Return to Transcripts main page

American Morning

The Reason for War

Aired January 08, 2004 - 08:32   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: Back to Iraq right now, this whole question of weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. search for banned weapons in Iraq reportedly being scaled back. There's a piece in "The New York Times" today saying the Bush administration has quietly withdrawn a military team of about 400 that has been searching for military equipment. The paper quoting some military officials as saying they see the move as a sign that the White House no longer expects to find chemical or biological weapons.
Meanwhile, a newer report says Iraq did not pose an immediate threat to the U.S., the region or global security prior to the war. The author of that report is Joseph Cirincione of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is with us here this morning live in Washington.

Good morning to you.

JOSEPH CIRINCIONE, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTL. PEACE: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

HEMMER: It's a pleasure to have you here.

"The New York Times" article, is this a concession of sorts in the search?

CIRINCIONE: I think very few people, either in Washington or in Iraq, actually expect there to be any significant finds from here on in. We have spent nine months of exhaustive searching. Our teams went in even before the war began. We have had over 1,000 people a day searching for many months, and we found nothing. There are no are large stockpiles of weapons. There hasn't actually been a find of a single weapon, a single weapons agent, nothing like the programs that the administration believe existed.

HEMMER: Which then takes us to the obvious question, why? And what did your study set out to prove?

CIRINCIONE: Well, this is a comprehensive review of everything we knew, or thought we knew, about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And it turns that some of the things we thought were working, our threat assessments, were deeply flawed. We exaggerated the threat. We worst-cased it, and then acted as if that worst-case was the most likely case. And some of the things we thought were not working, like U.N. inspections and sanctions, were actually working better than anyone anticipated. And that's been made clear not only by what we found, but what the interviews have been with Iraqi officials and scientists. Their programs were crippled by years of inspections and U.S. military strikes, and the sanctions that prevented them from getting anything going at all.

HEMMER: There is a theory in Baghdad -- many people are working upon this theory -- they say the scientists were telling Saddam Hussein whatever he wanted to hear. The scientists were telling Saddam Hussein, we're this close to getting it, all we need is $2 million more, and they would get the money, basically extortion. Did prove that in your study?

CIRINCIONE: Well, we didn't prove that. This is a study that reviews all the available evidence. But we found that as well, that there was clear testimony from Iraqi officials and scientists that that's exactly what they were doing, telling Saddam they were further along than they actually were. Apparently, some of that was picked up by some of the Iraqi defectors, who came to the U.S. telling stories of elaborate advanced weapons programs. So the defectors were fooled, Saddam was fooled.

But as it turns out, Saddam himself had made the decision, as far as we could tell, in the mid '90s, to shut down these programs. He was trying to walk a fine line between cooperating with the inspectors, getting rid of these programs, and sort of conveying the impression to his neighbors that he was still a big, bad guy, and you never knew what he had hidden in the cellar.

HEMMER: So then, a lot of this is hindsight, and hindsight is perfect, we know that. Do you blame the intelligence community in your study? Do you point the finger of blame of Iraqis who were giving possibly bad information at the U.S.?

CIRINCIONE: This is not a gotcha study. We're not out for recrimination. We're not looking for the resignation of any officials. We're trying to prevent it from happening in the future. And so to do that, we looked at the intelligence assessment process, and we have come to the conclusion that it is broken, that it has now become deeply politicized, that it is very likely that intelligence officials were pressured by senior administration officials, to conform their threat assessments to preexisting policies. And we're searching for ways to correct that.

We recommend the immediate formation of a senior blue ribbon commission to examine this in an independent, nonpartisan way, and make recommendations for how to insulate intelligence assessors from political pressure.

HEMMER: That's a heck of a claim you are making, too. How do you back it up, if indeed the claim was manufactured in a political sense to go to war?

CIRINCIONE: Well, there's nothing new about intelligence analysts being pressured by their bosses. And we don't know what happened in the offices of the administration. But there's a lot of evidence that points to that. For example, it strains credibility to think that a national intelligence estimate that was produced in a remarkably short time, 10 weeks, that was strikingly different from all previous assessments, and that was operating in an environment where a separate intelligence unit had been set up in the Department of Defense to produce their own intelligence estimates for senior officials, that in that process, officials in the intelligence community didn't feeling pressure to conform their threat assessments to what the administration wanted.

HEMMER: Thank you for sharing your findings with us. There's an awful lot of ground to cover here. Next time we will get to more. Thanks, Joseph Cirincione, his study now in D.C. on Iraq and WMD.

