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American Morning

Interview with Rep. Dick Gephardt, House Minority Leader

Aired May 17, 2002 - 07:12   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.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: The big question this morning: Is the criticism of President Bush just politics? Democrats and some Republicans are asking some tough questions about the way the White House handled information of possible terror attacks.

And a new CNN-USA Today Gallup Poll asked: Did the Bush administration act on the 9/11 warnings in a proper way? The response was 41 percent said yes, 52 percent said no.

And the debate over whether the administration did the right thing was a hot one yesterday on Capitol Hill.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. TRENT LOTT (R), MINORITY LEADER: Did anybody really think that this president or any president of either party at any time would know that we were going to be attacked and not take necessary actions to try to deal with it? I don't believe the American people really think that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAHN: And later this morning, we are going to hear from Republicans in Congress about the administration's handling of the pre-9/11 terror clues. As for Democrats, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt wants to know if there was an intelligence failure, and if the information was properly handled.

Joining us from Capitol Hill is the democratic leader in the House, Dick Gephardt -- good morning -- welcome back, sir.

REP. DICK GEPHARDT (D), MINORITY LEADER: Good morning.

ZAHN: You just heard what Trent Lott had to say. He said the insinuation coming from Democrats is that the president had enough information that he could have stopped that. He said that is absolutely ridiculous given the generalized warnings the president was given. Your reaction.

GEPHARDT: Well, Paula, I am a little puzzled by the reaction of some in the Republican Party. This is not about blame-placing. This is not about trying to assign motives to people. Everybody believes that everybody in the government is always trying to do his or her best. This is about trying to do better in the future. You know, when the millennium celebration was going on, we got intelligence reports, and the government was able to stop a planned potential terrorist attack. We obviously failed in that on September 11, and the inquiry that's ongoing is to find out how to do better. And we need the facts, so that we can improve our performance, the performance of all parts of government to carry out our most important duty, and that's to keep our citizens safe.

ZAHN: So you are telling me this morning that the heat that we are hearing from the Democrats has nothing to do with pinning some sort of blame on President Bush here?

GEPHARDT: Not at all. That is not at all what is happening. What's happening is what should be happening, and that is that every part of our government needs to find out what happened and how we can do better. This is a very important set of facts. Over 3,000 Americans got killed. We do not want this to happen again.

This is not partisan bickering. We are with the president on the war, have been, will be. But we have to get the facts out in front of the American people, so that we can all do better.

ZAHN: "The New York Times" points out that some of the president's opponents, and they are referring to Democrats, should -- quote -- "Remember that the House and Senate intelligence committees received some of the same intelligence reports as the White House." How troubling is that to you that members of Congress that got the same briefing weren't raising red flags earlier in the summer about better coordination of the CIA and the FBI and their efforts?

GEPHARDT: Well, Paula, first we need to find out who knew what and when they knew it. That's part of the inquiry. We need to know what the White House had. We need to know what went to the intelligence committees. There is some dispute about it. The facts are the facts, and we'll get those facts out.

Secondly, as you know, the executive branch has the responsibility to use facts for law enforcement to stop acts of terrorism. We obviously need to support those efforts, and that's why are involved in looking at these intelligence reports as well.

But we need to know both. We need to know who knew what when, and what they did about it. And then we need to look at what happened in the executive branch, so again, we can do better in the future.

ZAHN: Representative Gephardt, let's talk about the facts as we know them. Condoleezza Rice in an appearance yesterday before reporters basically said that the August 6 briefing was based on an unconfirmed intelligence report that was four years old, based on one British source, and it was not confirmed by the FBI and the CIA. Doesn't that suggest to you that certainly the White House didn't have enough information there to connect the dots?

GEPHARDT: We just don't know, Paula, and that's, again, why the inquiry that's already ongoing should continue and get the facts out on the table for the American people. There are conflicting reports. They may be wrong. They may be fragmentary. That's precisely the reason that we need to get the facts out on the table. No one will be hurt by that. Everyone will be helped by that.

Again, our greatest duty is to protect our citizens against terrorist attacks and against violence, and we have got to look back on what happened and try to figure out how to do better. That's what this should be about.

ZAHN: Former Senator Gary Hart had this to say about where he thinks some of the blame should lie yesterday, and he said part of it should lie with Congress. When he talked about the Hart-Redmond Commission, he said, "We predicted it. We said Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers." And that is a quote from the commission's Phase I report from the fall of 1999. This was a widely publicized report. Why wasn't Congress more aggressive on this one?

GEPHARDT: Well, obviously there are improvements that can be made in every part of our government. Again, I said on the floor a few days after 9/11 that this was a failure for all of us. We failed the American people in a very important respect. We did not protect them properly.

We all need to find ways to improve the performance of the government. But we're not going to do that if we resist looking at the information from the past to try to figure out what should be done. The American people deserve to know these facts, because they are going to be involved in trying to prevent terrorist attacks in the future.

So we have just got to look back. This is not blame-placing. This is not a political squabble. We support the president on the war against terrorism, have and will, but we have got to do better in preventing terrorist attacks. There was obviously a failure on 9/11, and we've got to figure out why and what we can do to fix it, not to place blame, but to fix the problem for the future.

ZAHN: Sir, we've got 15 seconds left. Are you confident, based on the vulnerabilities that have been exposed in the system, that we are any better prepared today than we were, based on these warnings going into 9/11?

GEPHARDT: I think we are, Paula, but we probably aren't where we need to be. We still have vulnerabilities. We still probably have lapses in intelligence information. And again, we've got to scramble and work and do everything in our power to defeat the terrorists and make sure they can't strike again. That's what this needs to be about, and that's why we are working on it.

ZAHN: Representative Gephardt, thanks for your time this morning -- appreciate your dropping by AMERICAN MORNING.

GEPHARDT: Thank you.

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