Covering Iraq - Pt3

Speaker 1: 30 years with the CIA, 1964 to 1994. I worked for the government for 35 years, starting with the Marine Corps from 1964 to 1968, with some service in Vietnam. I was 25 years as a professional intelligence officer with, with CIA. Almost 5 years in the Pentagon, and the last almost 3 of that working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Spent almost 20 years with the State Department, 3 years in I'm a retired colonel in the United States Army, military intelligence, Special Forces. I was previously with the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993. Prior to that, I worked with the Central Intelligence Agency. I'm a former senior estimates officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. I started, actually, as a science fellow at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and became The chief scientist of the Arms Control Agency. For 27 years, was an analyst, first of Soviet affairs and then of wider responsibilities. I'm a congressman representing the 30th District in Los Angeles. I've just completed almost 3 decades of service to the United States. Most recently, I was an assistant secretary of defense in the Pentagon from 1994 to 2001. I served for 23 years in the American Foreign Service as a diplomat. I worked for the CIA for 28 and a half years. I joined the agency in 1988, originally with what was then known as the National Photographic Interpretation Center. I'm Washington editor of The Nation magazine. I've been doing that for about 16 years now. I'm the Labour MP for a constituency in Birmingham called Birmingham Ladywood. I've been the MP for 20 years. For 30 years, I was a diplomat. Serving my country abroad. My last position, however, was as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. July of 1970, the president asked me to come over to be White House counsel. And I served for roughly 1,000 days, until it all fell apart. 23 years as a commissioned officer in the United States Army. I came back to public service in 2001 to be the secretary of the Army. I spent 21 years in the CIA. Of that time, I spent 90% in the Middle East. I'm a former weapons inspector with the United Nations in Iraq. I served in that capacity from 1991 to 1998. I worked for the CIA for 20 years, from 1966 to 1986. I've worked on assessing secret nuclear weapons programs for almost 20 years. Never expected that I'd leave the Navy and become the chief spook of our country, Director of Central Intelligence, but that happened. Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. He has weapons of mass destruction. A clear threat to the United States. And there's dozens of ballistic missiles. It has sponsored and sheltered terrorists. Paying suicide bombers. Chemical weapons are equally chilling. Biological weapons, including anthrax and botulism toxin. Biological and chemical agent to kill millions of people. Chemical weapons, including VX and sarin, mustard gas. Massive death and destruction. Death on a massive scale. The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons. The Iraqi regime is building the facilities necessary to make more biological and chemical weapons. And according to the British government, the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order were given. The regime has longstanding and continuing ties to terrorist organizations, and there are al-Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq. The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb and with fissile material could build one within a year. The Bush administration made up its mind to go to war on September 11th, 2001. That very first day, on September 12th, one day after September 11th, the meeting that was held in the White House, in the Situation Room, Led to Rumsfeld asking the question, shouldn't we use this as an opportunity to do something about Iraq as well? We all said, but no, no, al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said, there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq. From that time on, you were dealing with rationalization and justification for the war. You weren't dealing with real causes for the war or real reasons for the war. There was never a clear and Present danger, there was never an imminent threat. With weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass death. Weapons of mass destruction was a convenient way of tricking our Congress into giving the president authority to wage this war. Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Develop nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons. It was clear that Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program, but over and over again, President Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, particularly Vice President Cheney, but also National Security Adviser Condi Rice, drummed up the idea of a reconstituted nuclear capability, and particularly the notion that I think has some resonance among the American people of the mushroom cloud. Leaders will use worst-case assessments that point to nuclear weapons to generate political support, because they know people fear nuclear weapons so much. The evidence was simply not there. Wolfowitz would be asked to explain, you know, how good is the evidence? Can you tell us more about it? This is NATO, mind you. And he'd say, well, it's like this. It's like pornography. Hard to describe, but I'll— you recognize it when you see it. My God. And we're going to go to war on that? If someone is waiting for a so-called smoking gun, it's certain that we will have waited too long. We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun. It could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. So a lot of people who supported the war in Iraq actually believed that Iraq had the capability to fire missiles that could reach the United States carrying payloads of nuclear or chemical or biological weapons. Iraq has never had the capability to do that. They didn't have it in the first Gulf War. They didn't have it in this war in Iraq, and they don't have it— any way of getting it in the future. What the Bush administration did was try to round up as many people as they could who would make the case for them. What the White House wanted was the CIA to give it talking points to justify this war. It already made up its mind. Massive intervention by people, particularly from Vice President Cheney's office and Vice President Cheney himself, And I think the intelligence analysts found themselves really up against it when they tried to argue that those connections weren't as tight as people were saying. The intelligence director of the Department of Energy simply ordered his experts, who had raised questions about the evidence being used on the nuclear end of it, to, as the news accounts say, to sit down and shut up. So that the DOE would be on board with the overall estimate. They were not given an opportunity to speak, because no one wanted to hear what they said. I was in chief of collecting information on Iraq through the mid-'90s. I know what we had and what we didn't have. And I'm here to tell you there was no information. I understand that the director himself, George Tenet, is now accompanying the briefer in the morning. And this never happened in the past. In the past, we were trusted. We were senior people. We knew what the score was. And when I hear that George Tenet is going down with the senior briefer, I wonder why. And the very heavy leaning on the director of Central Intelligence and his staff to produce precisely the language they— which would allow them to make the statements which they have been making to support the decision to go into Iraq. Well, not only by their physical presence, but by the questions they asked, by the, well, don't you think? Sort of things. Well, couldn't it be possible that they call this data mining, going back over old information, coming with new conclusions? And the overwhelming opinion from the scientists of this government at the Department of Energy and even at the CIA and some of the State Department were arguing against using weapons of mass destruction as a case to go to war. You're talking about the Vice President of the United States, and you're talking about a GS. 13 or 14, a mid-level analyst in the Central Intelligence Agency. You're talking about a person who should have career protection for telling it like it is, but who knows that his chief, the director of CIA, is a member of the team. You know, a lot of pressure on that. Shouldn't happen. The