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.''

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."

Bill Kristol Defends Co-PNAC-Signator, Richard Perle, Against George Tenet's Claims

Bill Kristol goes on the offensive in the Weekly Standard:

Scott Shane reported in Saturday's New York Times that former CIA chief George Tenet's dramatic description in his book, At the Center of the Storm, of an August 2002 presentation at the CIA by defense undersecretary Douglas Feith and his staff, is at the very least misleading. In order to suggest that Feith's staff was utterly out of its depth, Tenet characterized the main briefer, Tina Shelton, as a "naval reservist." In fact, she had been a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst for almost two decades. Tenet also claimed that Shelton said in her presentation of Iraq-al Qaeda contacts, "It is an open-and-shut case." Shelton and Feith both deny she said that. One person who served in government with Shelton told THE WEEKLY STANDARD today he finds it "inconceivable" that Shelton, an experienced analyst, would have made such an unequivocal assertion.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has now learned of a second, more stunning error in Tenet's book (which is due to appear in bookstores tomorrow). According to Michiko Kakutani's review in Saturday's Times,

On the day after 9/11, he [Tenet] adds, he ran into Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative and the head of the Defense Policy Board, coming out of the White House. He says Mr. Perle turned to him and said: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility."

Here's the problem: Richard Perle was in France on that day, unable to fly back after September 11. In fact Perle did not return to the United State until September 15.

Did Tenet perhaps merely get the date of this encounter wrong? Well, the quote Tenet ascribes to Perle hinges on the encounter taking place September 12: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday." And Perle in any case categorically denies to THE WEEKLY STANDARD ever having said any such thing to Tenet, while coming out of the White House or anywhere else.

According to Kakutani, Tenet concludes by paraphrasing Daniel Patrick Moynihan's comment: "Policymakers are entitled to their own opinions--but not to their own set of facts." How many other facts has George Tenet invented?

Operation Clean Break

Wayne Madsen reports:

July 21, 2006 -- Informed sources have told WMR that arch-neocon Michael Ledeen, who acts as an unofficial foreign policy adviser to Karl Rove, was at the White House yesterday with a group of Iranian opposition figures. Among the topics discussed was a promised $25 million grant by the Bush administration to the Iranian insurgents. The money is to be used to plant Desert Storm-vintage biological and chemical weapons shells, confiscated by U.S. forces in Iraq, on the Iranian side of the Iraqi border. The weapons will be used as "proof" of Iran's plan to "attack" U.S. troops in Iraq. That will be used to justify, ex post facto, the coming U.S. attack on Iran. Our sources report that George W. Bush dropped by the White House meeting to offer his support to the Iranian opposition operatives.

Pretext for war with Iran: White House plans to move chem-bio weapons from Iraq into Iranian side of this desolate border.


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July 21, 2006 -- The current Israeli assault on Lebanon was stage-managed between the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and neocons in the Bush administration, according to well-connected sources in the nation's capital. The Bush administration had prior knowledge of and supported Israel's planned attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, the sources have revealed. In addition, there was no move by the Bush administration to warn Americans in the Occupied Palestinian Territories or Lebanon to leave the areas before the Israeli invasions. No travel warnings were issued to U.S. citizens in an attempt to mask Israeli attack plans, an action that resulted in last-minute Dunkirk-like sea evacuations of foreigners from Lebanon.

The first indication that Israel pre-planned its assault on the Palestinians came early this month when the Israelis began denying entry to the West Bank to Palestinians holding U.S. passports. The U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem refused to intervene with Israel, claiming it was the decision of a sovereign nation. The denial of entry to Palestinian-Americans was a violation of the Oslo Accords and the Geneva Conventions. The United States does not officially recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Washington insiders report that the Bush administration's coordination with Israel in the attacks on Hamas and Hezbollah involve the official adoption of the white paper, "A Clean Break: New Strategies for Securing the Realm," as U.S. policy. The "Clean Break" document, authored in 1996 by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and other neocon operatives, was written at the same time the program for the invasion and occupation of Iraq was drawn up by the same neocon players.


Carrying out the next phase of the neo-con "Clean Break": Netanyahu, Perle, and Ledeen still call the shots on U.S. and Israeli policies. First it was Iraq, then Palestine and Lebanon, next is Syria and Iran.

