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October 01, 2006

Jane Harman, Newt Gingrich, Daniel Benjamin, Michael Scheuer, Lawrence Wright, Roundtable

Fox News Sunday

CHRIS WALLACE, HOST: I'm Chris Wallace. New pictures surface of the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks -- next, next on "Fox News Sunday."

The Clinton interview -- it started as a media event...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WILLIAM CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You did your nice little conservative hit job on me.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: ... became a hot political issue.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We'll let history judge. I don't have enough time to fingerpoint.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

U.S. SENATOR HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY): I think my husband did a great job in demonstrating that Democrats are not going to take these attacks.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Even the late-night comics weighed in.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHILD ON NBC'S "THE TONIGHT SHOW": Don't you like Santa?

CLINTON IMPERSONATOR: I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized...

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Today, we'll discuss how our interview has changed the landscape for November with Congresswoman Jane Harman and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

Plus, separating fact from spin about what two presidents did before 9/11. We've assembled a truth squad: a former member of the Clinton National Security Council, the former CIA official in charge of hunting Osama bin Laden, and a journalist who spent years traveling the world and dug up new information on our fight against Al Qaida.

Then Bob Woodward's new book says the situation in Iraq is worse than the White House is telling us. We'll talk with our Sunday regulars: Brit Hume, Mara Liasson, Bill Kristol and Juan Williams.

And a special look back at our week that was -- all right now on "Fox News Sunday."

And good morning again from Fox News in Washington. Here's a quick check of the latest headlines.

There's new video out this morning of Mohammed Atta, the terrorist who flew a hijacked jet into the World Trade Center on 9/11. The tape, made in January of 2000, shows Atta along with others who took part in the attacks. Officials say the tape helps confirm Atta's movements before 9/11.

House Republican leaders have apparently known for months that Congressman Mark Foley sent inappropriate e-mails to a 16-year-old male page. A report today says Speaker Dennis Hastert learned about the e-mails early this year, but that they were described as "overfriendly."

And a former teammate of Roger Clemens allegedly has linked the all- star pitcher to performance-enhancing drugs. Clemens and five other players are named in a legal affidavit.

Well, our interview last week with former President Clinton prompted an outpouring of reaction. Joining us to discuss the fallout, Congresswoman Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

Welcome back, both of you, to "Fox News Sunday."

NEWT GINGRICH, FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Good to be here.

WALLACE: Before we get to the Clinton interview, let's start, as we always do, with the latest news.

It now turns out that, as we said, top Republican House leaders knew for months that Congressman Mark Foley sent inappropriate e-mails to at least one 16-year-old male page.

Speaker Gingrich, did House Republican leaders do all they should have?

GINGRICH: Well, I think if you look at what they actually knew, which was that the family did not want anyone involved and the actual notes were relatively innocuous -- there was nothing sexual in those notes. They had him counseled. They had the head of the page program, Congressman Shimkus, talk to him very directly. And I think they thought it was over. The newest incident only surfaced when ABC News interviewed Foley, and he resigned within two hours, or I think the House leaders would have moved to expel him.

WALLACE: But during all those months, they left Foley in the House Republican leadership. They left him as the head of the congressional caucus dealing with exploited children. No second thoughts about that?

GINGRICH: Well, you can have second thoughts about it, but I think, had they overly aggressively reacted to the initial round, they would have also been accused of gay bashing. I mean, the original notes had no sexual innuendo, and the parents did not want any action taken.

WALLACE: Well, how would it have been gay bashing?

GINGRICH: Because it was a male-male relationship. And they had no -- there was no proof, there was nothing that I know of in that initial round that would have led you to say in a normal circumstance that this is a predatory person. It's very clear -- and let me remind you, in 1983, I moved to expel two members for dealing with pages inappropriately, because I do think we have an en loco parentis responsibility. But I think it would have been very hard to have done much more than they did with the first action. And in the second action, had he not resigned, I think they would have expelled him.

WALLACE: Congresswoman Harman, did top Republican leaders in the House act appropriately in this case?

REP. JANE HARMAN (D), CALIFORNIA: Well, I'm a mother of four and a newly minted grandmother. And I don't know all the facts. All I know are the facts I read in the newspaper and some conversation on the floor, which I don't think is adequate. But I think this should be investigated objectively. I think the Democratic leadership should have been told 10 months ago. This was a very serious charge. And just because one page's family doesn't want facts out, I don't think is an adequate reason to do nothing. And I gather that basically nothing was done, except that Foley was warned, and Foley appears to have misled people, obviously misled people, about what he was up to. I mean, it's a human tragedy, not just for him but for all those involved. And I am not comfortable with where we're leaving this. It's not my call what we do next, but more needs to be done.

WALLACE: When you say not comfortable with where they're leaving it, it's going to the House Ethics Committee.

