CNN Crossfire - Transcript

CNN CROSSFIRE 16:30 February 5, 2004 Thursday
HEADLINE: Intelligence Blame Game

GUESTS: Maxine Waters, Mike Pence

BYLINE: Margaret Carlson, Tucker Carlson

HIGHLIGHT:

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
M. CARLSON: Congressman Pence, the intelligence community and the Bush White House keep telling us, but, you know, Bush did not say there was an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in the State of the Union and other things.

But if you take the totality of what Bush said, certainly, some of the things he said would lead you to believe it was an imminent threat. For instance, in the Rose Garden on September 26, he said, "According to the British, the Iraq regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order was given."

And then he said, in Cincinnati, not far from Indianapolis, "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

Doesn't mushroom cloud conjure up all these visions of a nuclear attack? Now, members of Congress say, there was a lot more to what was being put out there than simply Bush saying-never saying there was an imminent threat.

REP. MIKE PENCE ®, INDIANA: There was, Margaret. And I think the president-my-my best recollection was of the president's phrase and in our briefings on Capitol Hill of a gathering threat, a threat where the evidence that even David Kay conceded today at the Carnegie Foundation, there was evidence pointing to the development of a WMD program, particularly biological and chemical.

And we also know that, early on, Saddam Hussein did pursue a nuclear weapons program and had nuclear ambitions. And as the president said, in a post 9/11 world, we can't wait until a gathering threat becomes an actual threat, with clouds rising from our largest cities.

(APPLAUSE)

T. CARLSON: Now, Congresswoman Waters, it seems clear to me that there was likely a massive intelligence failure. I think everyone agrees with that. What bothers me is the irresponsible way in which Democrats have used this as a partisan cudgel, as if the Bush administration was the only party at fault here.

I want to read you something I think you'll find interesting. This is from the prime minister of Portugal, talking about a conversation he had with former President Bill Clinton this October. That is after the invasion of Iraq-quote-"When Clinton was here in Portugal, he told me he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to information he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime."

The point, obviously, is, if the Bush administration was wrong, everybody was wrong, including Clinton, no?

WATERS: It doesn't matter.

Clinton did not create a preemptive strike on Iraq. The fact of the matter is, this administration has no credibility. What they did was, they said and did everything to lead us to believe that they knew there were weapons of mass destruction. You even had Colin Powell going up before the U.N. with some aerial view of some sheds supposedly where chemical and biological weapons were being developed. None of it turns out to be true.

T. CARLSON: Well, but wait, you're not addressing what I just said.

WATERS: We have spent $157 billion; 526 American soldiers have been killed.

T. CARLSON: Congresswoman, with all due...

WATERS: It's not good enough to say that we thought, they intended to, we suspected. The fact of the matter is, they didn't have the weapons. And they ought to just say it. We made a mistake.

(CROSSTALK)

T. CARLSON: Well, wait a second. I think, clearly...

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

T. CARLSON: ... they did make a mistake, if it turns out there were no WMD in Iraq.

My only point is, isn't it a bit much of you to pretend that it was only the Bush White House that made a mistake? Didn't everybody, including the former president, make a mistake? Why is that hard to admit?

(CROSSTALK)

WATERS: No. No.

I can't do anything about the congress person before me who made a mistake about something in my district. I accept full responsibility for what goes on in my district now.

(APPLAUSE)

WATERS: The president of the United States must accept full responsibility.

(CROSSTALK)

PENCE: But, Maxine, Maxine, you will grant the point that Operation Desert Fox in 1998, when the president-then-President Bill Clinton fired hundreds of cruise missiles into Iraq, he did so to neutralize, in his words, the weapons of mass destruction program of Saddam Hussein.

This was the conclusion. If it was an intelligence failure-and I think-I think Director Tenet today made it very clear, Tucker, that we-we don't have all the evidence in. We don't have even the 85 percent of the evidence that David Kay said we had in. But, at the end of the day, if it was an intelligence failure, it was a world intelligence failure. France, Germany and Russia came to the same conclusion, as did the Clinton administration, Maxine.

M. CARLSON: But...

(CROSSTALK)

(APPLAUSE)

M. CARLSON: But, Congressman Pence, you make a point, which is, what Bill Clinton did was not what President Bush did based on the same information. It was a containment policy.

And, in fact, Secretary of State Colin Powell said in February of '01 that Iraq was being contained and did not threaten the United States. He said on Tuesday that, now that he's learned that there was no stockpile, it changes the political calculus. Now, what do you make of that? Where does Secretary of State Colin Powell...