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 January 8, 2004 - 08:32   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Back to Iraq right now, this whole question of weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. search for banned weapons in Iraq reportedly being scaled back. There's a piece in "The New York Times" today saying the Bush administration has quietly withdrawn a military team of about 400 that has been searching for military equipment. The paper quoting some military officials as saying they see the move as a sign that the White House no longer expects to find chemical or biological weapons.
Meanwhile, a newer report says Iraq did not pose an immediate threat to the U.S., the region or global security prior to the war. The author of that report is Joseph Cirincione of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is with us here this morning live in Washington.

Good morning to you.

JOSEPH CIRINCIONE, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTL. PEACE: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

HEMMER: It's a pleasure to have you here.

"The New York Times" article, is this a concession of sorts in the search?

CIRINCIONE: I think very few people, either in Washington or in Iraq, actually expect there to be any significant finds from here on in. We have spent nine months of exhaustive searching. Our teams went in even before the war began. We have had over 1,000 people a day searching for many months, and we found nothing. There are no are large stockpiles of weapons. There hasn't actually been a find of a single weapon, a single weapons agent, nothing like the programs that the administration believe existed.

HEMMER: Which then takes us to the obvious question, why? And what did your study set out to prove?

CIRINCIONE: Well, this is a comprehensive review of everything we knew, or thought we knew, about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And it turns that some of the things we thought were working, our threat assessments, were deeply flawed. We exaggerated the threat. We worst-cased it, and then acted as if that worst-case was the most likely case. And some of the things we thought were not working, like U.N. inspections and sanctions, were actually working better than anyone anticipated. And that's been made clear not only by what we found, but what the interviews have been with Iraqi officials and scientists. Their programs were crippled by years of inspections and U.S. military strikes, and the sanctions that prevented them from getting anything going at all.

HEMMER: There is a theory in Baghdad -- many people are working upon this theory -- they say the scientists were telling Saddam Hussein whatever he wanted to hear. The scientists were telling Saddam Hussein, we're this close to getting it, all we need is $2 million more, and they would get the money, basically extortion. Did prove that in your study?

CIRINCIONE: Well, we didn't prove that. This is a study that reviews all the available evidence. But we found that as well, that there was clear testimony from Iraqi officials and scientists that that's exactly what they were doing, telling Saddam they were further along than they actually were. Apparently, some of that was picked up by some of the Iraqi defectors, who came to the U.S. telling stories of elaborate advanced weapons programs. So the defectors were fooled, Saddam was fooled.

But as it turns out, Saddam himself had made the decision, as far as we could tell, in the mid '90s, to shut down these programs. He was trying to walk a fine line between cooperating with the inspectors, getting rid of these programs, and sort of conveying the impression to his neighbors that he was still a big, bad guy, and you never knew what he had hidden in the cellar.

HEMMER: So then, a lot of this is hindsight, and hindsight is perfect, we know that. Do you blame the intelligence community in your study? Do you point the finger of blame of Iraqis who were giving possibly bad information at the U.S.?

CIRINCIONE: This is not a gotcha study. We're not out for recrimination. We're not looking for the resignation of any officials. We're trying to prevent it from happening in the future. And so to do that, we looked at the intelligence assessment process, and we have come to the conclusion that it is broken, that it has now become deeply politicized, that it is very likely that intelligence officials were pressured by senior administration officials, to conform their threat assessments to preexisting policies. And we're searching for ways to correct that.

We recommend the immediate formation of a senior blue ribbon commission to examine this in an independent, nonpartisan way, and make recommendations for how to insulate intelligence assessors from political pressure.

HEMMER: That's a heck of a claim you are making, too. How do you back it up, if indeed the claim was manufactured in a political sense to go to war?

CIRINCIONE: Well, there's nothing new about intelligence analysts being pressured by their bosses. And we don't know what happened in the offices of the administration. But there's a lot of evidence that points to that. For example, it strains credibility to think that a national intelligence estimate that was produced in a remarkably short time, 10 weeks, that was strikingly different from all previous assessments, and that was operating in an environment where a separate intelligence unit had been set up in the Department of Defense to produce their own intelligence estimates for senior officials, that in that process, officials in the intelligence community didn't feeling pressure to conform their threat assessments to what the administration wanted.

HEMMER: Thank you for sharing your findings with us. There's an awful lot of ground to cover here. Next time we will get to more. Thanks, Joseph Cirincione, his study now in D.C. on Iraq and WMD.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com