*EPF402 07/22/2004
Transcript: Powell Praises Iraqis' Efforts to Re-establish Security
(Calls Prime Minister Allawi a dynamic leader with great courage) (3570)

Secretary of State Colin Powell praised the efforts of Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to re-establish security in Iraq and pledged continued U.S. support for the Iraqis working to bring the situation under control.

"There's no question that we have a dynamic leader in Prime Minister Allawi. He is acting with great courage, with very stern views, strong views about what he wants to do and how he's going to go after these insurgents, and we're very pleased at how he has taken hold and his ministers have taken hold and the new president has taken hold," Powell said in a July 21 interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News.

The secretary went on to extend his praise to all of the Iraqi citizens who are stepping forward to take control of the situation.

"Brave Iraqis are stepping forward every day -- policemen, soldiers, political officials, appointed officials -- all putting their lives at risk to give the Iraqi people what they want, what they deserve and what they are going to have as a result of what we were prepared to do and what President Bush led a coalition to do: get rid of one regime and bring in a better, better form of government," he said.

The secretary said, however, that the United States still has a role to play in the effort to bring security and stability to Iraq.

"Is it still tough over there? Yes. Are we still losing troops? Yes. I regret that very much. But we've got to stick with it and we've got to help the Iraqis develop their capability to deal with this insurgency and put it down," he said.

Turning to the questions of prewar intelligence and weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Powell said that Saddam Hussein had the intention and capability of pursuing WMD programs.

"The only thing that is the mystery is that we thought the stockpiles would be there, active stockpiles, not just the capability to produce, but active stockpiles. Those have not been found, and increasingly it looks like they will not be found. Did they exist? Where did they go? Were they destroyed years ago and the intelligence community just missed it and didn't know it? I don't know," he said.

He went on to say, however, that "the intelligence picture that was presented to the Congress, presented to me, presented to the president by the intelligence community and also reflecting the views of other intelligence communities around the world, to include the British, led the president to the conclusion, the correct conclusion, that you had to assume these weapons were there, in addition to the intention and capability, and the president acted on that knowledge."

Powell said that there were shortcomings in the analysis of the intelligence and said "that's what we have to look at now, not to get anybody in trouble or to point blame, but to make sure we don't make these sorts of errors in the future."

Following is the transcript of Powell's interview:

(begin transcript)

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman
July 21, 2004
INTERVIEW

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell With Sean Hannity

July 21, 2004 Washington, D.C.

(5:35 p.m. EDT)

MR. HANNITY: Joining us now on our newsmaker line is Secretary of State, no stranger to these microphones, a good friend, Colin Powell. How are you, sir?

SECRETARY POWELL: Hi, Sean, how are you today?

MR. HANNITY: You know, I've got to be honest, I don't know -- you really sacrifice for your country, and I, you know I read this stuff about you guys being under attack. You've got to get sick of this.

SECRETARY POWELL: Oh, it's just part of business up here in Washington, and, you know, Sean, you just come in here every day, as I try to do, and as the President does, and do what you think is right for the American people and just drive through all of this.

MR. HANNITY: Well, you know something, you don't get this credit enough. You know, Mr. Secretary, you could be out on the speaking circuit, you could be out writing books and making millions and millions of dollars a year, but you wanted to go back and serve your country. And I just wish the level of rhetoric in this country, especially from the left towards conservatives right now, would slow down, and I wish there would be some consideration of the personal sacrifice that people like you and other people give to the country.

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, you know, I'm entering my 40th year of public service between being --

MR. HANNITY: That's a long time.

SECRETARY POWELL: It's a long time, and I'm proud of it. I'm proud that I have been a public servant. It's a phrase that doesn't get mentioned enough, but I have been in public service my adult life and I'm very proud of that, and I'm privileged to have the opportunity to serve again. But you need to understand we live in a country where people are entitled to express their views and --

MR. HANNITY: (Inaudible) right about me.