The current U.S.-Israeli strategy of bombing and invading Lebanon is a follow-up to four years of covert activities by the Pentagon, White House, and Mossad in Lebanon that involved the car bombing assassinations of top Lebanese officials in order to clear out Syrian forces from Lebanon. The assassinations of Elie Hobeika, George Hawi, and Rafik Hariri were all carried out to destabilize Lebanon and force the withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon. Syria was blamed by the Bush administration for all the car bombing assassinations in Lebanon.

Israel's border exercise that saw the capture by Hezbollah of two Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese side of the border and the contingency plans involving the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Hamas in Israel, near the Israeli-Gazan border, provided a pre-text for the Israeli attack on Gaza and Lebanon. Similar plans have been drawn up to respond to a Syrian "capture" of Israeli troops in Lebanon near the Syrian border or from the Golan Heights. That will be used to justify a joint Israeli and American attack on Syria, with Israel entering from Lebanon and the U.S. entering from Iraq.

The carrying out of the joint Israeli-U.S. attack plan for Lebanon, Syria (and eventually, Iran) is the reason why the United States has stymied UN attempts to seek an immediate cease-fire. The intent of the Bush administration is to see a widening of the conflict. Unconfirmed UN ambassador to the UN John Bolton, appearing on Fox News, laid out the future blueprint for the joint U.S.-Israeli regionalization of the war in the Middle East when he stated, "I think that if you look at the support that Iran and Syria have given groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad that really the reckoning we need here is a reckoning, not just with the terrorist groups, but with the states that finance them."

WMR has also learned that top Israeli and U.S. military officers are adamantly opposed to the Clean Break policy. Many Israeli generals, remembering Israel's bloody occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s, favored negotiating a prisoner swap with Hezbollah. The Olmert government is purging the last remnants of the Yitzhak Rabin elements who favored negotiations from the Israeli military and intelligence agencies much in the same way that opponents of the Bush regime have been purged from the U.S. military, CIA, and State Department.


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July 21, 2006 -- The son of David Gribben, Vice President Dick Cheney's boyhood friend and his chief of staff at the Pentagon and Vice President for Corporate Affairs at Halliburton, has reportedly joined Cheney's White House staff as an assistant. The elder Gribben is an active player in the corporate-religious tax dodge known as The Fellowship, an Arlington, Virginia-based contrivance that uses religious tax-exempt status to lobby the U.S. and foreign governments on behalf of the military-industrial complex. With the carrying out of the Clean Break by Israel and the United States, profits for companies like Halliburton are bound to skyrocket. The Israeli attack on Lebanon is already estimated to have resulted in $2 billion in damage to Lebanon's infrastructure. WMR previously reported that Jacobs/Sverdrup has been promised a lucrative Pentagon contract to build a large U.S. airbase in northern Lebanon.


The stage is set for Halliburton to move into U.S. and Israeli-occupied Lebanon.

The Case for War Has Not Been Made

Colin Powell showed that Saddam Hussein is resisting disarming. But he didn't prove that he's an immediate threat.



At Salon.com, Joe Conason reports:
Show and tell As Colin Powell outlined his case against Iraq before the U.N. Security Council, with CIA director George Tenet sitting behind him, two questions kept occurring to me: Does this information prove that war is the best and only means to implement Resolution 1441? And if this information is accurate, was it provided to the UNMOVIC inspectors in full compliance with the responsibilities placed on all member states by that resolution? (Full text of Powell's remarks is here.)There are legitimate questions about the interpretation of what the tapes and satellite pictures mean, as we know from reported disputes within and between U.S. agencies over interpretation of intelligence about Iraq. Lacking the technical ability to evaluate this information, we will have to wait for other interpretations to emerge, if they do.

So let's assume that all of the evidence presented by Powell can be taken at face value, as described by him. A Gallup poll today showed that on this issue, he is far more trusted than the president by most Americans, for good reason. Meanwhile, the intercepted conversations played by the secretary of state do seem to reveal panic among members of the Iraqi officer corps over the arrival of inspectors. The tapes suggest that the Republican Guard and other units have tried to conceal evidence of forbidden weapons. Those conversations also indicate more broadly that Iraq is not handing over all its weapons and information to UNMOVIC forthrightly, as required by 1441.

To an untrained eye, the satellite photographs are more difficult to judge, as Powell acknowledged. Pictures of buildings don't tell us what's inside them. If decontamination vehicles have been detected outside certain facilities, that too suggests concealment.

