Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Newsroom

Obama Nominates Defense, CIA Chiefs; Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, Michael Morell, John Brennan Speak of Nominations; Republican Opposition Expected for Obama's Defense Secretary Pick.

Aired January 07, 2013 - 13:30   ET

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

LEON PANETTA, DEFENSE SECRETARY: And on that, as we've reached that turning point, we've developed a new defense strategy for the 21st century. We have, with John's leadership, decimated Al Qaida's leadership and weakened their effort to attack this country. We have brought wars in Iraq and we will bring the war in Afghanistan to an honorable conclusion. We've opened up opportunities for all Americans to serve in our military. And we continue to strongly support our forces, their families, and our wounded warriors. These are some of the achievements that I am proud of. Let me close by expressing my profound gratitude to the outstanding team of military and civilian staff and leaders that I've had the honor to serve with at the Department of Defense and at the White House. In particular, let me deeply thank the outstanding men and women in uniform, who I've had the privilege to serve and to lead. Those who've put their lives on the line every day on distant battlefields for this country, their sacrifices teach us that freedom is not free, a strong democracy depends on a strong defense, but you can also not have a strong and stable defense without a strong and stable democracy. As we continue to confront strategic challenges and fiscal austerity, my hope for the future is that the sense of duty our servicemembers and their families exhibit every day inspires the leaders of this nation to have the courage to do what is right, to achieve the American dream, to give our children a better life, and to build a more secure future. CHUCK HAGEL, FORMER SENATOR & DEFENSE-SECRETARY NOMINEE: Thank you, Mr. President. I'm honored by your trust and your confidence in me, and not unmindful of the immense responsibilities that go with it. I want to also acknowledge my wife, Lilibet, my daughter, Allyn, and our son, Ziller, who is in Chicago today, we hope, back attending his first day of classes at DePaul University. And to my friend, Leon Panetta, thank you for your extraordinary service to our country over so many years in so many capacities. You are one of the premier public servants of our time. To follow you at the Department of Defense will be a most challenging task, but I will try to live up to the standards that you, Bob Gates, and others have set for this job and this nation. Let me also express my deep appreciation and congratulations to my friend, John Brennan, and to also acknowledge the president's confidence and trust in John Brennan. Thank you, John, for your service and what you will continue to do for our country. To Mike Morell, who I have gotten to know over the years, not just serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee, but also, as the president has noted, the privilege of co-chairing the president's intelligence advisory board with former Senator Dave Boren, thank you, Mike, for your continued service. Mr. President, I'm grateful for this opportunity to serve our country again, especially its men and women in uniform and their families. These are people who give so much to this nation every day with such dignity and selflessness. This is particularly important at a time as we complete our mission in Afghanistan and support the troops and military families who have sacrificed so much over more than a decade of war. I'm also grateful for an opportunity to help continue to strengthen our country and strengthen our country's alliances and advance global freedom, decency, and humanity as we help build a better world for all mankind. I will always do my best-I will do my best for our country, for those I represent at the Pentagon, and for all our citizens. And, Mr. President, I will always give you my honest and most informed counsel. Thank you very much. MICHAEL MORELL, ACTING CIA DIRECTOR: Mr. President, thank you for your very kind remarks, and thank you for the trust that you placed in me when you asked me to be acting director twice. I have had the honor of knowing and working with John Brennan for the last 20 years. We have worked particularly closely the last three years. John Brennan is a intelligence professional with deep experience in our business, a public servant with extraordinary dedication, and a man of deep integrity. With Senate confirmation, I know that he will be an outstanding director of the Central Intelligence Agency. As the president noted, John started his career at CIA and spent nearly a quarter-century. So this is a homecoming for John. John, on behalf of the talented and dedicated men and women of CIA, it is my deep honor to say: Welcome home. JOHN BRENNAN, CIA DIRECTOR NOMINEE: Mr. President, it is indeed a tremendous honor to be nominated to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The women and men of the CIA are among the most dedicated, courageous, selfless, and hardworking individuals who have ever served this country. At great personal risk and sacrifice, they have made countless invaluable contributions to our national security and to the safety and security of all Americans. Most times, their successes will never be known outside the hollowed halls of Langley and the Oval Office. Leading the agency in which I served for 25 years would be the greatest privilege, as well as the greatest responsibility of my professional life. Mr. President, I want to thank you for your confidence in me, but even more for your confidence and constant support to the CIA and to those who serve in the intelligence community. They need and deserve the support of all of their fellow Americans, especially at a time of such tremendous national security challenges. If confirmed as director, I will make it my mission to ensure that the CIA has the tools it needs to keep our nation safe and that its work always reflects the liberties, the freedoms, and the values that we hold so dear. I'm especially proud to stand here today with such patriots as Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, and Michael Morell. It was a tremendous honor to serve with Leon over the past four years, and I very much look forward to the opportunity and privilege to serve with another of America's great patriots, Chuck Hagel. And I am especially proud and touched to be able to stand here today with my close friend and colleague, Michael Morell, who epitomizes what it means to be an intelligence professional. Michael's leadership at the CIA, as well as his 32-year career, has been nothing short of exemplary. Michael, I very much look forward to working with you in the weeks, months, and years ahead. And I also look forward to working with Congress, as our national security rests on the ability of the executive and legislative branches of our government to work as a team. While the intelligence profession oftentimes demands secrecy, it is critically important that there be a full and open discourse on intelligence matters with the appropriate elected representatives of the American people. Although I consider myself neither a Republican nor a Democrat, I very much look forward to working closely with those on both sides of the aisle. Finally, and most importantly, to my wife, Kathy, and to my children, Kyle, Jaclyn, and Kelly, to my parents in New Jersey, a shout-out... (LAUGHTER) ... Owen, who is 92, and my mom, Dorothy, who's 91, my brother, Tom, and my sister, Kathleen (ph), and my Jersey roots, I could not be where I am today without their love, their patience, their understanding, and their support. And there's no way that I can ever repay that, except to say I think I'm going to need it for a little bit longer. (LAUGHTER) So, again, Mr. President, I am deeply grateful for this opportunity. It will be bittersweet to leave all of my close colleagues and friends here at the White House and at the national security staff who I've come to work with and respect so deeply over the last four years. But if confirmed by the Senate, I would consider it to be the honor of my life to serve as the 21st director of the Central Intelligence Agency. OBAMA: Well, these are four outstanding individuals. We are grateful to all of them. I want, in particular, to thank Mike Morell and Leon Panetta for their extraordinary service. And I just want to repeat: I hope that the Senate will act on these confirmations promptly. When it comes to national security, we don't like to leave a lot of gaps between the time that one set of leaders transitions out and another transitions in. So we need to get moving quickly on this. Final point I will make. One of the reasons that I am so confident that Chuck Hagel is going to be an outstanding secretary of defense and John Brennan is going to be an outstanding director of the Central Intelligence Agency is they understand that we are only successful because of the folks up and down the line in these respective institutions, the folks on the ground who are oftentimes putting their lives at risk for us and are oftentimes at great remove from Washington and its politics. To have those who have been in the field, who've been in the heat of battle, who understand the consequences of decisions that we make in this town and how it has an impact and ramifications for everybody who actually has to execute our national security strategies, that's something invaluable. It will provide me the kinds of insights that I need in making very difficult decisions, but it will also mean that these folks are going to be looking out for the people who work for them. And-and that's something that I think, in these leadership positions, is absolutely critical. So I'm looking forward to working with these two gentlemen. They are going to be outstanding. Thank you very much, everybody. (END LIVE FEED)

