Kudlow & Cramer

Dr. CONDOLEEZZA RICE (National Security Adviser): (From videotape) The director of Central Intelligence and the director of the FBI, given the level of threat, were doing what they thought they could do to deal with the threat that we faced. There was no threat reporting of any substance about an attack coming in the United States. And the director of the FBI and the director of the CIA, had they received information, I am quite certain, given that the director of the CIA met frequently face to face with the president of the United States, that he would have made that available to the president or to me.

KUDLOW: Joining us now for some insight into Dr. Rice’s testimony is former CIA director Mr. James Woolsey. Mr. Woolsey, welcome back.

Mr. JAMES WOOLSEY (Former CIA Director): Good to be with you.

KUDLOW: Sir, the more I look at this, read about it and think of it, it seems to me that the difficulties in information gathering, intelligence gathering, between the FBI and the CIA may have been at the root of this problem. What’s your take, sir?

Mr. WOOLSEY: They were one part of the problem. Both of them made mistakes. The FBI, for example, couldn’t get its agents in Minnesota in touch with its agents in Arizona. Both of them had different aspects of suspicion about Moussaoui or others being trained to fly planes into buildings. The CIA had a line in 2000 on two of the 9/11 terrorists, and dropped the ball, didn’t inform the FBI and states, so they weren’t kept out of the country. But some of those barriers were imposed by statute. For example, the ’93 bombing of the World Trade Center, there was a lot of material around about al-Qaida that was untranslated. The FBI didn’t share it with the CIA until after the trial was over, so it just sat there, untranslated. Well, that wasn’t the FBI’s fault. That was the law until the Patriot Act was passed. Since they’d obtained it pursuant to grand jury subpoena, they couldn’t share it with the CIA. So there were things that needed to be changed. Sometimes people made mistakes, but some of this was institutionally required, this separation of the bureau and agency.

JIM CRAMER, co-host:

All right. Mr. Woolsey let me just turn to Iraq for a second. She’s very popular, Maureen Dowd. I just want to read a quote from her article, because I think a lot of people are feeling this way. I need you to refute it for me if you can. ‘Every single thing the administration calculated would happen in Iraq has turned out the opposite. The WMD that supposedly threatened us did not exist. The dangerous dictator was diluted and writing romance novels. The terrorism that would be thwarted has mushroomed in Iraq and is feeding Arab radicalism.’ A lot of people are agreeing with this. Tell me what’s wrong with that.

Mr. WOOLSEY: Well, in the first place, I think it’s ridiculous to say that Saddam was not a terrible dictator because he was writing novels. He’s one of the worst the modern world has ever seen. He’s responsible for at least 10 times as many deaths as Slobodan Milosevic, about two million vs. 200,000. And, one, we went to war against Milosevic twice in the 1990s without any UN resolutions, purely on human rights grounds. So it seems to me that it’s really ridiculous to say that Saddam was not a terrible dictator.

The WMD question’s a lot more complicated. I think the administration did make a mistake in focusing on that, almost to the exclusion of the terrible nature of Saddam’s regime and the relationship of one kind or another that his regime had with different terrorist groups. Not so much that they sponsored them or controlled them the way, say, Iran does Hezbollah or Muqtada Sadr in Iraq, but rather that they were like sort of a Mafia family dealing with other Mafia families. They hated one another and killed each other from time to time, insulted each other, but still worked together here and there on one thing and another. I think the administration should have emphasized those things more than just the WMD. It’s sort of like having a three-legged stool and balancing on only one leg of it. And then if you have trouble with some aspects of that one leg, you’re in deep trouble.

KUDLOW: I’d like to come back to Iraq, but, if I may, close the loop on Condi Rice. A couple things. One, she said today that there was no silver bullet for picking off 9/11 in advance. And, two, she inferred that there was really no ‘gotcha’ memo that showed that the president was delinquent or that the administration was delinquent. Those are two important points. Can you give us your comment, please?