Information obtained from human informants is subject to all the traditional doubts about testimony from defectors, and is therefore less convincing. And even based on defector and prisoner testimony, the information regarding Baghdad's alleged links with Osama bin Laden is still thin. (An essay in today's Wall Street Journal by former Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen advises the administration to drop this line of argument, but it's only available online to subscribers.) Powell didn't even try to suggest that Iraq was involved in any specific terrorist attacks on the United States, let alone the Sept. 11 atrocity.


There was quite a lot of other pertinent information missing from Powell's address. It is hard to listen to him talk about Saddam's violations of human rights and his gassing of the Kurds, without wondering why those events didn't bother the Reagan and Bush administrations when they were actually occurring. (It's easier to understand why he omitted any reference to the American role in arming Iraq and the subsequent coverup under his old boss, the president's father.)

What was most noticeably absent from Powell's presentation, however, was any evidence that Iraq is a present threat to its neighbors or any other nation -- and thus must be invaded and subdued immediately. He showed that Saddam has sought an arsenal of mass destruction, and that his regime is still resisting disarmament. But he inadvertently made some arguments for continued inspections backed by force, rather than war.

"This effort to hide things from the inspectors is not one or two isolated events, quite the contrary," he said. "This is part and parcel of a policy of evasion and deception that goes back 12 years, a policy set at the highest levels of the Iraqi regime." No doubt true -- and yet the U.N. inspection team between 1991 and 1998 destroyed tens of thousands of tons of chemical and biological weapons, prohibited missiles and the Iraqi nuclear program in its entirety, despite Saddam's duplicity. What the inspectors are now trying to find is a small fraction of what their predecessors found and neutralized.

Powell also pointed to the documents found by inspectors in the home of an Iraqi nuclear scientist, an achievement he attributed to "intelligence they were provided." If sharing U.S. intelligence with the inspectors can locate documents in a private home, why not continue with that process?

"Tell me, answer me, are the inspectors to search the house of every government official, every Baath Party member and every scientist in the country to find the truth, to get the information they need, to satisfy the demands of our council?" the secretary demanded. They don't need to do that. Finding every scrap of paper is not the mandate of the inspectors. Locating weapons and laboratories is their job, and Powell only offered glancing indications that the U.S. has made that easier.

There was also a clue that American confidence in the data presented by Powell is not absolute. His presentation about links between Iraq and al-Qaida included a satellite photograph described as a "terrorist camp" in northern Iraq where operatives are trained in the use of poisons. "You see a picture of this camp," he said. "The network is teaching its operatives how to produce ricin and other poisons ... Those helping to run this camp are Zarqawi lieutenants operating in northern Kurdish areas outside Saddam Hussein's controlled Iraq. But Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization, Ansar al-Islam, that controls this corner of Iraq."

If the United States firmly believes that its satellites have located an al-Qaida training camp in northern Iraq, why haven't our bombers, jets and missiles destroyed it already? On the ground, northern Iraq is friendly Kurdish territory, and the U.S. and its allies control the airspace.

Nothing Powell said proved that war is necessary now. He didn't justify the potential deaths of thousands of people and the unforeseeable dangers of an invasion by the U.S. and its coalition. He didn't convince the Security Council to change course in support of immediate war. What he did prove is that inspections ought to continue and intensify -- and if Iraq tries to frustrate them as the regime did in 1998, there will still be plenty of time for military action.

French kiss-off France is no longer an ally of the United States, according to neocon eminence Richard Perle, who told a conference in New York yesterday that other friends in Europe "must develop a strategy to contain our erstwhile ally or we will not be talking about a NATO alliance." Insofar as Perle sometimes plays "bad cop" for the Bush White House as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, his remarks suggest a bullying approach that is growing worse as they move closer to war. (Several days ago on Fox News, Perle accused the French government of pursuing an Iraq policy controlled solely by oil interests.)

At the New York event Perle also suggested that the United States should never again consult the U.N. Security Council on a matter of important policy. Such is Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policy at its worst: provoke America's oldest friends, bluster about dumping the U.N. when we don't get our way immediately, and dismantle the most important military alliance in the world in a fit of pique. It sounds eerily like the John Birch Society, circa 1962.

Perle's hostility to France is nothing new, but it made me recall today that he owns a very nice little house in the south of France. It's near the town of Gordes in the Luberon. I know because I went to a New Year's Day party at that house two years ago (he wasn't there). Maybe he's sold his share of it.

