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INSIGHT

Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction Continues

Aired January 26, 2004 - 17:00:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons.

ROSEMARY CHURCH, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR (voice-over): Not so fast. After months of searching, America's former chief weapons inspector says there probably aren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. U.S. intelligence officials are said to be upset about the revelations, but Bush officials say the war to topple Saddam is justified anyway.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CHURCH: Hello. I'm Rosemary Church, in for Jonathan Mann.

Well, it's the controversy that won't go away. Did Iraq have banned weapons? Were they chemical, biological or nuclear? Were they being stockpiled, traded on the black market, supplied to terrorists?

Well, the United States and its chief ally in the war in Iraq, Britain, said yes to many of those questions and an ominous maybe to the others. But it's (UNINTELLIGIBLE) the man who is saying it that's causing headaches once again for the Bush and Blair governments.

On INSIGHT today, still justifying the war.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHURCH (voice-over): In the days and weeks leading up to the war in Iraq, senior officials in the Bush and Blair administrations repeatedly asserted that Saddam Hussein had to be ousted because he was a dangerous man. A dangerous and unpredictable man sitting on vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and the inclination to share them with terrorists.

BUSH: This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for and is capable of killing millions.

CHURCH: But that was wrong, according to the chief. U.S. weapons inspector, David Kay, a well-respected arms expert in the international community.

DAVID KAY, FMR. U.S. CHIEF WEAPONS INSPECTOR: Based on what I've seen is that we are very unlikely to find large stockpiles of weapons.

CHURCH: Since stepping down Friday, Kay has gone public with assertions that there were no large stockpiles of weapons, no biological labs, no advanced program, and no nuclear weapons.

But Kay says it is not President Bush who needs to do the explaining. It's the U.S. intelligence community.

KAY: I think the intelligence community owes the president rather than the president owing the American people. We have to remember that this view of Iraq was held during the Clinton administration and didn't change in the Bush administration.

CHURCH: Senior officials on both sides of the Atlantic say they had every reason to believe Iraq did have WMD's and the war was justified even if there were no weapons.

COLIN POWELL, U.S. SECY. OF DEFENSE: And we believe he had every possibility of having such weapons in the present and it was a danger that the world should not be facing after 12 years of U.N. resolutions telling him to get rid of such weapons.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Military action was taken on the basis of Resolution 1441. We know that Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction previously. 1441 was given by the United Nations to Saddam Hussein as a last opportunity to cooperate with the international community.

CHURCH: The hunt for weapons in Iraq is not over and other arms experts say it's important to note that Kay did not come away completely empty-handed.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You have to remember that Dr. Kay did say there were continuing programs. He spoke about a continuing effort to research, develop and produce ricin, the biological warfare agent. So it's not that there was absolutely nothing going on.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CHURCH: Well, David Kay was to have issued a final report on his findings sometime in the coming months, smack in the middle of the U.S. presidential election. That will not be happening now.

CNN's David Ensor joins us with more on all of this -- David.

DAVID ENSOR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Rosemary, since being replaced Friday, as you mentioned, former weapons inspector David Kay has been talking plenty, providing ammunition mostly for critics of the war, but also some for its defenders.

He is blaming the CIA, his employers until Friday, not the White House, for apparently getting it wrong on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, saying that he thinks the intelligence community owes the president an explanation rather than the other way around, rather than the president owing an explanation to the American people.

Administration officials like that last comment, and they liked Kay's statement that Baghdad was actively working to produce a biological weapons component using the poison ricin until the American invasion of last March. But his comment that he expects no weapons to be found has put the administration on the defensive. In Little Rock, the president changed the subject today -- he changed it to terrorism. He was praising U.S. intelligence for helping to catch Hasan Ghul, an al Qaeda man who had just arrived in Iraq.

On Capitol Hill, however, Democrats saw Kay's statements as another reason to send an intelligence committee chairman, Senator Pat Roberts, to look into what went wrong at the CIA and at the White House.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TOM DASCHLE (D-SD), SENATE MINORITY LEADER: To fail to do so, we will again bring legislation to the Senate floor to establish a nonpartisan, independent commission to look at how intelligence was used by the intelligence community and this administration.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ENSOR: U.S. intelligence officials insist it's still premature in their view to say, as Kay has, that no weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq. They note that Kay says he quit because he didn't have enough people, and yet now he's saying there's no point in looking because there is nothing to find.

As one official put it, he can't have it both ways -- Rosemary.

CHURCH: David, I want to look a little closer at what the White House is saying about this. Just how angry are they that David Kay is speaking out?

ENSOR: Well, it's mixed, because on the one hand, they are on the defensive, with him saying he doesn't expect weapons to be found. On the other hand, he's blaming the intelligence community, not the Bush administration, for the way intelligence was handled and produced prior to the war. So they're perhaps relieved by that -- Rosemary.

CHURCH: All right, thanks for that. David Ensor, appreciate it.

We're going to take a short break now. When we come back, what went wrong with the intelligence? We'll talk with a former CIA agent.

Stay with us for that.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The issue here is, we need to look at the entire process. What did our intelligence community rely on in order to reach the information that they passed on to decision-makers? How did decision- makers utilize that information which they received? And then, finally, what were the decision made to communicate that to the world community, particularly through the United Nations and to the people of the United States of America?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CHURCH: Members of the U.S. Congress were briefed on the threat from Iraq's alleged WMD program. Many voted in favor of giving U.S. President George W. Bush the authority to attack Iraq based on those briefings.

Welcome back.

Well, some senior members of Congress have called elements of U.S. intelligence on Iraq sloppy. Now many are calling for a public investigation within the month.

Joining us to talk about what Congress would find, or likely find, is Robert Baer, a former CIA agent. He is the author of the book "See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism."

Thank you so much for being with us.

You've worked within the CIA. You know those inner workings. How could the intelligence service get it so wrong?

ROBERT BAER, AUTHOR: It's more than I just worked in the CIA. In the mid-90's, I was the deputy chief of Iraqi collections in Iraq and in Washington, and the fact is, and we knew it inside the CIA with absolutely 100 percent certainty, we had no sources inside Iraq to speak of. Not in Saddam's inner circle, not in the military, not in the biochemical labs. We didn't know what was going on in the country, and frankly Iraq is a hard place to collect intelligence on during the days of Saddam and we were fairly blind.

The question is, why didn't the president know that.

CHURCH: That's quite surprising, though. I mean, David Kay himself has said this is not the president's fault. This is the fault of the intelligence agents here. Why was there no one in Iraq? You say it's difficult, but surely that's what it's all about for intelligence services, to overcome those sorts of difficulties.

BAER: We lost a lot of our sources during purges during the war, people fleeing, and in the mid-90's and through the 90's, really through the entire 90's, Saddam wouldn't let people go out and we couldn't go it. It's what we call a denied area.

And without those human sources, as I said, we were completely blind.

CHURCH: What about this extraordinary revelation from David Kay that in fact some of the Iraqi scientists were going to Saddam Hussein and offering up these ambitious and fanciful ideas, getting huge sums of money from the leader and then spending that money on something else. Why would that information not leak out in some way?

BAER: Again, because those people that were extorting money from Saddam were not coming out. They were cutting separate deals, making as much money as they could.

What we didn't understand is how corrupt the system was in Iraq and that in fact it was on the brink of collapse, again because we didn't have people on the ground that could have smelled this going on.

CHURCH: What do you think this public investigation is going to find? Apparently it's going to be underway within the month. What will they find in that?

BAER: I think they're going to take a look at the intelligence after the U.N. inspectors left in '98 and they're going to say yes, in fact, the CIA had no information, but what did it tell the White House about what it had? That everything it had was built on supposition and guesswork.

CHURCH: If you're saying that this isn't the failing of the CIA and other intelligence services, admittedly right across the globe, then why are you saying it's the fault of the president of the United States? Why does it fall at his feet if even the intelligence services didn't know?

BAER: Because I think an experienced president would have had the sense to go to the CIA director and said are you absolutely sure that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, deployed with his military, a threat to the United States, before I launch a preemptive war.

I got the feeling that that was not done, so you have two groups at fault. The White House and the CIA. Bad intelligence and bad judgment.

CHURCH: So how do you improve that intelligence? What do they need to do to improve that and regain credibility right across the world?

BAER: You need to reform it. You need to put people back overseas. Human intelligence fell into disfavor during the 90's, even into the 80's. The United States thought that the Cold War was over, that it could stop spying on other countries, and it was all left up to the analysts who were using open source and the open source got it wrong.

