Tenet: 'It is not possible to protect everything'

We now have an enormous amount of data in our possession about how these guys think, train, operate.  The interesting thing about these guys is, history matters.  Even after 9/11, we found out about plot lines to use airliners again against the East and West Coast of the United States, in Europe and Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

MATTHEWS:  We’ll be right back with former CIA Director George Tenet to talk about the lead-up to war in Iraq.  That’s where I’m most curious, this morning and this afternoon, anyway, and the relationship between the CIA and the Bush administration.

You’re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTHEWS:  Welcome back to HARDBALL.  We’re back with former CIA Director George Tenet.  His book is called “At the Center of the Storm.”

NBC News video Al-Qaida and nuclear weapons May 6: Former CIA head George Tenet tells Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press" his thoughts on the possibility of a nuclear attack on U.S. soil. Meet the Press

George, I watched “Meet the Press” yesterday, and I learned some things.  First of all, it seems like, if you put it all together, the reasons we were given for the war in Iraq—the connection with 9/11, which the vice president liked to make all the time, the nuclear threat form Iraq—weren’t there in the end.  In fact, you believed, even beforehand, we didn’t have a case to make that there was a connection to 9/11.

TENET:  Chris, we could never make a linkage to 9/11, but let’s be clear, we believed that he had weapons of mass destruction, and we said so.  And we believed it across two administrations, not just this administration.

MATTHEWS:  Did you believe he had nuclear weapons?

TENET:  No, Chris.  We believed and said that is’s going to take him five to seven years to have weapons—

MATTHEWS:  The vice president said, fairly soon.

TENET:  Well, I should have corrected him.  I have said that, but...

MATTHEWS:  The president said, mushroom clouds.  The impression left with the American people, as came clear on “MEET THE PRESS” yesterday, was 71 percent of the American people believe that we faced this threat.  We faced the threat of a connection—of a 9/11 connection.

Now all I can ask you, if those reason ended up not—what was the reason for the war?

TENET:  Well, Chris, there—you know...

MATTHEWS:  The president didn’t have any evidence to believe they were a nuclear threat.  And the 9/11 connection was never made.  Most Americans were for this war for two reasons.  One, payback, it was even in our country music, remember how you felt.  And the fear of the nuclear weapon, that they actually had a delivery system, this balsa wood plane they were going to use to bring over here and attack us with.

And all of that wasn’t true.  OK.  So why did we go to war?  What was the motive here?

TENET:  Well, Chris, there were many.  You would have to talk to everybody...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS:  OK.  Let’s start with...

(CROSSTALK)

TENET:  So let’s start...

MATTHEWS:  Let’s start with these people you mention in the book. 

MORE FROM HARDBALL

Hardball Section Front

Countdown to Obama’s Afghan announcement Public option a barrier to reform? Report: Boehner’s PAC racks up big golf bill Obama’s first state dinner a success? GOPers forced to undergo loyalty test? Obama plots future of Afghan mission Palin’s road to the White House Rating Obama’s first ten months Congressman urges teens to learn the Constitution Lou Dobbs for president? Hardball Section Front   Add Hardball headlines to your news reader: