Judy Woodruff’s Inside Politics

Gentlemen, good to see you both.

JAMES WOOLSEY, FMR. CIA DIRECTOR: Good to be with you, Judy.

GARY HART, FMR. CO-CHAIR, U.S. COMMISSION ON NATIONAL SECURITY: A pleasure.

WOODRUFF: Senator Hart, to you first. Did we learn anything new from Condoleezza Rice today?

HART: No, and I frankly hadn’t expected to. I thought her appearance was, if you will, over-reported. She said almost exactly what one could have predicted. And that is, we were taking every step reasonable to take. I happen to disagree with that, but that’s what she was going to say.

WOODRUFF: Predictable from her, Jim Woolsey?

WOOLSEY: Well, some of the substance was predictable. But I think she made points very well. I think it was a real success for her. I think that she made two key points much more effectively than the administration has before.

One was that much of the problem that might have been correctable pre-9/11 had to do with coordination of intelligence inside the United States. And this is largely an FBI matter. And also FBI and CIA not sharing material, and some of that was required by law. She made that point very well.

WOODRUFF: Right.

WOOLSEY: I think she also came across as a strategic thinker. She made the point that the administration was focusing on dealing with Afghanistan so it could deal with al Qaeda, and then on Pakistan so it could deal with Afghanistan. And that’s, I think, what she meant about not swatting flies, not just shooting some cruise missiles at some empty structures.

WOODRUFF: Well, I want to ask you about that.

But, Senator Hart, what about her point that there really was no clear threat? That in all these documents and memos that emerged from the government, whatever agency, that there never was a clear threat?

HART: Well, I think this is disingenuous. It’s a bit like saying at the local level that a group of citizens warning the mayor and the police department that there is going to be a wave of burglaries. And when the burglaries occur, the defense says, you didn’t say which house, what night, and what method.

There are steps that could have been taken to make this more difficult. When I was a national candidate, Secret Service said if somebody wants to kill you, they’ll probably kill you. Our job is to make it as difficult as possible. We didn’t do that.

WOODRUFF: Jim Woolsey, is it credible to say that those threats were not specific? Which is what we heard her say in so many words?

WOOLSEY: It’s a matter of precision. The commission that the senator co-chaired, the Hart-Rudman Commission, did a superb job. And I think we did a good job in the one that I was on that Jerry Bremer chaired on terrorism. But none of us really said people are going to be flying airplanes into buildings.

And I think that they had general threat information. They knew something bad was likely to happen. But they didn’t have enough to, I think, take steps to specifically prevent what happened on 9/11.

HART: But that’s what the intelligence services are for. It’s not commissions that come up with those details.

When a president is warned by 14 Americans who have spent two- and-a-half years studying this that something bad is going to happen, we can’t tell you when, where or how, that president then calls up the intelligence services and the law enforcement agencies with a degree of urgency that was not present here and says, is this going to happen or not? And, if so, what is your projection as to how it might happen?

WOODRUFF: You’re referring to the report of your own commission…

HART: Precisely.

WOODRUFF: … that came out.

HART: Eight months before 9/11.

WOODRUFF: And in a nutshell, you said to Condoleezza Rice and others what?

HART: We said create — first of all, create a national coordinating agency with statutory and budgetary authority to protect our borders and prepare for attacks. And that recommendation was totally neglected and only supported by the president eight months after 9/11.

WOODRUFF: Jim Woolsey, very quickly — and I want to come back to this after the break — doesn’t that say that there was a lack of urgency then?

WOOLSEY: I think they were getting organized and they probably could have done some things faster. But keep in mind the Clinton administration had eight years. And from the mid-90s on, it was quite clear that al Qaeda was a very severe threat, and they hit empty buildings in 1998 with cruise missiles and they tried law enforcement.

And that was not a particularly felicitous or helpful overall approach. I think that’s what the president meant when he said he didn’t want to swat flies.

WOODRUFF: All right. We want to get back to this very point. When we come back after the break, more questions for Gary Hart and Jim Woolsey in just a minute.

And later on, Bill Schneider is going to delve into Condoleezza Rice’s testimony and find out what may be her most politically damaging admission for the Bush administration.

