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CNN Novak, Hunt & Shields

Interview With Porter Goss

Aired September 07, 2002 - 17:30   ET

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

MARK SHIELDS, CO-HOST: I'm Mark Shields. Robert Novak and I are on Capitol Hill, here to interview the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
ROBERT NOVAK, CO-HOST: He is Republican Congressman Porter Goss of Florida.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NOVAK (voice-over): As the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks neared, the war against terrorism focused on the removal of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. President Bush pledged he would seek congressional approval before using military force to change the regime in Baghdad. The president, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld all briefed members of Congress.

President Bush also made his case to the public.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I firmly believe that the world cannot allow the world's worst leaders to hold American blackmail, threaten American, threaten our peace and threaten our friends and allies with the world's worst weapons.

SEN. TOM DASCHLE (D-SD), SENATE MAJORITY LEADER: What has changed in the 10 years that brings this country to the belief that it has to act in a preemptive fashion, invading Iraq in circumstances that are certainly contrary to past practices and past policy?

NOVAK: Porter Goss is a former U.S. Army intelligence officer and a former clandestine services officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. He was first elected to Congress in 1988 and joined the Intelligence Committee in 1995, becoming its chairman two years later. He is helping lead the House-Senate bipartisan investigation of the September 11th intelligence failures.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

NOVAK: Congressman Goss, as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, you have access to a lot more information than most of your colleagues. Can you say it's your understanding that Iraq is developing weapons of -- nuclear weapons that pose a threat to the United States?

REP. PORTER GOSS (R-FL), CHAIRMAN, INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: What I can say is even more troubling than that, Bob. What I can say is, I don't know the full extent of what their status of development toward nuclear capability is. We know that efforts are being made, but I'm going to have to leave it to the president of the United States to go into the levels that he wishes to discuss that publicly.

NOVAK: This past week, the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, had a briefing that left a lot of Republican senators dissatisfied. There was a much smaller briefing for the leaders by the vice president, Vice President Cheney, and the CIA director, Mr. Tenet, which was more revealing. Don't you think that the American people, if they're going to go into a war, ought to have some information of what we know about the threat posed by Iraq?

GOSS: Oh, absolutely. And there's a difference, of course, a distinction between the nuclear capability and the other aspects of threat posed by Saddam Hussein, not necessarily the Iraqi people. I think those are important distinctions.

I would suggest that the long history of Saddam's activities puts us very much on alert that we have to deal with him. And it's a little bit like a cancer. When you know you've got a malignancy, it's better to get at it sooner rather than later.

And I think what the president is trying to do, in a very forceful way, is to point out that this is a malignancy, it's is an anathema to all civilized society to have a leader like this who is growing stronger and stronger and stronger and can infect with this disease not only the region, but perhaps other parts of the globe, and has particularly said that he is trying to aim his infection at the United States of America and its people, whether they're here in the United States or whether they are there. He doesn't like it.

SHIELDS: Chairman Goss, with your access to intelligence, is there any established evidence determining a correlation between Iraq and the terrorist attack on the United States of September 11th?

GOSS: Again, I'm going to have to leave those issues to the president, for a very simple reason. You've asked me a great question, Bob, about having the American people behind any action our American nation takes, and obviously we have to have that. We learned that lesson in Vietnam. We also would like to have some allies and friends with us in these efforts to deal with global issues that pop up here and there in these hot-spot areas.

But on the other side of it, knowing how much we can tell the American people, we have to remember that everything we tell the American people is also being heard by Saddam Hussein and the Republic Guard over there. So we have to be careful not to give out information that could be useful to Saddam in the event that we use some type of force to confront him for a regime change, which is the president's goals.

SHIELDS: Well, then let me get this then. If Saddam Hussein opened up his borders today to total unfettered inspection -- international, United States -- if he calls for open and free election, as long as regime change is the established policy of this administration, is there any incentive for him to comply in any way? GOSS: Well, I think there is. I think that there is a worse fate if he doesn't comply. Then the question is whether you could have full, fair, free democratic elections in Iraq under Saddam's leadership? The answer is no, you cannot.