HARMAN: Well, it's going to the House Ethics Committee now. There's been a Republican investigation for 24 hours of Republican activity. I just don't think that that is adequate. And it's not my call what is asked for next, but my view is, as a parent and a grandparent, that we need to do more to create a comfort level for those parents who are sending young pages, children under 18, to serve in the House.

WALLACE: Let's turn to my interview with former President Clinton in which he said that he did a better job fighting Al Qaida than President Bush has. Let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

W. CLINTON: If I were still president, we'd have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him. Now, I've never criticized President Bush, and I don't think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is only one-seventh as important as Iraq. And you ask me about terror?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Let's turn to the issue of what both presidents did pre- 9/11. We already know about the August 2001 CIA memo to the president that warned him that bin Laden wanted to attack America. But now we have learned, in the new Bob Woodward book, that in July of 2001, CIA Director George Tenet was so worried about an imminent attack -- this was just two months before 9/11 -- that he met with then-National Security Advisor Rice and felt that she gave him the brush-off.

Speaker Gingrich, does former President Clinton have a point about the Bush administration?

GINGRICH: I think he has a point about the Bush administration; I think people have a point about his administration. But we need to start figuring out how to play the solution game.

We are in a very hard war against people who hate us and want to destroy us. The fact is neither administration has gotten bin Laden. And instead of pointing fingers at each other, it would be nice for President Clinton to give us six or eight solutions. It would be nice for President Bush to admit this is going to be much harder than anybody ever dreamed. Winning this campaign is going to be a long, bitter, difficult problem.

WALLACE: I promise to move forward in a moment, but, Congresswoman Harman, I want to give you a chance to respond to the same question. Bill Clinton had eight years. George W. Bush had eight months.

HARMAN: Well, let's look at the history. It goes over four presidencies. I mean, the first modern terrorist attacks were to the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, the U.S. embassy in Lebanon, the Achille Lauro, Pan Am 103. Those were all during the Reagan administration.

Then in Bush I, we cut the defense and intelligence budgets because we declared a peace dividend because the Cold War ended. Great achievement. And I'd love to give credit to Reagan and Bush I for that.

Then we start the Clinton years with too-low expenditures, I'm sure Newt would agree with me, both on defense and intelligence. I was elected to Congress then, and my aerospace district in California had lots of triple Ph.D.s out of work.

In the mid '90s, we realized the world was more dangerous on a bipartisan basis, and we start adding to the budgets on a bipartisan basis. We double the counterterrorism budget. We add 20 percent to intelligence. We prevent the millennium plot. Yes, I think Bill Clinton did a lot.

Then we have eight months, nine months of Bush. And this July 10 memo you just mentioned, Chris, is news to me, the July 10 meeting, and it's something we should explore. I mean, that is as close to a smoking gun as I can imagine. Condi Rice did nothing, and she was told by two senior terrorism officials that their hair was on fire.

WALLACE: Let's move if we can, because I know you want to, Speaker Gingrich, to the present, because there's plenty in the Bob Woodward book about that as well.

He reveals that, this May, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a secret assessment of the situation in Iraq to the president and all the top officials. And let's put it up on the screen: "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase the current level of violence through the next year."

But two days after that secret Pentagon report, which said that, in fact, the situation could get even worse in 2007, the Pentagon sent a public report to Congress, and let's put part of that up on the screen, in which it said: "Appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane, to reduce, in early 2007."

Speaker Gingrich, is the president misleading the American people about the situation in Iraq?

GINGRICH: Well, I think what you just said -- and Jane may want to comment -- I think what you just reported was two Pentagon documents. I mean, I think there's a genuine intellectual fight under way inside the government among professionals over the way ahead. And I think one group is saying, "Stay the course. Hold things steady. This will all work." And the other group of equally serious professionals is saying, "This is much harder than you think it is. You had better rethink your entire strategy."

This is a genuine fight in the intelligence community and a genuine fight at the State and Defense departments. And I think the president, in that sense, has two different camps in the government today over how to do this.

WALLACE: Congresswoman Harman, how do you explain this disparity between the private intelligence estimates that the top officials in the Bush administration are getting and what they're putting out, in this particular case in a report to the Congress and public and statements that the president has made?

HARMAN: Well, first of all, I want to applaud Newt for saying in 2003 that an occupation of Iraq was a bad idea. He criticized Jerry Bremer, who was then there and our Coalition Provisional Authority, for following the wrong strategy. He turned out to be right, as he sometimes is.

(LAUGHTER)

The intelligence is not in equal piles. The intelligence is overwhelmingly negative and has been since the military effort ended. We didn't have a post-war plan. We've made incredible mistakes. And stubbornly, this president sticks to stay the course.

He says there are only two options: stay the course or cut and run. The right option is change the course, protect our troops on the ground. It's almost reckless endangerment, Chris, to have these kids there and have the intelligence say so clearly that they're in harm's way.