whole purpose of the CIA was to leave those people out of Langley. That's why they're not in Washington. They're in Northern Virginia, away from the White House, away from Congress. Leave them alone, ask them what they think, but don't tell them to rethink their positions, because then you come up with nonsense like we saw. The administration had decided very early on that Saddam should go, and that in itself is not a bad goal. But of course, everything depends on how you do it, when, how, where, with whom, etc. Preemptive war by its very nature is something that is entirely new to the United States of America and to what we call the old Western alliance. Let's— you know, you go back through history, and at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a group of nations that had just killed most of each other off decided that this isn't quite the way to do it. And they came up with a set of laws that we've all lived with fairly well since then, which doesn't much allow for preemptive war. Delay, indecision, and inaction could leave It simply makes no sense to wait any longer. Take action before it's too late. We will not wait. I believe it is essential that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent. It's too late if they become imminent. As President Bush has said, time is not on our side. It was a rushed NIE. It was done, I believe, in 3 or 4 weeks, which is really fast. It wasn't done earlier, from what I understand, because the Bush administration didn't want such a document that had caveats. That's why they never asked for a comprehensive national intelligence estimate within the intelligence community on this particular problem, because they knew the intelligence community didn't agree on any of these issues. The national intelligence estimate is really about, I don't know, 5 major players, but 10 intelligence agencies in total. Weighing in on the basic situation with weapons of mass destruction. It only happened because the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Graham, called for it. And so I think the Bush administration resisted having an NIE, and then once it was out, selectively picked what was useful to their argument. Most of their qualifications were simply filtered out. The sanitization of the original estimate was not true to its real meaning. All the modifiers were dropped off. It was a prosecutor making a case using what benefited his case, ignoring evidence that would undermine his case. And there was no defense attorney to give us the other side. And the end product used by policymakers, particularly in its discussion with the American public, were much more forceful than could have possibly been when originally written by CIA, DIA or It was a bizarre warping of the intelligence process, and they thought they would be able to get away with it, because who's going to see the classified version? Well, later, several months later, they released parts of the classified version. They thought no one would notice. So this was not a case where the national intelligence estimate was driving the war. This was to provide an excuse after the fact. Going to war based on intelligence is yet another example, I think, of intelligence simply not being able, by nature, by definition, to live up to that kind of requirement. You may produce intelligence that could keep you out of a war, but I doubt that you'll ever get 1, 2, 3 reports of intelligence that will in any way allow you to go to war. There are al-Qaeda in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, um, cavorts with terrorists. Secretly and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists or help them develop their own. Well, the war really had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. There was no connection whatsoever between Iraq and the secular regime there and the religious fanatics who They wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying, we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked for a connection, and there's just no connection. Saddam was not a maniac or a fool. He was a terrible villain, yes, but he was not going to sacrifice his own life and the future of his country to stupid adventures with terrorists who had completely antithetical views to his. It is just inconceivable to anybody who understands Saddam Hussein and understands the nature of highly centralized dictatorships generally that dictators would want to give up control of their most potent weaponry, because once you've given up control, you have no control. So you can't say to al-Qaeda, you will use this or you won't use it. The decision on whether or not they're going to use it depends on what Osama bin Laden does. Do you want to entrust your fate to Osama bin Laden and his nihilistic ways? I don't think so. Saddam Hussein is a psychopath and a sociopath. He was not an irrational being in the sense that he was going to ensure his own demise by doing something like that. Al-Qaeda has had total contempt for Saddam Hussein himself. He's been a He's been very harsh. He's treated Islamic leaders, Islamist leaders, extremely harshly. Iraq— and we have very good intelligence on this— was not part of the picture of terrorism before we invaded. Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were enemies. Bin Laden considered and said that Saddam Hussein was the socialist infidel. These were very different kinds of individuals competing for power In their own way. And Saddam Hussein made very sure that al-Qaeda couldn't function in Iraq, that terrorists couldn't function, except for the small northeastern quadrant of the country where there was an extremist group, but he had no control over that. It was near the Iranian border. There is no doubt that Ansar al-Islam is a radical Islamic terrorist group with ties to al-Qaeda. But they operate in a part of Iraq that is not controlled by Hussein. The leaders say they seek to overthrow Hussein and his government. They are our enemy, or really they are also our enemy. We believe that Saddam Hussein, him and his group and his ministers also, they are outside of Islam's zone. And the ties with al-Qaeda was just a scare tactic to exploit the trauma, the very real trauma that the American people have felt ever since 9/11, and to associate that trauma with Iraq. As you know from the polls, Most Americans believed that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, and that was a very successful, very deliberate and very unethical and immoral operation on the part of the PR people of this administration. We now know that the war on terror That Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors. Access to émigrés and defectors, with more direct access to these programs. From 3 Iraqi defectors, we know that Iraq in the late 1990s had several mobile biological weapons labs. It was only after defectors told us about it. The inspectors were in the country. The most important information that inspectors have ever gotten On what's going on in Iraq have come from defectors. We know about that capability from defectors and other sources. A recent defector stated that as recently as August of '98— that's while inspections were still going on— a formal order was issued to proceed with a nuclear program at full blast. Our strategy is to bring to the world the danger that Saddam poses in his current state. Without doubt, he is developing weapons of mass destruction. Without doubt, he has chemical and biological weapons. And without doubt, for 30 years he has been trying to acquire a nuclear weapon. The usual scrutiny of these kind of guys was just not done adequately. There was this attitude of, let's find the smoking gun, let's find the evidence, rather than let's, let's look at what's out there and weigh the evidence. They wanted to believe him. It goes back to contacts that originated as early as the 1990s. With individuals like Dick Cheney, like Paul Wolfowitz, like Richard Perle, dealing with Ahmed Chalabi. They became enamored of this fellow who dressed like a Westerner, talked with a British accent, and appeared to be upper crust, and therefore was quite believable. And everyone in Washington was believing them. And I thought people had really somehow checked out of reality in order to go to war. That it was a war fever that had taken over. These people wanted to get back into Baghdad. They couldn't defeat Saddam Hussein, but they knew that U.S. military power could. So the worst of these offenders, who would be Ahmed Chalabi, who's been in exile from his own country for 20 to 