Transcript for December 18

SEC'Y RICE:  Tim, I think that everyone should listen to what the president said yesterday. He made a compelling case for why he felt it necessary to use these authorities. He made a compelling case for the kind of war in which we are, and, again, we need to think back to what the--what the analysis of what happened to us on September 11 told us. And it told us that there was a gap, a gulf, between our intelligence agencies which looked outwards as if threats were only on the outside and our law enforcement agencies which looked inward. The notion that you would not want to somehow use your capabilities to connect the dots between what is going on inside the country with terrorist activities and outside the country I don't, frankly, understand. And I want to just remind people, this is a limited number of people.

MR. RUSSERT:  Well, that's why the law – wait a second. That's an important point because the reason the law was created to create a court to expedite this was to adjudicate the balance between civil liberties and national security and the president decided to circumvent that.

SEC'Y RICE:  This is a program that is very thoroughly controlled and reviewed and it has been reviewed not just by the White House counsel but by the lawyers of the Justice Department and by the lawyers of the N.S.A., the National Security Agency, and by the inspector general of the National Security Agency, and it has to be reauthorized every 45 days. And the Congress, the congressional leaders, including...

MR. RUSSERT:  But those are administration lawyers.

SEC'Y RICE:  ...including of the...

MR. RUSSERT:  Why not go to an objective court?

SEC'Y RICE:  The Congress, including congressional leaders, including leaders of the relevant oversight intelligence committees, have been briefed on this.

MR. RUSSERT:  The Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said that she expressed reservations.

SEC'Y RICE:  I am not going to comment on specific conversations with congressional leaders but I will say that the president went out of his way to make certain that there--that people were--that these leaders were briefed on the program and the activities that were being undertaken--that were being taken under this program. This is a very limited program. There have to be ties to al-Qaeda for the people who--on whom you're collecting information, and it was the president's belief and I agree that without the ability to know what was going on between people with terrorist links inside the country and people--terrorists outside the country, that we're going to leave the country vulnerable to attack again the way that we were vulnerable to attack on September 11.

MR. RUSSERT:  Let me turn to Iraq. The elections on Thursday; 11 million Iraqis voted. George Casey, our commander on the ground, said this in September:  "...we've looked for the constitution to be a national compact, and the perception now is that it's not, particularly among the Sunni."

Will the Bush administration urge the Iraqis to modify, to amend, the constitution to be more inclusive of the Sunni community, to be more inclusive and understanding of women's rights?

SEC'Y RICE:  Clearly, we believe that the Iraqis now are going to engage in a process which gives them a real chance of a representative, broadly representative, government. And Zal Khalilzad has wonderful contacts and is pressing...

MR. RUSSERT:  Our ambassador.

SEC'Y RICE:  Our ambassador. He has wonderful contacts. He's pressing this case. It is an Iraqi process. But all the Iraqis with whom you talk seem to understand that this is their real chance to build a unified Iraq in which everybody has a part. Women are going to have 25 percent of the legislature by statute. They will have to now go out and build their links and use the tools that are given to them to assure equal rights. But the constitution, of course, gives those equal rights to women.

I think, Tim, that this is a remarkable couple of days for the Iraqi people. They went out and they voted in huge numbers. There were pictures of little children dipping their fingers in ink and blind people going to vote. They understood what the vote meant. The vote meant a democratic future and a chance to control their lives. Now, they will have representatives, broad representation, and while I think government formation is not going to be easy, I've heard a number of leaders, Sunni, Shia and Kurd, say that their goal is to find people across lines with whom they can work.

MR. RUSSERT:  On November 15, 79 United States senators, Democrats and Republicans, voted for the following:  "The Administration should tell the leaders of all groups and political parties in Iraq that they need to make the compromises necessary to achieve the broad-based and sustainable political settlement that is essential for defeating the insurgency in Iraq, within the schedule they set for themselves..."

Will you, as secretary of state--will the president say to the Iraqis, "You have to fix this constitution, you have to amend this constitution, to make sure the Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds all feel involved"?

SEC'Y RICE:  Tim, it was because of the efforts of our ambassador and the British ambassador and the U.N. and others that the ability to amend the constitution is there. And we worked with the Iraqis to put in place that ability to amend the constitution.

MR. RUSSERT:  Will you encourage changes?

SEC'Y RICE:  It should be--yes. There should be a process now by which the concerns of those who were perhaps not fully represented at the time of the writing of the constitution--what really happened was, because the Sunnis didn't vote in the January election, they had to in a sense be grandfathered into the constitutional process. Now, they will have truly elected representatives. So that's why the amendment process is there, and it ought to be used.

MR. RUSSERT:  The president said something on Wednesday about weapons of mass destruction. Let's listen.

(Videotape, Wednesday):

PRES. GEORGE W. BUSH:  It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  "Much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong."  Colin Powell, back in September of '02 said, "The president has said repeatedly that the purpose of this is to disarm...if [Saddam] does...that to the satisfaction of the international community, then there will be no war..."