WALLACE: But I'm asking a different question, not the question of what the policy should be. How do you explain the fact that the public statements do not reflect the private intelligence?

HARMAN: Well, I think that there's an evidence-free zone in the White House and the top levels of the Pentagon. Regardless of what the intelligence says, regardless of what some of their key inside advisors say, they say something different in public.

WALLACE: All right. I'm going to ask you a question, though, about the situation, Congresswoman Harman. President Bush went after your party and, in fact, you personally the other day. Let's take a look. Here it is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: The party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: But, Congresswoman, this week Congress passed a bill authorizing the interrogation and prosecution of terror detainees. And I want you to take a look at the vote count. Let's put it up on the screen. In the House, 82 percent of Democrats, including you, voted against that measure. In the Senate, 32 of 44 senators opposed the measure.

Doesn't the president have a point when he says, "Every time I ask for a tool to fight the terrorists, whether it's the Patriot Act, whether it's warrantless wiretaps, whether it's this bill to handle terror detainees, most Democrats, including yourself, oppose it"?

HARMAN: Let me respond: Bring it on. Article 1, section 8, of the Constitution says Congress shall regulate captures on land and on water. Members of Congress, including me, for five years have been talking to this White House about drafting fair and balanced legislation to deal with this problem. We're all for detaining these guys. We're all for prosecuting them. And I am for, if it's under strict limits, with clear oversight by Congress, treating high-value detainees differently.

But this bill, with the exception of the one piece that John McCain negotiated, is a power shift from Congress and the courts to the White House so that they can do whatever they want. We've just ratified their blank check. And I think it's irresponsible, and I think it's probably unconstitutional.

And they did it in the last week of Congress to put Democrats and some conscientious Republicans in a box so they could cut their 30- second spots for the election.

WALLACE: So, Speaker Gingrich, have they, in fact, put Democrats in a box? And is this now back to the Karl Rove playbook, they're "soft on terrorism"?

GINGRICH: First of all, this was all in response to a Supreme Court decision called Hamdan, in which the administration had to get something passed or they had no authority.

Second, there's a genuine, legitimate disagreement between those people who believe that this is a vicious, brutal war and requires wartime rules and those people who believe you can handle this as a criminal justice matter and have procedures that are more like the criminal justice system.

That's a very significant difference of approach, and it tends to fall into the two parties -- not totally. I think Senator Lieberman, for example, voted for the administration bill.

But the challenge you have I think is going to get worse. There's a French professor today who is in hiding because there are Web sites that show his home and that urge people to go kill him because he wrote an article that criticized Muhammad. Now, we're going to find ourselves in the next four or five years looking at bills involving civil liberties we never dreamed of because our enemies are going to give us no choice.

And I just think we have to confront -- I mean, Jane's right. This is a very important debate about the future of the country. There are two very different approaches to how to do it. And I think what you saw was an honest reflection of the difference between the two parties.

WALLACE: We're going to have to leave it there. Speaker Gingrich, Congresswoman Harman, I want to thank you both for coming in and talking with us today. Pleasure, as always.

Up next, what really was done by two presidents before 9/11 to fight Al Qaida? We'll ask a truth squad we've assembled, right after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WALLACE: Bill Clinton said a lot of things in our interview last week. How much of it was true? Well, we've assembled a panel of experts to discuss just that: Daniel Benjamin, a counterterrorism expert for the Clinton National Security Council; Michael Scheuer, who ran the CIA unit that hunted Osama bin Laden; and Lawrence Wright, author of a behind-the- scenes new book on the run-up to 9/11 called "The Looming Tower."

We should note we invited Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism expert President Clinton mentioned last week, but he declined.

Gentlemen, thank you all for coming today.

Let's start with President Clinton's claim in our interview that he may not have known in 1993 about Osama bin Laden but that, as time went on, he became very knowledgeable about him. Here it is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Did they know in 1996 when he declared war on the U.S.? Did they know in 1998...

W. CLINTON: Absolutely, absolutely...

WALLACE: ... when he bombed the two embassies? Did they know in 2000 when he hit the Cole?

W. CLINTON: What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized the finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody's gotten since.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Mr. Scheuer, as the man in charge of what was called "Alec Station," the CIA unit in charge of hunting down Osama bin Laden, you say the Clinton administration missed at least 10 chances to get him. I don't want to go into all 10, but what was the problem?

MICHAEL SCHEUER, FORMER CIA AGENT: Well, the president is correct, in that he got - President Clinton is correct that he got closer than anyone, but, of course, he always refused to pull the trigger. And in addition, we were never authorized, while I was the chief of operations, to kill Osama bin Laden. In fact, Mr. Richard Clarke definitely told us we had no authorization to kill bin Laden.

Why they didn't shoot, of course, is, at least from Mr. Tenet's viewpoint it was because one time they were afraid to have shrapnel hit a mosque when they killed bin Laden. And two other times I think they were afraid they actually would have to do something, so they warned the emirates on one occasion, the princes from the United Arab Emirates, to move so we couldn't attack bin Laden.

