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good evening thanks for being with us tonight this is a joint resolution of Congress it was passed in 1964 the signatures here that the Speaker of the House of Representatives the president of the Senate and down here the big one that is the signature of the President of the United States this resolution passed on a Friday the Tuesday before the president had gone on TV in a live late-night urgent broadcast my fellow Americans and then that broadcast he said the United States Navy had come under attack he said there had been open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America the result was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution it passed in the House unanimously it passed in the Senate 88 to 2 turns out we got snookered it did not happen the way they said it happened the way they so urgently and sternly informed us that it happened but it would be seven years before this was repealed and by then the escalation that this levered us into had already become the longest yet war in US history a war that defined an era that indelibly tattooed the generation of political leaders who made it happen or who did not stop it from happening we say that Vietnam changed our politics forever but less than 40 years after this again a campaign directed at the highest levels of government to get us to agree to a war based on something that did not happen the way they said it happened it was a months-long campaign in 2002 and 2003 and it worked it's a decade now since it worked since they got that war how did it work why did it work and could it work again NBC News investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff and mother Jones's david korn an MSNBC contributor they co-authored a book called hubris that detailed exactly how that war was sold to the American people what you are about to see tonight is based on their reporting we are still too close to all of this in time to know if what some say was the biggest foreign policy deception and disaster in modern US history will define its generation of leaders - whether this is going to be the first line in the obituaries of the men and women who caused that war but if what we went through ten years ago did not change us as a country if we do not understand what happened and adapt as a country to resist it then history says we are doomed to repeat it again here's what happened the people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder my belief is we will in fact be greeted as liberators there's a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be US taxpayer money and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people do you go to war with the army you have not the Harmy you might want or wish to have the search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them what weighed on many of us is the 9/11 attack revealed major vulnerabilities Iraq had been a big problem even before 9/11 and became even bigger and more urgent in light of 9/11 America's greatest national security failure since Pearl Harbor hurls its leaders into a massive national security response AMA bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network are the immediate target but the day after the attacks President George W Bush comes to the White House Situation Room and orders counterterrorism director Richard Clarke to look into an Iraq connection when I said mr. president we will do that of course but we've done it before and rather recently and the answer has always been no and it's likely to be no this time he didn't like that answer and he got mad I was in in the room during that time and he was very adamant about perhaps seeing whether or not Iraq could conduct such an operation against the United States I was surprised when the president left the room I said I believe secretary Wolfowitz got to him Paul Wolfowitz Bush's Deputy Secretary of Defense has had Saddam on his personal enemies list for two decades every time he survives something he sends the message to his enemies I ought last my enemies and if you are on the wrong list when I'm still around you'll be in trouble Paul Wolfowitz had become convinced that if we looked strongly enough if we look closely enough we'd find the hand of Saddam Hussein behind virtually every terrorist attack on the United States even before 9/11 Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith had been driving administration policy on Iraq some of us believed that you will harvest a Saddam Hussein problem forever unless you get rid of him meeting notes from the afternoon of 9/11 show donald rumsfeld tasking a top aide to find the best info fast good enough to hit saddam hussein he asks the aide to get evidence from Wolfowitz of a saddam connection with UBL osama bin laden we all looked at each other like what are they talking about who the hell Saddam Hussein bin Laden hates him this is a heretic there's no connection between Saddam Hussein and al-qaeda the word goes out to the CIA FBI and all the intelligence services find the connection first though the war on terror goes to Afghanistan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and destroy the Taliban regime that supports al-qaeda by November the enemy is on the run forced to flee into the mountains and across the border to Pakistan but while bin Laden remains at large Washington's attention turns to Iraq to Saddam I think the United States since Desert Storm has always had a various planning with respect to Iraq Operation Desert Storm also known as the first Gulf War in 1991 following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait a us-led coalition of 34 countries drives Saddam's forces out of Kuwait and decimates the Iraqi army in six weeks but despite that overwhelming victory President George HW Bush faces criticism at home for not going all the way to Baghdad to rid the world of Saddam Hussein I made very very clear from day one that it was not an objective of the coalition to get Saddam Hussein out of there by force Dick Cheney his defense secretary at the time supports the first President Bush's restraint I think we got it right conversations I had with leaders in the region afterwards they were concerned that we not get into a position where we were an imperialist power willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world taking down governments after the Gulf War Bush and his successor Bill Clinton send us planes to provide air cover for vulnerable populations in northern and southern Iraq the UN Security Council imposes harsh sanctions and sends in weapons inspectors to dig deeply for Iraqi WMD capabilities weapons of mass destruction this went on for years at a certain point unbeknownst the weapons inspectors or anyone else other than Iraq it turns out that we had pretty much accounted for the full system but we didn't know that in 1998 Saddam refuses to cooperate further and the United Nations pulls out the weapons inspectors Saddam virtually seals Iraq off from the West in a 1998 letter to President Clinton Paul Wolfowitz Donald Rumsfeld and other leading neoconservatives urged the president to take action to remove Saddam's regime from power the neo-cons aligned with an urbane Iraqi expatriate named Ahmed Chalabi Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress a group of Iraqi em'ly grays and defectors lobbying to get rid of Saddam I say to you now that the opposition is united in its aim of getting rid of Saddam and establishing democracy and he was a very impressive and effective spokesman for the Iraqi opposition to Saddam a very slick operator who was skillful enough to convey the idea and that he could step in as a new leader of Iraq but that was totally divorced from realities on the ground George Walker Bush do solemnly swear but when George W Bush is sworn in in January 2001 Rumsfeld Wolfowitz and Fife take the reins of Defense Department policy Vice President Cheney has reversed course and now supports regime change in Iraq motive awaits opportunity and for the Bush administration 9/11 provides it Iraq continues - Lana's hostility toward America and to support terror this is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world states like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil arming to threaten the Peace of the world what I heard the axis of evil speech mass destruction I thought well something's gonna happen the idea was take actions after 9/11 that would so shocked state supporters of terrorism around the world that we might be able to get them to change their policies regarding support for terrorism and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction general franks is both a warrior but also a wise and inspiring commander a declassified memo from november 2001 reveals that donald rumsfeld met as early as then with CENTCOM commander general Tommy Franks to review plans for the decapitation of the Iraqi government they discuss ideas of how to start a war one suggestion is to create a dispute over WMD inspections this is a regime that agreed to international inspections then kicked out the inspectors 9/11 made it politically possible for the first time to persuade the American people to break a tradition of not launching offensive Wars the pressure to find evidence falls heavily on all fifteen US intelligence agencies the extremely strong policy wind that was blowing at the time and that everyone in government corridors felt made it absolutely clear what was preferred and what was not preferred oughta Mohamed Atta leader of al Qaeda's 9/11 hijackings from Prague comes a Czech intelligence report of a photograph allegedly showing Mohamed Atta meeting with a high-ranking iraqi intelligence officer the photograph of the supposed meeting is never made publicly available Mohamed Atta was a slight guy barely what five five five six and skinny the guy in the photograph was muscular and thick and had a neck the size of tool my necks mmm that's not Mohammed I found a photograph but send it to the lab anyway and in my mind that matters put to bed in the final analysis but even without definitive evidence the vice president goes public with it I'm pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April I was sitting in my den in my home Washington DC and I remember looking at the TV screen saying what did I just hear and I first time in my life I actually threw something at the television because I couldn't believe what I just heard over and over again the vice president for years would say we had a report of this meeting it's true there was a report and nobody believed it that's what they didn't add we clearly know that they're in a PBS interview on the news hour with Jim Lehrer National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice reveals with certainty more evidence of Saddam's supposed terrorist link we know too that several of the detainees in particular some high-ranking detainees have said that Iraq provided some training to al-qaeda in chemical weapons development the key high-ranking detainee rice is referring to is an al-qaeda commander named ivan el sheikh al Libi he's it first interrogated by the FBI using standard interrogation techniques but the CIA wants more they seize control of him they send him to Egypt where he's rendered and turned over to one of the most brutal intelligence services in the world this is our living years later in a Libyan prison being visited by his family this video was recently located by Michael Isikoff within weeks of his interrogation in Egypt a living coughs up his story that he hadn't told the FBI before that Saddam was training al-qaeda in chemical and biological weapons it's the single most frightening story that could have been told post 9-11 almost from the outset the intelligence community has doubts about the claim a 2002 CIA report states that questions persist about al Libby's forthrightness and truthfulness and that in some instances he seems to have fabricated information after the invasion al-libi will recant the story that was extracted by the Egyptians brutal interrogation what we said at the time was look he said two different things at two different times and we will tell the policy consumers and other analysts in the community both stories you choose to believe what you choose to believe but I don't know which one's accurate the administration chooses to believe the connection we've learned that Iraq has trained al-qaeda members in bomb-making in poisons and deadly gases right up to the war and Beyond it remains a key administration argument for war and the public largely trusts it to be true if you look at all the key pieces of evidence that they presented publicly at the time on every single one of them not only was there doubt there was debate within the intelligence agencies of the US government the intelligence community assessed that saddam hussein was building a mobile biological weapons capability to avoid detection by the US and its allies and the assessments was based almost entirely on one source from the german government a source named curveball his real name as far as they know is ruffed ahmed l1 an iraqi engineer who makes his way to germany and tells german intelligence that he worked in Saddam's mobile weapons labs used to develop weapons of mass destruction in the intelligence community curveball was known to be a fabricator he could not be relied upon his intelligence was always had been sort of stamped you know do not do not disseminate this is this is useless curveball is a loan and seriously suspect source and US intelligence agencies rely solely on German reports they never actually questioned him themselves even though in this 2011 interview with Britain's newspaper The Guardian the man called curveball confirms the lies of his pre-war claims for to see into the gang height-gain kit - um so I told him no I find my emergency no hind my Lou gets here yeah Alice Peter would bust more busy digging sucked I'm taking these outside he gave me this particular issue about the supposed mobile labs was mishandled all the way around certainly by the intelligence community in terms of how it was assessed and then became the very heart of the whole case about unconventional weapons with dubious evidence like that the White House will present its case for war the case of Saddam Hussein a sworn enemy of our country requires a candid appraisal of the facts simply stated there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends against our allies and against us I had a seat at the stage next to the lectern where he was speaking and I literally bolted at that with our help in liberated Iraq can be a great nation once again Vice President Dick Cheney's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars is the opening salvo of the Bush administration's effort to sell to the American people what White House insiders call the product thank you very much it was a shock that was a total shock I couldn't believe the vice president was saying this and doing work with the CIA on a rock WMD through all the briefings I heard at Langley I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program and that's when I began to believe they're getting serious about this they want to go into Iraq two weeks after the speech Cheney again makes his case on national television what we know is just bits and pieces we gather through the intelligence system but we do know with absolute certainty that is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon Sadam and nooks absolute certainty a terrifying prospect based on the CIA's discovery that Iraq is attempting to purchase 60,000 aluminum tubes some analysts become convinced that the tubes are intended to be used in centrifuges to make uranium for nuclear weapons soon after the discovery the Department of Energy gets hold of the actual tubes and asks engineering professor Houston would an expert on gas centrifuges to evaluate them from the information they gave me it took me about 15 minutes to come to the conclusion that these tubes could not be used for gas centrifuges they're too thick they're too heavy the Energy Department concludes that the tubes are for conventional Rockets not for nuclear weapons but CIA analysts stick to their position that the tubes are for centrifuges and the White House embraces that position administration sources leak the disputed findings to the New York Times in September 2002 the paper runs its sensational scoop on the front page this is a no and I wanted within hours Dick Cheney is quoting that scoop as fact on Meet the Press it's now public that in fact he has been seeking to acquire and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge I called my friends in Oakridge and I said are these the same tubes that we were talking about last year and they said yes and I said I thought we put that to rest a year ago United Nations inspections