(CROSSTALK)

M. CARLSON: Is he speaking truth to power at the moment?

PENCE: Well, I have great admiration for the secretary of state.

But let me say that, from my seat on the International Relations Committee, Margaret, this was never about an imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction. That was a piece of the equation. The largest piece of this was the ignoral by a brutal dictator, who filled the outlying areas with the bodies of men, women and children that he murdered, the outlying areas of his country, a Stalin-like record on human rights, but a brutal dictator who had flouted international convention and rejected over a dozen U.N. resolutions over a decade.

(CROSSTALK)

M. CARLSON: Let me interrupt you for a moment. I agree with you.

(APPLAUSE)

M. CARLSON: Saddam Hussein was a...

(CROSSTALK)

M. CARLSON: Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. Good that he's gone. But that's not the reason the United States was giving for going to war. It was the presence of weapons of mass destruction.

WATERS: That's absolutely true. And that's the difference. That's the difference.

(CROSSTALK)

PENCE: It wasn't just the presence of weapons of mass destruction, though, Maxine.

WATERS: Well, but he didn't say that.

And the administration ought to came out and say, well, listen, we made a mistake. They didn't have the weapons of mass destruction, but we still think that we had reason to go in and to have this war and to do what we have done. But what's interesting about what the administration is doing now is this.

They're asking for more time. We asked for more time before we had the preemptive strike. We said, please let the U.N. continue to have the inspections. President Bush thumbed his nose at the U.N., and he said no. And now they're saying, not only, give us more time. We think they're still there. We can find them.

And then the president starts to put together this phony commission that won't report until after he's elected. Give me a break.

(APPLAUSE)

(CROSSTALK)

T. CARLSON: Congresswoman, Congresswoman...

WATERS: Give me a break!

T. CARLSON: Before the commission has issued a single piece of paper, for you to call it phony, I must say, seems a bit much. But let me just ask you this.

(CROSSTALK)

WATERS: Why doesn't it report until after the election?

T. CARLSON: Hold on. Let me just finish my question here.

WATERS: Yes.

T. CARLSON: And here it is.

If the CIA made a mistake and other intelligence agencies made a mistake in their assessment of the weapons Iraq possessed, kind of a big deal, given that there are still a lot of people around the world trying to kill us. I'm interested in very specific recommendations that you might have, as a member of Congress, for what our intelligence agencies ought to do to get better.

WATERS: No.

T. CARLSON: Because the threat has not gone away, has it?

WATERS: No. You're not going to deter me from pointing the...

T. CARLSON: Away from your partisan crusade?

(CROSSTALK)

WATERS: ... the finger at the president of the United States, who must accept responsibility.

T. CARLSON: Oh.

WATERS: Just yesterday, Rumsfeld was up on the Hill literally lying to the Senate committee.

T. CARLSON: Well, wait a second. Wait.

WATERS: Just a moment. Just a moment.

(CROSSTALK)

T. CARLSON: You accused him of lying. Tell me how he lied.

WATERS: Just a moment.

He said-they pointed to the fact that he said he knew where the weapons were. And he said, well, no, I kind of said they were up north, and maybe I had a bad description of where they were. He lied. That's what he did.

T. CARLSON: Well, how did he lie?

WATERS: He did.

(CROSSTALK)

(APPLAUSE)

WATERS: He did not know where there were weapons of mass destruction. He should not have said, we know where there are weapons of mass destruction.

PENCE: But, Maxine, Maxine...

WATERS: They're up north, he said.

PENCE: You and I were both in the very same briefing.

(CROSSTALK)

PENCE: There was never specifics presented to us on Capitol Hill. From the secretary of defense or anyone else.

(CROSSTALK)

PENCE: That's the very nature of intelligence.

M. CARLSON: That's a very lawyerly-that's a very lawyerly way of looking at it now.

(CROSSTALK)

PENCE: It is, Margaret.

But the director said today that, in criticizing indirectly Dr. Kay's report and statements in the last two weeks, he said, you can't say that we were all wrong, because intelligence is never all right or all wrong. You accumulate evidence and information without the advantage of human intelligence, which we know we lacked there.

(CROSSTALK)

PENCE: ... within the circle of Saddam Hussein.

(CROSSTALK)

(APPLAUSE)

M. CARLSON: You also ignored Hans Blix. You also ignored-you ignored the most recent information coming from Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei.

PENCE: Not necessarily.

(CROSSTALK)

PENCE: We recognized that Hans Blix was being frustrated, that there was evidence that the director of the CIA

(CROSSTALK)

T. CARLSON: OK. I'm sorry, I'm going to have to-I'm going to have to cut it right here. I'm sorry.