Crossfire

In the CROSSFIRE today, President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council spokesman P.J. Crowley. He’s now a senior fellow at the Center For American Progress, a Democratic think tank. And also here is former Republican National Committee communications director Cliff May. He’s president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

(APPLAUSE)

CARVILLE: Cliff, one prominent member of this administration, but admittedly maybe not the smartest member of the administration, but weighed in heavily on what he thought of the intelligence and the intelligence that we received prior to the war. Let me show you a clip of this prominent administration member and what he thought of the CIA’s intelligence.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: Let me first say that, you know, I think the intelligence I get is darn good intelligence.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(LAUGHTER)

CARVILLE: I’m sorry.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

CARVILLE: I mean, I — do you think anybody else in America agrees with this man, that the intelligence he gets is darn good intelligence?

CLIFF MAY, FOUNDATION FOR THE DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES: Obviously, he’s being politically correct, because he doesn’t want to offend the people who are in the intelligence community who are trying very hard.

But the fact of the matter is, we have not had good intelligence for many years. About 25 years ago, we began to cripple our intelligence services. We have done so under Republican and Democratic presidents, starting with Jimmy Carter, who fired about 25 percent of the CIA agents, particularly the kind we need right now. That culture was totally decimated. We have a problem here. You know it. I know it. The president shows it. He doesn’t want to

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: Well, what did he say? Did he — I just showed you a clip of him saying it was a darn good intelligence.

(LAUGHTER)

P.J. CROWLEY, SENIOR FELLOW, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS: Usually, you go back only 10 years to blame for the intelligence failures of the Bush administration. Now you’re going back 25 years.

MAY: I’m saying — I’m telling — I’m letting the truth, and you know it to be the truth.

(CROSSTALK)

MAY: Let me just explain. I’m saying both Republican and Democratic presidents have had a hand this. And the Congress has. And when Jimmy Carter came into office, he believed, under Stansfield Turner, that they — they fired 25 percent of the agents. You know that.

(CROSSTALK)

CROWLEY: We had very good intelligence in Iraq until 1998, when the UNSCOM inspectors were pushed out.

MAY: No.

CROWLEY: We had the opportunity when the U.N. inspectors went back in to reestablish and reverify the intelligence.

(CROSSTALK)

CROWLEY: The president was in a hell of a hurry.

MAY: We did not.

NOVAK: P.J., let me ask you this. The thing that — the urban legend that’s been propagated by the Democrats is that the CIA was bludgeoned into these false — this bad intelligence by the administration so they could go to war.

But I want you to see what Senator Roberts said today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERTS: The committee found no evidence that the intelligence community’s mischaracterization or exaggeration of intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of politics or pressure.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NOVAK: Now, this was not one Republican chairman. This was the committee, the bipartisan, unanimous committee. So can we put that issue aside, then?

CROWLEY: There were definitely intelligence failures. Our intelligence was stale. It was incomplete. And, of course, it was also false.

Now, what’s not in the report today is what the Bush administration did with the intelligence that was available. And what’s not in the report today was Ahmad Chalabi and his role in bringing us false information that we paid him for the led

(CROSSTALK)

NOVAK: You’re not answering…

(APPLAUSE)

MAY: You’re confusing — hold on.

CROWLEY: Whoa, whoa, whoa.

MAY: You are purposely — I hope you’re not purposely confusing the issue.

CROWLEY: It is a valid issue, though.

MAY: The CIA

(CROSSTALK)

MAY: … did not have to do with Ahmad Chalabi. That was the Pentagon. They were separate sources of information for the CIA. George Tenet did not

(CROSSTALK)

MAY: You know that George Tenet did not rely on Ahmad Chalabi. You know that.

CROWLEY: We’re talking about an intelligence community failure. And most of the intelligence community resides in the Pentagon, not the CIA.

(CROSSTALK)

MAY: Let me point this out, that we didn’t — and this is very important that people understand and you understand. We did not have human intelligence in al Qaeda. We did not have human intelligence in the Taliban. We did not have the human intelligence in Iraq.