WALLACE: They were on a hunting trip with bin Laden.

SCHEUER: Yes, sir. And Richard Clarke called the emirates and warned them that they should get out of that area, which cost us the chance to kill him.

WALLACE: Mr. Benjamin, you were working in the National Security Council at that time. Weren't there a number of cases where the Clinton administration had bin Laden in their sights and refused or failed to pull the trigger?

DAVID BENJAMIN, FORMER MEMBER OF CLINTON'S NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL: Well, as the 9/11 Commission report has shown, the answer to that is no. On three different occasions we had some intelligence that bin Laden might be in a particular place at a particular time, and we had warships off the coast of Pakistan ready to shoot cruise missiles. However, we never got the confirming intelligence.

I have the greatest respect for Mike Scheuer, but on this case I think he's wrong, because, quite simply, we never had enough information to do this with confidence, knowing that we would get the target. And it doesn't help your deterrence and it doesn't help your case if you fire and you don't hit the right person.

WALLACE: Mr. Wright, one of the strongest points I picked out from your book was, you talk a lot about the so-called wall that was barring the sharing of information between the CIA and the FBI. And you say repeatedly that it blocked, it hindered efforts to get bin Laden.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT, AUTHOR: Right. The wall was, to some extent, legal. There was a small legal wall constructed within the FBI between criminal and intelligence agents. But the mythical wall, the nonexistent legal wall, grew up between these cultures, and they naturally decided not to share information. There's a natural jealousy in all intelligence agencies about their information.

WALLACE: But give us one, very briefly, an example of the kind of case where if one side, the FBI, had known what the CIA knew or vice versa, it could have made all the difference.

WRIGHT: Well, in January of 2000, two members of Al Qaida flew from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles and then moved to San Diego. In March of 2000, the CIA learned of this, and they didn't tell the FBI. This is a year and a half before 9/11. And once they're in the U.S., they really belong to the FBI.

WALLACE: In our interview, President Clinton was very emphatic that after the attack on the USS Cole in October of 2000, he was ready to go to war. Let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

W. CLINTON: After the Cole, I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and launch a full-scale attack and search for bin Laden.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Now, Mr. Wright, you say in your book - and I must say I mentioned this to President Clinton in our interview last week - that bin Laden was so sure after the Cole attack that he was going to be hit that he separated, he scattered all of his leaders, but there was no response. Why not?

WRIGHT: Well, they took place 25 days before the general election, for one thing, so it would have been politically difficult.

I think this whole thing about the FBI and the CIA not warranting that Al Qaida did it was done as a kind of "you don't want to know" basis. Because everybody knew Al Qaida did it. And, you know, the intelligence agencies were reporting to the NSC what the FBI guys on the ground in Yemen were finding. They knew that it was Al Qaida in early November. But the leadership of those two agencies wouldn't certify it, in my opinion, because they didn't want the president to have to know that.

WALLACE: Let me ask you about that, Mr. Benjamin, because that was one of the points that President Clinton made in our interview, that it wasn't certified by the FBI and the CIA. Two points about that: One, he's the commander in chief. The CIA and the FBI don't work for - I mean, they work for him, he doesn't work for them. And two, doesn't this get to the whole issue as to whether or not this was viewed as law enforcement or a war?

BENJAMIN: No, I don't think it has anything to do with that. I think it has to do with having a standard of proof that you know that there was outside leadership of Al Qaida directing an attack in Yemen, and could you attack that outside leadership in Afghanistan on that basis? I think it's a very clear issue.

The whole discussion of a law enforcement paradigm versus a war paradigm is, in many ways, just a myth, because the war on terror, if you want to call it that, was conducted in a way before 9/11 that involved an awful lot of intelligence operations that had nothing to do with law enforcement.

This was about being able to say we got the right guys. And it was a very difficult time. It was right before the election. He needed to have proof to justify this kind of attack.

WALLACE: But, Mr. Scheuer, I can see you beginning to shake your head. I mean, whether or not they had certifiable proof about the Cole, they certainly knew that Al Qaida had been involved in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa. In your opinion, as somebody who was up close and personal, why didn't the Clinton administration go after Al Qaida after the USS Cole?

SCHEUER: Mr. Wallace, my opinion is not all that important. I went to a little Jesuit school in Buffalo called Canicius, and the priests taught us never to lie, but if you had to lie, never lie about facts. Mr. Richard Clarke, Mr. Sandy Berger, President Clinton are lying about the opportunities they had to kill Osama bin Laden. That's the plain truth, the exact truth.

Men and women at the CIA risked their lives to provide occasions to kill a man we knew had declared war and had attacked America four or five times before 1998. We had plans that had been approved by the Joint Operations Command at Fort Bragg. We had opportunities, many opportunities to kill him.

