Judy Woodruff's Inside Politics - Interview

SHOW: JUDY WOODRUFF'S INSIDE POLITICS 16:00

HEADLINE: White House Acknowledges State of the Union Statement That Iraq Sought to Buy Nuclear Material From Africa Was Wrong

GUESTS: Jay Rockefeller

BYLINE: Bruce Morton, William Schneider, Jeanne Moos, Judy Woodruff, Charles Feldman, Jonathan Karl

HIGHLIGHT:
The Bush administration now acknowledges that the president's State of the Union statement that Iraq sought to buy nuclear material from Africa was wrong.

BODY:
WOODRUFF: The revelation that President Bush's State of the Union address contained false information about alleged Iraqi government attempts to buy uranium has sparked a growing political dust-up Washington.

I'm joined now from Capitol Hill by West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller. He is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Senator, what does this say, if anything, about the president's credibility?

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER (D), WEST VIRGINIA: I think it hurts his credibility. He apologized, said it shouldn't have been in there. Most of us knew that quite a long time ago. The whole theory about Niger and Iraq and enriched uranium has long since been disproved. And it's not a bright chapter for the administration.

WOODRUFF: The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, Senator, is saying that the White House did not know before the State of the Union address that this information was false. Go ahead.

ROCKEFELLER: Well, see that then brings up a much more basic question, Judy. And that is why? Why didn't they know? I mean all 14 intelligence agencies basically work for the president. He is the final receiver of intelligence and analysis.

Now they give him the best analysis they have. They had pretty much broadly discounted this whole Niger problem. But somehow on the way up through the NSC or at some various points people had neglected to look at what the intelligence community of the United States was saying, as well as the intelligence community of other parts of the world.

WOODRUFF: Are you getting any better information than we are about what happened at the White House?

ROCKEFELLER: No, not in terms of what happened at the White House. But I think we have had good information for quite some time now that this whole -- that it was just fraudulent episode. I mean there was nothing about it that made any sense at all.

And there wasn't a single person who stood up for it. The president did use it in his speech. That was obviously a very important State of the Union speech because in a sense it kind of shaped the climate of what the American people might be thinking about the prospect of going to war with Iraq and that was a pretty potent thing. Nuclear weapons are not incidental matters.

So it was wrong to put it in and he was right to admit that it was wrong to put it in. The problem is, the damage was already done.

WOODRUFF: Even though now, Senator, that they're acknowledging that it was wrong to put it in, they're saying that this in no way takes anything away from the president's broader allegation that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction. What about that now?

ROCKEFELLER: Well, what do you think a nuclear weapon is? It's a weapon of mass destruction. I mean, you got chemical, you got biological and you got nuclear. That's all there really is.

And so this was taking the most dangerous of the three of those, that is a potential for a weaponized nuclear weapon, granted at an early stage, and saying that it was on its way to Iraq and that it was going to be turned into a nuclear weapon and holding out that prospect, not in so many words, but in every sense of the way he talked and the way it was put.

WOODRUFF: What -- in your mind, what has to be done now to get to the bottom of this?

ROCKEFELLER: We have to find out what happened to broadly held intelligence within the United States that this was not anything that amounted to anything, that it was wrong, that it was fraudulent, that it was a forged signature, it was a (UNINTELLIGIBLE) signature of somebody who had been out of office for ten years at the time that he was meant to have forged the signature. And we have to find out what happened from going from the analysis side, that is the intelligence side to the policy making side which is the whole executive branch side.

And that's going to be a serious inquiry. I've already asked Senator Roberts and I've already asked for the CIA and for the State Department for their inspector generals to report on that to us. I've asked the FBI for the same thing. We have to get to the bottom of this. It's a very important thing.

We are in an era where you cannot say wrong things that give wrong impressions because everything is so fragile and on such a hair trigger.

WOODRUFF: Senator Jay Rockefeller of the Intelligence Committee, vice chairman, thank you very much.