As you know, he is tribal. He comes from the (inaudible) tribe. It is a small group of family and friends and relatives, as you would say, that keep him in power, that use fear, repression, brutality to stay in power. So in a full, free democratic election he would be out.

The next question is, would he -- nevertheless, as we deal with the regime question problem, because of the activities he's taken, the type of thing we saw, invading Kuwait and talking about going into Saudi Arabia and trying to exercise hegemony -- personal hegemony in that whole region and control all of the resources of that region, what will he do if we take him out?

Well, the answer is, he will do exactly what a malignant cancer will do if you surgically remove it: It will no longer be a threat.

Now, I am not suggesting that there are not a number of ways to deal with Saddam Hussein, and there are many options. And I think those are the options of the commander in chief. And I think we should let the president unfold what he is going to unfold at the U.N. and through his Cabinet officers and Congress in the coming week or two.

NOVAK: Mr. Chairman, without getting into classified information -- I know you won't do that.

GOSS: You're right.

NOVAK: In the public press (ph) it appears that the only al Qaeda in Iraq they've been under the auspices of the Kurdish rebels in north Iraq. And my sources at the Pentagon says that if you want to go after al Qaeda you'll find a lot of them in Pakistan, which is an ally of us. What do you think of those two comments?

GOSS: What I would say is, I don't think we want to over-focus on just al Qaeda as the only terrorists that are out there. The president of the United States, after 9/11 a year ago, as you very well know, said, "The first thing we're going to do is make sure this doesn't happen again."

And we have employed all of our law enforcement and foreign intelligence assets to try and ensure that, and with the exception of the anthrax problem, which we're still tracking down and not sure whether all of the antecedents of that are domestic or foreign at this point, we've done a pretty good job. The American people have had, in spite of all the anxiety, a fairly comfortable year.

The second issue he said is, "We're going to bring the perpetrators to justice." We've done a pretty job of that. Our courts and our judicial system are struggling with some of the problems we are confronting today because this is a kind of unconventional situation we've never really faced before.

And the third thing I think that the president scored, which is where we are and goes directly to question is, fighting international terrorism. And it's not just al Qaeda. That is a bad one and we've gone to Afghanistan and we've taken on some big issues there and done a marvelous job. The men and women fighting there and doing the intelligence work are extraordinary. But it's also going on in many, many other corners of the world: back alleys, dirty places.

And so, I think that you have to look at the whole terrorist question. And when you look at the whole terrorist question you cannot close the book on terrorism without dealing with a chapter on Saddam Hussein.

NOVAK: The last time you appeared on this program, Congressman, was on September 15th of 2001, four days after the attack -- the terrorist attack. And Iraq came up just very briefly and tangentially. You thought there was mischief afoot in Iraq, but you just -- you weren't very specific. You didn't mention weapons of mass destruction. Has all this danger occurred in the last year since then?

GOSS: I think there has been a steady progression in Iraq's capabilities through the past year to create more mischief than even a year ago when we talked about this. My problem is, as I said at the beginning, I don't feel comfortable in knowing exactly where they are today. And I think that's a critical point for us.

But even without knowing all of that, in terms of their weapons of mass destruction capability, knowing Saddam's track record, what kind of a person he is, the efforts to harm Americans, and the other capabilities he has is enough to grab our attention and say, "We've got to do something about this."

SHIELDS: Mr. Chairman, with all due respect, looking at Iraq and the litany of his abuses, this tyrant, this despot and all the rest of it, much of it done with the United State's complicity and support in the war against Iran, if very bluntly, but is there anything to suggest that Saddam Hussein is irrational? And wouldn't it be an irrational act for him to initiate any attack on the United States which would result completely in the loss of his own life and the loss of power?

GOSS: I don't think that he would willingly do that. My guess is Saddam is more of a survivor than not.

But I think that he is not faced with rational options. Look at how he's acted: It is not rational; it does not measure up to our area of rational activity. And, of course, the terrorism we are dealing with are fundamentally radical people. And they are not rational. How do rational people like us deal with irrational people like that? And he is somewhere in the middle of that.