But that's the president's decision. That's absolutely the case. It's not a simple, dumb bureaucrat like me; that's not my decision. It's his. But for him to get on the television and say to the American people he did all he could is a flat lie, sir.

WALLACE: Mr. Benjamin?

BENJAMIN: Well, I simply disagree. The plans that Mike is referring to about being approved were actually disapproved by his own chain of command. The CIA did not have confidence in the operation that was drawn up, and we couldn't go forward with it.

After the attack on the East Africa embassies, the covert operations were restarted, and again the same assets that were being involved earlier proved to be feckless and didn't deliver the goods.

(CROSSTALK)

SCHEUER: ... saying this, that what Mr. Benjamin, who I have a great deal of respect for, but what I say doesn't matter. What matters is the documents that back up what I have to say or what Mr. Benjamin has to say.

The 9/11 Commission ignored those documents, didn't publish them to the American people, let no one involved with the effort to get bin Laden testify to the American people.

This is not a question of interpretation or judgment. This is a question of fact. And the documents will show the president had the opportunity.

WALLACE: All right. I want to get into one last area here, and I'll give you all an opportunity. One of the other issues that I discussed with President Clinton was the transition to the Bush administration in 2001, and here's what President Clinton had to say about that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

W. CLINTON: At least I tried. That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers that are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.

So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti- terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke, who got demoted.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Mr. Benjamin, wasn't the plan that President Clinton talks about there, the plan that Dick Clarke presented to Condi Rice in January of 2001, wasn't that awfully close to the delenda plan, "delenda" being Latin for destruction, which, in fact, he had drawn up in 1998 in the Clinton years and in fact was rejected by the Clinton White House?

BENJAMIN: Well, I was no longer in the administration. My understanding was that it was an elaboration of the original program. And things, of course, had changed because of the bombing of the Cole. This involved elaborate diplomatic approaches to other governments that a new administration needed to take on.

I do think that the key point here is that President Clinton is correct. The administration came into office. They held a meeting immediately on regime change in Iraq. They didn't hold a meeting of the principals of the National Security Council until September 4 on Al Qaida. They didn't take the threat nearly as seriously as their predecessors had, and valuable time was lost.

WALLACE: Mr. Scheuer, you're very critical of President Clinton, as we've seen today, but you also are on the record as saying that President Bush was, quote, "absolutely negligent in his failure to do more in the first eight months."

SCHEUER: Oh, I think that's absolutely the case. And I think that this administration has led us into a tremendously difficult long-term problem, which will be very bloody and costly for Americans.

I think fair is fair, though. Mr. Clarke, Mr. Berger, Mr. Clinton did have opportunities that were delivered by the men and women of the CIA to kill Osama bin Laden. In the first eight months of the Bush administration, there were no such opportunities. Could Bush have done more?

BENJAMIN: He didn't create any either.

SCHEUER: There were no such opportunities.

BENJAMIN: There were no votes (ph)?

SCHEUER: Well, the agency was still in the field. We were still trying to collect information. We didn't know where he was. I'm not saying that what they did or not was right, but the fact is Bush didn't have eyes on target.

WALLACE: Let me bring Mr. Wright into this, as well.

As someone -- and I have read your book -- who has reported this exhaustively for years around the world, after the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa, after the attack on the USS Cole, and it's not like the slate gets wiped clean when a new president comes in, why did both presidents fail to appreciate and take more seriously the threat of Al Qaida?

WRIGHT: Well, first of all, they were both poorly served by their intelligence agencies. And this is not a Clinton or a Bush problem; it goes back to Carter. It has been withered for decades under many administrations. And the will to act had also withered along with that.

And so, when it gets down time for Mike -- you know, when Clinton says, "Get him," and Mike is in charge of getting him, he doesn't have the kind of people really available to him. They're trying to hire tribal people who are not CIA employees. They're trying to give them some kind of reward if they capture him. They don't have people that speak natively Arabic and...

WALLACE: I understand that, but wasn't it also failure of will by both presidents?

WRIGHT: I think if they actually had a real moment of having bin Laden in their sights, but the truth is, on each of these occasions, when they had tribals who said they thought that he was there, one time when he was in the governor's house but he actually left, another time when the CIA had mistakenly given information that led to the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and then the best opportunity to get bin Laden arises right after that, and, you know, and Clinton -- and Tenet had a failure of nerve.

In each of these cases, the intelligence was not great. And the reason the intelligence was not great is they didn't have people that were capable of getting inside the tent.

WALLACE: All right. We could talk about this, and I wish we could, talk about this a lot more. And I want to thank you for coming in today and helping us try to set the record straight.

