langley, Virginia, a year and a half before 9/11 … they don't get on a watch list. They don't get on a no-fly list. You know these are bad guys."
"Scott, they don't. And honest people doing honest work, for whatever you know, all of these people who are doing the best that they can, and understand this in great granularity, understand all of this and feel this pain, we all know this. I can't dress this up for you," Tenet replies.
What happened?
"People were inundated with data and operations. And they missed it," Tenet acknowledges. "We're not trying to intentionally withhold—human beings made mistakes."
But the 9/11 Commission accused Tenet’s CIA of being bureaucratic and failing to recognize al Qaeda for the threat that it was.
"All these commissions, and all these reports never got underneath the feeling of my people. You know, to see us written about as if we're idiots. Or if we didn't understand this threat. As if we didn't understand what happened on that day. To impugn our integrity, our operational savvy. You know, the American people need to know that's just not so," Tenet says. "We're the ones that stand up and tell you the truth about when we're wrong. It's a great thing about this government. The only people that ever stand up and tell the truth are who? Intelligence officers. Because our culture is, never break faith with the truth. We'll tell you, you don't have to drag it out of us. You didn't have to serve me a subpoena to tell me I didn't watch list Hazmi and Midhar. We knew right away; and we told everybody. Truth matters to us."
(CBS) The truth of the CIA and al Qaeda starts before 9/11. Two years before the attacks, the CIA had officers on the ground in Afghanistan laying plans to overthrow the Taliban and take out bin Laden. But Tenet says neither Clinton nor President Bush would give him the go ahead. Then, by the summer of 2001, Tenet says he was so alarmed by intelligence that an attack was coming, he asked for an immediate meeting to brief then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice.
"Essentially, the briefing says, there are gonna be multiple spectacular attacks against the United States. We believe these attacks are imminent. Mass casualties are a likelihood," Tenet remembers.
"You're telling Condoleezza Rice in that meeting in the White House in July that we should take offensive action, in Afghanistan, now. Before 9/11," Pelley remarks.
"We need to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan now. We need to move to the offensive," Tenet says.
In his book, Tenet says that even though he told Rice an attack on Americans was imminent, she took his request to launch pre-emptive action in Afghanistan and delegated it to third-tier officials.
"You’re meeting with the president every morning. Why aren't you telling the president, 'Mr. President, this is terrifying. We have to do this now. Forget about the bureaucracy. I need this authority this afternoon,'?" Pelley asks.
"Right. Because the United States government doesn't work that way. The president is not the action officer. You bring the action to the national security advisor and people who set the table for the president to decide on policies they're gonna implement," Tenet says.
"You thought you had some time," Pelley remarks.
"Well, you didn't know. Yeah, you thought you might have time," Tenet says. "You can second guess me until the cows come home. That's the way I did my job."
On Sept. 11, Tenet was at breakfast near the White House when the first plane hit. He thought instantly of his old nemesis.
"I knew immediately this was bin Laden. I excused myself from breakfast. I jumped in the car," he remembers.
"What do you mean you knew immediately? I mean, most people in the country thought there had been a terrible accident," Pelley asks.
"Listen, when you’ve been following this as long as I've been following this, when you’ve been thinking about multiple spectacular attacks. There was no doubt what had happened in my mind immediately," Tenet explains.
At the CIA headquarters, as the towers burned and the Pentagon was hit, Tenet got the aircraft passenger manifest; Hazmi and Mihdhar were listed.
"After all these years of planning and plotting and wanting to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, you must have thought, 'The SOB got me first,'" Pelley remarks.
"Um, yeah. But I had another thought. 'I'm gonna run you and all your bastards down. And here we come. Because the rules are about to change. Here we come; our turn now. Unleashed, authorities, money, direction, leadership; here we come, pal.' That's what I thought," Tenet says.
Immediately, Tenet got the authority he had been asking for in Afghanistan. And for the first time, the CIA led an American war. Tenet calls it the agency’s finest hour, except, perhaps, for just one thing.
"Was Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora?" Pelley asks.
"We believe that he was," Tenet says.
"And, the question is, 'How did he get away?' If this plan of yours is so great … and Afghanistan went so well…. How does Osama bin Laden get away, when we've got him cornered at Tora Bora?" Pelley asks.