Frontline Interviews Richard Perle

Richard Perle is the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon made up of leading figures in national security and defense which backs laying the groundwork for overthrowing Saddam through military means. He previously served as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy in the Reagan Administration. In this interview Perle says, "There can be no victory in the war against terrorism if at the end of it Saddam Hussein is still in power." He argues that the second phase of the war against terrorism should consist of U.S. political and military support for the Iraqi opposition's efforts to overthrow Saddam Hussein. He was interviewed in mid-October 2001.

PBS interviews Richard Perle:
What must one understand about Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, even before entering the debate on how we should deal with Iraq?

Well, about Saddam Hussein, the essential point is that he's a thug who has been willing to murder some of the people closest to him, who has used chemical weapons against his own people, who has invaded his neighbors. He is probably the most dangerous individual in the world today.

Capable of?

Capable of anything. Capable of using weapons of mass destruction against the United States, capable of launching other military maneuvers as soon as he thinks he can get away with it.

You have stated in the past that this is not a fringe issue. What do you mean by that?

The question of Saddam Hussein is at the very core of the war against terrorism. There can be no victory in the war against terrorism if, at the end of it, Saddam Hussein is still in power -- not only because he supports terrorism, not only because he trains terrorists [Editor's Note: see the interview with a defector on Iraq's alleged terrorist training camp.] and gives them refuge -- but because he is the symbol of defiance of all Western values. He succeeded in throwing the United Nations out. He's violated all of the undertakings that followed the end of the Gulf War. As long as he is there, we are in danger, and we are in danger from terrorist activity.

We haven't dealt with this threat. This threat has been there for quite a while. What are some of the reasons why?

We made a fundamental mistake at the end of Desert Storm: we didn't finish the job. Finishing the job would have meant the destruction of Saddam Hussein's military power, which, in turn, would have led to the destruction of his regime. The people who made that mistake were loath to admit it, so they described the situation in unjustifiably sanguine terms. He was, to use the phrase they adopted, in a box, and safely in a box, and we need not be concerned about him. I think that was wrong. It's been wrong all along, and it is demonstrably wrong today.

Why is it wrong?

It's wrong because he has weapons of mass destruction, because he has expelled U.N. inspectors. He has violated all of the terms and conditions of the U.N. resolutions that had been allowed to fall into disuse. He is winning. Because he is winning, and because he has awesome capabilities, he poses a continuing threat to us and to others.

Have we not only ignored the situation, but in fact had several chances that we didn't do the job?

We didn't do the job, in part because we didn't understand the dangers. I think after Sept. 11 those dangers are now much better understood. But we have passed up one opportunity after another to take action against Saddam, even action that would have been led by his own Iraqi opposition.

Saddam Hussein is hated throughout Iraq. There is a small group of people who benefit from his regime, but the vast majority of Iraqis suffer terribly under his regime. There is an opposition. The opposition is eager to take action against him. Instead of supporting that opposition, we have held them back.

There seems to be a bit of a schizophrenic attitude toward the Iraqi National Congress in Washington. Can you define that for us and what it means?

Yes. The INC is highly regarded on Capitol Hill, and I believe highly regarded by a number of people who know the INC leadership well. It is not held in high regard by the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency, who are, together, the architects of the failed Iraq policy, including the mistakes of 1991 and repeated failures to deal with Saddam since then.

So how has that translated into the debate that is ongoing in Washington right now over future moves?

It's very clear that the CIA and the State Department are energetic opponents of support to the Iraqi opposition, partly because they believe that we are safe. That's going to get serious reconsideration when we examine the prospect that Saddam Hussein could -- and very possibly will -- transfer weapons of mass destruction to anonymous terrorists, and thereby escape the retaliatory capabilities that have always been the basis for the theory that he's in a box and can't get out.

What is the threshold that needs to be reached before that is believable, or before that action might actually be taken?

I think sensible people looking at the dangers to the United States, recognizing how we failed adequately to contain terrorism before Sept. 11, will conclude that with [Saddam Hussein's] hatred of the United States, with his blood feud with former President Bush -- [which] could extend to George W. Bush as well -- to leave him in place and wait for him to take action against us is simply too dangerous.

So in very practical terms, what does that mean for our policy as of today?

I think we will need a new policy toward Iraq, because the current policy is to leave Saddam Hussein alone, to subject Iraq to sanctions which are ineffective. They're increasingly being violated by other countries. They're certainly not going to change Saddam's policy, and yet that is the policy of the last administration and, I'm sorry to say, has been the policy of this administration.