Coming up, our panel of Sunday regulars talks national security: Democrats energized by the Clinton interview, while Republicans pass legislation to handle terror detainees. Stay tuned.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D), NEW YORK: I think my husband did a great job in demonstrating that Democrats are not going to take these attacks.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: All the different, you know, finger-pointing and all that business -- I don't have enough time to finger-point.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: That was just part of the fallout this week from Bill Clinton's energetic interview on "FOX News Sunday." And it's panel time now for our Sunday regulars. Brit Hume, Washington managing editor of FOX News, and FOX News contributors Mara Liasson of National Public Radio, Bill Kristol of "The Weekly Standard," and Juan Williams also from National Public Radio.

Well, I have to say that I am shocked -- not displeased, but shocked - - to see that the Clinton interview continues to have this kind of fallout a week later. But as you just saw from those clips, it seemed to dovetail neatly into the larger national security debate between the Republican and Democratic parties.

At one point this week, we had Secretary of State Rice and Senator Clinton facing off again with each other. Brit, why do you think that the pre-9/11 actions or failures to act are still so politically explosive?

HUME: Because 9/11 is the biggest event of our time. It was a terrible thing, and responsibility for it is something historians will be examining for as long as there are historians. It's just a very big deal.

And for President Clinton, who had a successful, popular presidency during what appeared, at least on the surface, to be a wonderful time in America with a booming stock market and no wars in the world to speak of, this is a terrific threat to the legacy of a president who really had no massive major huge challenges of the kind that make big history.

And what I think he's concerned about -- and understandably so -- is that the big history that will be made about him is that he did nothing serious to abate the greatest threat then facing our country, which then came into fruition on 9/11.

LIASSON: Look, I think it is definitely good politics for the Republican base when Clinton is blamed for pre-11 lapses. I think it's great for the Democratic base when Clinton fights back hard against his detractors. I think one thing we've seen with President Clinton over and over again is, as usual, he gives ammunition to his enemies and heart to his supporters all at the very same time.

And I think when you hear Hillary Rodham Clinton saying, "My husband is right to fight back against these accusations," she is really representing the kind of battle cry of the Democrats this year, which is, "We will not be swift-boated again."

And they feel that they've been unfairly attacked for being weak on national security again and again, and that this year, this election year, is going to be different. And I think it fits perfectly into the bigger debate over national security in a week where you have the president of the United States saying the Democratic Party is the party of cut and run.

This issue is intensely partisan; it's intensely politicized. What you're not hearing anything about in this election campaign is what do we do now, what do we do next, to solve this problem?

WALLACE: You know, I seldom, seldom disagree with you. But you advanced a theory this week that perhaps this whole thing was premeditated by Bill Clinton to rally the Democrats. And I'm not saying you fell into this, but some of your colleagues in the press, a fellow named David Remnick, who seems to be in full Clinton spin cycle, advanced the same theory.

I'm going to reveal something today for the first time, which was that we -- I've mentioned it in the past -- that when the interview was going on, that the press secretary to Bill Clinton was jabbing my producer in the shoulder saying, "End this interview right away. Shut off the cameras."

After he left -- and I said before that he was shouting at his staff in the hall -- in fact, he threatened to fire them if they ever got into this kind of situation again. So premeditated, I don't think so.

KRISTOL: Well, maybe not. I, of course, agree with Hillary Clinton. I admire Bill for standing up to the outrageous assault that you launched on him by daring to ask him about whether he was entirely happy with what he had done to prevent 9/11.

I don't know. He obviously got genuinely angry. I also think that he had stored up these arguments, and he wanted to lay them out. He thought there was an advantage to defending his legacy, to trying to intimidate journalists from asking this question in the future. That was what was going on there. I do think that's true.

He may have been genuinely angry, but he thought -- he didn't intimidate you, but he thought if he could intimidate others from raising the whole issue of his administration's actions and failures to act prior to 9/11 and, therefore, in a sense, to prevent -- to almost make the whole discussion about which party is better on terror, make that sort of illegitimate. Put it out of bounds.

We had a vote this past week. Obviously, the two parties differed on this particular issue of how to treat detainees. The Democratic talking point isn't to defend their position. It's to say, "Well, this is politically an illegitimate debate," almost. I think that's what Clinton was trying to do.

WILLIAMS: What strikes me is that whenever we question -- have questions about President Bush's conduct pre-9/11, people say, "Well, why politicize that? You know, we're all struggling, we're all trying to get it done." But when it comes to discussions of President Clinton's role, it's apparently fair game to go after Clinton. I think that's a double standard. And I think that's what Clinton, in part, is reacting to.

It's interesting to me -- I saw a Gallup Poll this week that asked the American people, "Who do you think is more responsible for the failure to capture bin Laden or kill bin Laden?" And the answer is like 53 percent. It's President Bush, not Bill Clinton.

And, yet, the emphasis -- and I think this is something Clinton said to you in a challenging way -- the emphasis is always on what Clinton hasn't done as opposed to what Bush didn't do. And so all those questions, it seems to me, reside on Bush's watch, and yet the emphasis coming from the right wing has been, maybe astutely so, to attack Clinton and undermine Clinton going forward.