"Well, have you ever seen the geography in Tora Bora?" Tenet asks.
"I have," Pelley replies.
"You don't have anybody cornered in Tora Bora," Tenet says.
Tenet says our forces were too light to stop bin Laden’s escape. "We played with what we had. 'Cause you didn't have a big force presence on the ground. We caught a lot of people, we didn't catch the one we wanted," he says.
But they did catch others, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who planned 9/11. He was captured in Pakistan.
"When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ended up in the hands of CIA interrogators, what did he say?" Pelley says.
"I'll talk to you guys when you take me to New York and I can see my lawyer," Tenet replies.
(CBS) But the CIA had something else in mind. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others were swept up in the "high value detainee" program. Secret prisons were set up, and several suspects were questioned under new, so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques," said to include sleep deprivation, extreme cold and water boarding, which causes a severe gag reflex, as water is continuously poured over the face.
"The image that's been portrayed is, we sat around the campfire and said, 'Oh, boy, now we go get to torture people.' Well, we don't torture people. Let me say that again to you. We don't torture people. Okay?" Tenet says.
"Come on, George," Pelley says.
"We don't torture people," Tenet maintains.
"Khalid Sheikh Mohammad?" Pelley asks.
"We don't torture people," Tenet says.
"Water boarding?" Pelley asks.
"We do not – I don't talk about techniques," Tenet replies.
"It's torture," Pelley says.
"And we don't torture people. Now, listen to me. Now, listen to me. I want you to listen to me," Tenet says. "The context is it's post-9/11. I've got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City, apartment buildings that are gonna be blown up, planes that are gonna fly into airports all over again. Plot lines that I don't know – I don't know what's going on inside the United States. And I'm struggling to find out where the next disaster is going to occur. Everybody forgets one central context of what we lived through. The palpable fear that we felt on the basis of the fact that there was so much we did not know."
"I know that this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots," Tenet says.
"But what you're essentially saying is some people need to be tortured," Pelley remarks.
"No, I did not say that. I did not say that," Tenet says.
"You're telling me that… the enhanced interrogation…" Pelley says.
"I did not say that. I did not say that. We do not tor…. Listen to me. You’re, you're making…," Tenet says.
"You call it in the book, 'enhanced interrogation,'" Pelley remarks.
"…an assumption. Well, that's what we call it," Tenet says.
"And that's a euphemism," Pelley says.
"I'm not having a semantic debate with you. I'm telling you what I believe," Tenet says.
Asked if anyone ever died in the interrogation program, Tenet says, "No."
Asked if he's sure of that, the former director tells Pelley, "Yeah. In this program that you and I are talking about? No."
"Have you ever seen any of these interrogations done?" Pelley asks.
"No," Tenet replies.
"Didn’t you feel like it was your responsibility to know what's going on?" Pelley asks.
"I understood. I'm not a voyeur. I understand what I was signing off on," Tenet says.
Asked if he lost any sleep over it, Tenet tells Pelley, "Yeah, of course you do! Of course you lose sleep over it. You're on new territory. But that's not the point! What’s this tension? The tension is, 'I've just lived through 3,000 people dying. This is not a clinical exercise.' Maybe for you guys it's a clinical exercise. Not for me! 3,000 people died. Friends died. Now I'm gonna sit back, and then everybody says, 'You idiots don’t know how to connect the dots. You don’t have imagination. You were unwilling to take risk to protect this country,'" Tenet says.
"Let me ask the question this way: why were enhanced interrogation techniques necessary?" Pelley asks.
"'Cause these are people that will never, ever, ever tell you a thing. These are people who know who’s responsible for the next terrorist attack. These are hardened people that would kill you and me 30 seconds after they got out of wherever they were being held and wouldn’t blink an eyelash," Tenet says. "You can sit there after, you can sit there five years later, and have this debate with me, all I'm asking you to do, walk a mile in my shoes when I'm dealing with these realities."
Tenet says the interrogations uncovered networks and broke up plots in the U.S.
(CBS) Asked if al Qaeda is in the United States right now, Tenet tells Pelley, "My operational presumption is that they infiltrated a second wave or a third wave into the United States at the time of 9/11. Now can I prove that to you? No. It’s my operational intuition."
He told 60 Minutes in 2003 terrorists were in the U.S. prepared to attack the New York City subways, when bin Laden’s number two called them back.