But the president has already stated that we're in a war against terrorism. We will not end until we weed it out, which include states that sponsor or help terrorists. So help a non-Washington audience; translate that for us.

If the president means what he says -- and I believe he does -- and if he has a disciplined administration support him -- a Department of State, a Central Intelligence Agency, a Department of Defense, a National Security Council -- who consider that it is their responsibility to implement his policies, then they will design a much more aggressive policy toward Iraq and we will no longer leave Saddam Hussein unencumbered. We'll take action against him.

As far as this war on terrorism, if you were designing it or advising the administration, would you do it differently? Is the war somewhat flawed at this point?

Well, we're conducting this war now in phases. Always bet on phase one, because phase one always happens. Phase two sometimes happens and sometimes it doesn't. I would have gone about this differently. I would have gone after Iraq immediately. I would not have relegated it to some subsequent phase. But it's all right, as long as we get to phase two. Phase two should be overwhelming support for the Iraqi opposition. They're eager, they're ready to go. I believe they can do it. We haven't done that until now, and the State Department opposes doing it.

[This should be] coupled with plans that could involve the direct application of American military power in support of the Iraqi opposition. Bombing targets in Iraq without any connection to a strategy seems to me unwise and ineffective. ...

I think the regime of Saddam Hussein is far weaker than most people believe, and what it would take to topple it is a tiny fraction of what was necessary to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1991.

Some people will argue, I suppose, that it's not that simple, that it's another quagmire, the INC is not as easy to rely on, and democracy is not an easy thing that you set up quickly. What is your response to that opinion?

It's certainly true it's not easy. It's not simple. On the other hand, simply waiting until biological weapons show up in this country because we didn't take action against Saddam when we had the opportunity would be foolish and shortsighted, just as it was foolish and shortsighted to not act with vigor against terrorism in the period in which Al Qaeda was developing into the organization it became. Ten years ago, Al Qaeda was nothing. We watched it grow, because after each terrorist act, it was stronger than before. We never challenged it. We never took significant action against it. And these acts of terror were regarded as great triumphs and the basis upon which Al Qaeda became a magnet for people who want to destroy us....

Jim Woolsey told us basically he considers that the last decade of actions, in regards specifically to Iraq, has been feckless. What's your opinion about the policies they developed and why they developed in the way they have?

Jim's certainly right that the policies were feckless. Saddam Hussein plots the assassination of a former American president. The American response: a cruise missile, in an unoccupied intelligence headquarters. And before the dust had cleared from that missile attack, American officials were at great pains to explain that we had deliberately chosen the middle of the night so nobody would be hurt. We looked ridiculous; we looked ineffective; we looked weak. Saddam must have enjoyed that night.

And the other occasions were similar -- a few missiles here or there. We said we would take action to keep the inspectors in Iraq. We didn't. We didn't take effective action. Even Desert Fox, which was a slightly more aggressive bombing of Iraq, which was intended to restore the inspection regime, ended without ever restoring the inspection regime. One encounter after the other, and the winner in each round was Saddam Hussein. I don't think there's any doubt about that.

What's your opinion on the use of courts to deal with terrorism?

I don't think you can use the courts against sovereign states. You certainly can't use them against thugs like Saddam Hussein. If you manage to get your hands on an individual terrorist, I suppose you could try it. But these fellows are not working for themselves; they're working for governments like Saddam Hussein's Iraq. To focus our attention on the individuals who are hired to commit murder rather than the people who hire them is a great mistake....

The secretary of state's policies seem to be, to some extent, based on the fact that you need the coalition, and the coalition is endangered if one, for instance, goes after Iraq. What is correct or wrong about that belief?

First of all, I have serious doubts about the extent to which we need a coalition. I don't know what this coalition is, who's in it, who's out of it, where you get your membership card. Can you be expelled if you're not doing certain minimum things? Are the Saudis in it? Are they out of it? The Syrians support terror -- are they in, are they out? It's a very vague concept, and an insubstantial one.

Under the best of circumstances, a coalition is a means to an end. If we confuse means and ends and the coalition becomes an end in itself, then we won't win the war on terror, because a broad coalition is not dedicated to winning the war on terror.

So why does Colin Powell believe this?