But there is no question that if you look at Iraq under Saddam Hussein as a support mechanism for terrorism -- international terrorism, which is a legitimate question to ask and will be part of the debate as we go ahead, and I think you will see things unfold in the intelligence briefings and the president's statements on that -- I think that the president's made it clear, that if you are not with us on this war on terrorism, that you better watch out.

SHIELDS: We have to take a break right now. But when we come back, we'll ask the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee about his investigation of what has been called the most massive intelligence failure in U.S. history since Pearl Harbor.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

NOVAK: Chairman Goss, on September 15th of last year, when I asked you if there had been an intelligence failure, you indicated at that time you thought there had been. Now, after investigation -- a very thorough investigation by both Senate and House committees, bipartisan, is the failure worse than you thought it was, not as bad? What have you learned?

GOSS: What I've learned is we have to define exactly what we mean by intelligence failure, because the failure was much broader than just our foreign intelligence capability. It went to the interrelationship of that foreign intelligence capability with our law enforcement mechanisms and our regulatory agencies in the United States: the FAA, the airport people, the Customs people, the Immigration people and so forth.

What we have found is there is a frightening lack of coordination, of integration between the capabilities and the rule- making and, frankly, just the communication, just the daily business that should be going on among federal agencies. That has not been happening. And that clearly let down the gates in some places they shouldn't have been down.

The other thing is there's a psychological factor to this, that in the '90s we enjoyed wonderful blue sky prosperity, a peace dividend, people -- we weren't concerned about, threats, necessarily, and they were going about their business in this country, in a wonderful, free democracy society. And I think that it was a little bit unreal that people were worried about something that seemed so incredible as terrorism someplace else. So psychologically we had let our guard down as a nation, and I don't think we were as alert as we should have been.

But the intelligence community was issuing warnings. The problem was, people weren't listening and the warnings weren't specific enough. So the intelligence failure didn't give a specificity, and the rest of the world wasn't listening carefully enough.

NOVAK: As for your investigation, sir, a member of your committee, Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, says your investigation is understaffed and overwhelmed. How do you respond to that?

GOSS: Well, I think that that would be no surprise to say that in the time we have and with the amount of people we have, we are not going to exhaust every possible lead that should be exhausted. What we are going to do is a -- I think, a very excellent foundation of what actually happened and where we should be asking other questions and what fixes we should be making now. I don't think anybody's pretended that this would be the final and last word on what happened on 9/11.

SHIELDS: Congressman Goss, there's been a continuing debate in the country, within the administration on whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead. Where do you come down on that debate?

GOSS: I come down on the basis that I have no evidence that is conclusive either way.

SHIELDS: Is it in any way -- could it be considered an indictment of U.S. intelligence that somehow we cannot anywhere locate a six foot, five inch Arab fundamentalist on dialysis?

GOSS: No, I don't think it is. I think that, given the nature of the problem of where we are, with the capabilities we have, I think it is probably no surprise that we have not been able to get to him.

As you've read in various published accounts, there is some question about what opportunities we may have missed, and I think we will be dealing with those things as we go along in our 9/11 review.

But I don't think it is indicative of an immediate failure to say that just because one terrorist out there has been able to, because of the terrain and safe harbor activities that he has got going on, and the initiatives he has been able to take -- I don't think that is an indictment.

It does point out a lack of capability, and it is a lack of capability that the intelligence communities have been sharing with the American people and the administration now for about seven years and not getting quite the response we needed.

NOVAK: Mr. Chairman, your counterpart on the Senate side, Democratic Senator Bob Graham, also of Florida, has said that after you finish this investigation he would entertain the idea of a public blue ribbon commission to look into the 9/11 situation. Do you agree with that?

GOSS: I have no problems with whatever is going to come next. What I hope is that we are allowed to finish our work without any further interruptions and we can deliver a product that is pure and factual to the American people. After that, what we are going to do with that product I think will be up to the leaders of the nation on how they proceed. My question...

NOVAK: But you wouldn't object to a blue ribbon investigation after that?