"By 2003, the intelligence tells you that Zawahiri has called off an attack against the New York City subway system, in favor of something larger. What is that larger thing?" Tenet says.
One clue, Tenet says, is that bin Laden has been trying to get his hands on nuclear material, since 1993. "Are these people gonna have a nuclear capability? This confers superpower status on a networked organization that is not a state. Is it gonna happen?" Tenet wonders. "Look, I don't know. But I worry about it. Because I've seen enough to tell me that there's intent. And when there's intent, the question is, when does the capability show up? If al Qaeda were to acquire nuclear capability, the thousands of weapons we have would be irrelevant."
In the midst of the al Qaeda threat, Tenet says he was astonished and mystified when the White House turned its aim to Iraq.
Tenet told 60 Minutes the war in Iraq is "a national tragedy." He says he realized it was the end of his career when he picked up The Washington Post and saw that he was being blamed for the decision to go to war. In classic Washington fashion, someone had leaked a story suggesting that the president decided to attack after Tenet said the evidence against Iraq was a "slam dunk."
In our interview, Tenet admits the CIA's mistakes and his own. But what makes him angry now is how the White House ignored CIA warnings, cooked the books on intelligence, and then used "slam dunk" to brand him with the failure.
"The hardest part of all of this has just been listening to this for almost three years. Listening to the vice president go on 'Meet The Press' on the fifth year of 9/11, and say, 'Well, George Tenet said, slam dunk.' As if he needed me to say slam dunk to go to war with Iraq," Tenet tells Pelley. "And they never let it go. I mean, I became campaign talk. I was a talking point. You know, 'Look at what the idiot told us, and we decided to go to war.' Well, let's not be so disingenuous. Let's stand up. This is why we did it. This is why, this is how we did it. And let's tell, let's everybody tell the truth."
(Editor's Note: In his book, "At the Center of the Storm," and on Sunday's broadcast of 60 Minutes, George Tenet said he encountered Pentagon advisor Richard Perle outside the White House on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the 9/11 attacks. Perle disputes Tenet's account, saying the encounter never happened because he was stranded in France that day, and was not able to return to the country until September 15. George Tenet told Tom Brokaw Monday, April 30, 2007, "I may have been off by a couple of days," but says the conversation did happen.)
The truth of Iraq begins, according to Tenet, the day after the attack of Sept. 11, when he ran into Pentagon advisor Richard Perle at the White House.
"He said to me, 'Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility.' It’s September the 12th. I’ve got the manifest with me that tell me al Qaeda did this. Nothing in my head that says there is any Iraqi involvement in this in any way shape or form and I remember thinking to myself, as I'm about to go brief the president, 'What the hell is he talking about?'" Tenet remembers.
"You said Iraq made no sense to you in that moment. Does it make any sense to you today?" Pelley asks.
"In terms of complicity with 9/11, absolutely none," Tenet says. "It never made any sense. We could never verify that there was any Iraqi authority, direction and control, complicity with al Qaeda for 9/11 or any operational act against America. Period."
"The president, in October of 2002, quote: 'We need to think about Saddam Hussein using al Qaeda to do his dirty work.' Is that what you're telling the president?" Pelley asks.
"Well, we didn't believe al Qaeda was gonna do Saddam Hussein's dirty work," Tenet says.
"January '03, the president again, [said] quote: 'Imagine those 19 hijackers this time armed by Saddam Hussein.' Is that what you're telling the president?" Pelley asks.
"No," Tenet says.
The vice president upped the ante, claiming Saddam had nuclear weapons, when the CIA was saying he didn’t.
"What's happening here?" Pelley asks.
"Well, I don't know what's happening here," Tenet says. "The intelligence community's judgment is 'He will not have a nuclear weapon until the year 2007, 2009.'"
"That's not what the vice president's saying," Pelley remarks.
"Well, I can't explain it," Tenet says.
Tenet says he sometimes warned the White House its statements were false, but he admits that he missed a big one in the 2003 State of the Union address, when the president said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
(CBS) The CIA had knocked down that uranium claim months before. The agency even demanded it be taken out of two previous presidential speeches. How did it get through the third time?
"I didn't read the speech. I was involved in a bunch of other things," Tenet says.