I think Colin Powell is simply wrong about this, just as I think he was wrong about the end of the Gulf War. He was in favor of leaving Saddam standing, and we now know that that was a very costly mistake. Tens of thousands of people have died since, and Americans are exposed to an unprecedented danger. I think he's wrong now in believing that the coalition is more important than effectively going after those states that sponsor terrorism. If the coalition is going to protect a terrorist state like Saddam, then to hell with the coalition.

Some will say that a coalition is necessary for intelligence reasons, for financial closing down of systems....

All of these claims about the benefits of coalition are subject to detailed analysis. Are we getting intelligence that we can rely on that we would not get if it were our policy to go after Iraq? I haven't seen anyone demonstrate that any country is giving us valuable intelligence that would be withheld if it were our policy to replace Saddam Hussein. Indeed, some of the intelligence that we're getting is coming from countries who would be delighted if we went after Saddam Hussein.

In terms of the financial, the effort to control funds going to terrorists, I have not heard anyone identify a country that would be unwilling to cooperate in that regard, but is doing so today, if we were go after Saddam Hussein.

The INC maintains that, to some extent, the coalition of Arab nations -- friends of the United States, Saudi Arabia, for instance -- would not be very interested in seeing help to the INC, because you end up, perhaps, with then a democratic Iraq, [which might be detrimental to their own regimes]. Do you believe that that is part of what's going on here?

There may be an element of that. The Saudis certainly do not want to see the dominoes falling where the dominoes are leaders who use intimidation to stay in power, and [who] live very well at the expense of their own country. That's a fair description of the Saudis, in my opinion.

But I also think the Saudis realize that they are threatened by Saddam. If Saddam had not made the mistake in 1991 of stopping too soon, he would have overwhelmed Saudi Arabia too, and the Saudis knew that, which is why they were our coalition partners. So they want to see him out of the way.

What the Saudis fear, and what others in the region fear, is an insubstantial, ineffective, halfhearted effort against Saddam, because they are left in a dangerous neighborhood with Saddam still there, after having provoked him fecklessly. So it's the fecklessness of American policy that stands in the way of unifying the Gulf states against Saddam. ...

What would need to happen, in your viewpoint, for the administration to turn towards Iraq?

I think we're going to turn towards Iraq, because it's impossible to claim victory in the war against terrorism when a man who supports terror continues to occupy power in Iraq. But the important change came with the discovery that anthrax, a lethal biological weapon, can be delivered anonymously to Americans. It was done on a small scale, by posting letters with anthrax in them. But surely the lesson of that is that we can be attacked anonymously with biological weapons.

So the argument on which those prepared to accept Saddam Hussein forever have based their case -- which is that we can retaliate and punish him so severely that he won't attempt to use his weapons of mass destruction -- that argument is out the window, because it is now clear that he has the option of providing weapons of mass destruction to anonymous terrorists. That is a threat that this country would be foolish to accept.

But doesn't it then have to be proven that the anthrax in the hands of the terrorists in the United States that are sending it to our news media and to our government officials is Iraqi anthrax?

No, not at all. In fact, I rather doubt that it's Iraqi anthrax. But what the delivery of anthrax through the mail forces us to consider is a range of options available to Saddam Hussein that we didn't consider before. Because the argument that we could deter Saddam by threatening to destroy him if he used weapons of mass destruction against us is no longer relevant, if you allow the possibility that he could deliver weapons of mass destruction through anonymous third parties. And there's no question he has the capacity to do that....

Let me put it this way: Iraq's time will come. Either that, or we will end the war against terrorism without a victory, as we ended the war against Saddam Hussein in 1991 without a victory....

Does that mean that, once you've done with Iraq, you need to turn your attention to Iran and to Syria?

There are a number of countries that have been supporting terrorism. Many of them get very little benefit out of it. On the other hand, there's been no cost. So as they look at the costs and benefits of offering hospitality, safe haven to terrorists, they have concluded that on balance it's a good thing for them to do. If now we impose serious costs, if we say to them, "If you support terrorism, you're going to be at war with the United States, and you may be destroyed in the process," I think several of these governments will simply get out of the support of terrorism business. It will be too costly, the risks will be too great, and they will exercise some rational judgment and decide they're not going to do that anymore.

But isn't there an example of basically going after another terrorist state? The attacks on Libya during the Reagan administration didn't seem to dissuade other terrorist states.

