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American Morning
Political Strategists Look at Bush 9/11 Intelligence Reaction
Aired May 21, 2002 - 09:22 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: House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt is calling for independent commission to investigate how the government reacted to intelligence reports about terrorism before 9/11. The Bush administration says this panel isn't necessary because the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are already looking at the same issue.
The White House been on the defensive since last week's news about pre-September 11 briefing, where the president was actually warned that al Qaeda might be planning to hijack planes. Is this all about politics? Or are these fair questions to address? That is the question in this morning's "Sound Off," where Democratic Political Strategist Bob Beckel -- you can see he's just licking his chops there -- and Cliff May, the Former Director of Communications for the Republican National Committee -- good morning, gentlemen, good to see both of you.
BOB BECKEL, DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL STRATEGIST: Good morning, Paula.
CLIFF MAY, FORMER DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS, RNC: Good morning, Paula.
ZAHN: All right, Cliff, because I know Bob is so fired up to talk about this from Boise, Idaho today. And we dragged him out of bed early. I'm actually going to start with you first, Cliff.
There is a lot of second-guessing going on, and there are people out there, even the president's supporters, who are saying that they think this latest series of warnings are nothing more than the administration collectively trying to cover its derriere. What about that?
MAY: Well I don't that's what's going on here. I do think we need a very thorough evaluation review process. And I may disagree with the administration on how best to do that. I may think that what you do need is independent commission.
We need to find out where the system broke down, because it did. I think what the administration is particularly worried about, though, after some of the things they heard last week from a lot of Democrats, is that this will be used by some Democrats, unfortunately, to score political points, to try to knock down the president's favorability ratings by five or six points. We're using the template of Watergate trying to make a Memogate: What did he know and when did he know it? The fact of the matter is that our ability to gather and analyze intelligence efficiently has been breaking down for many years. We did not fully understand or recognize or want to recognize the threat that militant Islam -- not all Muslims -- but militant Islam represented to us the fact that we've been under attack for years. Don't forget the kind of memo that Bush had was very generalized. But in the 1990s, there were even more specific memos that went to Bill Clinton.
We shouldn't lay blame with Clinton or Bush. We should find out what went wrong and fix it.
ZAHN: What about that, Bob Beckel, that this isn't necessarily Bill Clinton's or President Bush's fault, this the fault of the system?
BECKEL: Well that -- let me just say, Cliff, that spin was remarkably complex. And I notice you got Bill Clinton in there immediately. The fact of the matter is...
MAY: He was the president for eight years. You may have forgotten.
BECKEL: Excuse me -- now, wait a minute. What Dick Gephardt and the Democrats are talking about is to put together a committee to look into potentially damaging intelligence problems that caused the lives of a lot of people. If I remember, you all spent months and months and months on a blue dress. We're talking here about the lives of American citizens.
And when Dick Cheney goes out on Sunday and says that somehow this is unpatriotic, what would be unpatriotic would be to not let people know that we have intelligence community that failed. And we have terrorist running around this country.
MAY: As you know -- look, the head of the CIA under President Bush right now was the head of CIA under President Clinton. What this can't be is a partisan witch hunt, and I hope you agree with that. And, Paula, when people hear Democrats or anybody saying we need to find out what the president knew and when he knew it, that's how you know they're going for this as a partisan thing. And that's a bad idea not just because it -- this is much too important to be partisan, but because we can't distract from the effort to figure out what happened.
On September 11 we had the worst atrocity in our history. If all the systems had been working well, if everybody doing their job perfectly, we would have stopped that from happening.
ZAHN: That is the big "if". Bob Beckel, weigh in on the fact that it has now been widely reported that President Clinton had in his hands a report that predicted -- not exactly what kind of attack was going to be carried out by al Qaeda, but the possibility of hijacking planes. And then we had the head of the commission -- bipartisan commission on -- who said in June of 2000 -- this is when President Clinton was still in office -- there was a very specific warning about a Pearl Harbor-style attack on the United States.
To his knowledge, the president may never have been given a copy of that. He didn't get it, and then the Bush administration apparently, according to Mr. Bremer, get a copy of it. How can that be?
BECKEL: Well, how can it be, I'm not sure. But the point is it didn't happen. So there's a big distinction here. I mean, I don't know how often you all are going to pull out, Cliff, Bill Clinton here. I suppose you are not going to take into Moscow and give him any credit for having cut back on a lot of these nuclear weapons they're going to sign a treaty on. But you sure want to do whenever something like this happens.
The fact is, on Bill Clinton's watch this did not happen. On George Bush's watch, and his (UNINTELLIGIBLE) national security team, it did. And I'll tell you, you talk about specific warnings, I don't know how much more specific you can get than flying a plane into the World Trade Center.
(CROSS TALK)
MAY: Which was known -- which was known in memo that Bill Clinton received in '99. But I don't want to blame Bill Clinton, I don't want to blame Bush. I don't want to ask the question. Listen to me. No, there was a memo that the CIA had prepared by the Library of Congress which talks specifically about aircraft hijacking and banging into the CIA headquarters.
BECKEL: That didn't happen.
MAY: But the point should not be to say, OK, who's more to blame, Clinton for letting the system break down or Bush for not fixing it in his first nine months of office. Rather we have to understand what happened. We have to understand, for example, that the CIA, for many, many years, really since the end of the Cold War, was not allowed, for example -- (UNINTELLIGIBLE) mid 1990s -- to recruit unsavory characters as spies. Well, frankly, savory characters don't make very good spies.
The FBI has not been an intelligence-gathering agency, it's been a law enforcement agency. It was forbidden from sharing a lot of information with the CIA. We have to correct the flaws and we have to get away from any partisanship whatsoever on this by you or by any Democrat.
ZAHN: Now, Bob, you get the final word this morning, and weigh in on what many editorials are saying, which is we're getting very sidetracked on this investigation. And meanwhile, we're extremely vulnerable and sending a signal that has we fight over how this happened, we're as vulnerable as we were pre-September 11.
BECKEL: I don't buy that for a minute. I think the more you look at it, the safer we area. The fact of the matter is, when they say every day, there's a real chance -- maybe tomorrow maybe next week. It's like the weatherman saying it's a 50-50 chance of rain, you can't really miss.
The point is, we're not trying to blame Bush here. We're trying to find out what went wrong. And I'll tell you, if you think the families of the Pan Am flight in Lockerbie, Scotland, hung on and complained to the government for years, you will have what happens now with all these people who died. And they know that somewhere in the government people knew that a plane could well fly into the World Trade Center. That's not spin, that's fact.
ZAHN: We've got to leave it there, Cliff. Hang on to that thought, Cliff. We're going to see you a little bit later on in the week. Bob Beckel, joining us from Idaho, Cliff May from Washington, thank you both for your time this morning.
BECKEL: Thanks, Paula.
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