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American Morning
Closed Door Hearings Later Today on Hunt for WMDs
Aired October 02, 2003 - 08:09 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.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Closed door hearings later today on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A new development this morning.
Our national security correspondent, David Ensor, live in D.C.
A preview of it now -- David, what are you learning?
DAVID ENSOR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Bill, I'm understanding that at the end of the day, after these two closed door sessions with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, the CIA plans to release a summary of the main points that David Kay will be making behind closed doors. About 10 pages long, I'm told, and there may be some photographs released, as well, to illustrate the points he's making.
Clearly here the CIA, and perhaps the Bush administration, don't want to have a day when their testimony is behind closed doors and they are not able to say that they found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then you have senators and congressmen who were against the war in the first place coming out and saying well, doesn't this just show they were wrong in the first place?
So they want to get their side of the story out there, too, and that's why there's this plan to put a 10 page summary out and some photographs to back it up -- Bill.
HEMMER: David, thanks.
We'll look for that later today.
Meanwhile Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is our guest now live in D.C.
Welcome back to AMERICAN MORNING.
Good morning to you there.
REP. JANE HARMAN (D-CF), VICE CHAIRWOMAN INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: Thank you.
HEMMER: You penned a letter along with a Republican, Porter Goss, who is your colleague on the House Intelligence Committee, sent it to George Tenet of the CIA. That letter was leaked to the media and has been...
HARMAN: Yes, not by us.
HEMMER: ... it's been -- not by you, you're saying?
HARMAN: No.
HEMMER: Who put the letter out, then?
HARMAN: I have no idea. I mean the climate of leaks has been going on for years. I think the most pernicious leak at the moment is the identity of an undercover agent at the CIA, which you've just been covering. That's enormously harmful.
HEMMER: Let's put that to the side for just a moment and we'll stay focused on what David Kay's purpose is today. In that letter, it's been reported that you said the CIA was relying on outdated, circumstantial and fragmentary evidence to build its case against Iraq.
HARMAN: Right.
HEMMER: On what do you base that opinion?
HARMAN: Well, we studied all the information in 19 volumes provided to us by the director of Central Intelligence. Those 19 volumes, according to him and the CIA, are everything that was used to develop what are called the analytic product that predicted what might be the case with the weapons of mass destruction and the ties to al Qaeda involving Iraq.
And so we read everything and we concluded that a lot of the basic evidence, the collection, was fragmentary and circumstantial, especially after 1998, when the U.N. inspectors left Iraq, not that they were intelligence collectors. And that, I believe -- and here was where Chairman Goss and I disagreed to some extent -- that the product, the analysis based on that collection was also inadequate because it didn't have a substantial basis for the conclusions reached.
When the national intelligence estimates said that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that wasn't supported by the evidence.
But let me just say, I just heard on your show that David Kay, when he testifies to us later today, will release to the public 10 pages of summary of his testimony. We don't have his testimony. We don't have the evidence that he's going to present to us. We've been asking for it for two weeks. We met with him in Iraq -- or I did -- in July and I frankly think that conducting these campaigns this way is really stunningly shocking. We're the experts up here.
HEMMER: He's going to answer some questions today, though, right?
HARMAN: Yes, he's going to answer questions. Then he's going to put out some spin afterwards.
HEMMER: What is your -- I'm sorry about the interruption. What is your first question for him, then? HARMAN: My first question is what have you found and if you haven't found very much, what were the problems with our intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq, just what I've been talking about. Did we collect enough information? Was it hard enough information? What were the problems with the products that we put out leading up to war in Iraq? He wasn't part of that.
HEMMER: A Senate colleague of yours, Saxby Chambliss from Georgia, was with us, a Republican, the other side of the political aisle. He was with us last hour. He says the issue for him and the issue raised by Porter Goss was that you need more human assets at work within the CIA. You're shaking your head in agreement.
HARMAN: I agree with that. A problem we had in the '90s was that our humans, our human intelligence declined. There are a variety of reasons for that. One of them was we had won the cold war and frankly we thought that perhaps we were going to have a more peaceful time in the world. That did not pan out. This terrorism threat rose during the '90s and then it just -- specifically in Iraq, once the U.N. inspectors left in 1998, we really didn't have hard evidence. We didn't have people on the ground who were penetrating these inner meetings of Saddam Hussein and knew his plans and intentions.
It may turn out, when we roll this back, that a lot of what we thought was true about WMD in Iraq was false.
HEMMER: Jane Harman from D.C.
HARMAN: Thank you.
HEMMER: We'll watch it throughout the day.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us again.
HARMAN: Thank you.