If the primary rationale was to disarm Saddam and he had no weapons of mass destruction, we've now found out--understanding that, do you believe if the president went before Congress in March of '03 and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, we do not have any information that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, but we still believe we should go into Iraq and topple him"--do you think the Congress would have supported that?

SEC'Y RICE:  Tim, I don't--I can't possibly know the answer to that. I do know this:  What happens today can affect what happens tomorrow, but not what happened yesterday. And the fact of the matter is, at the time of the war resolution, we believed, other intelligence agencies around the world believed, the U.N. Security Council apparently believed, with its multiple resolutions telling him to disarm, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was continuing to pursue those programs. That is the reason that there were some of the toughest sanctions ever placed on Saddam Hussein. And he didn't answer the just demands of the international community that he come clean about his programs.

Now, yes, much of the intelligence was wrong. But that Saddam Hussein was a threat, I think, is incontrovertible, because even--as someone who had used weapons of mass destruction before against his own people and against his neighbors, in whom we were still in a kind of suspended state of war, flying no-fly zones to the north and the south, him shooting at our aircraft, his continued threat to the region and to his neighbors--and this horrible dictator, who was filling mass graves, sitting in the world's most volatile region, a region out of which this ideology of hatred that we experienced on September 11 had come--and, by the way, paying suicide bombers to go in and commit atrocities in Israel as well--he was a threat. After 17-plus resolutions, after 12 years, it was time to take care of Saddam Hussein.

And the effect is now that, with what the Iraqi people are doing, we have an opportunity to see an Iraq that will be a friend of peace, a friend of a stable, truly stable, Middle East, and democratic as a pillar of a different kind of Middle East. And everybody knows that we need a different kind of Middle East than the one that currently exists.

MR. RUSSERT:  Do you have any regrets that you may have misled the American people by talking about aluminum tubes that could have been used for nuclear development, which our own State Department and Department of Energy said was not the case, or talking about a mushroom cloud when, in fact, there's no evidence that Saddam had a nuclear program under way?

SEC'Y RICE:  Tim, we talked about the uncertainties associated with nuclear weapons programs, and I have--I believe that we gave the American people at the time our best estimate and, by the way, the best estimate of the intelligence community, of what his activities were. Let's remember that the key judgments, which have, in fact, been declassified included a judgment that left unchecked, Saddam Hussein would have a nuclear weapon within 10 years, that he had an active program on the biological and chemical side and, in fact, had those weapons available.

MR. RUSSERT:  But that's proven to be inaccurate.

SEC'Y RICE:  But, Tim, you know what you know at the time.

MR. RUSSERT:  But it is now considered inaccurate.

SEC'Y RICE:  But you know what you know at the time, and the president at the time was relying on the best intelligence that we and others had. But that does not cloud the fact that what happened in Iraq a few days ago is that the Iraqi people, who had suffered under this brutal tyrant, many of whom who had lost family members to mass graves, went out and voted 11 million strong for the first constitutional parliamentary democracy in the Arab world. That is going to make the United States of America safer. Yes, it has come at sacrifice, and we mourn the sacrifice of every American or coalition soldier that has been lost. We have a lot of people who are operating under dangerous circumstances, but we know, too, that when American values and American power are married, as they were after World War II, we know now that when you have democracies that are friends of the United States, we know that the possibilities for peace, for permanent peace, for truly stable peace, are enhanced. And that's what the removal of Saddam Hussein has made possible.

MR. RUSSERT:  To be continued. Merry Christmas.

SEC'Y RICE:  Merry Christmas to you, too.

MR. RUSSERT:  Coming next, another perspective on Iraq. A key Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin of Michigan, offers his views right here on MEET THE PRESS.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT:  Democratic Senator Carl Levin on Iraq and the eavesdropping of American citizens after this station break.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT:  And we are back.

Senator Levin, welcome to MEET THE PRESS.

SEN. CARL LEVIN, (D-MI):  Tim, good being here.

MR. RUSSERT:  You just heard Secretary Rice:  The president believed that if there were a phone call from foreigners coming into America or vice versa that could jeopardize our security, he wanted to find out what was being said and use that information to protect us, that he briefed congressional leaders at least 12 times. So what's the big concern?

MORE FROM MEET THE PRESS

Meet the Press Section Front

Sunday's Meet the Press guest list Nov. 29: Rick Warren, Bill & Melinda Gates Nov. 22: Senate roundtable, Brinker, Snyderman Nov. 15: Clinton, Duncan, Gingrich, Sharpton Nov. 8: Casey, Barbour, Rendell, roundtable, Brokaw Nov. 1: Tim Geithner, David Plouffe, roundtable Oct. 25: Cornyn, Schumer, Burnett, Sorkin, roundtable Oct. 18: Jarrett, Dodd, Kyl, Shriver, Podesta Oct. 11: Levin, Graham, McCaffrey, Myers, roundtable Oct. 4: Ambassador Susan Rice, roundtable Meet the Press Section Front   Add Meet the Press headlines to your news reader: