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CNN Live Today

Interview With Stansfield Turner

Aired May 16, 2002 - 13:16   ET

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


THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Now in the post-9/11 attempt to streamline the sharing of intelligence, the president now gets briefed every morning by FBI and CIA officials together, instead of having them brief him separately. Well, one man who knows than most about that procedure is former CIA director and retired Navy Admiral Stansfield Turner. He joins us from the CNN bureau in Washington this afternoon.

Good to see you, sir. Thank you very much for your time today.

STANSFIELD TURNER, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Thank you, Leon.

HARRIS: Well, if you had a chance to sit there and look at the timeline that David Ensor put together, and you heard reports here from those in the Intelligence Committee, saying that perhaps we're making too much of this. I'd like your insight, particularly since you are actually involved in these kinds of briefings. If there were that number of, quote, unquote, "non-specific" threats that all came in together at that same time -- in that short a period of time -- there, do you think that the White House should have actually taken it more seriously then they actually did; or not?

TURNER: I think it would have been very difficult to deduce what was going to happen, but there were two clues out there. The first was that these people were taking flight lessons. If you are just going to hijack an airplane, you don't necessarily have to fly it yourself. You count on the pilot doing that under your duress. And the second was the Moussaoui clue which said he didn't even want to learn to land and take off. Could we have deduced from that? Pretty tough, but it seems to me that there are two lessons here that we need to learn.

One is that all this information wasn't being shared, as the two senators, who have been on this program just a few minutes ago both confirmed. Now, today, the Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet does not have the authority to compel people to share information between the FBI and the CIA and the defense intelligence agencies and such forth. That authority should be given.

The second lesson is that we aren't thinking out of the box enough. We're thinking in terms of our Western Judeo-Christian culture. I think we ought to have a team out there somewhere today of Islamicists, Middle Easterners, academic experts in those things that says to us, what could come next. Not how would we do it, but how would people who think so very differently from us be likely to do it.

HARRIS: Yes, and that is exactly the post-9/11 thinking that we were talking about, that Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary was talking about. Using that sensibility, and now wading through this sort of information. But let me ask you about the process of the briefing. Even if the CIA and the FBI did brief the president, or the White House officials there, if not necessarily just the president, separately -- if they did brief him separately -- should not he or someone there in the room with him have put the dots together themselves. And said, even if the CIA and the FBI weren't sure of the information, at least one person there in the White House was getting all of the information.

TURNER: Yes, I would doubt that the Moussaoui report and the Phoenix report necessarily went to the president himself. It doesn't seem clear that it did from what I've been reading and hearing. So, I don't think you can put too much onus on the president here. This is up to the intelligence community as a whole to bring this together for him.

HARRIS: The reason why I ask that is because, you know, we did hear that this information was being collected from beginning in May. But for some reason, there was some sort of critical mass reached in early August to actually bring the president on board and actually have a briefing with him there on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. What happens in the process of collecting this information over that kind of period of time, before you decide to bring in the president?

TURNER: Well, you aggregate clues as they come in and at some point, the director or Central Intelligence, probably personally, has to make a decision that this has reached enough of a critical mass that the president should be brought in on it. It is a very difficult set of judgments, because you can't bring the president in on everything that is boiling behind the scenes back there. You've got to be very wary of over-utilizing his time.

But I think that George Tenet did a good job in identifying Osama bin Laden and identifying the danger of hijacking and alerting the president and the country to it.

HARRIS: All right, even if the agencies, the CIA and FBI, specifically were not necessarily sharing information, do we have any insight at all as to actually who would be present at one of these briefings at the briefing in which the president would have learned of these sorts of things?

TURNER: I really can't answer that for you, because each administration is different. The briefing I read in the newspaper that the president got was a written briefing in what is called the president's daily brief. In my time as director of the Central Intelligence, I personally approved that brief late at night every night. It got to the president's desk early in the morning. Other presidents have the director of Central Intelligence come in and be there when he reads that brief or sometimes give it orally. I can't tell you what was the process in this instance. HARRIS: Unless we have a fly on the wall it is going to be, maybe impossible for us to find out about that. Stansfield Turner, the former CIA director and former admiral, we thank you very much.

TURNER: Thank you.

HARRIS: We appreciate your time this afternoon. Thanks for the insight.

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