It is true that when the Reagan administration went after Libya, it succeeded only in repressing Libyan terrorism. It wasn't followed up when terrorism began to show up elsewhere, and that was the mistake. Because we didn't say when we went after [Qaddafi] [that] we will go after anyone else who supports terrorism. The ball was dropped at that point, particularly during the long period of the Clinton administration.

...What's your opinion of what the evidence is out there [against Iraq], and why is it relevant?

There's a great deal of circumstantial evidence that Iraq was involved in the 1993 attempt on the World Trade Center. Ramzi Yousef, who sits in jail now, was traveling on an Iraqi passport. There were lots of communications back to Iraq that suggest there were people in Iraq who were at least cognizant of the operation and possibly even directing it. Laurie Mylroie has done some serious work on this, and it's very convincing. It's not conclusive at this stage. It was the view of the chief FBI officer who dealt with the case, who passed away, that Iraq was involved. We may never be able to prove conclusively whether Iraq was involved or not, but there's strong circumstantial evidence that suggests Iraq was indeed involved.

Why is that relevant to the decisions being made today?

I don't think it is relevant to the decisions being made today. What is relevant to the decisions being made today is one simple question: Does Saddam Hussein, in power in Iraq, in possession of weapons of mass destruction, pose a threat to the United States that is of such a magnitude that we had better take action before he takes action against us? That's the issue. It has little to do with the past history.

But we do know that he has connections with terrorist networks, that he has training facilities for terrorists. At Salman Pak, there's a facility that has mock-ups of a variety of aircraft so that hijackers can be trained. We know that he has motive; we know he has capability. It's a question of whether we wait and hope for the best.

We talked to a refugee from Iraq who INC has been working with, a gentleman who knows what's been happening at Salman Pak. How believable is the evidence that is out there? What we're told is that terrorists are being trained from many Arab nations, some fundamentalists. They're being trained in how to take over planes with knives and/or pens, and how to use them as a terrorist act. Is it believable? Is it relevant? Why is it important?

I think it's believable. Look. I don't believe that we will again experience an attack exactly like that of Sept. 11. For one thing, we now know that you never yield control of the aircraft. Instructions to pilots were exactly the opposite, before Sept. 11. So it isn't going to be a repetition.

We're always fighting the last war. I can't tell you what form a new terrorist attack will take. The one that troubles me the most is the use of biological weapons, disseminated not by Iraqi intelligence officials, but by terrorists who are prepared to commit suicide, who would cheerfully kill millions of Americans, if they could do it. All that remains is to organize their entry into the United States together with those biological agents. And that is something that Saddam Hussein and his intelligence apparatus is in a position to do.

So we can either hope he doesn't do what we know he can do, and wait, or we can consider that the threat is large enough to justify action today.

But is the threat alone enough? Doesn't evidence need to be compiled so that one understands that there is a tie to Iraq and terrorist acts, before making a move to include them this war on terrorism?

No. I don't know why we would say to ourselves, "Saddam Hussein has biological weapons. He has a well-known hatred of the United States. He spoke approvingly of the attacks on Sept. 11. But despite all of that, we will not take any action against him until we find evidence that he did what." This is a question of protecting ourselves, and we are in a situation where the only credible defense has to include a strong offense. It is too easy to get into the United States. It is too easy to recruit suicide bombers. It is too easy to disseminate weapons of mass destruction. So either we take this to the enemy, or we wait, and hope the enemy chooses not to take it to us. But if we wait, it will be his choice, and not ours.

There has been some reporting on the meetings of the Defense Policy Board and the importance of this very influential group of former and present day policy makers. You're still the chair, right?

Yes....

Can you in any way define the importance of the board, in general terms?

Well, I think the importance of the board is really the importance of the individuals who serve on it. When you have people like Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger and Harold Brown and Newt Gingrich and Tom Foley and others applying their considerable intelligence and experience to a difficult issue, that counts for something. And they have done that, and they can all speak for themselves about their own views.

What is the relevance that there are representatives of the INC there, giving testimony to this influential group?

I wouldn't characterize that part of the deliberation in that way. We thought it was useful for them to meet some of the opposition, so that they would understand who among the opponents of Saddam might be available to help rid the world of Saddam.

Are we still basically at war with Iraq after ten years? We've been bombing them time and time again, here and there; we assume Iraq is back in the business of biological, chemical and nuclear, probably. Is this a war that's continuing? Or do we not understand, really, the reality of what's going on here?