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: Chalabi.

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: They had — Judy Miller had him. Paul Wolfowitz had it. We had Chalabi everywhere. We had all the human intelligence

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: Your naive counterparts

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: It takes smart people to go through that. You were had.

MAY: It’s so amazing that people like…

(APPLAUSE)

MAY: James, people like you have been against the CIA for years. And now you’re saying, oh, the CIA wasn’t strong enough.

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: … said that in my life.

NOVAK: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

CROWLEY: Even with the intelligence failures, as George Tenet said clearly, the CIA never said that Saddam had nuclear weapons. And the CIA never said that this was an imminent threat. That was George Bush.

(CROSSTALK)

MAY: No, no, no, I’ve got to say this.

(APPLAUSE)

MAY: George Tenet — it’s in Bob Woodward’s Bush. George Tenet was asked by President Bush, does Iraq have weapons of mass destruction? His answer was said, it’s a slam dunk. It’s a slam dunk.

(CROSSTALK)

NOVAK: Let me just go back to my

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: According to Bush.

MAY: According to Bob Woodward. According to Bob Woodward.

CARVILLE: There’s a dispute.

(CROSSTALK)

NOVAK: Let me go back to my question…

(CROSSTALK)

NOVAK: … P.J., that you didn’t answer it. And I’m going to give you another witness on that. That’s a member of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Kit Bond of Missouri, on the floor of the Senate today. Let’s listen to him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. CHRISTOPHER BOND (R), MISSOURI: Despite the political charges that are being made on the other side of the aisle, no one was pressured to change judgments or reach specific judgments. In fact, the committee interviewed over 200 people searching, searching and searching for those who might be pressured.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NOVAK: So can we — please, and try to direct yourself to this question, sir, if you could. Can we say that that is off the table now? Because there’s a unanimous, bipartisan agreement that the intelligence community was not pressured by the administration?

CROWLEY: I accept the fact that the Bush administration didn’t pressure any individual intelligence analyst to change a particular view.

NOVAK: Thank you.

CROWLEY: But, that said, clearly, the Bush administration was only paying attention to the information that verified the preconceived notion it brought into office by Cheney, Wolfowitz, who wanted to finish the job that they screwed up in 1991.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

CROWLEY: And overthrow Saddam Hussein.

CARVILLE: Cliff, Cliff, everybody knows at the time we went to war that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. We kicked out 236 U.N. inspectors that had been there 90 days.

So, regardless of what we knew in October, any idiot knew that they were sitting there, that Hans Blix, the U.N. was saying, tell us where these sites were. They would go check them out and they would come back and they would tell us nothing. So the truth is, you knew and the world knew at the time we invaded Iraq that there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction there.

(APPLAUSE)

MAY: Let me ask you…

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: So why in the hell did we go? Why do we kick them out and start the war?

MAY: Let me ask you, James.

CARVILLE: Yes.

MAY: Because you are a very smart guy. What do you think did happen to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction? Where do you think they are today?

CROWLEY: They were destroyed in 1998.

CARVILLE: They were destroyed in — yes.

MAY: Wait a minute. Where? Where? How? How come nobody saw it? Did Hans Blix see it? Did the U.N. see it? Who saw it?

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: Hans Blix said, I’ve got 236 people here.

MAY: Excuse me.

CARVILLE: Tell me where they are and I’ll go find them.

MAY: Excuse me.

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: And he went to look. And he came back and he told us they wasn’t there.

MAY: No, no, no, that’s not true.

(CROSSTALK)

CARVILLE: You knew they weren’t there.

(CROSSTALK)

MAY: Let me just say, 1998 was when Saddam Hussein threw out the inspectors. We understand that. We agree on that. He did that because he didn’t have any weapons. And, secondly, it was then that Clinton rightly passed the law, the Iraq Liberation Act, which made it the official policy of the U.S. government to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Were you against that? Was that a mistake? How were you going to get him out?

(CROSSTALK)

MAY: You’re going to talk him out of office? You’re going to talk him out?

