Transcript: Lott, Rockefeller on 'Fox News Sunday'
URL:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,110092,00.html
Sunday, February 01, 2004
The following is an excerpt from FOX News Sunday, Feb. 1, 2004.
CHRIS WALLACE, HOST, FOX NEWS SUNDAY: So, if the pre-war intelligence on Iraq was wrong, what will Congress do to try to fix the problem? For answers, we turn now to two key members of the Senate Intelligence Committee: the vice chairman, Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller, and Republican Trent Lott.
And good morning to both of you, gentlemen. Welcome.
U.S. SENATOR JAY ROCKEFELLER (D-WV): Good morning, Chris.
U.S. SENATOR TRENT LOTT (R-MS): Good to be with you.
WALLACE: Before we get to Iraq, I want to ask you both about these latest terrorist threats against the U.S. and the cancellation of some international flights.
Senator Lott, what do you know?
LOTT: Not a whole lot more than what you hear in the media. I understand that these threats have been going on since before Christmas. They're sort of the same pattern. They can't be ignored, when you've got information or some intelligence that some individual or group of individuals may be trying to sabotage or commandeer an aircraft.
But we don't know a lot more on the Intelligence Committee about that, I think, than anybody else.
WALLACE: Senator Rockefeller, there is reportedly some intelligence, some reports that U.S. officials are getting, that one of the ideas is that someone would release either a chemical or biological agent onboard the plane that passengers would then unknowingly spread when they disembarked in this country.
Does the U.S. have any way to counter that?
ROCKEFELLER: I don't think so, and that's partly the problem of not checking cargo, and it's partly the problem of biological weapons, which nobody has figured out really what to do about yet. Nobody has any idea about what to do about them on an airplane or on the ground.
WALLACE: So, in fact...
ROCKEFELLER: It's very dangerous.
It was very interesting to me they were some of the same flights, you know, 223, British Airways.
We have to be alert. We have to be careful. We have to protect.
LOTT: The way to deal with it, Chris, is to do what they're doing. When you have some intelligence, some information that's credible, that some particular aircraft or airlines might be attacked with whatever form, you start increasing your checks or you cancel the flights. And they've done that. I think they're doing the right thing.
WALLACE: Senator Lott, let's turn to Iraq. There is, as we've been mentioning, a report this morning that President Bush has changed his mind and agreed to support an independent investigation into this question of pre-war intelligence. What do you know about that?
LOTT: I understand that they are looking at the situation and want to get the whole story. I'm not a fan of commissions, generally speaking. You know, government by commission, we've got an awful lot of them that we've done over the years. But, in this case, there's no question that there was an intelligence failure, in some form or another.
I think you phrased the question right at the beginning. What I want to know is, what happened? Why wasn't it more reliable, why wasn't it more accurate? And, more importantly, what are we going to do about it?
I think — I'd like to know more information from the Iraq Survey Group that's still working, the successor group of the group that Dr. Kay headed. I think Dr. Kay has been very helpful in the way that he's handled himself.
The Intelligence Committee that we serve on will — we're in the process of doing a report. I think people maybe will be surprised at how aggressive it is, in the questions we raise.
But I think it's important for the Congress, the administration and the American people to know as much as we can about this, get, you know, a very honest assessment, and then decide what we're going to do about it.
WALLACE: Senator?
ROCKEFELLER: When you introduced the subject, you said, "on the pre-war intelligence." Now, I don't know what the total deal is, but it's got to be more than just pre-war intelligence.
I mean, for a long time on the Intelligence Committee in the Senate, as Senator Lott knows, I have been trying to get it expanded not just to the pre-war intelligence, but also the use of, by decisionmakers, of that intelligence, and the whole interrelationship between intelligence and decisionmaking.
And so, one, it has to have that included. And that is still not settled.
Secondly, it cannot, as some of our colleagues indicated, start a year from now or at the end of the year. It's got to start very soon. You don't take national security and say, oh, let's just put it on hold for a year, until an election is over, until something else.
WALLACE: Well, let me ask you about that, Senator Rockefeller, because the report today is that the White House and congressional Senate Republicans are talking about pushing maybe not the start of it, but certainly any report by this independent investigation until after the election.