Mr. WOOLSEY: I think she did a superb job today. And I think from everything I’ve read and seen and heard, I think those points are likely to be quite correct. I think it’s key that people look at the way she approached this problem. She approached it as a strategist and she encouraged the administration to. They looked at al-Qaida. They realized that blowing up empty structures, as the Clinton administration did in ’98 and earlier in ’93 in Iraq, wasn’t going to do very much. That’s, I think, what President Bush meant when he said he didn’t want to swat flies. And so they came up with an approach to move against–or get ready, anyway, even before 9/11, to move against Afghanistan to get out al-Qaida. And they realized they had to change things with Pakistan in order to move against Afghanistan.

Now that’s the way you think strategically. Dick Clarke is a tactical guy. He was focused on a very narrow set of issues, and he kept insisting, again and again, that we do something, do something, and very frustrated that the CIA and the military didn’t want to do what he recommended. But I think what he was recommending was basically, on several occasions, simply the advisability of blowing up empty structures. And that didn’t do much good in ’93 and ’98, and I don’t think it would have done any good to continue it.

CRAMER: Mr. Woolsey, are we as a country and our leaders perhaps too much believing in a separation of powers between religion and secular, in that we keep coming up with these enemies–we go into Iraq–I don’t think anyone really thought that underneath Saddam would be this tremendous series of Sunni and Shiite leaders who truly hate us. Have we just continually misjudged the religious opposition to our country?

Mr. WOOLSEY: Well, there are sort of three totalitarian movements in that part of the world, all of whom hate us because they’re totalitarians. One of them, the Ba’athists, the fascists, essentially are secular; the other two sort of theoretically have religious roots, people like Khameini in Iran and the mullahs who run the Iranian instruments of power, and on the other hand, al-Qaida and its affiliated organizations from the Sunni side of Islam. But I don’t really regard them as religious organizations. I think they’re religious precisely the way Torquemada was, say, in the Spanish Inquisition. I mean, he said he was a Christian, but he was really a totalitarian, and his behavior was about as far from the Sermon on the Mount as you can get.

Khameini in Iran and the way they torture people and kill students and so forth, and al-Qaida and their Wahhabi backers in Saudi Arabia are, I think, pretty darned far from the generally just and decent tenets of Islam as well. They say that they’re religious people, and so we have a hard time sorting that out, because when somebody claims they’re acting for a religious reason, we tend to want to back off here in the States.

CRAMER: Right. Right.

Mr. WOOLSEY: But it’s a tough problem.

CRAMER: That’s what we do.

KUDLOW: You know, I think you’re exactly–it’s a good insight, sir. Let me just finish with Ms. Rice. Going forward, looking ahead in terms of the defense of the United States, she said the creation of the Homeland Security Department, the Patriot Act and the Terrorism Threat Information Center would solve a lot of these problems and allow us to head off future threats. That’s an optimistic view. Do you share it?

Mr. WOOLSEY: I think those are all good things to do and they help us make progress, but we’ve got a lot more to do. I think building resilience into our infrastructure so that it’s much harder for people to, say, take down the electricity grid or to blow up a rail car filled with chlorine gas or something like–there’s a lot of things with our infrastructure that the National Academy of Sciences has pointed out in a report a year or so ago that just have to get fixed so that even if we take terrorist hits, they’re not catastrophic. And we will have some more attacks. I think it’s just about as sure as these things get. What we have to do is stop as many as we can and operate ourselves in such a way that the ones that do occur are not catastrophes.

CRAMER: Excellent. All right. That’s former CIA director James Woolsey. Thank you for coming on KUDLOW & CRAMER.

Mr. WOOLSEY: Good to be with you, all.

CRAMER: As always, very coherent and precise with no BS.

KUDLOW: Insightful. Insightful.

CRAMER: Excellent.

Later, our market roundtable. Up next, a new study says music downloading has not made a dent in record sales. Can this really be true? You’ve got to keep it with K&C.