HEMMER: A House committee, behind closed doors today, will hear from David Kay. A bit later in the afternoon, a Senate committee will hear similar testimony. And we'll track it in D.C.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired October 2, 2003 - 08:09 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Closed door hearings later today on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A new development this morning.
Our national security correspondent, David Ensor, live in D.C.
A preview of it now -- David, what are you learning?
DAVID ENSOR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Bill, I'm understanding that at the end of the day, after these two closed door sessions with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, the CIA plans to release a summary of the main points that David Kay will be making behind closed doors. About 10 pages long, I'm told, and there may be some photographs released, as well, to illustrate the points he's making.
Clearly here the CIA, and perhaps the Bush administration, don't want to have a day when their testimony is behind closed doors and they are not able to say that they found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then you have senators and congressmen who were against the war in the first place coming out and saying well, doesn't this just show they were wrong in the first place?
So they want to get their side of the story out there, too, and that's why there's this plan to put a 10 page summary out and some photographs to back it up -- Bill.
HEMMER: David, thanks.
We'll look for that later today.
Meanwhile Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is our guest now live in D.C.
Welcome back to AMERICAN MORNING.
Good morning to you there.
REP. JANE HARMAN (D-CF), VICE CHAIRWOMAN INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: Thank you.
HEMMER: You penned a letter along with a Republican, Porter Goss, who is your colleague on the House Intelligence Committee, sent it to George Tenet of the CIA. That letter was leaked to the media and has been...
HARMAN: Yes, not by us.
HEMMER: ... it's been -- not by you, you're saying?
HARMAN: No.
HEMMER: Who put the letter out, then?
HARMAN: I have no idea. I mean the climate of leaks has been going on for years. I think the most pernicious leak at the moment is the identity of an undercover agent at the CIA, which you've just been covering. That's enormously harmful.
HEMMER: Let's put that to the side for just a moment and we'll stay focused on what David Kay's purpose is today. In that letter, it's been reported that you said the CIA was relying on outdated, circumstantial and fragmentary evidence to build its case against Iraq.
HARMAN: Right.
HEMMER: On what do you base that opinion?
HARMAN: Well, we studied all the information in 19 volumes provided to us by the director of Central Intelligence. Those 19 volumes, according to him and the CIA, are everything that was used to develop what are called the analytic product that predicted what might be the case with the weapons of mass destruction and the ties to al Qaeda involving Iraq.
And so we read everything and we concluded that a lot of the basic evidence, the collection, was fragmentary and circumstantial, especially after 1998, when the U.N. inspectors left Iraq, not that they were intelligence collectors. And that, I believe -- and here was where Chairman Goss and I disagreed to some extent -- that the product, the analysis based on that collection was also inadequate because it didn't have a substantial basis for the conclusions reached.
When the national intelligence estimates said that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that wasn't supported by the evidence.
But let me just say, I just heard on your show that David Kay, when he testifies to us later today, will release to the public 10 pages of summary of his testimony. We don't have his testimony. We don't have the evidence that he's going to present to us. We've been asking for it for two weeks. We met with him in Iraq -- or I did -- in July and I frankly think that conducting these campaigns this way is really stunningly shocking. We're the experts up here.
HEMMER: He's going to answer some questions today, though, right?
HARMAN: Yes, he's going to answer questions. Then he's going to put out some spin afterwards.
HEMMER: What is your -- I'm sorry about the interruption. What is your first question for him, then? HARMAN: My first question is what have you found and if you haven't found very much, what were the problems with our intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq, just what I've been talking about. Did we collect enough information? Was it hard enough information? What were the problems with the products that we put out leading up to war in Iraq? He wasn't part of that.
HEMMER: A Senate colleague of yours, Saxby Chambliss from Georgia, was with us, a Republican, the other side of the political aisle. He was with us last hour. He says the issue for him and the issue raised by Porter Goss was that you need more human assets at work within the CIA. You're shaking your head in agreement.
HARMAN: I agree with that. A problem we had in the '90s was that our humans, our human intelligence declined. There are a variety of reasons for that. One of them was we had won the cold war and frankly we thought that perhaps we were going to have a more peaceful time in the world. That did not pan out. This terrorism threat rose during the '90s and then it just -- specifically in Iraq, once the U.N. inspectors left in 1998, we really didn't have hard evidence. We didn't have people on the ground who were penetrating these inner meetings of Saddam Hussein and knew his plans and intentions.
It may turn out, when we roll this back, that a lot of what we thought was true about WMD in Iraq was false.
HEMMER: Jane Harman from D.C.
HARMAN: Thank you.
HEMMER: We'll watch it throughout the day.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us again.
HARMAN: Thank you.
HEMMER: A House committee, behind closed doors today, will hear from David Kay. A bit later in the afternoon, a Senate committee will hear similar testimony. And we'll track it in D.C.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
