‘Meet the Press’ transcript for May 6, 2007

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MR. TIM RUSSERT:  Our issues this Sunday:  This new book, "At the Center of the Storm," has created its own firestorm about ignored intelligence before the September 11 attack and "slam dunk" intelligence in making the case for the Iraq war.

(Videotape, October 2, 2002)

PRES. GEORGE W. BUSH:  Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons, and he is
moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  The WMDs were never found, a colossal intelligence failure. What happened?  With us, the author and former director of central intelligence, George Tenet. Mr.  Tenet, welcome to MEET THE PRESS.

MR. GEORGE TENET:  Thank you, Tim.

MR. RUSSERT:  Let's go right to it, "At the Center of the Storm." I want to bring you back to the fifth anniversary of September 11.  Vice President Cheney was on this program, and I asked him, in light of the fact that we hadn't found weapons of mass destruction, would he still have gone into Iraq, and this was his answer.  Let's watch.

(Videotape, September 10, 2006)

VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY:  That was the intelligence all of us saw.  That was the intelligence all of us believed.  It was--when, when George Tenet sat in the Oval Office, and the president of the United States, to ask him directly, he said, "George, how good is the case against Saddam and weapons of mass destruction?" And the director of the CIA said, "It's a slam dunk, Mr. President.  It's a slam dunk."

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  When you watched that interview, what did you think?

MR. TENET:  Well, I, I thought quite, quite honestly, Tim, I thought that, you know, "There's a bit of a deflection here." That meeting that morning was about a public case that we might make.  I, I said slam dunk.  You always owe the president better and more discipline than I did that morning.  But the implication left from what the vice president said was we had a meeting in the Oval Office that day and the president decided to go to war, and that's simply not the case.  I, I, I am always--and, and it's important to take responsibility for what we got wrong, but it's also important that we not share responsibility for decisions others made.  So my, my view of that is let's, let's be honest about what happened in that room that morning.  This, this was a meeting to talk about a public case.  We believed-- I believed we had better data that we could declassify to make a case that we all believed in, that every intelligence service believed in.  I believe this, this meeting occurred 10 months after the president saw his worst workable war plan on Iraq, after the vice president had given his VFW speech, two weeks after
a military mobilization order.  And the concern I had, Tim, was, is that this comes rolling out the door, of course, sometime in '04 after things are going badly.  So did we believe he had weapons of mass destruction?  Yes, we did, and we said so.  Were we found to be wrong?  Yes.  But let's not turn this meeting into the seminal moment that I think the vice president was implying.

MR. RUSSERT:  The vice president said in that interview, "We made a choice based on this." The president told Bob Woodward that your talking about slam dunk, "That was very important." Do you believe that?

MR. TENET:  Tim, I can only tell you what I believe.  We, we had--we, we expressed high confidence in our estimates.  We had talked about this.  There were numerous public speeches that had been made.  I, I, I say in the book, I do not believe that that comment that morning either affected the president's views of the legitimacy or the timing of going to war, and that's my strongly held view.

MR. RUSSERT:  This is how Bob Woodward described that scene on December 21st. You came into a meeting with your deputy, John McLaughlin.  He had just finished his presentation.  The president said, "`Nice try,'" Bush said.  `I don't think this is quite--it's not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from.' Bush turned to Tenet, `I've been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we've got?' From the end of one of the couches in the Oval Office, Tenet rose up, threw his arms in the air. `It's a slam dunk case!' the DCI said.  Bush pressed, `George, how confident are you?' Tenet leaned forward and threw his arms up again.  `Don't worry, it's a slam dunk.'" You remember that?

MR. TENET:  Tim, no, I do not remember jumping up and down.  There were five CIA officers in the room with me that day.  There was an officer who sat next to me on the couch.  I interviewed him.  That officer said, "Listen, I know you said it.  It was no more than a passing comment.  You didn't jump up and down.  And when I read all of this, the implication was you said slam dunk, and we're going to war." And he said it's just--the officer said, "That's just not the way it happened." So there was no pantomime here.  And as I say in the book, Tim, you always owe the president your best discipline.  If I'd said we can do better on this--on making this presentation, that would have been a better thing to say.  But the notion that this moment, after months of preparation, after months of testimony, after public statements, after a military mobilization order, this was--this was a seminal moment?  Well, we're, we're
all going to disagree.  I just don't believe that was the case.

MR. RUSSERT:  What if you said, "Mr.  President, I can't make the case any better.  It's not a slam dunk"?