You need to go back to the Cold War days and start collecting intelligence on al Qaeda, on Iraq, in other countries that are threat.

CHURCH: I mean, I see you protecting the CIA here. Presumably you wouldn't see that anything should happen to George Tenet here.

BAER: There's -- I'm not protecting it, because when I left the CIA, I was very discouraged with the quality of intelligence, and I wrote a book based on how bad the intelligence was, which by the way came out before the war, so I'm not defending it at all. I'm just saying that we can't put the blame entirely on the CIA. It should be spread around Washington, including Congress.

I mean, Congress, where were they during all of this? Why didn't they go to the CIA? Why haven't they moved farther on their investigation of 9- 11 and the Iraq War? I mean, they're not particularly aggressive either.

CHURCH: The world expects more from a superpower, doesn't it? I mean, the other countries could have got it wrong, but the United States, the onus is on it, as a superpower, to get these sorts of things right, especially when they base this on a preemptive strike on another country.

BAER: Rosemary, that's exactly it. It's a preemptive strike. We had -- this isn't Pearl Harbor that we're dealing with in this Iraq War. It was just war based on supposition and wishful thinking and a lot of beliefs which were misplaced. And, worse, you were relying on exiles to tell you what was going on in Iraq, and they didn't know what was going on either.

CHURCH: What lessons, then, do you think have been learned from this by the United States, by Britain, but of course by countries across the world as well, who stood by and watched as it happened?

BAER: I think this is a catastrophe. I mean, a lot of people had a feeling this was wrong, but they had to defer to the United States because it said it had the intelligence. I think this is going to cause a lot of credibility problem for the United States, which is going to effect other conflicts.

It's going to take us a long time to get over this, and in the meantime we'd better get better intelligence or not launch preemptive wars.

CHURCH: Can the United States regain its credibility? Can it stand in the United Nations and be respected when we see this happen?

BAER: I think it can in the sense that we're an open society still, that David Kay can go public and say mistakes have been made, that Secretary or State Colin Powell has also come out and hinted that there may not be weapons of mass destruction.

I think once a country like the United States admits a mistake, that over time you can get over this.

CHURCH: All right, Robert Baer, thanks for talking with us. I appreciate it.

BAER: Thanks, Rosemary.

CHURCH: And when we come back, what David Kay's report means for George Bush and Tony Blair.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TONY BLAIR, BRITISH PRIME MIN.: As for the existence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, there can be no doubt at all that those weapons existed, absolutely no doubt, because that is said not just by this government or the United States government. It was set out in detail over 12 years by the United Nations and by United Nations inspectors. Now it is the job of the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) group to find out what has happened. That they will do. When they come up with their final report, then we can debate it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CHURCH: British Prime Minister Tony Blair standing firm on his belief that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq. What are the political ramifications? And how will George W. Bush be effected in this presidential election year? All a matter of trust. Has the credibility of the two leaders been damaged?

Welcome back to this edition of INSIGHT.

The revelation from David Kay that illicit weapons probably don't exist in Iraq has cast a cloud over the credibility of U.S. President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the intelligence services of both nations. The superpower and its ally based their preemptive strike on Iraq on what many now say was flawed intelligence. What's the political fallout and who should pay?

A short time ago I spoke to Jim Walsh, an international security expert from Harvard University. He told us that he was surprised by Kay's conclusions and that could be damaging in a variety of ways.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JIM WALSH, HARVARD UNIV.: I think the surprising thing that David Kay was saying is that not only are we not going to find them, but they weren't there to begin with, that in the late 1990's and in the years running up to the war, the intervention in Iraq, there weren't weapons that were threatening to the United States or the West. I think that's a big surprise.

The second big surprise, I would say, and the piece of it that has received virtually no coverage, is David Kay's point that the inspections were working, that Saddam destroyed his weapons in part because he feared international inspectors. And so I think that says something positive about the international nonproliferation regime.

CHURCH: All right, I want to look at the political ramifications now for both George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Let's start with Bush. How is it going to effect him?

WALSH: Well, it's certainly not welcome news for the Bush administration to have David Kay come out and say this, particularly when it happens the same week that the vice president, Vice President Cheney, comes out and reasserts that there is a major threat. Clearly Dr. Kay's comments undercut the vice president.

