Interview with Curt Weldon and Adam Smith- April 13, 2004
SHOW: FOX HANNITY & COLMES
HEADLINE: Interview With Curt Weldon and Adam Smith
GUESTS: Curt Weldon, Adam Smith
BYLINE: Sean Hannity, Alan Colmes
BODY:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BUSH: America's commitment to freedom in Iraq is consistent with our ideals and required by our interests. Iraq will either be a peaceful democratic country, or it will again be a source of violence, a haven for terror,and a threat to America and to the world.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HANNITY: We continue now with Republican Pennsylvania congressman Curt Weldon, and Washington Democratic congressman Adam Smith.
Congressman Weldon, I thought one of the more powerful moments the president had tonight is he said, We weren't on a war footing. The enemy was at war with us. And we've got to deal with the gathering threat, which is why I went into Iraq! I mean, in light of the 9/11 commission, I find it ironic that his most ardent critics that said we didn't do enough-now he saw the threat and dealt with it, and that's not enough for them. Is it a case that this president will never be able to satisfy his political opponents?
WELDON: Well, with some people, that will be the case. But I think most-most people will, in fact, accept the direction the president has taken. Most members of Congress did, certainly, months before the decision to go to war, when we overwhelmingly supported giving the president that use of force.
But let me say this, Sean. On November the 4th in 1999, almost two years before 9/11, at the suggestion of deputy secretary of defense John Hamre (ph), I had the deputy director of the FBI and the deputy director of the CIA with John Hamre in my office to brief them on a proposal to establish a national integrated data fusion center to bring together all 33 classified systems of the federal government. The Defense Department said they would pay for it. At the end of the briefing, the CIA and the FBI said, We don't need this capability. That was two years before 9/11. It would have taken the steps to develop what we put in the defense bill in both the '00 defense bill and the '01 defense bill, and that was...
HANNITY: Let me ask you this...
WELDON: ... the suggestion to create a national data fusion center. We'd have brought all those tidbits of data together...
HANNITY: I agree.
WELDON: ... but the FBI and the CIA didn't want it.
HANNITY: I agree. And they had structural issues and the lack of communication. And I think, clearly, we're making progress on this. I want to ask you this, Congressman Weldon, because you've been a guest on this program over the years a number of times, and you actually came on this program once with a suitcase. And in that suitcase, it was a markup of a nuclear device. We still cannot account for hundreds of them from the former Soviet Union.
WELDON: Absolutely right. That was the Mitrokin (ph) files, the secret files of the KGB. We raised this issue with the CIA on 20 occasions. The CIA still...
HANNITY: Is it likely it's going to go off in a-here's my-is it likely one of those bombs or another one will go off in an American city? Is that an-is that a Hollywood movie, or is that a reality?
WELDON: No, we just don't know, Sean. We know they developed the capability, and we had Russians testify that they actually placed these kinds of capabilities in the U.S. strategically. We just don't know the whereabouts. And I have gone to great lengths in classified sessions with the CIA and Defense Intelligence, and they just don't have the answer.
COLMES: Congressman Smith, I think the whole...
SMITH: If I could step in here, Sean-I wanted to...
COLMES: Go ahead.
SMITH: I wanted to address Sean's point and also compliment Congressman Weldon. I served on the Armed Services Committee with him. He's been a terrific leader on identifying the threats before they happen. But the point that Sean's making is essentially if, in fact, you know, we were wrong once and didn't react to what happened, in this case with al Qaeda, therefore, anything we do of a preventative nature...
HANNITY: That's not what I'm saying!
SMITH: ... beforehand is justified. Well, let me...
HANNITY: I got to respond to this first!
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: After 17 resolutions, maybe!
SMITH: The problem...
HANNITY: After 12 years, maybe!
SMITH: The problem is...
HANNITY: Not right away. That's not what I said!
SMITH: The problem is, with what we feel about Iraq-like I said, I supported the resolution. I supported holding Saddam accountable.
COLMES: Congressman, I...
(CROSSTALK)
SMITH: Did we do it-did we do it in the right way.
COLMES: All right, Congressman Smith, I think the president...
(CROSSTALK)
SMITH: ... did he say how much money was going to be needed, how many troops are going to be needed? They downplayed how difficult this was going be, and now...
COLMES: Congressman Smith...
SMITH: ... we're having some problems.
COLMES: ... I think the president tonight needed to make the case-I think he needed to convince not the people who already agreed with him about Iraq, the war on terror and how it's going from his perspective. He needed to reach out to those who do not agree with him, who are perhaps on the fence. I don't know that he accomplished that tonight, do you?
SMITH: Well, he doesn't really do that, for the most part. I mean, he is, as he says, a very non-nuanced, black-and-white sort of guy. But the point I want to get back to is that, yes, we should hold Saddam Hussein accountable. But just because we say that doesn't mean anything that the president does to do that is right. I think there were mistakes made, as I mentioned. When we went into this, someone said this would cost $50 billion. And Don Rumsfeld laughed at him. He said, There's no way it's going cost that much money. I don't know what the number is, but that's ridiculous. Somebody else said we were going need 250,000 troops. Again, he was laughed at. We weren't prepared for this in the way that we should have been.
COLMES: Congressman Weldon, I think...
SMITH: Right policy, wrong implementation, is my concern.