GOSS: I don't know what a blue ribbon investigation is, but I think there will be follow-on to what we do. In fact, I would be disappointed if there weren't.

SHIELDS: Chairman Goss, about that investigation, there have been press reports that -- among staffers being quoted as saying they're going to get CIA director George Tenet. Could I get your reaction to that?

GOSS: Yes. I think that's totally inappropriate, and I think Senator Graham and I have both taken steps to make sure that staff understands that this is a factual investigation. We are following the bread crumbs to take us down the trail where it goes. There's no partisanship in it. There is only one flag at the top of the pole. And there is no room for a personal vendettas or chemistry or anything else in this.

We are going where the facts are, and we will share them with the American people as completely as we can, protecting only sources and methods that are still operative and useful to us in the war on terrorism.

SHIELDS: You have confidence in Director Tenet?

GOSS: I have confidence in Director Tenet, yes. I think he's served the nation very well. And more important, the president has confidence in him, and that's what matters.

SHIELDS: OK. We have to take a break right now. But when we come back, Robert Novak and I will ask Chairman Porter Goss the Big Question.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SHIELDS: And now the Big Question for Chairman Porter Goss.

Chairman Goss, many of those arguing for military action by the United States against Iraq argue that once that happens, the Palestinians will capitulate) and peace will become operative on the West Bank between Israel and Palestine. Do you agree?

GOSS: I do not.

SHIELDS: Any evidence to support it?

GOSS: None that I know of. I think that we've already got huge instability in the Palestinian situation. There is a certain identity in sometimes what I will call solo activities by the different terrorist groups. And I think, while there is a general common purpose to them, they quite often go and operate their own ways.

I think that we are going to be dealing a long, long time with the problems of the Mideast and the Transcaucasus area. There is no doubt about it, that there is a need for some evolution there. And we are trying to put our best foot forward.

It is not going to happen overnight. This is going to require a lot of patience. People said when we went into Afghanistan, we would inherit a mess. It is a mess, but it's one we're coping with. It's not easy. And we don't want to own all these places. We don't want to be imperialist. We want to get in and get out. NOVAK: Mr. Chairman, on this program a couple of weeks ago we had the Iraqi ambassador of the United Nations. He said that Iraq no longer has missiles capable of reaching Israel, and therefore could not retaliate against Israel in the event of a war. Do you agree with that?

GOSS: I do not.

NOVAK: Is it -- they can reach Israel with their weaponry?

GOSS: I believe Iraq has a way to inflict damage on the Israeli interests in the event of hostilities.

NOVAK: Do you think they would, if we attacked Iraq?

GOSS: I think -- it's a hypothetical question, but I think, under certain circumstances, that would be in their interests to do.

NOVAK: Porter Goss, thank you very much.

Mark Shields and I will be back with a comment after these messages.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

NOVAK: Mark, Porter Goss said he didn't really know whether the Iraqis had nuclear weapons, which is a major reason I thought for attacking them. But he has no doubt that it is necessary to get rid of Saddam Hussein and change the regime.

SHIELDS: You're right, Bob, that Chairman Goss did shoot down the argument of many urging military action by the United States against Iraq, by -- who insist that once Iraq falls, that peace will reign, the Palestinians will capitulate, and there'll be harmony between the Israelis and Palestinians. He said that was bunk.

NOVAK: I was struck, Mark, by the lack of interest that he had in trying to connect Iraq with the 9/11 terrorist attacks or with al Qaeda. There's other reasons for attacking Iraq, but I believe that that is a problem in getting the rest of the world to go along with U.S. military action.

SHIELDS: Not only the rest of the world, Bob, but he made the point in comparing the United States predicament right now to that of Vietnam, that it's up to the president to make the case, to inform the American people, to convince them of the necessity, the urgency and the sacrifice required to go to war.

NOVAK: I'm Robert Novak.

SHIELDS: I'm Mark Shields.

NOVAK: Coming up at 7 p.m. Eastern on "CAPITAL GANG," is the Bush administration, all on the same page for an attack on Iraq? Our guest is a member of the House Republican leadership, Roy Blunt of Missouri. SHIELDS: Thanks for watching.

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