HUME: Until, Chris, Clinton sat for this round of interviews -- and, by the way, it's not clear to me, Bill, that any intimidation of journalists were needed to avoid that question because Chris, after all, despite the fact that a number of other media celebrities interviewed him, was the only one who asked the question, as you've noted. The question was very mildly worded.

I must tell you, Juan, I haven't been listening and hearing much of many, many attacks in recent times about the Clinton record on this. It's kind of -- until he came out and this all happened, it wasn't being talked about.

WILLIAMS: What about "The Path to 9/11," that ABC movie?

HUME: Well, that was fictionalized history.

WILLIAMS: What about Rush Limbaugh literally days after in the pages of the "Wall Street Journal"?

HUME: Well, they made a big deal out of trying to suppress that documentary. What I'm saying to you is that the national debate as you see it played out here in Washington and day in and day out in the pages of the news media has not much been about the Clinton record pre-9/11.

Most people, I think, in the country felt that after the 9/11 Commission report came out that that whole pre-9/11 question had been reviewed, authoritatively, nobody was covered with glory, and ended.

WALLACE: Let me, if I can -- because everybody keeps saying -- we keep going back into this, but everybody says, "Let's talk about the present and the future." There was another big development on the national security front this week, Mara.

Congress passed this terror detainee bill that, as I pointed out to Congresswoman Harman, 80-plus percent of Democrats in the House opposed the Bill; 3/4 of Democrats in the Senate opposed the bill. Have they once again opened themselves up to Karl Rove's attack line, they're soft on terror?

LIASSON: Well, the attack lines are happening all over the country now regardless of how Democrats in the majority voted on these bills. I do think two things are happening. One, Democrats feel as a whole that these attacks are not as potent as they were in the past because of what's happening in Iraq.

I think on the other hand, when you look at who voted for it, it's Democrats in tight races. So Democrats in tight races in general voted with the president. But on the whole, as you said, a majority of Democrats voted against it. And I don't think they're as worried as they were in the past. They chose not to filibuster. They clearly chose not to make this some kind of a huge fight, but they're not as afraid of those attacks as they were in the past.

WALLACE: Real quickly, Bill.

KRISTOL: I think they should be worried. This was a vote. You know, as Mara said, people attack each other all the time. Here we have a vote on the record, more than 3/4 of Democrats voting against tough interrogation techniques for detainees. I think the Republicans -- it genuinely illustrates the difference and understanding on how to fight the war on terror between the two parties. It was an actual, recorded vote in both houses of Congress.

WILLIAMS: Let me just say very quickly, there's a 14th Amendment in our Constitution that requires equal treatment under law for all Americans.

HUME: Enemy combatants? Battlefield detainees?

WILLIAMS: We should apply it in a way that keeps with our morals, Brit. We are Americans. We have a different standard than the terrorists, and I don't want to go down to the terrorists' standard.

HUME: When we had several hundred thousand prisoners held here with no trial of any kind during the Second World War, were we an immoral nation then?

WILLIAM: I think we had a challenge then, we had a different situation. We were fighting a clear enemy state. We're fighting terrorists now.

WALLACE: We need to take a break here, but we're going to continue this conversation. And also coming up, the new Bob Woodward book and that leaked national intelligence estimate. How does it all fit into the fall campaign? We'll ask the panel when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WALLACE: On this day in 1908, the Model T Ford was introduced to the American public as a reliable car for the average American. Better known as the Tin Lizzie, the Model T helped put America on the road. Stay tuned for more from our panel.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TONY SNOW, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: In a lot of ways, the books are like cotton candy. It kind of melts on contact.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), HOUSE MINORITY LEADER: The president failed on all of those scores, and he has become Mr. Rosy-Scenario.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: That was White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi reacting to Bob Woodward's new book called "State of Denial." And we're back now with Brit, Mara, Bill and Juan.

Well, as we've been saying, Woodward has written another book just in time for the fall campaign, and it is interesting. He says the president has been far more optimistic about Iraq in public than the secret intelligence he's getting.

And he also says that everybody, just about, in the Bush administration except the president and the vice president -- those are two pretty big exceptions -- was fed up and wanted Don Rumsfeld out. Brit, your thoughts about what we know about the book so far.

HUME: Well, I haven't had -- don't have the book, haven't read the book. I just read some of the excerpts. It's not all that much to go on. My guess is that most of what's reported in the book is right. Bob Woodward is a careful reporter, and he probably -- the facts as stated are probably correct.

The question is whether they fit into an overall pattern of the kind he describes, and that's where I think it's probably more subject to challenge. And there are obviously some details in there, the question, for example, of whether a request for more troops by Paul Bremer was disregarded, it turns out, perhaps, not to be so.

But on balance, is this administration and this president in what the book calls a state of denial about the situation in Iraq? I don't think so. I think that no one is more aware of the difficulties there than the president and those around him.