30 years and is clearly not a hero under any definition of heroism to his own people, sold the Pentagon on the idea that Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction, and he must be stopped. But they were bringing forward individuals who they claimed were either high-level military or scientists with access. They were looking for money, first of all, 'cause Chalabi was paying money. Supplying money shouldn't be a surprise. That's how informants are dealt with in the spy business. But there was no effort to check their bona fides. None. Every checkable piece of that intelligence that's come to Public notice has proven to be false, or at least self-serving in the extreme. You had the U.S. Congress approve and appropriate money for the Iraqi National Congress, with no telling how much they were taking off the top for themselves. You get all kinds of people who want a reward and have nothing to offer. And many ended up with Chalabi because they would believe anything bad about Iraq. It was phony evidence. It was based on intelligence we had from Iraqi exiles. Who wanted this country to attack Iraq so these people could then take over in Baghdad and establish their own regime. We have to go back and examine just the role that defectors played throughout the entire inspection process. If inspections work, then you don't overthrow Saddam Hussein. How does somebody like that— I don't know even how to describe him— get into a position where he's determining U.S. policy? Senior members of the Department of Defense Gave him their thumbs up. His information was coming into the White House to people like Dick Cheney through the Office of Special Plans. So it was coming in through an avenue that's not traditional to the intelligence community and wasn't open to being vetted or reviewed. You had Chalabi himself admit that they didn't mind providing false information because it helped them to achieve their goal of removing Saddam. Nobody in Iraq will defend that regime, including the military, both the regular army and the Republican Guard. Our liberation would not have been achieved without the determination of President George W. Bush and the commitment of the coalition, at the forefront of which stand the people of the United States of America and Great Britain. The Iraqis will never forget your courage and sacrifice on our behalf. We are here today to declare that a new Iraq is born, an Iraq where dignity, justice and human rights are assured for all citizens. There is no risk of a breakup of Iraq, that there is no risk of a civil war. I stand before this assembly as a representative of free Iraq. To all those here who helped us in our struggle for liberation, we extend our gratitude. The Iraqi opposition will ensure the continuation of its institutions and to reestablish democracy and the rule of law. He said, I got what I wanted. I got my war. I'm back in Iraq. And if you people relied on my information, you're stupid. Every year, by law and by custom, we meet here to consider the State of the Union. This year we gather in this chamber deeply aware of decisive days that lie ahead. Bush presented so many distorted beliefs Estimates and guesstimates. It appears that he was misleading the public and the Congress. Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. Any sarin that they were making in 1990, 1991 had a known shelf life of about 2 months. I have confirmed this with inspectors and analysts who were deeply involved in the 1990s analyses. Well, if you made it 12 years ago and it had a shelf life of 2 months, it may not be safe to drink, but it isn't sarin nerve gas any longer. And there's no way the agency could not have known that. U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them, despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence. And then they tried to use the fact that inspectors found 16 of these as evidence that thousands more existed. And again, I mean, it's— as a methodology, it's a very weak way to predict anything. And I think it borders on propaganda to argue that The small number that have been found by inspectors imply that, in this case, over 29,000 exist. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions. Put it this way, Bush administration officials either routinely said or tried to give the impression that if Iraq had not fully accounted for all of a certain item involved— related to Chemical or biological weapons, then it must be there. And that's not at all what the inspectors said or found. He hadn't accounted for that material. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed it. And the inspectors could go in and say, okay, we can prove, yeah, you destroyed that set in this way or that set in that way, but these others, we can't prove it. And that doesn't mean that they didn't destroy these warheads or whatever the item was. It just means Iraq hadn't been able to prove it. If Saddam Hussein had admitted to the Iranians, to the Syrians and his own people that he had been so intimidated by the U.N. inspection and sanctions process that he'd given up all that, they probably would have torn him limb from limb. Saddam Hussein had material sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure. He hadn't accounted for that material. Revealed its biological weapons program, particularly its ability to make botulinum toxin, and therefore it was an open issue. But again, it doesn't mean that what the inspectors found was evidence that Iraq possessed that. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. I think there was very little doubt That the centrifuge tubes, so-called, were nothing but rocket motor tubes to go into M81-style artillery rockets. They certainly have all the specs for that. Nuclear experts, for instance, from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's Z Division, the experts on centrifuge enrichment, came out and said, no, you couldn't enrich uranium using these tubes. They're not compatible. I saw it as a deliberate attempt to take information and selectively take information and try to basically say Iraq poses an imminent nuclear threat, and therefore action is absolutely necessary. And I felt that was absolutely wrong. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program. The administration showed photos of nuclear or former nuclear weapons sites in Iraq pre-1991. nuclear weapons sites, claimed that new construction showed they were ongoing nuclear weapons production sites. Complete nonsense. The most troubling thing about the fact of the distortions and the misleading statements that Bush gave Congress is that it is a federal felony, it's a crime to mislead and distort information and present it to the Congress. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium When Secretary Powell addressed the U.N. about weapons of mass destruction, he deliberately left out any reference to attempts to buy uranium from Africa. I didn't use the uranium at that point, because I didn't think that was sufficiently strong as evidence to present before the world. CIA officials warned members of the president's staff the intelligence was not good enough to make the statement Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa. In October, for the Cincinnati speech, not for the State of the Union, but the Cincinnati speech, George Tenet asked that this be taken out of the Cincinnati speech, the reference to yellowcake. It was taken out of the Cincinnati speech, because whenever the director of Central Intelligence wants something out, it's gone. How'd it get back in? It's not a matter of getting back in. It's a matter, Tim, that 3-plus months later, people didn't remember that George Tenet had asked that it be taken out of the Cincinnati speech, and then it was cleared by the agency. