Tenet: 'It is not possible to protect everything'

Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, these guys were for this war because they had signed that Project for the New American Century document in the ‘90s.

TENET:  Chris, let’s put this in different buckets, OK?  There are some people who believe this was unfinished business.  There were some people who believed we needed to change the face of the Middle East. 

There are people who were concerned about the fact that Saddam Hussein might surprise us.

We said that he had weapons of mass destruction.  Every—but we also were concerned that what we didn’t know might accelerate timelines for him acquiring things.  So people were fearful.

We remember back in the 1990s when we thought the biological weapons file was closed?  His son-in-law told us it wasn’t.  We remember back to the 1990s when we said it was going to take him eight years to develop a nuclear weapon?  He was six months away.

So history mattered to some people on the weapons side.  There were issues—there were concerns for terrorism.  In the end there were many, many reasons.  Countries go to war because of their geo-strategic interests and how they view the world.

MATTHEWS:  I covered (INAUDIBLE), let me tell you what I watched in real time.  The polling was very close on this war.  People said, we would support the war if we thought there would be very few casualties. 

Well, it was 3,000 guys, many more seriously and permanently wounded.

So they didn’t—we didn’t anticipate the terrible damage this war would do to our own troops.  But they bought the war because—not because of all of this ideological, we are going to move the Rubik’s Cube around the Middle East.  We are going to make the road to Jerusalem through Damascus and all of that stuff—or through Baghdad.

They bought it because of a fear of nuclear weapons and because of sense that somehow Iraq was involved with 9/11.  There weren’t involved with 9/11.  How come the American people were lead to believe that?  Why did you let it happen?

TENET:  Well, it is not what—Chris, when the vice president wanted to give a speech before the war about Iraq and al Qaeda, I walked in and told the president he can’t give that speech.

When the secretary of state was going to talk to the U.N., we looked at the input provided.  We didn’t use that data.  When Doug Feith presented his analysis to the Congress about Iraq and al Qaeda, I testified that he mischaracterized that data.

So we—look, this is a contact sport.  There were three legitimate areas of concern.  There were contacts.  There was training.  There was safe haven in northeastern Iraq.  We never believed this was more than two organizations trying to take advantage of—notwithstanding the concerns and we could find no complicity.

Now on the nuclear question, people say, you guys just watch, this will happen.  We took the Niger uranium piece out, not in one speech, in two speeches.

MATTHEWS:  But not in the State of the Union.

TENET:  It got into the State of the Union speech.  OK?

MATTHEWS:  But the bottom line, George, is that despite your efforts, to the extent that you made the effort, the message got to the American people that there was a 9/11 connection, 71 percent of people believed there was.  That the Iraqis were involved in attacking us on 9/11.  And the nuclear—I have talked to some really smart people who are not political.

And they supported this war because of the nuclear piece, not this WMD phraseology, nuclear, because that threatens us.  And these weren’t true.  The war was fought on bogus grounds.

TENET:  Chris, our intelligence was wrong.  I have to—we have to take that responsibility.  On the nuclear question, what our National Intelligence Estimate said, five to seven years.  If a terrorist group provided them fissile material, he could have it within a year.

MATTHEWS:  A couple of questions.  We know that there are certain ideologues in this administration in great positions.  Paul Wolfowitz argued with me for three-and-a-half hours one day at lunch about this war.

We know Doug Feith was a hawk.  We know Perle, of course, was a hawk because he went to you and said, let’s go to Iraq, right afterwards. 

Scooter Libby had a lot of influence, he was for the war.  We know a lot of people ideologically around this town who weren’t in government before this war.

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