four days later commemorating the first anniversary of 9/11 President George W Bush repeats the claim at the United Nations Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon I think the Bush administration took a great deal of satisfaction in being able to cite the you know supposedly liberal New York Times in making their case for it absent the aluminum tubes most of the community believes that there is no sufficient evidence to assess that there is a nuclear program from the African country of Nazaire comes another nuclear alarm Italy's military intelligence agency informs the CIA that it has the text of a contract between Iraq and Nazaire for Saddam to purchase 500 metric tons of yellowcake a form of uranium suitable for nuclear weapons well there were rather extensive written documents about the ways in which Iraq was negotiating to buy very significant amounts of uranium ore but the State Department expressed how dubious they were about these documents and the likelihood that they were forged at the time no one from US intelligence had actually laid eyes on the documents and they will ultimately turn out to be forgeries but when a dia report on the yellowcake claim is presented to Dick Cheney he orders the CIA to dig deeper the agency sends Tunisia air a veteran diplomat with extensive experience in Africa former ambassador Joseph Wilson I knew the foreign minister who was subsequently the prime minister I knew the Minister of Mines it did not happen it could not have happened just because of the nature of uranium mining operations in francophone Africa the French maintained control the most important thing to know about the yellowcake story is that the CIA never believed but even as speculation it is enough for administration officials to move ahead with plans to take out Saddam National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice goes on CNN to alert the nation the problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapon but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud what I was hearing and what I knew did not jive the I asked one time at Langley am I crazy or is there no credible evidence of an ongoing program and I had a former Deputy Director CIA said to me you're not crazy but there are administration voices urging caution Secretary of State Colin Powell and his senior staff who unlike their counterparts at defense are all former military men they press to give a chance for sanctions to work for inspections to keep Saddam in check the concern was we hadn't finished in Afghanistan and if we went to war in Iraq we would take the emphasis off Afghanistan which subsequently is exactly what happened the administration has Saddam's squarely in its sights the time has come to persuade Congress to squeeze the trigger one of the most serious responsibilities that Congress has is to cast a vote to set a young man a woman to war to die with Congress back from its summer recess administration leaders prepare to make their case to invade Iraq to eliminate Saddam inside the White House Paul Wolfowitz is deputy undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith an Iraq hawk like his boss presents a slide show to national security officials that is full of questionable assertions of all the places where intelligence was being manipulated and then in the Bush administration the fight shop was the key place there was a debate about how one characterizes the relationship between Iraq and al-qaeda nobody made the argument that there was no relationship between Iraq and al-qaeda the administration deploys its biggest guns to push congressional leaders for quick passage of a resolution to authorize the President to take military action it's important signal for the world to see that this country is united in our resolve to deal with threats that we face the president made the point that there was an urgency to taking action that it couldn't wait he got very animated he used uncharacteristically profanity and used the middle finger to demonstrate Saddam Hussein's disdain for the United States and for him personally a number of members of Congress mostly Democrats remain unconvinced I'm still very skeptical about Saddam Hussein's intent and position nothing has changed the basis for that skepticism the Senate Intelligence Committee requests a National Intelligence Estimate a comprehensive summary of the evidence and II's are routinely delivered on intelligence issues yet on this gravest of matters none yet exists in three weeks the CIA pulls together what normally takes months it has delivered just seven days before the Congressional vote now aluminum tubes are interesting and I know there's controversy associated with it in my judgment the CIA director George Tenet had become a political spokesperson for the administration that is not the role of the CIA it was too often toeing the line that the administration wanted him to tell we think we've stumbled onto one avenue of a nuclear weapons program there's no question that there were erroneous judgments in in that National Intelligence Estimate and purpose was to sell a policy initiative which was to go to war against Iraq the 90-page classified nie asserts that Saddam is actively pursuing his WMD program it cites the debatable intelligence on aluminum tubes the yellowcake uranium purchase and mobile weapons labs but deep inside that thick document our strongly worded dissents that argue the evidence is weak even wrong the nie is sent over to Congress it's kept in a classified vault and as far as we can tell only about a half a dozen senators actually read it had they done so they would