SECRETARY POWELL: (Laughter.) Well, you express your views right back, Sean. But that's also what makes this place of ours great. And the Founding Fathers -- I love to give speeches about this -- the Founding Fathers did not mean for democracy to be a quiet system, but a clash of ideas for the purpose of making compromises, gaining consensus and figuring out what the American people want. And my faith is with the American people. They know what they want and they will vote for what they want, and all of this negativity goes away in due course and an election sort of flushes clean the system again. And that's what will happen this November.

MR. HANNITY: I don't want to pull you into political discussions. At any point, if you think it's a political question, just tell me, "I don't want to talk about it." I really don't want to do that to you, but I want to ask, in principle, in the case of Sandy Berger, if you hear that documents are taken from the National Archives, security documents, are you concerned about that?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, sure. It's a very serious matter and it's being investigated. I don't know what the facts are and I do know Sandy Berger and I am confident he will cooperate with the investigating officers on this. But I don't know the facts and, therefore, I can't comment on what might have happened or what he might have done or not done.

MR. HANNITY: Do you have a relationship with him? Do you know him?

SECRETARY POWELL: Sure, I've known Sandy for many years. And you have to remember, for the first nine months of the Clinton Administration I was still Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and so I worked for President Clinton for those nine months as well as with Sandy Berger and Tony Lake and lots of others.

MR. HANNITY: Yeah. Let me move on, if I can. By the way, the President has green-lighted the arms sales to Iraq. I guess it's just another in a series of ongoing developments that show that the Iraqi people and Iraqi sovereignty is taking hold.

SECRETARY POWELL: Right. There's no question that we have a dynamic leader in Prime Minister Allawi. He is acting with great courage, with very stern views, strong views about what he wants to do and how he's going to go after these insurgents, and we're very pleased at how he has taken hold and his ministers have taken hold and the new president has taken hold.

And you have seen mostly Iraqis on television and in print and on the world stage over the last several weeks, which is exactly the way we wanted it. Ambassador Negroponte is there with the new commander on the scene, General Casey. They're working very closely with each other, but more importantly, working closely with the Iraqis. But it is the Iraqis now to solve the problems of the country and we will help them do that.

MR. HANNITY: I guess it's sort of become, in the minds of many, many people in this country, I guess, conventional thought that the weapons of mass destruction never existed, although we have evidence that he used them against the Kurds in the north -- meaning Saddam -- we knew that he used them in the Iraq-Iran war, and we knew all the intelligence from every imaginable source indicated he had them, was seeking them, wanted them and continued to develop them, and, of course, he would not allow the inspectors in.

Am I the only one that really, truly and firmly believes that, in all likelihood, they were moved out of the country as we had this buildup to the war?

SECRETARY POWELL: You may be right, Sean. I just can't say that you are because I don't know. I do know that he used them. And I have been to the city where he used them, Halabja, in northern Iraq. I have been to the memorial to the 5,000 people who were killed on that beautiful March morning in 1988. I have shaken hands and hugged mothers who lost children and husbands that day, and I have spoken at that town. There's no question; it's a historic fact. There is also no question that he used them against Iran during the course of the Iraq-Iranian war.

So it is not the figment of anyone's imagination and there is no question that when we went into Gulf War I, to Desert Storm, one of my greatest concerns as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was whether or not our young soldiers were going to be exposed to that stuff during the war. They were not, but we found it. We found the weapons in 1991.

MR. HANNITY: But didn't you also find that they were far further along in terms of developing --

SECRETARY POWELL: They were much further along with respect to chemical weapons, and in 1995 we got the smoking gun evidence by a defecting general that they were much further along in biological weapons. And so what other assumption should someone make when you have 12 years of experience, 12 years of UN resolutions, all the intelligence communities believed that he has the intention and capability, and that proved out to be correct. He did have the intention and capability.