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: That's it, almost half an hour for the president to make his nominations official, Chuck Hagel to be the next secretary of defense and John Brennan to be the next CIA director.

Even as the president was speaking, got an e-mail from General Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the former secretary of state, strongly endorsing Chuck Hagel to be the next defense secretary. I believe that more than ever," he writes, "we need that kind of independent and emboldened leader who thinks in and out of the box." General Powell endorsing Chuck Hagel.

Gloria Borger is here. John King is here.

Gloria, there will be tough questions he will ask. I assume he will be thoroughly prepared and answer those questions directly and to the point.

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: Right. I think what we heard from the president today really gives us a look into his mind and what he was thinking.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Into the president's?

BORGER: Into the president's mind. Earlier on, we were talking about how he wanted somebody in Chuck Hagel who wouldn't be intimidated by the generals. Today, we heard the president say over and over again that, in both places, in the CIA and at the Pentagon, he has chosen somebody who is one of your own, he said, somebody in Chuck Hagel who is geared towards the guy at the bottom, who is doing the fighting and the dying. I think this is the case he's making to the American public, which is, these people understand the organizations they're about to lead from the ground up. I think that was so important in the president's thinking in nominating both these men. And we heard it directly from him today.

And we heard from Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John, also a strong statement, he wants to get this process going. They would like this confirmation process to begin very soon. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will do John Kerry, secretary of state. The Armed Services Committee will do Chuck Hagel as secretary of Defense. The intelligence committee will take a look at John Brennan.

JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: So will the chairman of the committee, during the event, issues his statement saying, I endorse you, let's get this process moving, that tells you Chuck Hagel's chances of being confirmed multiplied exponentially. That doesn't mean if they get it out of the committee -- which if the chairman endorses you, trust me, he has done the math. He thinks he can get it out of the committee -- it could possibly be a filibuster.

