Bangkok--Aug 19--Francom Asia
Airtimes: Saturday, August 20 at 17:00
Saturday, August 21 at 11:00 and 17:00 (replays)
A commission appointed by President Bush says U.S. intelligence concerning Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was “dead wrong.” With remarkable access, a new CNN PRESENTS documentary pieces together the chain of events that led to the faulty intelligence and examines the roles played by key players in the Bush administration and in the intelligence community.
“DEAD WRONG — INSIDE AN INTELLIGENCE MELTDOWN,” reported by CNN national security correspondent David Ensor, premieres Saturday, August 20.
The presidential commission said “the harm done to American credibility by our all too public intelligence failings in Iraq will take years to undo.” In DEAD WRONG, CNN PRESENTS interviews government officials intimately involved in the process and provides new insight to how the mistakes were made and how they might be avoided in the future.
The following are quotes from the documentary. Please credit CNN PRESENTS in all uses:
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff from 2002-2005 on Powell’s address to the United Nations on Iraq and WMD: “I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life. I wish I had not been involved.”
Wilkerson, recalling a conversation with Powell: “He walked into my office, musing, and he said words to the effect of, ‘I wonder how we’ll all feel if we put half a million troops into Iraq and march from one corner of the country to the other and find nothing?’”
Carl Ford, assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research: “Once an analyst starts believing their own work and quits doubting themselves and starts saying, ‘I’m going to prove to you that they’ve got nuclear weapons,’ watch out, be on the alert.”
Ford, on whether Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program: “I think that it would have been more accurate for the intelligence community to say, ‘Boss, we don’t know exactly what’s going on there. And there are some indications that they may be working on their nuclear program again, but don’t ask us to go up and prove that to anybody because it’s mostly guess work on our part.’”
David Kay, former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, on the future of U.S. intelligence gathering: “We can’t afford to be wrong a second time. How many people are going to believe us when we say, ‘It’s a slam dunk Iran has nuclear weapons?’ The answer is going to be: ‘You said that before.’”
Michael Scheuer, CIA analyst from 1982-2004: “There was just a resignation within the agency that we were going to war against Iraq, and it didn’t make any difference what the analysis was, or what kind of objections or countervailing forces there were to an invasion. We were going to war.”
AIRTIMES ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE
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