Tenet: 'It is not possible to protect everything'

Chris Matthews Host of 'Hardball' • Profile

The man who's been blamed for the faulty intelligence on Iraq's alleged WMD program and for failing to prevent 9-11 is now speaking out. Former CIA Director George Tenet has come out swinging against the Bush Administration for the way they used intelligence in the run-up to the war in Iraq in his new book, "At the Center of the Storm." But he's also taking some heat for breaking his silence a little too late, and not standing his ground before the war started. On Monday's Hardball, George Tenet answered for his actions and discussed the current state of our national security.

You can read a transcript of the interview below.

MATTHEWS:  Former CIA Director George Tenet is the author of, “At the Center of the Storm.”

How’s the book doing, George?

TENET:  I think okay.

MATTHEWS:  Okay. Let me ask you some questions.  You know about the inside better than anybody we’ve ever had sitting in that chair.  When we get Dick Cheney in that chair, we’ll know even more, perhaps.

Could, in your mind’s eye, when you repeat 9/11 in hour head over and over again, could it have worked?  Could our intelligence, our CIA, our FBI, our first responders—everyone else, had they had a little bit more of a break, could we have stopped it?

TENET:  I don’t think there’s a silver bullet, Chris.  Now, you look back at this and you look back at what we were doing around the world at the time, in the spring and summer, the concern that we raised, obviously there were some people—we made mistakes at the back end—FBI made mistakes, CIA made mistakes, but here’s, I think, the larger systemic point.  The country never thought about this as something that was going to happen here, and as a consequence, did we have a system of domestic protection in place?  If you go back to the millennium period, we told the president five to fifteen attacks—that fellow tried to cross the border from Canada coming into the United States—visa policies, border policies, security policies, infrastructure policies.

So at the end of the day, we were playing relentless defense—offense, we were playing relentless offense overseas in that spring and summer, and what we never had is a back end with a defense that matches the offense.  It’s a big systemic point.

MATTHEWS:  Do you—but you probably—but I’ve been listening to your interviews, George, and I’ve been hearing you talk about how there was a lot of noise, a lot of noise going up to July, a real sense that something spectacular was coming.

TENET:  It was more than noise, Chris.  There was hard data about plots overseas:  the embassy in Rome, the embassy in Paris.

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