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Just 16 words in the State of the Union address, words that we now know were misleading. And retired career diplomat Joe Wilson tried to warn the administration of just that nearly a year before the speech. I received a call from the CIA in February 2002, and I was invited out to talk to those people within the broader intelligence community who deal with 3 different subjects: Iraq, uranium and Niger. I briefed them on what I knew about the uranium business. It was during the course of that briefing that they said that they had received a report That had piqued the interest of the Office of the Vice President, and that report was of a purported memorandum of agreement authorizing the sale of uranium yellowcake, somewhat enriched uranium, from Niger to Iraq. And it was a document that was executed by the government of Niger. They asked me if I would be willing to go out and take another look at it and talk to people I knew there. I left there telling them that if they wanted, I would be able to free up my schedule. They subsequently called me and said, please do. I'd spent the 8 days there drinking mint tea and talking to everybody there was to talk to who knew anything about the subject matter in Niamey. And I'd come back persuaded that it could not have happened, one, from a business perspective, because of the way the consortium was structured, you just couldn't do it without a lot of people knowing, and, two, the way the government The way the government bureaucracy was structured, you could not make the decision without a lot of people knowing. And if you made the decision, the decision would be reflected in a series of signatures on the documents. And if the documents did not contain those signatures, they could not be authentic government of Niger documents. The president quoted a British paper. We did not know at the time— no one knew at the time in our circles. Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery. Of course, it was information that was mistaken. But the— it was a relatively small part of the case about nuclear weapons and nuclear reconstitution. It is also the case that the broad picture about Iraq's programs was Now, given what I knew about where the question had originated, and given what I knew about the way the government works, I knew that people in her circle did know. Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents, which form the basis For the reports of recent uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger are, in fact, not authentic. Numerous French words were misspelled in the documents. One of the letters was signed by a Niger official who had left office 10 years ago. Several dates in the documents did not match the day of the week. Several of the names and titles of officials mentioned in the documents were incorrect. We all know that the documentation On yellow cake from Niger was a fake. But why doesn't anybody say who did it? Who faked the document? And why don't we take another look, then, at the same stream of consciousness that was prevailing at that moment on the aluminum tubes and the— even the trailers, the bioweapons trailers that were so ballyhooed? At that point, Someone's got to say, who is putting this intelligence out there, and why? And I don't think that question's been answered, and maybe because the answer is known, and it's not a pleasant one. Who was it that asked for this review of the Niger nuclear material question? It was the vice president. Mr. Wilson, a former ambassador, was sent to Niger in response to the vice president's questions about this issue. So, assumedly, the vice president got a report back in response to his question, and that report contained the Wilson memo, his assessment of the situation. The question remains: Who did the document? Who forged the document? And why? You know, the list is possibly short. Somebody ought to be able to work on that. Wilson says his family is the subject of a smear campaign by senior administration officials. They deliberately leaked his wife's identity as a covert CIA operative, damaging her future career and compromising past missions, after he criticized the administration on Meet the Press and in The New York Times. The White House hatchet men came out and started writing articles in which they basically said that Wilson— well, the first one came out and said that Wilson told the truth because he's a Democrat. They'll set that up as an argument. Democrats tell the truth, ergo Republicans fill in the blank. Then, then a couple of senior administration officials leaked to Bob Novak that my wife was a CIA operative involved in the weapons of mass destruction business at the CIA. Senior administration officials is a key to being very— it's typically the The president, vice president, cabinet officers, and the top of the White House had gone out of their way to get that information out, not only told Novak, told Time magazine. They wanted that information out. Now, that's against a statutory law that prohibits the identification of CIA operatives. What you're doing when you expose a CIA officer Of any name, you're basically taking their entire career and flushing it down the toilet. It also has the potential of placing that person in jeopardy because of their operations, and their own operations and people they have operated with in jeopardy. So it is a very vengeful act against the ambassador to try to hurt him by hurting his wife's career, if not Wishing for physical damage. I had never seen a dirty trick that could be a hit. A president of the United States and an administration who has come to office on a platform of restoring dignity and honor to the White House— what they did was neither dignified, nor was it terribly honorable, nor was it germane to the issue at hand. First of all, it should be noted that Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations was theater, a masterful theater, effective theater at the time. You know, here's a man who has tremendous credibility, who presents himself to the Security Council, to the American people, to the international public, and stares the camera in the eye and says he knows Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option. My first visual impression here, watching George Tenet, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, back there as a prop, almost like a potted plant, as if to say that the Central Intelligence Agency stands behind— or, in this case, sits behind— everything that Colin Powell says, that was a terrific blow to the morale of the Central Intelligence Agency analysts. Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons. Chemical weapons, although they can be very deadly in a subway station or something like this, are not really strategic weapons. They are weapons that can kill 50, 100, 200 people, but in fact they won't devastate you the way a nuclear weapon in New York City or Chicago or someplace would be a deadly blow. Saddam Hussein has used these horrific weapons on another country and on his own people. He used weapons— Saddam Hussein did— back in the 1980s, when the U.S. administration, the Reagan administration, was actually supporting him and allowing him to import the chemical precursors for that. Donald Rumsfeld actually, as a special envoy for Ronald Reagan back in those years, helped, you know, open the door for better relations between Washington and Baghdad. Colin Powell spoke of thousands of liters of anthrax that were unaccounted for. He said, they're probably hiding it. And then he held up a little vial of white powder, and he said, a couple teaspoonfuls of white powder like this, if launched against American cities, could kill thousands of Americans. If he was truly to reflect the Iraqi capability, he would have held up a bottle of Diet Coke and said, the Iraqis produced anthrax that looked like this. And it has a shelf life of 3 years. The last known production batch came out in 1991. So, even if Iraq was hiding this brown sludge liquid, it would be useless today. Just a few weeks ago, we intercepted communications between 2 commanders in Iraq's 2nd Republican Guard Corps. If you know anything about Iraq, they have very strict communications security procedures. So you would never have military personnel speaking in the clear over a radio about sensitive subjects. On the left is a close-up of one of the There were never any chemical weapons in that facility. I'm intimately familiar with that facility. I've inspected it a number of times. Other inspectors have inspected it many more times than I have. To believe they were proof is to believe the statement that Iraq would put its crown jewels in the one building or one of the few buildings that either the United States will bomb first or the inspectors will go to first. The truck you also see is a signature item. It's a decontamination vehicle. The UN weapons inspectors knew that the trucks shown by Colin Powell in those photographs were fire trucks, not decontamination trucks. I would have to comment here on Secretary of State Colin Powell's debut as an imagery analyst. It was highly embarrassing for those of us who know something about the business. We couldn't tell whether this was an honest mistake by those who now do the imagery analysis, who now