"Wait a minute, the president’s State of the Union," Pelley remarks. "You didn't read that?"
"Right, I didn’t, farmed it out, got it at a principal's meeting, brought it down the hall, handed it to my executive assistant. I said, 'You guys go review this, and come back to me if I need to do anything,'" Tenet remembers.
"Nobody comes back to you?" Pelley asks.
"And therein lies why I ultimately have to take my share of responsibility," Tenet says.
"Did anyone at the White House, did anyone in the defense department ever ask you whether we should go to war in Iraq?" Pelley asks.
"The discussions that are on-going in 2002 in the spring and summer of 2002 are 'How you might do this?' Not whether you should do this," Tenet says.
"Nobody asks?" Pelley asks.
"Well, I don't remember sitting down in a principles committee meeting and everybody saying, 'Okay, there's a deep concern about Iraq. Is this the right thing to do? What are the implications?' I don’t ever remember that galvanizing moment when people sit around and honestly say 'Is this the right thing to do?'"
Still, at CIA headquarters, Tenet's team was about to make a historic blunder of its own. The CIA produced its evaluation of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in a secret report called a "National Intelligence Estimate."
"The first key judgment in the national intelligence estimate says, quote, 'Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons.' Period," Pelley says.
"High confidence judgment," Tenet replies.
How could he make such a bold statement? Says Tenet, "We believed he had chemical and biological weapons."
"But there was no hard evidence," Pelley remarks.
"No, no. There was lots of data. There's lots of technical data," Tenet says. "So you put all of this together, it's not evidence in the court of law. Remember, when you write an estimate, when you estimate, you’re writing what you don't know. You might win a civil case. Huh? You're not gonna win a criminal case, in terms of evidence."
"We are going to war. Tens of thousands of people are going to be killed. And you're telling me you had evidence to prove a civil case, not a criminal case?" Pelley asks,
"Well, as you know, hindsight is perfect. The public face on this what we wrote on weapons of mass destruction and for professionals, who pride themselves on being right, this is a very painful experience for us," Tenet acknowledges.
Perhaps the most painful experience for Tenet was the presentation of Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations. Powell asked Tenet to sit behind him.
"Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent," Powell said at the U.N.
"Conservative estimate of 100 to 500 tons? I mean, how can you be so wrong?" Pelley asks.
"Scott, we've gone through this. It's what we believed, it's what we wrote," Tenet says.
"Where did these numbers come from?" Pelley asks.
"From our national intelligence estimate," Tenet says. "You don't make this kind of stuff up."
"Wait a minute, you did make this kind of stuff up," Pelley remarks.
"No, we didn't make it up, Scott, we just…," Tenet says.
"It's not true," Pelley remarks.
"Scott, you're doing it again, you're impugning the integrity of people who make analytical judgments and make their best judgments about what they believe of the Iraqis possessed. Intelligence, you know, my business is not always about the truth. It's about people's best judgments about what the truth may be. We believed it. We wrote it. We let the secretary down," Tenet says.
"These are not assertions, what we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence," Secretary of State Powell said.
"He didn’t tell the United Nations, 'Look, we think this might be true.' This was laid out to the world as a iron-clad case," Pelley remarks. "Conservative estimate. Between 100 and 500…."
"I wish I could reel the tape back," Tenet says. "Do you think that the American intelligence community's gonna roll out the secretary of state in front of the entire world and consciously let him say things that are wrong? No."
Asked if he apologized to Colin Powell, Tenet says, "Well, Colin and I have talked about it. I'm not going to talk about what he and I have said to each other, but we've talked about it."
(CBS) When it became clear there were no weapons of mass destruction, a rift split the White House and CIA. A former ambassador named Joe Wilson wrote an article debunking the uranium claim that had slipped into the State of the Union address. The White House retaliated, leaking a story that exposed the identity of Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as an undercover CIA officer.
"She's one of my officers. That's wrong. Big time wrong, you don't get to do that," Tenet says. "And the chilling effect that you have inside my work force is, 'Whoa, now officers names are being thrown out the door. Hold it. Not right.'"
Asked how much damage that did, Tenet says, "That's not the point. Just because there's a Washington bloodletting game going on here and just because her husband's out there saying what he's saying. The country's intelligence officers are not fair game. Period. That's all you need to know."