have seen that it was filled with the sense if I'd read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq I probably would have been I've done myself a favor by being better informed on the intelligence rather than listening to the administration as a congressional resolution to authorize war is put to a vote most Republicans stand solidly behind President Bush the forces of freedom are on the march and terrorists will find no safe harbor in this world Democrats are deeply divided it is wrong for Congress to declare war against the right now before we have exhausted the alternatives I urge senators to go down on the Capitol Mall and look at the Vietnam Memorial we were there two months out from an election and no one Republican Democrat independent ever wants to be viewed as weak on national security I will vote to give the president the authority he needs the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real it is a boat that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our president and we say to him use these powers wisely and as a last resort in my heart I knew that a No to the authority for the present was the right vote but yet I was not strong enough to vote my conscious joint resolution has passed without objection the vote is overwhelming the margin is more than three to one in the Senate it's more than two to one in the house the president is officially given a free hand the days of Iraq acting is an outlaw state are coming to an end Powell walked into my office and without so much as a fare-thee-well he walked over to the window and he said I wonder what'll happen when we put 500,000 troops into Iraq and comb the country from one end of the other and find nothing and he turned around walked back in his office and I wrote that down on my calendar it's close to verbatim as I could because I thought that was a profound statement coming from the Secretary of State former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the march to war begins in earnest and it is colon Powell who gets the job of selling it to the world what we're giving you our facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence anybody who says this was an intelligence driven war I believe is mistaken and stop by the end of 2002 the US military is headed to the Gulf Congress is on board as our British Prime Minister Tony Blair and most of the mainstream media the stage is set for war a new UN resolution has forced Iraq to submit to tough new arms inspections but President Bush's growing impatience the Defense Department tells him that if he's going to war he's got to do it before the blistering desert summer we were moving along the path of getting a good inspection going that would probably come to fruition one way or the other but once you start military forces flowing to the extent that we did for Iraq it's hard to pull them back as the inevitable moves closer President Bush reaaargh use the case and ups the ante with 16 infamous words in a State of the Union address the British government has learned the Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa that would be yellowcake again but by referring to a six month old British white paper the president doesn't end run around a claim discredited by his own intelligence service it wasn't a matter of lying about this or lying about that but rather through the artistry of speech writers and pace presenters conveying an impression to the American people that certain things were true it's a real sleight of hand and I think it's kind to call that disingenuous on the heels of the President's speech the administration plays its ultimate trump card it tasks Secretary of State Colin Powell it's most trusted public face it's most reluctant warrior to make the case against Saddam at the United Nations he's given a week to pull that presentation together you walked in my office with a sheaf of papers in his hand and he threw him down on my desk and he said that's the script of my presentation at the United Nations came from vice president's office was jumped it was pure John I was in charge of putting it together Powell and Wilkerson tear up the original 48 page script and start over with a team from the State Department and CIA director George Tenet suggests they based their presentation on the National Intelligence Estimate which unbeknownst to Powell is a deeply flawed document still he is weary we went into a room he slammed the door shut he said sit down and he sat down we were there only two people in the room he looked at me and he said this Bush of contacts with al-qaida has got to be taken out it's both and I said I agree with you let's take it out done within a half an hour tenant comes in and explosively tells about this high-level al-qaeda operative who's been interrogated and admitted to these contacts whoa and we put it back in that would be the dubious confession extracted from eben el sheikh al Libi the result of torture by the Egyptians both of us convinced ourselves that if the intelligence community believed what we were presenting then we had to believe it because they were the experts I wrote part of the speech then what I saw over the course of weeks up until the night before he gave that speech and in fact into the early morning 1:00 2:00 a.m. was does this fit is this compelling who can pick a hole in this I'm gonna stand in front of a billion people what I say better be them clearest and most credible information we have On February 5th 2003 the moment of truth arrives the 4700 and first meeting of the Security Council is called to order the world witnesses : powell delivered the ultimate argument