report to the Secretary of Defense, unlike our day when they reported to the Central Intelligence Agency, whether that was the case or whether perhaps Colin Powell was being set up. From our point of view, I mean, we do all kinds of analysis of satellite imagery. You can't form any conclusions on what's going on inside the building. They could have been building tractors. They could have been doing nothing inside that facility. Now look at the picture on the right. You are now looking at 2 of those sanitized bunkers. The signature vehicles are gone. It's been cleaned up, and it was done on the 22nd of December, as the UN inspection team is arriving. Contamination vehicles, they rotate from site to site. And so the absence of the vehicle on the second photo, which we know is the 22nd of December, could just as easily be explained by the normal rotation, because you didn't tell us the date of the first, and it was several weeks before. We have noted that the 2 satellite images of the site were taken several weeks apart. The reported movement of munitions at the site could just as easily have been a routine activity as a movement of proscribed munitions in anticipation of imminent inspection. We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels These mobile labs that you saw have been shown to be nothing more than hydrogen generation facilities. Here you see both truck and railcar-mounted mobile factories. When you take a look at the mobile labs that Colin Powell discussed, he didn't put up photographs of these facilities. He put up artist renditions of these facilities. Why? Because we have no proof they exist. This video of an Iraqi test flight obtained by UNSCOM some years ago This photograph shows an Iraqi F-1 Mirage jet aircraft. Note the spray coming from beneath the Mirage. That is 2,000 liters of simulated anthrax. Iraqis continued to visit bin Laden in his new home in Afghanistan. George Tenet's analysts had spent a year and a half Of torturous investigation, torturous analysis, to see if there were ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq. They found none. Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. So the secretary of state is telling us that our conservative estimate is that Iraq possesses between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent, enough to fill 16,000 warheads on the battlefield. Where are they? What happened to them? My suspicion is that this is not our conservative estimate, that this sounds very much to me like our neoconservative estimate. Iraqi denials of supporting terrorism take their place alongside the other Iraqi denials It was a masterful performance, but none of it was true. Where are all these weapons? Where is all this VX? Where is all the anthrax? Probably one of the low points in his long and distinguished service to the nation. The old weapons inspection process was little more than a game. They concealed, denied, deceived. Return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever. To eliminate by inspection is, quite frankly, a fool's errand. On the contrary, there's a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow back in his box. The reality is that between the original UNSCOM inspections and the UNMOVIC inspections, you destroyed, with those inspections, 90 to probably 95% of the Iraqi arsenal. The first Gulf War destroyed almost nothing. And, you know, postwar U.S. battle damage assessments confirmed that. The weapons inspectors were effective. They forced Saddam to get rid of his stuff. They had that country under control. By 1998 at the latest, those inspectors had discovered most of the weapons of mass destruction, and the Iraqi programs at that point were essentially at an end. Before the war in Iraq, the United Nations inspectors told us that Saddam Hussein Ironically, the major effect of the invasion of Iraq, in terms of weapons of mass destruction, has to be— has been to show that the inspectors were right all along. The inspection regime worked. It was the most intrusive inspection regime in history, and it worked. And at the end of the day, that's another reason why we went to war for nothing. These maniacs who are encouraging our enemies, weakening our troops' resolve and confusing the American people. Well, you shouldn't listen to these persons. Protest, because they're obviously helping Saddam Hussein. Who would have guessed that you could build a massive international peace movement on the protection of Saddam Hussein? The media is culpable for the misleading of the American public. They bought into the Bush administration's rhetoric. They don't understand that there is moral violence and immoral violence. We used moral violence. God bless this president. He is truly Reducing troop morale, confusing the American people and emboldening our enemies. They are absolutely committing sedition or treason, as far as I'm concerned. There's a huge difference between a personal opinion and an opinion which degrades and debases our military at a time of war. It's a disgrace. I don't believe that mainstream media acted responsibly in regards to Iraq. You know, I was belittled. I was called a traitor. I was called crazy, Polizan of CNN accused me of drinking Saddam Hussein's Kool-Aid for making accurate statements in response to aluminum tubes. People out there are accusing you of drinking Saddam Hussein's Kool-Aid. If I'm an ideologue, then I'm a Republican ideologue. I'm actually a fairly conservative person who voted for George W. Bush. But I don't allow my ideology to get in the way of the facts and the reality of my duties and responsibilities as an American citizen. It's a tendency, if you want to kill the message, to go after If you can discredit the messenger, then you discredit the message. Or if you can make the story about the messenger, then people forget about the message. And I think it's so unfair to try to silence debate and criticism by attacking those who say something with which you disagree. The media's supposed to be the fourth estate, but they decided to completely climb in bed with the administration on this. In a way, the administration constructed a box And that was— that box had all the information that the administration wanted the media and the public and Congress to have. What they would do is you'd have the Iraqi National Congress taking bogus defectors, the information from them, giving them to the Pentagon, and then the Iraqi National Congress then giving them to the journalists. And they said, if you don't believe us, the Iraqi National Congress, call up the Pentagon. So you had this circular reporting. And you've had The New York Times admitting that it was using one source for all of its information on weapons of mass destruction. And it was, you know, self-affirming by going to the Pentagon, which is to put this stuff on paper. It was a lot of exaggerations, partial information, sometimes the whole information, but on balance, a very one-sided view of Iraq's WMD program. And a lot of these stories, the journalists didn't want to look into, because The editors told them to run with. We're going to be supportive of the administration. It's the patriotic thing to do. I think that there was, on the part of the media, too much of, of, in a sense, getting into the upcoming war and not enough look at, do we really need to go? There were some journalists out there raising the alarm bells, the Seymour Hershes, the Walter Pincuses of the world. But unfortunately, those great investigative reporters They're usually exiled when the heat is on, and it's only after the fact that they end up being praised and given the pats on the back. The excitement was to make the case to go to war, you know, to show that— you know, and that was the controversy that the media loved, is, you know, it was the titillation of a WMD hitting us, not the titillation of or the conflict of attacking the administration. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times He had very conservative editors that supported the White House on this. I didn't foresee all of this. I'd like to say, oh, I was very prescient, I knew what the others in the intelligence community were saying. I didn't. And I'm one of the ones who also— I drank the Kool-Aid. But early on, I felt that there were some real dangers going into the war. And I tried to get an op-ed into various major newspapers, and the word kept coming back, nobody wants to hear this, because we're going to war. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. His regime has an active program to acquire and develop nuclear weapons, and let there be no doubt about it. We know for a fact that there are weapons there. Fire! There were a group of people who, for many years, had advocated going after Saddam Hussein, and they pushed this hard. And, of course, raw intelligence data can be interpreted in a lot of different ways, as I'm sure experts have talked to you about. And so there were a group of people, I think, that, that were adamant that this was the right course to pursue. We found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories. Everybody knows that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I have reason, every reason, to believe that the intelligence that we were operating off was No question we have said that Saddam Hussein possesses biological and chemical weapons. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south, and north, some of them. And all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes. Are you confident that you'll also find weapons of mass destruction? I believe we will find evidence of the programs of chemical and biological weapons, yes. How about the actual weapons? Well, I just don't know. Let's wait and see what we find. Operations continue with our new exploitation teams that have been brought in. And that we will in fact find weapons or evidence of weapons programs that are conclusive. It is somewhat puzzling, I think, that you can have 100% certainty about the weapons of mass destruction's existence and zero certainty about where they are. Do you agree? And does it matter whether or not you find those weapons? This is a process that takes some time, and it will ebb and flow. One thing we know is that he had a weapons program. I don't know anybody that I can think of who has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons. We believe he has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons. But on the specific issue of weapons of mass destruction, it's going to take time, and we're going to have to be patient. More time. The truth will come out. Now, it's going to take time to find anything, because they've had— they've— People will find that we presented a solid case, a case that is there and was there and will remain there. So it's going to take a period of time to find the people. I don't think we'll discover anything, myself. I still thought that 3 and a half months for new inspections was a rather short time before calling it a day, and especially when we now see that they say— the U.S. government is saying that, look, You have to have a bit of patience. You know, these things take time. I believe that we will find the truth. And the truth is, he was developing a program for weapons of mass destruction. I think what will happen is we'll discover people who will tell us where to go find it. You're not going to find it simply in a house-to-house search. You're going to find it when people start to talk to you. It is not like a treasure hunt, where you just— Run around looking everywhere, hoping you find something. I just don't think that's going to happen. The inspectors didn't find anything, and I I doubt that we will. Are people going to find out the truth? And the truth will say that this intelligence was good intelligence. No doubt in my mind. What we will do is find the people who will tell us. There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and and that's just a fact. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt. Is U.S. credibility on the line over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? I'm not exactly sure what that means. Depends on the assumptions. It depends on how long the war lasts. It depends on whether weapons of mass destruction are used. What we have done is we have taken estimates looking at different variables and said, if this were the case on this variable and then on this variable— but there's so many variables that the numbers of possible point answers create a range that simply isn't useful. Yeah, I'm just not going to get into any speculation about numbers. We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon. So the money's going to come from Iraqi oil revenue, as everyone has said. They think it's going to be something like $2 billion this year. They think it might be something like $15, $12 next year. They think it might be something like $18 to $20-plus the next— $19? $19. The next year. Congress a request for $87 billion. Why did the administration so dramatically underestimate the cost of this war? We did not have perfect foresight into what we were going to find in Iraq. With the cost of the war rising and the search for weapons of mass destruction going nowhere, This work is being carried out under the direction of Dr. David Kaye, a respected scientist and former U.N. inspector, who is leading the weapons search in Iraq. We are determined to take this apart. We have a tremendous group of dedicated American men and women involved in this, with the best assets that the intelligence community can provide. And Dr. Kaye and his team are making progress. We have had— found a large body of continuing activities and equipment. We are surprised by new advances that we're making. Network of laboratories and safe houses controlled by Iraqi intelligence and security services. And unlike prewar intelligence, we don't require someone just to say something. We actually need the physical evidence. Equipment suitable for continuing David Kaye is not going to be done with this for quite some time. David Kaye wants more time. And he says it could take another 6 to 9 months to make a definitive finding. Administration is asking Congress for hundreds of millions more. $600 million to fund the continuing search. We have not yet found shiny pointy things that I would call a weapon. Before we can draw firm conclusions, we need to let the We were all wrong, probably, in my judgment. And that is most disturbing. It's inevitable that there will be an outside commission appointed on an issue of this gravity. We'll have public hearings, and we will get to the bottom of this, and we will let the chips fall where they In a democracy, you have an obligation. Your obligation is to speak truthfully to the public. That's the basis of civility and our belief in our system of government. It is going to require an outside effort, probably through an outside commission, to deal with some of these very serious problems. Because I think explanations are important in a democracy. This whole episode has caught the White House completely by surprise. They've become so fearful of admitting error that they stand up and defend things that On their face are untruthful. President Bush is being pounded with calls for an independent investigation into how U.S. intelligence so badly misjudged Iraq's capabilities before the war. Having the president holding all the cards, appointing all the people, having everybody accountable to him, is a very bad idea. If you say you're going to war because he has weapons of mass destruction and you don't find those weapons, It is not persuasive to jump to a second argument— well, that didn't work, but here I've got a second explanation. I was asked if I would care to try to operationalize some of the comments I'd made about what was going wrong in Iraq. And so I said, if you— among other things, that if you're going to do this, you had to treat it like an intelligence problem, and that is not go looking for hidden weapons, but going looking for the people who would be associated Well, what I did is I formed teams for each of the areas, and we formally had hypotheses. Half the teams took a hypothesis that it was there; the other half said it wasn't there. And both followed exactly the same method. If you believe it's there, what is the proof that will in fact conform that— prove that hypothesis? Or what evidence clashes with it? Same thing is true with the teams that took the hypothesis it wasn't there, is, what evidence You know, collecting evidence. So, yeah, you start with a viewpoint, a hypothesis, an academic would say, and you collect the evidence that will support our challenge. You tell them, you know, go form and discuss with your team a hypothesis and get a strategy for doing it. And I just, you know, I was unsure whether they would come back pro or con. And I really didn't care. And that was intentional, because I didn't want to be seen as stacking the deck. And we met every Saturday afternoon, and each team went through a very— almost— it was rigorous, but almost predictable. You started with, here's our hypothesis, here's what we've done this week, here's how the evidence stacks, here's what we propose to do the next week. And there would be a discussion between the groups and myself over— on each of them, of what they were doing. A lot of cross-fertilization. There is a gradual buildup of evidence That forces you to challenge your preexisting belief and then keeps generating either more questions or generates questions about the hypothesis. For example, I'll give you a real case. One of the first things that worried me was, we had a big army running through Iraq in March and April. WMD was not used against them, nor was it found. That's sort of remarkable, if they'd had large stockpiles. I really believe in the jungle telegraph. Put the word out on the street. Let people know what you're about and what you have to offer, and usually you'll get people coming to you. And I had a lot of money, reward money, and I had green cards or passports to virtually any attractive place in the world. You come to us with weapons of mass destruction, evidence about the weapons, and we'll take care of you. All I had coming to me were fabricators, people who said it but didn't have anything, had absolutely no evidence. Iraq was a horrible place in June, July, August, September, October, November. Insecurity, the economy wasn't working. There was violence. There's still violence there. It was remarkable to me and disturbing that in a place this bad, who wouldn't want a golden lifeboat to get out? All they had to do is come with information. I would protect their identity. It was clear to everyone. I would take their whole family. It wasn't a case, you have to leave your family behind. You'll be taken care of, but you'll have to find a new family in California. Well, some of them might like to. But no one bought. And so that worried me. Around a weapons program, if a weapons program exists, you're going to find people, people engaged in the production, the technology, engineering, design. People involved in protecting the weapons, people involved in moving them, and people involved in preparing to use the weapons. We found none of that. We were running into fewer and fewer leads that looked profitable, and a lot of evidence that stacked up to explain something other than large stockpiles of weapons. I had the habit of writing a personal report back every weekend, which was quite separate than the official reports back, saying, You know, this is what it looks, smells like to me. Here are the issues of the week. Here's how I'm proposing just to— I've always found that's a good way to keep people informed of what you're doing. I don't think there was a surprise about the conclusions I was drawing, because those were fully and, I think, completely and adequately reported. I think the surprise would be that you would speak out and say that. I had— The privilege, although I didn't always think it was a privilege, of watching a lot of very senior government officials come to agonizing terms about Vietnam and decide not to speak out because they knew they'd never be asked to lunch again. They wouldn't be part of the process. And I just— I think, like a lot of people of my age and my generation who were in the government— it's by no means unique to me— just decided that if ever the occasion came, I simply wasn't going to live like that. There wasn't a lunch or part of a process that was important enough. This committee has a special responsibility to the men and women of our armed forces to look at the prewar intelligence, because planning for military operations is based on intelligence. Policymakers take data. They interpret threat. They assess risk. You talk about a mushroom cloud. How much more Why was the skepticism left out of the public white paper of the CIA? Many of us feel that the evidence so far leads only to one conclusion, that what has happened was more than a failure of intelligence. It was the result of manipulation of the intelligence to justify a decision to go to war. Secret societies have their own rules, and secret societies generally don't feel an obligation to openly and democratically communicate. Prime Minister Blair has set up a similar commission in Great Britain. His is going to report back in July. Ours is not going to be until March of 2005, 5 months after the presidential election. Shouldn't the American people have the benefit of the commission before the election? Well, the reason why we gave it time is because we didn't want it to be hurried. This is a strategic look, kind of a big-picture look about the intelligence-gathering capacities of the United States of America. I think every president should have kept on their desk the statement, the carved statement, that Harry Truman had: The buck stops here. If there are no weapons of mass destruction, which there aren't, if there are no ties with al-Qaeda, which there weren't and which there aren't, Or maybe now there are. Then why do we go to war? Well, all you need do is go on the web and download Project for a New American Century. There you will find the ideological and the strategic underpinnings for this policy, which was rejected by George Bush the First, which was ridiculed out of town in those days, It became the avowed policy of this government and was implemented starting with the war. I felt in my last year in the Pentagon that— I felt there was a great deal of contempt for the constraints on government that our Constitution lays out. And I also felt that there was a contempt for the Constitution. And I only absorbed this sense of contempt. By association with some of these senior appointed civilians. Who are all neoconservatives, who all believe in dominance, who believe in preemption, who believe in the military option as the first resort rather than the last resort. They have had a very fixed, indeed almost obsessive idea that in fact Iraq is a major actor in the world and a probable threat, possibly a deadly threat. This is a group of people who have essentially believed that might makes right, that the United States at this stage of history has unchallengeable power and therefore a responsibility to use it to make the world over in the manner that we— or they, rather— think it ought to be made over. I think behind the basic neoconservative philosophy is a considerable arrogance that American interests are the primary goal of all American foreign policy. And they seem to have a really serious habit of not being interested in listening to what other people say about this subject. Now, of course American interests should matter, but there are enlightened and unenlightened elements of self-interest. And I think in this case, we have determined and defined our interests globally in almost total disregard of what other states want, what their concerns are, how they might or might not be able to contribute. It's, we're on a roll, you're either with us or get out of the way. I find remarkably little interest in the character of other countries, the nature of their This is boring, I think, to neoconservatives, who really see this as quite irrelevant, what other people— what the political culture of other societies are, what they want, what their people might want, what some of their concerns might be. It's really quite irrelevant, because we know what we're going to do, and get out of the way if you don't agree. They said, look, the neocons, we brought down the evil empire of the Soviet Union. And now we're going to bring down Arab nationalism as personified by Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad. And once that happens, you're going to have democracy. You know, the problem is those people have not set foot— if they've been to the Middle East, it's been to Tel Aviv only. No, I don't think it's an accident at all that so much of the justification turned out to be fallacious, misleading. They thought they had a place in history. They were going to bring down, obviously, a very dysfunctional Arab Peninsula, as well as Iran, and they were going to change history. They believed they won the Cold War. And they said, all right, we won the Cold War because we were tough with the Soviet Union. We get tough with these people, and they're going to become like us. It is fair to say that the The Iraq War was a diversion from, from the war on terrorism. It certainly meant that people weren't paying as much attention to Afghanistan as they should have, and the resources that might have gone to Afghanistan ended up being focused more on Iraq. If you, if