But I think in some ways the political dynamic has changed here in the United States. With the capture of Saddam Hussein, politically and psychologically, it's given the administration something to hold on to. It's made Americans feel better about the campaign, even if the reason for going in to war in the first place turns out to have been a sham or a mirage. Folks still feel good that they got Saddam. So I think politically President Bush may be hurt, but he has some political coverage.

CHURCH: You don't think Americans care that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that the justification for war does not exist?

WALSH: I think that they do care, but then the administration is also able to argue that Saddam was just a bad guy, he was a human rights violator, he had the torture cells and committed all of these horrible atrocities, and the world is better off without him, and by gosh, I'm George Bush and I got rid of him, so I can claim some credit for that.

I think what it does, it allows him to be able to say, look, something has come from this, some positive has come from this. And in the lead up to Saddam's arrest, there really wasn't very much positive in terms of news coming out of Iraq. So I think it helps him, it doesn't save him but it helps him.

CHURCH: What about Tony Blair? Because he has continued to insist that weapons of mass destruction do exist.

WALSH: Indeed. It is I think a more difficult position for Tony Blair because he has stuck with that position. In the United States, you've had some administration officials moving away from that position, such as the Secretary of State Colin Powell, but in England and in the case of Tony Blair, he has stuck to his guns, and I think this has probably hurt him as Kay's comments have become more and more widespread. And, after all, it was a controversy that began in London. That's where Dr. Kay first made his comments.

His problems are compounded by the fact that this week he faces a difficult report. On Wednesday, there will be a release of the report on the suicide of Mr. Kelly, who committed suicide after being tagged as the person who leaked information to the British press implying that the Iraq dossier had been, quote, "sexed up" to make it more attractive. He was fingered as the leaker in that and later committed suicide. Who is responsible for that suicide will come out in a report this week, so the timing of it is very difficult for Tony Blair. This report comes out at the very time that Dr. Kay is saying that there are no weapons in Iraq and indeed there were no weapons in Iraq.

CHURCH: Indeed. So getting us back to this failed intelligence, David Kay himself says it's not the president that owes an apology, it's indeed the intelligence services. Why was the intelligence so bad, so poor?

WALSH: Well, I think we need to step back for a minute. I think there were problems with the intelligence, and what I mean by that is first of all a lack of information. A lot of us were depending on inspectors, international inspectors that were in that country and then kicked out. When they were kicked out, the quality of the information declined.

But, you know, it's always easy to blame the intelligence folks, and I think here clearly there were some assumptions that should have been challenged that went unchallenged, but it's too easy to just say it was the CIA's fault. This was a president who came to office, even before his first day in office had already decided that he wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein. There are others in the administration who were shopping around for a rationale, and there were reports that individual intelligence analysts had been pressured into skewing their intelligence. Now whether that's true or not, clearly there was the sense on the part of some analysts that they felt like they were being pressured.

So you mix all that up together, and I think you've got a very nasty brew that leads to a decision to go to war and so, sure, some of the blame should go to the intelligence agencies, but there's plenty of other blame that should be allocated as well.

CHURCH: Enough blame that George Tenet should possibly step down, be held accountable for these failings and be replaced, perhaps?

WALSH: Well, it's an interesting question. I think there have been senators here in the United States who have called for an investigation. I think that's appropriate. I think we need to see more of the documents to see how this decision was made.

They had released parts of what's called a national intelligence estimate, and when you read that document, it actually turns out that the intelligence agencies, some of them, were being cautious. The State Department intelligence people, for example, were expressing skepticism about some of these claims and were disagreeing in the footnotes of these documents, saying we're not so sure that these claims are true.

I think to see who is really at fault, we're going to have to get more of the documentation and look at that decision process, but let me also say this, that whether the intelligence is good or bad is one question. The real issue is is it good enough for what we want to do in the future? President Bush has a policy of preemptive strikes. We're going to go in and whack countries that we suspect, based on our intelligence, have WMD programs. Well, if our intelligence isn't up to the task, whether it's good or bad, if it's not good enough, then the preemptive strategy could be very disastrous indeed.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CHURCH: Jim Walsh talking to us there.

And that's all for this edition of INSIGHT. I'm Rosemary Church. Thanks for looking in. The news continues here on CNN.

END

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