ROCKEFELLER: Big mistake. Big mistake. And it's not fair, because we're talking about national security.
David Kay you just finished interviewing. I consider that he has changed the future of security, insofar as we as Americans look at it. I think he's done an enormous service. He told the truth. People didn't want to hear it. But he was right. All of a sudden, everybody is folding in.
So, we've got to do it fairly, and we've got to do it promptly. You do not put the future of American security on hold.
LOTT: Several reactions to that.
First, we don't want to politicize this issue. This is an election year, and it's very hard not to politicize almost everything, or anything.
The problem with the intelligence community didn't begin while Senator Rockefeller and I were on the Intelligence Committee. This has been a problem for years. I think it goes back to the Church Commission. That's when we started losing human intelligence. That's when all kinds of things stopped being done well.
We have had a failure in the intelligence area, in my opinion, for a long time. I'm very unhappy with the quality of and the reliability of the intelligence we get. I don't think we get nearly enough human intelligence.
What we want is answers and solutions. When you start getting into interpreting the intelligence, as to how it was used — look, we just went through that in Britain.
LOTT: There was a Lord Hutton report. And the report came back and said...
WALLACE: We should tell our viewers, this is about whether or not Tony Blair and his government had hyped up the intelligence.
LOTT: Yes. "Sexed it up" was the way the BBC described it. And he determined that, as a matter of fact, they did have information they relied on. They didn't exaggerate it. And by the way, the BBC did. And all of a sudden, BBC's got all kinds of credibility problems, people resigning.
But I am not happy with the intelligence community. I'm not happy with how it was conveyed to us. I may be willing to go along with an independent commission, because I think it's important that we get reliable information and that we do something about it. How do we make our intelligence more reliable?
WALLACE: Senator Rockefeller, you now say that you believe this war was pre-meditated and pre-planned. What's your evidence for that?
ROCKEFELLER: Several things. Number one, starting about 10 months ago, 10 months before the beginning of the war, there were about five different groups — the State Department, DOD had a couple of them, the CIA, and a number of other groups, in and out of government — were doing studies on what do we do in a post-Iraq war situation.
Ten months before the war started, and way before the National Intelligence Estimate, which influenced the vote of the Congress about authorizing, such a process came about.
WALLACE: But, in fact, wasn't regime change a policy of this government starting in the late '90s under Bill Clinton?
LOTT: And the Congress voted for that.
ROCKEFELLER: But with a difference. Regime change did not mean the way, what I would call the neoconservatives — and Senator Lott will not be happy about that.
LOTT: Well, I'm not one of them.
ROCKEFELLER: No, you're not one of them. But you won't be happy that I said it.
WALLACE: You're just a conservative, right?
LOTT: Right. I'm not a new conservative.
ROCKEFELLER: In other words, they wrote President Clinton on January 1, 1998, and it was Rumsfeld and it was Wolfowitz and it was Cheney's top guy and it was everybody that runs the Defense Department basically. And they said, "Diplomacy isn't working, let's go in there. Let's take them out militarily."
That was not Clinton's policy. Regime change to him meant, you know, a revolution by the people, a quiet action, something of that sort. It was not a military attack.
WALLACE: But, Senator, let me ask you, in October of 2002, as you were explaining your vote — because you voted for the authorization of force — here's what you had to say: "I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat. Saddam's existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose a very real threat to America now."
What did you base that on?
ROCKEFELLER: I based it upon the intelligence, which was clearly flawed. And I have since said that that was a wrong vote and, as far as I'm concerned, it's a wrong war. Look...
WALLACE: But if you believed in the intelligence, isn't it possible that the president believed in and acted upon the same intelligence?
ROCKEFELLER: It is possible, but he has access to more. And in this process — and this is one of the things, what do we do about what went wrong with intelligence? We never pulled back from it. We never stood back and took a larger view.
Look, these boring pieces of paper I went through very carefully last night, they're all the pre-National Intelligence Estimate, which came just before the Senate vote, analysis of the intelligence community, the United Nations and the White House and then what happened right at the — they are totally different. Intelligence changed dramatically between 2000 and 2002.