(APPLAUSE)

(CROSSTALK)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

NOVAK: I’ve got a very important question for Colonel Crowley.

Last night, the senator, John Kerry, who says he is an expert on terrorism, was on the “LARRY KING LIVE” show. And he was asked what he thought about this Intelligence Committee report, which was all we’re — and he gave a really interesting answer.

Let’s listen to it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, “LARRY KING LIVE”)

SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: They have offered to brief me. I just haven’t had time.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NOVAK: He just hasn’t had time to be briefed? What kind of a serious candidate is that?

(APPLAUSE)

CROWLEY: Well, yes, he’ll have the weekend, like all of us, to read all 500 pages.

I mean, Senator Kerry is — he’s a sitting senator. He has access to the information. He already knows what he’s going to spend the next four years doing, is digging out from under the hole that the Bush administration has put him in.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

NOVAK: He couldn’t answer because he hadn’t been briefed. Will he find time to be briefed if he’s elected president?

(CROSSTALK)

CROWLEY: But his running mate, John Edwards, is a member of the intelligence community, is familiar with the report, and supports it as far as it goes. Of course, it doesn’t go far enough.

NOVAK: Next, in “Rapid Fire,” we’ll ask whether John Kerry is having second thoughts over one of his votes in Congress.

And an international court’s opinion about this barrier produced strong reaction in the Middle East. Details after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MILES O’BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Hello. I’m Miles O’Brien at CNN Center in Atlanta.

Coming up at the top of the hour, a Senate report says the decision to go to war in Iraq was made on bad information and it blames the CIA. We’ll talk with Republican Pat Roberts and Democrat Jay Rockefeller.

The U.N.’s highest court says Israel should tear down the barrier in the West Bank.

And an emotional reunion for an American man and his Japanese wife. Now the question is, can they stay together?

Those stories and much more just moments away on “WOLF BLITZER REPORTS.”

Now back to CROSSFIRE.

CARVILLE: It’s time for “Rapid Fire,” where we can ask questions even faster than the Bush administration can ignore the facts that don’t suit its agenda.

Our guests are Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and P.J. Crowley with the Center For American Progress.

NOVAK: Colonel Crowley, when he was a senator, Senator Kerry voted many times to cut CIA spending, tried to cut it even more than it was cut. Do you think he regrets that now?

CROWLEY: I think John Kerry is going to help rebuild the intelligence community, just like other members of the Senate will be — it will be a very tough job, but he’ll do it.

CARVILLE: All right, hey, Cliff, I want to show you something here, because there’s a little politics in here. John Edwards, in the wisdom of the American people, the fact that he’s a trial lawyer shows that he fights for the average person, 55 percent; contributed to frivolous lawsuits, 26. Aren’t you really impressed with the wisdom of the American people that they see through all this cockamamie right-wing stuff?

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

CARVILLE: And see this man is a real fighter for people?

MAY: He’s a charming guy. I think John Kerry’s criticisms of him have been the most telling. He said during the primary that John Edwards is not ready to be president of the United States. If he’s not ready to be president, is he ready to be vice president?

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

NOVAK: P.J. Crowley, Senator Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the committee, said today he wasn’t sure that Iraq was any better off without Saddam Hussein than it was with him in power. Do you agree with that?

CROWLEY: I think the Iraqi people are better off without Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately, because of what the Bush administration has done, we are not safer.

(APPLAUSE)

CARVILLE: What has so — what’s so impressed you about President Bush’s foreign — wide foreign policy expertise in 2000, when he was ready to assume the office of presidency, that he had that John Edwards doesn’t have after being six years a United States senator in 2004?

MAY: I think most of his foreign policy experience, you’re right, has been after 9/11.

(BELL RINGING)

MAY: And he’s done a good job since then.

By the way, we took out of Iraq last week the material that is used to make a dirty bomb, not a weapons of mass destruction, but a dirty bomb. Aren’t you happy about that?

CARVILLE: Yes, I’m

(CROSSTALK)

(APPLAUSE)

NOVAK: Cliff May, thank you very much.

P.J. Crowley, thank you very much. Thank you very much.