What has happened is that, after the defeat of Saddam's forces in Kuwait in 1991, and the imposition of a number of U.N. resolutions aimed at protecting the world against his weapons of mass destruction, we have lost one engagement after another. The result is that those U.N. resolutions are now in the trash can. He's simply defied them, and gotten away with it. There are no inspectors in Iraq today, so we don't know what he is doing. But there's every reason to believe that he continues aggressively to pursue the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.

So he's no longer in Kuwait. But he's very much in power in Iraq, because he is unchallenged in Iraq. It seems to me foolish in the extreme not to challenge his power and authority in Iraq, since so many Iraqis would gladly join in the effort to do that.

Why is it that we still haven't released the $90 million promised to them? Can you shed any light on that?

The money that was promised to the Iraqi opposition was never spent by the Clinton administration, because they were basically opposed to the policy. So far, that has been the attitude of the Department of State even in this administration, despite a very strong declaration in the platform on which President Bush ran, and despite, I think, the president's own instincts. So it's going to take a while before some parts of this government come to the inevitable conclusion that, as long as Saddam is in the position he's in, with the weapons he possesses, we are in danger. And I have no doubt that eventually even my friends at the State Department will come to that conclusion....

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the anthrax attacks that are taking place now ... in some ways, were these inevitable?

... An attack on this scale was inevitable, because we failed to respond to lesser attacks, and the terrorists were emboldened by their successes. And make no mistake about it: every time they killed Americans or carried out an attack against American property abroad, they considered that they had achieved a victory. They determined to go from victory to victory, and we did not interfere with that....

Is there any point about Iraq one must understand so that an educated view can be made?

It's important to recognize that Iraq is a country with an enormously talented people, and that is well understood by the rest of the Arab world. So there is real concern when the rest of the Arab world observes suffering in Iraq, which is now widely attributed, I think wrongly, to the embargo that's been in effect for many years. That is very different from believing that the Arab world supports Saddam Hussein, or that it would not welcome the elimination of Saddam Hussein's regime. I think there would be dancing in the streets if Saddam were removed from power, and that reaction of the Iraqi people would be reflected in the attitude of the Arab world, generally. So the notion that if we go after Iraq we are somehow going to advance in the direction of a war against Islam that will turn out to be far worse for us, I think is really quite mistaken....

The common belief is that our soldiers are not welcomed very easily in any Arab nation today, even when there is no battle going on. It's hard for an American public to believe that the Arab allies will indeed welcome us with open arms in any endeavor against any other Arab nation. Is that a mistaken a view?

Yes, I think it's a mistaken view. This idea of Arab solidarity is complete nonsense. It's been nonsense for as long as I can remember. They're at each other's throats all the time. Saddam invades Kuwait. You have a war between Iraq and Iran. Although Iran is not an Arab nation, it's a Muslim nation. You have Jordan fighting Syria in the 1970s. It's just nonsense to suggest that there's solidarity. There is no solidarity there....

If we go into Iraq and we take down Hussein?

Then I think it's over for the terrorists.

Why so optimistic?

Because having destroyed the Taliban, having destroyed Saddam's regime, the message to the others is, "You're next." Two words. Very efficient diplomacy. " You're next, and if you don't shut down the terrorist networks on your territory, we'll take you down, too. Is it worth it?" Of course it isn't worth it. It isn't worth it for any of them.

The nightmare scenario is that we get bogged down in Afghanistan, we can't find bin Laden in some cave. We go into Iraq, we have problems, we're hit back at home with biological weapons or whatever; we lose the public, or start losing the public. Things start getting rattled. It's not clean. It's difficult. What happens?

...I think we will be vulnerable in a way that this country has never been vulnerable before. And this is not a war we cannot afford to lose.

So we have to win this war?

We have to win this war, which is why I'm confident that we will not seek to win it in the cheapest and easiest of all ways, which is to define it so that it is already won. There was that old line about Vietnam: that we should declare victory and go home. You can't do that in this war. Declare victory; but if you haven't won victory, you're as vulnerable as before you made the declaration. So that isn't an option.

Does Washington understand that?

I think the president understands that. I think the secretary of defense understands it. I think the vice president understands it, and I hope others understand it.

Does the State Department get won over, or does the State Department at some point argue their case to the death?

There are some very intelligent and talented people at the Department of State, and the secretary himself is immensely talented. They'll come to the right conclusion at the end. But they're going to have to work through a lot of historical beliefs before they get there.