The only thing that is the mystery is that we thought the stockpiles would be there, active stockpiles, not just the capability to produce, but active stockpiles. Those have not been found, and increasingly it looks like they will not be found. Did they exist? Where did they go? Were they destroyed years ago and the intelligence community just missed it and didn't know it? I don't know. But I do know that the intelligence picture that was presented to the Congress, presented to me, presented to the President by the intelligence community and also reflecting the views of other intelligence communities around the world, to include the British, led the President to the conclusion, the correct conclusion, that you had to assume these weapons were there, in addition to the intention and capability, and the President acted on that knowledge.

MR. HANNITY: Secretary of State Colin Powell is with us. I woke up this morning and I saw a UPI report -- and I don't know if you've had an opportunity to see this -- that said Iraqi security reportedly discovered three missiles carrying nuclear heads concealed in a concrete trench northwest of Baghdad. Later, Reuters had a story quoting Iraq's interior minister dismissing it as "stupid," this report that these missiles had been found near the town of Tikrit. Do you know anything about it?

SECRETARY POWELL: No, only the reports you're describing, the UPI report and then the Iraqi minister dismissing it. I would go with the Iraqi minister, I'd be surprised if they found any such thing.

MR. HANNITY: You know, and I'm not going to drag you into a political discussion, it's not fair to you and you have a much bigger role to play, but when I, for example, as I have gone back and I have looked at the comments of prominent leaders on the Democratic side -- two of them are now running for president and vice president -- John Edwards in 2003, for example, said the threat was this man who we knew was going to do everything in his power to acquire nuclear capability. He went on to say he's involved in developing weapons of mass destruction, we cannot allow him to continue in this effort to develop and foster weapons of mass destruction. And the bottom line, it's very difficult to imagine a situation where the world is secure, that the U.S. is secure while Saddam Hussein is in power.

John Kerry said Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose a real and grave threat to the U.S., and he went on to say leaving Saddam unfettered with nuclear weapons or WMDs is unacceptable, and here's my question. When I listen to people on the left now, they accuse our President almost daily of being a liar, yet a year before this war, they were saying the same things that you were saying. I mean, whatever happened to, you know, we unite together in a common war? How does one make that jump like that?

SECRETARY POWELL: Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards were recipients of the same intelligence information that the President received and I received and Mr. Rumsfeld and the Vice President received. The President had the responsibility to act on that information. The Congress also acted on that information by providing a resolution of support to the President before the war. And so all of us were working off that information and it was frightening, it suggested that action was appropriate and necessary, and that's why there was strong bipartisan support for the President at a time that he was weighing his options. And so you can't now say, well, I would have done something differently -- and they haven't even said that -- it's just not a good position to be in, and their words speak for themselves.

MR. HANNITY: I -- well, John Kerry now is saying that the threat was an exaggeration and then he also admitted he didn't read the intelligence assessment document before voting to give the President authority to go to war, I mean, which is an amazing admission to me. But --

SECRETARY POWELL: No, the President --

MR. HANNITY: That's amazing to me.

SECRETARY POWELL: He acted not on an exaggeration, he acted on the same information that others were provided, others in the Congress. And everybody was operating off the same base of intelligence, as did President Clinton in 1998 when, in response to this same threat, President Clinton accepted it, correctly, in my judgment, and undertook military action against Iraq. It was much more limited; it was only four days, Operation Desert Fox, where they bombed these facilities, and afterwards expressed satisfaction that they had destroyed a significant component of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability. But it was always a possibility it could be rebuilt again.

And so it's not an exaggeration on the part of this Administration or this President. It was the information that he was provided that he acted upon and did not have to exaggerate it. It was information that was solidly sourced and believed in by the intelligence community, it wasn't intelligence people making up anything. It turned out that there were some shortcomings in what they looked at and in the analysis that they did and that's what we have to look at now, not to get anybody in trouble or to point blame, but to make sure we don't make these sorts of errors in the future.