You get -- The statement from Powell is very interesting because there's a divide in the Republican Party. Colin Powell lived it in the Bush administration. He was often at odds with the Cheney/Rumsfeld neo-conservative view of the party. And the party is still sorting this out from a policy standpoint. But I think what's significant today is the personal.

To Gloria's point, he emphasized both John Brennan and Chuck Hagel rose up through the ranks at the CIA and the military. Their personal biographies, the president hopes, gets them through the political questions. But also, the press -- he took George W. Bush's defense secretary at first, Bob Gates. Came to like and trust him quite a bit. But at first, that was continuity because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Took his former rival as secretary of state. Again, came to trust her beyond bounds, beyond anyone's expectations. Their relationship got better. In the second term, he wants people he knows, he likes and he trusts. He's not as worried about the politics. He wants his guys, if you will on his national security team.

BLITZER: And he does like Chuck Hagel a lot. The Vice President Joe Biden likes Chuck Hagel a lot, too. I personally eyewitnessed that excellent relationship that these two men have.

Let's take a quick break. We have more to digest, more to assess, much more coming up. Our special coverage of the president's nominations for secretary of defense and CIA director continues right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Critics and supporters of former Senator Chuck Hagel are already speaking out. Earlier on CNN, we've heard from both sides.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RABBI ARYEH AZRIEL, CONGREGATION TEMPLE ISRAEL: I met him actually a few months before he was elected as Senator from the state of Nebraska. In all our conversations, I was always impressed with his amazing knowledge, with his integrity, with his ability to speak his mind. So I think this will be a wonderful choice for our government to have an additional voice, a clarion voice for security and safety for the Middle East.

BING WEST, FORMER ASSISTANT DEFENSE SECRETARY: We faced, with the Pentagon, enormous problems. And I worked for seven secretaries of defense. But right now, we're trying to get our troops out of a war that we didn't win and, at the same time, the Pentagon is about to be hit with a cascading flood of cuts. And for that kind of an environment, you don't need somebody who is an outsider, who doesn't have the practical experience, and who's nakedly ambitious for the job.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Tom Cotton is a Republican Congressman from Arkansas, veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's joining us now.

Congressman, thank you for coming in.

REP. TOM COTTON, (R), ARKANSAS & MILITARY VETERAN: Thank you, Wolf. Good to be here with you.

BLITZER: Why do you oppose the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be defense secretary?

COTTON: Wolf, the president said that Chuck Hagel is the leader our troops deserve. I couldn't disagree any more strongly. Our troops deserve much better than a man who voted to send them to war when it was popular and then abandon those very troops when it was unpopular. I would know, Wolf. I was one of those troops. I returned from Iraq in November 2006 with my platoon from the 101st Airborne just as Chuck Hagel was writing that we couldn't achieve victory in Iraq, that time for more troops had passed, and it was time to withdraw.

But he just didn't oppose the surge, Wolf. He called it the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country's history since Vietnam. He delayed emergency funding for the troops. He voted to require a hasty withdrawal. He denied its success after two years when everyone recognized we had succeeded. He even said that we are fighting a war for oil, which aligns more closely with Code Pink than it with President Obama.

These are the reasons I think our troops deserve much better than Chuck Hagel.

BLITZER: Do you believe going to war in Iraq was the right decision 10 years ago?

COTTON: I do believe it was the right decision. I believe that Chuck Hagel must have thought it was the right decision in 2002 when he voted for it. He's never --

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Let me ask -- but you don't believe Iraq had anything to do with al Qaeda or the attack on 9/11?

COTTON: The evidence is inconclusive there, but I know that Saddam Hussein was widely believed by all western intelligence agencies, not just the United States, but western European countries who were not in a rush to war to have weapons of mass destruction. Our sanctions regime was beginning to crumble and we wouldn't be able to contain Saddam Hussein if we hadn't confronted him at the time.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: But I'm saying now, with hindsight, Congressman, he didn't have weapons of mass destruction, he didn't have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The 9/11 commissions, all the commissions point out he had nothing to do with the attack on 9/11. And he was being contained by the U.S. and the international community.

Are you happy with what is going on in Iraq right now, 10 years later, looking at the situation, given the trillions that the United States spent, the thousands of American lives lost, the tens of thousands of Iraqi lives lost? The question is do you believe the U.S. Made the right decision to go to war in Iraq?

COTTON: I do believe we made the right decision, Wolf. I believe the war did not go very well in the early years. But President Bush in his lowest political moment had his finest hour when he recommitted to victory in 2006 and 2007 against all odds, against Chuck Hagel's own best counsel. And by the end of 2008, the surge had succeeded.

Do I like the status of Iraq right now? Not as much as I would. I wish President Obama had kept a few more stay-behind troops there as the generals recommended, but it was an honorable and noble cause, and we fought hard for victory. Chuck Hagel and none of the other opponents of the surge in 2006 and 2007 told me or my troops at the time that we couldn't achieve victory there.