"They didn't seem to know that in the White House," Pelley remarks.
"I'm done with it. I've just told you what I think," Tenet says.
What Tenet didn’t know was that the next bloodletting would be his. It came in another White House leak, this time to reporter Bob Woodward. An unnamed source described to Woodward a pre-war meeting in the Oval Office. The CIA was showing the president how to present to the public the case for weapons of mass destruction. Woodward wrote “Tenet rose up, threw his arms in the air. 'It’s a slam dunk case!'"
"I never got off the couch, I never jumped up, there was no pantomime. I didn’t do my Michael Jordan, Air Jordan routine for the president that morning," Tenet tells Pelley.
"What did you mean by slam dunk?" Pelley asks.
"I guess I meant that we could do better," Tenet says.
"Do better?" Pelley asks.
"We can put a better case together for a public case, that’s what I meant. That’s what this was about," Tenet explains.
Tenet says the president wasn’t happy with the presentation. So he was telling Mr. Bush that improving the presentation would be a slam dunk. But Tenet says the leak to Woodward made the remark look like the decisive moment in the decision to go to war.
"I'll never believe that what happened that day, informed the president's view or belief of the legitimacy or the timing of this war. Never," Tenet insists.
In addition to five from the CIA, the only people in the room were the president, vice president, Condoleezza Rice, and Chief of Staff Andrew Card.
"Somebody who was in the Oval Office that day decided to throw you off the train. Was it the president?" Pelley asks.
"I don't know," Tenet says.
"Was it the vice president?" Pelley asks.
"I don't know," Tenet says.
"Who was out to get you, George?" Pelley asks.
"Scott, you know, I'm Greek, and we're conspiratorial by nature. But, you know, who knows?" Tenet says. "I haven't let myself go there, but as a human being it didn’t feel very good."
Tenet says, when he saw "slam dunk" in The Washington Post he knew the breach with the White House was total. He called his principal contact in the president’s office.
(CBS) "And I remember picking up the phone and calling Andy Card, who is a terrific human being and somebody I’ve always trusted … I call Andy and I said 'You know I believe he had weapons of mass destruction. And now what’s happened here is you’ve gone out and made me look stupid. It’s the most despicable thing I've ever heard in my life. Men of honor don't do this,'" Tenet recalls.
"Men of honor don't do this?" Pelley asks.
"You don't do this. You don't throw people overboard. You don’t do this you don’t call somebody in, you work your heart out, you show up everyday. You're gonna throw somebody overboard just because it's a deflection? Is that honorable? It's not honorable to me. You know, at the end of the day, the only thing you have is trust and honor in this world. It's all you have. All you have is your reputation built on trust and your personal honor. And when you don't have that anymore, well, there you go. Trust was broken," Tenet says.
"Between you and the White House?" Pelley asks,
"You bet. You bet," Tenet says.
Still, the president awarded Tenet the nation’s highest honor for a civilian, the Medal of Freedom.
Asked if he was conflicted about accepting the medal, Tenet says, "Well, there was conflict."
At Georgetown, he told 60 Minutes he accepted the medal because the citation was for the CIA's work in Afghanistan, not for Iraq. Some have asked whether the medal is why Tenet has withheld criticism of President Bush.
"Some people have wondered whether the Medal of Freedom is the reason you tend to give the president a pass," Pelley remarks.
"Well, that’s the most outrageous thing I have ever heard in my life," Tenet replies. "The notion that I would trade in my integrity to pull punches with anybody is just ridiculous."
He had the second longest tenure at the agency, but on July 11, 2004, Tenet took a cigar, and walked the grounds of the CIA one last time.
"You know that there are people watching this interview, they're gonna say to themselves, 'That's the guy that missed 9/11. That's the guy who got it wrong on Iraq.' To them, you say what?" Pelley asks.
"You know, history'll judge who this guy is. All I would say to them is I'm also the guy that was privileged to lead men and women that saved thousands of lives. I'm also the guy that was privileged to lead men and women who get up every day to try and keep them safe. I'm also the guy that knows that my report card is a heck of a lot better than the bad things, and there a lot of good things, and I would hope that the American people believe that here's a guy who tried to serve his country as best as he knew how, is an honest man, and led his people as well as he possibly could," Tenet says. "And, the rest is for other people to judge."