WALLACE: I want to ask you, Senator Lott — you look like you're coming out of your chair — about a different issue, but you can get into something else if you want to.
LOTT: All right.
WALLACE: This is not, as you pointed out, the only intelligence problem the CIA has had, and not the only one it's had under Director George Tenet. We had the 9/11 problem. We had the failure to understand that India was going to test nuclear weapons in 1998.
Do you still have full confidence in George Tenet, or do you believe that he should step down?
LOTT: Well, the official word that you should say under circumstances like this, that's the president's decision.
I think we have major problems with our intelligence community. I think we need to take a look at a complete overhaul.
LOTT: I'm not even opposed to the idea of bringing in all the different 13 agencies under some one supervision at the White House. I'm certainly not happy with the intelligence.
But remember this...
WALLACE: Would you like to see Director Tenet step down?
LOTT: You know, if the president has confidence in him, that's his decision.
WALLACE: Do you?
LOTT: I have real problems with the job they've done.
But let me say this on the intelligence we had, we what knew. We know they had biological and chemical weapons, do we not? They used it on their own people, on their neighbors. They attacked their neighbors. They funded suicide bombers in Iraq. We know they had them. Now, what happened to it?
I think there was disinformation within their own government. I think Saddam Hussein was lying about it, and I think maybe he was being lied to. But they did have these weapons. Now what did they do with them? Did they dismantle them years ago? Well, show us. Why didn't they show us? (inaudible) able to find it. Did they transfer it to some other countries, Syria, Iran?
So this is not something that we got at the last minute. Was there additional information right at the end? I was one of the four people that was briefed by Director Tenet and the vice president about a unmanned air vehicle that might could deliver biological weapons. Those things did have an effect on us, no question.
But two other points I want to make, Chris: We are still at war. There is a war on terrorism going on. Iraq is still a very dangerous place. I want to be very careful about what we say and how we say it in America while — and, you know, the intelligence community is involved right today in Iraq trying to help our troops find out where the problems are and to deal with them. So I think we ought to be conscious of that.
WALLACE: But let me ask you, because you talk about all this intelligence, if you'd known 15 months ago what you know now, that, in fact, whatever the history was, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, would you still have voted to send 100,000 American troops into war?
LOTT: I probably would have, because, as a matter of fact, we know there were weapons of mass destruction, and we don't know where they are now or what happened to them. We did the right thing. Saddam Hussein was a threat to his people, his neighbors and, in many respects, to the world, in my opinion.
Look, this didn't develop over 10 months. The problem wasn't based on intelligence right at the end. This is a man that had defied everybody, the entire world, for 12 years. And it was not going to get better. It was going to get worse.
We're trying to do something unbelievable in the Middle East, and that is help people be free and have democracy, and to get rid of this tyrant, this murderer, this mad man, Saddam Hussein. Was that worthwhile? I think the answer is yes.
WALLACE: Senator Rockefeller, briefly, two questions. One, I'd like you to respond, if you could, to Senator Lott. And, secondly, do you still have full confidence in George Tenet, or should he step down?
ROCKEFELLER: I'm not going to answer that. And you know why? It's sort of like, did you get Osama bin Laden today? Did you get Saddam Hussein today? Americans want everything to be crystallized in one person.
The president has to admit that he made a mistake on intelligence. The Congress has to admit we made a mistake on intelligence. The intelligence community has make a mistake on — that they made a mistake on intelligence. Do you know why?
Because until we admit that we were wrong in our intelligence, we will not go about fixing it to make sure it doesn't happen again. Whether it's a, you know, collected DNI, director of national intelligence, which has some problems to it, but nevertheless is part of the equation, OK?
WALLACE: Gentlemen, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you both very much for joining us today.
LOTT: Thanks, Chris.
ROCKEFELLER: Thank you.
WALLACE: Appreciate it.
Up next, stories you won't find on any other Sunday show. And we'll discuss the Democratic race with our panel: Brit Hume, Mara Liasson, Bill Kristol and Juan Williams. Ne |