MR. TENET:  Well, Tim, we thought, on the basis of the intelligence that we had, we thought we could declassify more data to make a case that we believed in.  It's, it's very, very important for people to understand, Tim, we believed it.  All of our partners believed it.  I've heard debate about this book subsequently, and it, and it looks like, "You knew this was wrong, and you let the president of the United States or you let the secretary of state go to the United Nations and say it." Absolutely not.  You knew in the moment, at the time you lived in, all of the problems that would manifest themselves in postwar Iraq and didn't tell anybody." That's absolutely not true.  None of us knew how this was going to unfold because, in fact, when we got on the ground, we did things quite opposite than we believed they were going to occur.

So what I'm trying to do is give you a reflection of the time period.  People think a lot of this is go back and think about what happened because you have some historical obligation to do better in the future as a country.  But the notion that we knowingly, wittingly said things that we knew to be false or that we had a full understanding of how our government would so badly manage a postwar situation and didn't say so is simply not true.

MR. RUSSERT:  December 21st, when this meeting occurred, the Congress had already voted to authorize the president to go to war if necessary.

MR. TENET:  Right.

MR. RUSSERT:  This is how you describe it:  "National Security Council officials had asked us to start assembling a public case that might be made against Saddam regarding his possession and possible use of WMD.  It was our turn to deliver [the briefing] to the president, vice president," chief of staff "Andy Card," Condoleezza "Rice," who was then head of the National Security Council, "and a few others.  Some might criticize us for participating in what was essentially a marketing meeting."

And, in fact, that has happened.  A former CIA officer said this:  "What is the head of the intelligence community in the United States [doing] involved in marketing this war?  That's not his role.  His role is to give advice to the president, unvarnished advice, and speak the truth."

Why did you participate in a marketing meeting?

MR. TENET:  Well, well, well, the critics have said it is--it's a marketing meeting.  Intelligence was going to be used in a public case.  Now, you have two choices.  You can walk away from that and let policymakers determine how to use the intelligence and then face enormous risks, or you can be very, very careful, and you can do your best to ensure--which I believe is the role of the director--is to always ensure that when the president or anybody else uses intelligence, that, that it be done in a manner that is consistent with what we believe the best intelligence shows.  You could have let Colin Powell go deliver his speech.  You could've let him give the speech that the White House wrote and provided the secretary when he came to my headquarters.  We could never let him give that speech.  So you have an obligation, to the best of your ability, to always ensure that your intelligence is used in the best way. You
can choose not to do it that way, but there's also risk involved in that. The, the notion that we were marketing a war is absolutely false.  That's not our intent.  Our intent was to make sure that when people speak about things that have to do with data we produced and analysis we produced, that it be done so accurately and fairly.

MR. RUSSERT:  In Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial," he has an exchange between you and your close aide John Brennan.  And he says this:  "Tenet told deputy executive director at" the "CIA headquarters John Brennan that, in his gut, he didn't think invading Iraq was the right thing to do.  Bush and the others were just really naive, thinking they would just be able to go into Iraq and overturn the government.

"This is a mistake,' Tenet finally told Brennan.

"But Tenet never conveyed these misgivings to the president.  Bush had never asked him directly for his bottom line counsel, although Tenet felt that Bush had nevertheless opened the door in their conversations to the point where Tenet could have said, `No, this is crazy, this won't work, you shouldn't do this.' But Tenet never said it."

Did you have that conversation with...

MR. TENET:  Tim, I had conversations with Mr.  Brennan and a lot of people in the run-up.  I had deep concern--any time you commit men and women to war, any time you do that, you, you, you should have misgivings.  I thought about it long and hard--that was one conversation.  I reflected long and hard--I had other conversations.  And at, and at the end of the day, where, where I ended up personally, notwithstanding one or two conversations, was--and, and you can't, and you can't deflect at this moment.  Did I believe Saddam Hussein should be removed from power?  I'd worked on doing it over two administrations.  Did I believe--did I believe our case on WMD?  Yes, I believed that case.  Was this a close policy call?  Yes.  Did I feel so strongly about this that I went to the president of the United States and said, `Don't do it'?  I did not do that, Tim.  I understood it.  I understood their logic.  And in, in the end, notwithstanding all these conversations, I worked at this very, very hard internally.  Now, when you're the director, you're, you're always supposed to be dispassionate about these things.  The concern of crossing that policy line is is that then you're analysis is seen to be suspect.  But I didn't do it, I waited carefully.  If I, if I felt strongly enough, Tim, I would have told the president.  And I didn't, so whatever misgivings I had, I weighed them carefully and thought through this. But you can't recreate history at this moment.

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