you attack another country with no justification, people are going to say, wait a minute, this isn't a war on terrorism. This is a war on— this is imperialism. This is colonialism. You know? And this is why it's a distraction, because you need the help of these people. If you get this view that the CIA and the FBI are lurking around the bazaars and the souks of the Middle East and handcuffing people or assassinating— it's just— that's not the way the world works. You've got to have the help of the locals to identify these people and either put them in jail or remove them In January of 2002, as I was sitting in the bunker of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, and I and several colleagues were sitting around the one little working TV, and lo and behold, here came the infamous statement of the Axis of Evil— you know, Iraq, Iran and North Korea. And we all looked at ourselves and went, oh, my God. I was in the Pentagon. You know, here we are kind of in ground zero of Afghanistan, and Washington's talking about, and talking in very belligerent terms about these other 3 countries, and we don't have Afghanistan anywhere close to being settled. The only person Saddam was a threat to at this point, as we saw when the army collapsed, was to Iraq. He didn't have weapons of mass destruction. He wasn't scaring anybody. He certainly wasn't scaring the Iranians or the It was a state that was on the verge of failure. Now it is a failed state. Failed states cause terrorism. You know, you can name them: Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia. Anytime you create a vacuum, it's where people flock to, discontented, to fight wars. Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, America wants to invade An Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country. He'd been saying this. This was part of his propaganda. So what did we do after 9/11? We invade an oil-rich and occupy an oil-rich Arab country, which was doing nothing to threaten us. The only real connection is that having invaded Iraq, we are very likely to make it a focus of terrorism. We are likely to produce what the president has said. Iraq represents, namely, the central battlefield in the war on terrorism. Why? Because we've sent a lot of Americans into a place where they're sitting ducks for people who think the only good American is a dead one. How are you doing? I'm fine. Iraq cannot be governed by Americans. I don't care what the intention is. I don't care if we truly want to build a democracy there. It cannot be ruled by a foreign power. We, as the one indispensable nation of the world, as we We characterized ourselves for so long in the last administration, cannot contemplate that possibly someone else might not like everything we call the American way of life and that they would in fact welcome us into their countries. This may not be the case. The only tool in the toolbox of the Bush administration is military force. Military force is a very blunt instrument. It just doesn't work. We've created more terrorists One of the more ironic effects of the attack on Iraq was to buttress other countries in the conviction of the infamous remark by an Indian general after the first Gulf War, when he said the lesson of this war is that if you have to fight the United States, you better have nuclear weapons. In some respects, it's as if Vietnam didn't even happen. It's as if the Vietnam War never happened. A lot of our leaders have suffered some kind of historical and political lobotomy. And that's frightening. And every American should be concerned about that, because the United States ultimately is supposed to be an exemplar for the rest of the world. We are supposed to be, in Ronald Reagan's words, that shining city on a hill. Well, that shining city is looking kind of slummy right now in terms of our image abroad, and I think with good reason. We violated, I think, fundamental principles that have guided this country's foreign policy so successfully since 1947. You don't want your president to be seen as a hot dog. And when your president gets into a jumpsuit and gets in the back of a jet and lands on an aircraft carrier and then waddles out with his little straps between his legs, and that's not— I mean, you want a sign of kind of maturity and not It's not testosterone blasting through when you're talking about things so fundamentally important as sending a nation to war and sending young men and women to their deaths. There is a sense in Washington now that you can't raise objections to this because you're not supporting the troops in the field. I would rapidly point out that unlike almost anybody I know that holds office in this country— I've had 2 sons in Both of whom have been in combat. And so, I don't have to take any nonsense from anybody, nor will I. Mark Twain's definition of patriotism is, patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it. Well, I don't think it's patriotic to stand by and remain silent while your country stumbles into disaster. Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels. And I think these are scoundrels. They have no argument now. They have no defense for what they did. The country is in a terrible international security situation that I think is perilous. So they're attacking the patriotism of others. Having been an insider, I know that the insiders don't have it all right. They make mistakes. And indeed, it's more likely to be mistakes, and it's more likely to be misjudgment, if there is no criticism. It was Jefferson who said that our kind of government is not based on trust; it's based on, in fact, suspicion. Supporting the Constitution, understanding what's in the Constitution, caring about the Constitution. That's why we don't have a king, because we have a piece of paper. So, I think that is patriotism. It's not just those of us who have been privileged to serve, actually, in the government, who are the patriots. It's every citizen who respects and honors the fact that we have such a wonderful country. To suggest that if you have a different viewpoint than any given administration, and/or if you're not supporting the president in policies that may be highly erroneous, I don't see that as patriotism at all. In fact, I would argue that any patriot with integrity is going to speak out. It's not unpatriotic to demand that Congress upholds its constitutional responsibilities regarding the declaration of war. It's not unpatriotic to be very upset, vocally upset, when Congress abrogates this constitutional responsibility by transferring war powers authority to the president of the United States, as they did in October of 2002. Listen, when you guys were working NASDAQ, the dot-coms. I was out in Iraq trying to get rid of Saddam and almost got killed for it, and besides almost going to jail. So it doesn't take a whole lot of courage for me to come out against the war, and I did at the beginning, but I was studiously ignored. When we did the first Gulf War, when I came out of Baghdad in 1991, I met with the president of the United States. I met with the senior leadership of both parties. And the one thing that sticks with me to this day is the extent to which each one of them explained to me, in very emotional terms, the extent to which they had had to plumb their consciences to come to a decision on how to vote on the use of force authorization. It had been a moral decision on their part. It had been one that had kept them up at night as they thought their way through this. We owe our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen and our Marines nothing less before we send them to battle. Sometimes the true patriot takes the unpopular course, but helps their country avoid mistakes. And even if they can't persuade, at least they tried. For me, America is this amazing land of opportunity, of beauty, of idealism, of hope. It is a beacon to the world. the world. It's a place of fantastic people. And what infuriates me more than anything else is that this administration has systematically slandered, libeled, blackened the image of America to our friends and allies around the world. Having the authority and the ability to go and wage war is a very, very solemn thing. And it needs to be done with care and with deliberation and with genuine forethought. And I think that none of that was present in the lead-up to this entire debacle that we now call Enduring Freedom. When the emperor has no clothes, you have to have the, the presence of mind and the courage to stand up and say, the emperor has no clothes.