MR. HANNITY: Secretary of State, Colin Powell, of course, is with us. One of the things I'm concerned about is we have this September 11th, 9/11 Commission report coming out tomorrow. And I just wonder if we're going to -- if this whole thing is going to be politicized. And I don't even want to go back -- I really wonder if anybody could have stopped what happened on September 11th. I guess it's easy to Monday morning quarterback, but we did have eight years of the Clinton Administration leading up to the attack and eight months of the Bush Administration. And the report won't say openly the attack was preventable, but they will cite about ten missed opportunities.

SECRETARY POWELL: That's what I hear, based on press reports. I have not seen the report yet. It's being briefed to some of us this afternoon. I will see it in the morning, and we'll just see what it says. As the President has said, he welcomes the report. He is pleased that the commission looked at this and we will internalize any lessons learned from the report.

But it's always easy to go back and say, gee, this particular piece of information should have led you to the conclusion that something was going to happen. It's always easy to do that in hindsight. I hope the report will not do that but just show us what sorts of things were out there that perhaps might have been analyzed in a different way. So I hope it's a report that points us in the right direction in the future and doesn't try to make political points over what happened in the past.

MR. HANNITY: That would be very constructive and, I hope, as well. And I've asked you this before and I'm just going to ask you again for the benefit of our audience. Secretary of State Powell is with us. With all we know right now and all the information you had, are you proud of your decision and what you did with Iraq and the case that we laid out to the American people, and was it the right thing to do, with all we know now?

SECRETARY POWELL: Yes. Earlier today, Sean, I had in my office three Iraqis. One of them survived a mass execution at a place called Anfal.

MR. HANNITY: I think this person is on TV with me tonight.

SECRETARY POWELL: I hope so. I'm glad to hear that. You'll be very impressed. Put in a mass grave. They were all shot. He survived, with bullet wounds.

MR. HANNITY: He's on TV with us tonight, yes.

SECRETARY POWELL: Right. And he crawled out of there and he was the only one who survived and he lived to tell the story. It's not going to happen again because Saddam Hussein is gone and he is not coming back, nor is his regime.

Another fellow who was here today escaped from beatings in Saddam's prisons and got away, and the third person who was here documented all this in a marvelous documentary film.

But there are people who are out and free now and are participating in the construction of a new Iraq based on freedom and liberty and democracy and the rights of all people, where this kind of horror will not happen. The 25 million Iraqi people are free because of what President Bush did; 25 million Afghans are free because of what President Bush did. And what are they going to be doing over the next several months? These 50 million people are going to be getting ready for open, free and fair elections; in October, presidential elections in Afghanistan, and in December or no later than January, elections for a transitional assembly in Iraq. That's something we should all be proud of.

Is it still tough over there? Yes. Are we still losing troops? Yes. I regret that very much. But we've got to stick with it and we've got to help the Iraqis develop their capability to deal with this insurgency and put it down. And brave Iraqis are stepping forward every day -- policemen, soldiers, political officials, appointed officials -- all putting their lives at risk to give the Iraqi people what they want, what they deserve and what they are going to have as a result of what we were prepared to do and what President Bush led a coalition to do: get rid of one regime and bring in a better, better form of government.

MR. HANNITY: The world is a better place. I can concur.

SECRETARY POWELL: Yes.

MR. HANNITY: All right, I know the question you're not going to answer. So you are going to stick around for four more years?

SECRETARY POWELL: (Laughter.)

MR. HANNITY: I have to ask it because --

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, you know, my term -- I'm not on a term. I serve at the pleasure of the President. But nice try, Sean. You always try it. (Laughter.)

MR. HANNITY: Mr. Secretary, it's always an honor to talk to you. Secretary of State Colin Powell, thanks for being with us. Have a great weekend, a good weekend, and we'll talk hopefully again soon and maybe we'll see you soon.

SECRETARY POWELL: Okay, Sean. Bye.

(end transcript)

(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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