‘Meet the Press’ transcript for June 10, 2007

MR. RUSSERT:  The public posturing, however, some supporters of the war saying it would be a cakewalk, the president—the vice president on this program saying we’d be greeted as liberators, the public was not in any way girded with the notion that this could be tough slogging and could, in fact, result in deep sectarian violence and anarchy as evidenced by the CIA report.

GEN. POWELL:  I never used terms such as cakewalk, and I never had any illusions about this being simply a stroll into Baghdad and then everything was going to be wonderful.  But let’s go back to around 10 April of 2003. Saddam Hussein’s statue fell on the 9^th, and from the 10^th of April, for a month or two, everybody in the United States thought this was a terrific outcome.  And it looked like it was going to work, just as the administration has said it was going to work.  We were liberators for a moment, and then we simply did not handle the aftermath.  We didn’t realize we were in an insurgency when we were in an insurgency, and we watched as the ministries that we were counting on, the government ministries we were counting on to help us take over, were being burned and looted.  And we didn’t respond.  And we didn’t have enough troops in the ground.  That’s my judgment, not the judgment of military commanders at the time, but it’s certainly my judgment, and we didn’t have enough troops on the ground.  Because once the government fell, the whole structure of government collapsed.  Once the government in Baghdad came down, everything came down.  And it was our responsibility then, under international law as the occupying authority as well as the liberators, to be responsible for restoring order, and we didn’t have enough troops there to restore that order nor did we have the political understanding of our obligation to restore that order.

MR. RUSSERT:  Let me bring you back to February 5^th, 2003.  This is Colin Fowell—Powell before the United Nations.

MR. POWELL (United Nations Security Council, February 5, 2003):  My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources.  These are not assertions.  What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.

MR. RUSSERT:  When you uttered those words, you believed them deeply.

GEN. POWELL:  I spent five days out at the CIA going over every single piece of information that was going to be in my presentation.  There were a lot of other pieces of information that different people would have wanted me to use and it was all rejected.  Everything in that statement was blessed by the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet; his deputy, John McLaughlin; and all of their senior officials.  They believed it, too.  George has said he believed it.  And so I went to the UN having dumped a lot of stuff on the side of the road because it wasn’t multiple source.  It might have been right, but it wasn’t multiple source and I wouldn’t use it.  And the reason you see Director Tenet sitting behind me is because I wanted to make sure and he wanted to make sure that people understood I was not making a political statement.  I was making a statement of the facts as we knew them.

Now, those same facts, that same set of facts, was available to the Congress the previous fall in the National Intelligence Estimate that the Congress asked for.  But I notice a lot of candidates are now saying they didn’t read it.  But it was up there and they asked for it.  The mobile biological laboratories was up before the Congress months before.  The president used that in his State of the Union speech.  So over a long period of time, the CIA and all of the other intelligence agencies of government had created a, a statement for all of us that said, one, this is a regime that has used these kinds of weapons on the past; two, they have retained the capability of making such weapons; and three—and here’s where we fell down—they have stockpiles of these weapons.  And we all believed it.  Our military believed it going into battle.  Other governments believed it.  The reality is they did not have those stockpiles.  We were wrong.

Fourth point I’d like to make.  Suppose that the UN sanctions had subsequently broken down.  We didn’t go into a war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein was free of all UN constraints because of the collapse of the Oil for Food program.  Would you believe, would anybody believe, that with the capability and with the intent he would not then go back to trying to build up those stockpiles? That’s the chance the president did not want to take, that’s the risk he did not want to take.

MR. RUSSERT:  Your own State Department intelligence agency, however, had a real caveat about the use of aluminum tubes.  They did not think they could be used for nuclear centrifuges.  And yet you put forth that testimony.

GEN. POWELL:  With the caveats.  There was a big debate about the aluminum tubes, whether these tubes are for centrifuge or rocket bodies.  CIA was absolutely convinced that they were for centrifuges.  Department of Energy, IAEA, others and some of my people in the State Department said, “We’re not sure.  We think they probably could be used for rocket bodies.” We challenged that repeatedly, and the CIA kept coming up with technical reasons why they had to be for centrifuges.  Even after the, the war was fought and over, the debate continued.  But I was aware that it was an important piece of information, so when I presented it to the UN, I said, “It is our belief, based on the CIA making the call,”—they’re the referee in such matters, the director of Central Intelligence—“that they were for centrifuges.” But I included in my statement, “This is not a uniform opinion.  Everybody does not believe this, therefore we have to keeps studying it.” And so I included the caveats with respect to the cen—the aluminum tubes in my presentation.

MR. RUSSERT:  The, the mobile trains and trucks and track—lab stories, David Kay, the former UN inspector went before the Senate and said that members of the intelligence community knew some of the information not to be true, and yet they still sent you out there.  Tyler Drumheller, who headed up the European section for this CIA, writes in his book that he saw your presentation the day before it was going to be given, and he took out that reference to the mobile labs because he knew it wasn’t true.  And yet it never got to you that he had taken it out.  What happened?

GEN. POWELL:  I can’t answer that, and I would ask a question of Mr. Drumheller:  Why didn’t you take it out when it appeared months earlier in other intelligence documents?  Suddenly, the night before I’m giving a speech, we decide we have to take this out?  There was a total failure in the intelligence system with respect to those mobile biological labs which turned out not to be.  And the reason I made such a point of those labs in my presentation was that I got assurances from CIA that they had multiple sources, four sources, that could verify this, the existence of these labs. And then when the war was over, after the 9^th of April, we found some things that looked like the labs, and everybody was saying, “We got it.  See, we have it.” And then after examination, people started to say, “Wait a minute, this is not—this is not clear, doesn’t, doesn’t look like what we thought it was going to be.” And even a month afterwards, the CIA put out a paper, a 28-page paper saying, “Yes, it is.  It’s a mobile biological lab.” But it’s turned out that it, it really doesn’t pass the smell test, that that’s what it is.

I cannot tell you why, within the intelligence community, the people who had put out burn notices—meaning don’t trust this source—those burn notices never rose to the right level.  And one of the things I’m most irate about is that I have reason to believe in, in, in the CIA, the nights we were out there till midnight every night putting this presentation together, trying to make it airtight, there were people in the room who knew that burn notices had gone out on some of these sources, and that was not raised to me or to Mr. Tenet.

MR. RUSSERT:  Why not?

GEN. POWELL:  I can’t answer that question.  This is, this is for others.  You know, I’m not, I’m not the investigator of the intelligence community.  But if I was, we, we would be having very long meetings about this.  But I do not know why the information did not surface.  I don’t know why it came—did not come to the proper analysts, I don’t know why it went—did not go to Jami Miscik, it did not go to John McLaughlin.  And Mr. Tenet says he has no recollection of these conversations, nor does Mr. McLaughlin.

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