The question they face is, of course, whether you try to see this through, believing, as Henry Kissinger is quoted in the book as saying, victory is the only exit strategy, or whether you try to figure out a way to get the heck out of there. So I think that's what it comes down to.

WALLACE: Mara, when you take this and you add it to what the national intelligence estimate that was partially leaked last Sunday and then more of it was disclosed this week by the president, which again seems to indicate that the president is receiving more negative, grimmer private intelligence than perhaps what he's saying to the American public, is that a problem for him, and is it an avenue of attack for the Democrats?

LIASSON: I think it is, because I think what the White House has been trying to do is to kind of de-link Iraq from the war on terror. The war on terror is where, politically, they're firmer on ground. But I think the NIE and the Woodward book re-links it again in a negative way.

It adds up to an impression that, gee, the Iraq war is going badly, more badly than we thought or more badly than the administration is telling you. Now, that clearly can be used as ammunition for the Democrats.

It doesn't suggest the solution. Does it suggest that we should get out? Not necessarily. Maybe it merely suggests we should try to figure out a better plan for being victorious there, because if we're not, whether we fail or whether we get out, the results will be disastrous.

WALLACE: Bill?

KRISTOL: The Bush administration has not tried to de-link Iraq and the war on terror. The president says in every speech that Iraq is a central front in the war on terror. The question is, are we doing everything we should be doing to win in Iraq?

I think the American people -- the FOX poll shows this -- they want to win in Iraq, and they will support changes in strategy to win in Iraq. What they won't support, I think, is a sense that we're just hunkering down, we're going to try to tough it out, and that the president is not open to rethinking strategy and tactics.

But if he can -- the president can make clear that if he gets a Republican Congress, he's going to pursue the war on terror on all fronts, whether it's detainees or Iraq or Iran, that we're fighting one jihadist enemy, and that he's willing to rethink tactics where they're not working. I think he gets support. If it becomes a president who's hunkered down, not listening to criticism, then he's in trouble.

WILLIAMS: Well, that's the problem. He's been hunkered down. And people have a sense that he is detached, in a bubble, however you want to put it, and hasn't been listening.

Now, the president was on a roll, and I think Republicans were doing better approaching the midterms over the last several weeks. I don't think there's any question about that. You saw his numbers bump up, not anything great, but over 40 percent, where it wasn't going to quite be the drag on Republican candidates.

But with the NIE and now the Woodward book, the conversation has shifted back from war on terror, where the president is strong, as Mara was saying, and back clearly to this ground that's so controversial where you have 2/3 of the American people saying, "It's wrong, it's a mistake. We don't like this policy."

KRISTOL: Wait, wait, wait. But the NIE says getting out of Iraq would be disastrous.

WALLACE: You know what, guys? We could talk about this forever. And we'll talk about it next week. But before we leave -- and we've got a couple of minutes left -- I want to talk about the Mark Foley scandal. Mara, you're the one who spent the most time covering -- and there's two issues: what Foley did, and perhaps most importantly, the issue of what the House Republican leaders did or failed to do.

LIASSON: Right. I think the question now is how this affects the midterms. That's what people are talking about. Foley's seat, which was considered to be his -- it's a competitive seat, but he was going to win -- now, I think, might be a potential loss to the Republicans.

There's another seat that's affected, which is Tom Reynolds, the head of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, who now is at war with Dennis Hastert about how soon the speaker's office actually knew about this problem. Reynolds is in a very tight race of his own in upstate New York. That also could be hurt.

WALLACE: Brit, bigger issue here. Does this feed into a sense that, certainly at least the Democrats are arguing, that it shows an arrogant Republican majority that, you know, is more concerned about incumbency than about, in this particular case, protecting kids?

HUME: It is serious misbehavior on the part of Congressman Foley. Whether it stems from some overall arrogance or just the weakness of the human flesh is another question.

It's probably worth noting here that there's a difference between the two parties on these issues. Inappropriate behavior towards subordinates didn't cost Gerry Studs his Democratic seat in Massachusetts, nor Barney Frank his.

Nor did inappropriate behavior toward a subordinate even cost Bill Clinton his standing within the Democratic Party, even though indirectly, he was impeached for it. Mark Foley found out about this, was found out to have done this, and he's out of office and in total disgrace in his party.

WILLIAMS: It took him long enough, don't you think?

HUME: What do you mean?

WILLIAMS: Well, gee, they knew about it way back. No action taken. That's the question.

HUME: We don't know.

(CROSSTALK)

HUME: It is worth noting that we don't yet know exactly what they knew and when they knew it. Obviously, we'll find out this week.

WILLIAMS: Well, there's an argument among Republicans that have a very different time record here for what Hastert is saying.

WALLACE: All right, guys. You can take it outside afterward. Thank you, panel. That's it for today. See you next week.

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