BLITZER: When I see what's going on in Iraq right now, I see a regime, a government right now, Nouri al Maliki's government getting increasingly close to Iran, forging a strategic alliance between the Shiites in Iraq, the Shiites in Iran, going after Iranian Sunnis, destroying so many of the democratic traditions so many of us would like to see, with Kurdistan in the north moving into an independence. And the question I keep asking, was it worth it? Was it worth it based on this current situation in Iraq now, moving away from the U.S. toward Iran, was the price that we paid in blood and treasure worth it, looking back over these ten years? I ask these questions only because Chuck Hagel made it clear he doesn't think it was worth it, and you're saying it was worth it.

COTTON: Wolf, I think those are all reasonable questions and also troublesome trends. We might not be seeing them today in 2013 if the president hadn't withdrawn all troops from Iraq last year. However, you have to make decisions when it comes to national security based on the information at hand.

In 2002, Chuck Hagel agreed with the vast majority of the United States Senators that we should go to war in Iraq. In 2006 and 2007, when it was no longer popular, he disagreed that we should recommit ourselves to victory. Those are questions he's going to need to explain at his hearings.

And I found it very puzzling that neither the president nor Chuck Hagel addressed any of the points that have been raised by his critics. I admire Chuck Hagel's service. I admire the service of all of our veterans, but Vietnam veteran service alone cannot be the sole qualification for serving as secretary of defense. He needs to explain his dangerous views on Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas and his strange hostility towards Iran, and his view, contrary to Secretary of Defense Panetta, that the Department of Defense's budget is bloated and needs to be pared down even after $500 billion of cuts over the last four years.

BLITZER: Congressman, those questions will come up during extensive hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee and I'm sure all of those questions will be raised. Let's continue this conversation down the road. Like you, I watched what happened in Iraq up close and I saw it unfold. I'm very, very, very worried right now, looking where the regime in Baghdad is moving. I'm very worried and I ask myself the serious question, was it worth it in blood and treasure that was lost?

We can continue this conversation, Congressman, down the road.

Congressman Tom Cotton.

Thanks, also, by the way, for your service in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know you had nothing to do with the policy. You went there as an honorable patriotic American. And we welcome you to Washington now as a United States Congressman.

COTTON: Thank you, Wolf. I appreciate it.

BLITZER: Let's bring our national security contributor, Fran Townsend, who is joining us right now.

Fran, you're on the advisory board of the CIA. What do you think of Brennan becoming -- assuming he's confirmed -- the next CIA director?

FRAN TOWNSEND, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CONTRIBUTOR: You know, Wolf, as you realize, when I was in the White House, John was not only serving in the CIA, but he was instrumental in, frankly, sort of the founding director of what is now the National Counterterrorism Center. At the time, it was called the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. And it was John's vision, John's leadership that stood up that initial body that is today the National Counterterrorism Center which integrates information.

John and I, our careers during the course of public service, have very much -- we've worked together throughout probably 20 or 25 years in various positions. It is true what John says. Like John, I never thought of myself as an allegiance to any particular party, it was to the mission. And I think John really epitomizes that sense of public service. He has been an extraordinary public servant, extraordinary patriot.

And, you know, during this -- it has been a real tumultuous time. There was the bombing at coast where the CIA lost officers. You've been through the sort of -- the leaving of General Petraeus from CIA under sort of embarrassing circumstances. What they need is someone they can follow, who understands their mission, can lead them. And I think John will do an extraordinary job.

BLITZER: I just got a statement in from Senator John McCain, who writes this. He says, "I appreciate John Brennan's long record of service to our nation, but I have many questions and concerns about his nomination, especially what role he played in the so-called enhanced interrogation programs while serving at CIA during the last administration and his defense of those programs. I plan to examine that closely."

What exactly was his role, Brennan's role in those enhanced interrogation techniques, which some critics call torture?

TOWNSEND: You know, Wolf, look -- that issue, Benghazi, all of that is appropriate and will be on the table during John's confirmation hearing. But we should remember, during the period of the Bush administration, when there was this program of enhanced interrogation techniques, John was in a career position, not a policymaking position. I can't speak to what his level of awareness was about that program. But I will tell you, he certainly was not in a position to advocate in terms of the policy of the administration. That wasn't his role at the time.

As I mentioned, the real role he had during most of that period was at the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, and the standing up of that body, which was meant to integrate counterterrorism information.

So Senator McCain is quite correct, he'll have the opportunity to ask those questions, as will other Senators. But I think what you're going to find is he was not in a policymaking position.

BLITZER: Fran Townsend, thanks very much.

We're going to continue our special coverage. An important day as the president puts together his national security team for the second term. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)