Also ahead, veteran journalist Jack Germond joins me for some ticket talk.

Plus, President George W. Bush’s twin challenges.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WOODRUFF: Continuing our discussion on the U.S. response to terrorism and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission, with me, former Senator Gary Hart, who chaired the U.S. Commission on National Security, and former CIA director, James Woolsey.

Senator Hart, what about what we just heard from Jim Woolsey, that the Clinton administration had eight years and they were, in the mind of George W. Bush, swatting flies?

HART: I think we’ll not know the true facts about this and until the 9/11 Commission report comes out. We do know that Richard Clarke said there was a greater degree of urgency at certain points. And I think he specifically said the summer and fall of ’99, as I recall, in the Clinton years then, the first eight months of the Bush years.

I think you had to have been inside to gauge something as intangible as urgency. But I know Sandy Berger has said that we had a lot of the agencies up and alert, on a high state of alert during a period of time. And I don’t know exactly when that was.

WOODRUFF: Jim Woolsey, you don’t think the Bush administration will be ultimately vulnerable for not having had a greater sense of urgency during those first months?

WOOLSEY: Well, it’s hard to say. They were proceeding with deliberate speed. But it seemed to me they were going in a positive direction.

They were considering the strategy. They did see that they had to — if they were going to get rid of al Qaeda, they had to change the government in Afghanistan. That meant that they had to get on the right side and work with Pakistan.

And they brought on Zalmay Khalilzad, a Pakistani — I mean — sorry — an African-American, very experienced national security expert who is now the ambassador in Afghanistan. They were focused, it seems to me, on the right things.

It’s very hard to get moving in any administration these days because your people aren’t on board and until the summer. And some of them the fall. The clearance process and confirmation process takes so long.

HART: Could I just say that I think it’s not either or. You can attack al Qaeda or anyone else abroad, but that’s not a reason for not doing more to coordinate here at home. Clearly, there was laxity in the system.

Whose responsibility that was, Clinton or Bush, history must judge. But we did have information that wasn’t circulated, and there wasn’t coordination. And to say we were fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan and, therefore, were occupied there, I think is insufficient.

WOOLSEY: I want to agree with the senator on that. I mean, the FAA left the cockpit doors flimsy. The CIA didn’t transmit information about two terrorists that it had information on to the State Department. So they got into the country. The FBI couldn’t have the agents in Minnesota talk to the agents in Arizona. There were a lot of ways the country as a whole was asleep.

WOODRUFF: Should that presidential daily brief of August 6 be made public? What do you both think, yes or no?

HART: Yes.

WOODRUFF: Yes. Any…

WOOLSEY: I don’t really think the history of giving very highly classified documents like that out to the public is a good one to establish. It probably goes with my former job.

WOODRUFF: What about Mitch McConnell, Senator Mitch McConnell’s comment that this commission is already a political casualty of this election? In other words, whatever they put out in late July, it’s going to be consumed by the election, the presidential election. Do you believe that, Senator Hart?

HART: No, not if they do the work properly. I don’t think so. I think — I know most of the members of that commission and I think they’re diligent, committed Americans.

You know, in Washington, everything is partisan and political. But I think there are people genuinely in this country who want to do what’s best for America.

WOOLSEY: I agree. Forty percent or so of the country is going to vote Republican, 40 percent or so Democratic. And the people who swing the balance probably don’t start paying attention till after the World Series. There will be plenty of time then, I think, to focus on what this commission does, and I think they’re able people and they’ll probably do a good job.

WOODRUFF: So you think its work will be taken seriously?

WOOLSEY: Yes.

HART: Well, that depends on people in your business.

WOOLSEY: I agree with that.

WOODRUFF: You’re pointing the finger back at us.

WOOLSEY: It certainly will be by the people, but they have to know what the conclusions are.

WOODRUFF: All right. It’s very good to see both of you. Former Senator Gary Hart, Jim Woolsey, good to see both of you.

HART: A pleasure.

WOOLSEY: Good to see you.

WOODRUFF: We appreciate it. Thank you.