for war against iraq what we're giving you our facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence i will cite some examples and these are from human sources I was at CIA headquarters and all of us would have gathered around the TV in the office to watch his speech live from the UN we have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on Rails those would be descriptions by the discredited witness curveball as he's talking about this and showing vials of white powder and so forth I turned to a woman next to me who had followed this whole case of curveball much more closely than I I said what the hell is going on and my colleagues said I don't know I don't know what's going on what is this we did not know he was in Germany we did not know he had a codename curveball we did not know that no US intelligence personnel had ever interrogated him based on defector information in May of 1991 Saddam Hussein had a massive clandestine nuclear weapons program that covered several different techniques to enrich uranium that would be defector information supplied by the notoriously unreliable Ahmed Chalabi head of the Iraqi National Congress the self-appointed expatriate Iraqi shadow government we talked to chalabi on multiple occasions and we saw that you know they were hyping the type of information they put out he is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high specification aluminum tubes from eleven different countries even after inspections resumed yet again the aluminum tubes I was incredibly disappointed when he brought out comments about the aluminum tubes I felt betrayed as America and scientists I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda fortunately this operative is now detained and he has told his story Powell is referring to a banal shake al Libi the same detainee the CIA labeled a fabricator the copy in his natural structure with a built-in ally Powell takes 90 minutes to run through his persuasive litany of evidence much of it will turn out to be at best inaccurate Thank You mr. president if you look at that speech in retrospect there's a little too much of what we think and not enough of what we don't know there's too much certitude in the speech that's not Secretary's power problem that's on us as intelligence professionals Secretary of State Powell set aside his personal misgivings and staked his global reputation for integrity on this one moment selling the case for one though neither powell nor anyone else from the state department team intentionally lied we did participate in a hoax my fellow citizens at this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger our nation enters this conflict reluctantly yet our purpose is sure the conquest goes quickly and just as quickly a country liberated from a dictator dissolves into chaos freedom's untidy and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things an administration eager to go to war fails disastrously to plan for its aftermath and after 19 months of scouring the country the truth about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is finally revealed there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and there haven't been for a long time a new report by the chief US weapons inspector finds that Iraq got rid of its weapons of mass destruction shortly after the first Gulf War I wasn't supposed to find WMD I was supposed to find the truth you know I did not fail to find WMD I succeeded in finding the truth you're telling us in addition to having no WMD stocks before the war for the reasons you gave Saddam chose not to have those weapons is that correct that is correct those are stunning statements it was a terrible mistake the CIA had said we would find stockpiles that we didn't find it was a disaster and you believed it was true at the time yes so today they shouldn't have I mean there were a lot of people in the agency in the community that knew some of this information wasn't you know as solid as it was being presented to me it's not just an intelligence failure it's a failure to the very highest levels of decision-making in America George W Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney would have gone to war with Iraq and gotten rid of sodomy saying even if there wasn't any intelligence at all it is at worst lies and deception it is at best incompetence a lack of understanding a lot of people who purposefully used extreme rhetoric to gin up popular support for the war there were no consequences for them we said here some eight years later 4,000 Americans lost their lives maybe a hundred thousand Iraqis lost their lives it cost about a trillion dollars was it worth it did you give the right advice I think I did if you look back at the proposition we faced after 9/11 with respect to Saddam Hussein we were very concerned about the prospects of terrorists like the 9/11 crowd acquiring weapons of mass destruction biological agent or nuclear weapon that they could use on the United States there's no question in the news media didn't do its job during the run-up to the Iraq war far too often the press simply accepted these sweeping assertions by the highest officials in the government without looking for the hard evidence to support it it's more concern about the politics of my decision rather than what is right and what is wrong I have prayed to God many times that he would forgive me for sending his children to die in a war that never had to happen was there ever any consideration of apologizing to the American people I mean apologizing would basically say the decision was a wrong decision and I don't believe it was the wrong decision