General Hayden On Trump Accusing Pres. Bush of Lying about WMD’s In Iraq: “He Is Flat-Ass Wrong”
“No, absolutely not. In fact, he is flat-ass wrong”
–General Hayden on Trump saying Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction to get us to invade Iraq.
Former director of the NSA & CIA, General Michael Hayden, sat down with Brian for a fascinating, hour long interview on Kilmeade & Friends. Some of the topics the two talked about were Obama wanting to close Gitmo, Trump saying Bush lied about WMD’s in Iraq, why he sides with Apple in their fight with the FBI, whether or not the NSA can do its job effectively without collecting metadata, and if he believes waterboarding is a valuable tool in the war on terror. Plus, General Hayden talks about his new book “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror”
Watch here:
Hayden on Donald Trump accusing the Bush Administration of lying about WMD’s in Iraq
(KILMEADE) Is Donald trump accurate when he says the Bush Administration knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
(HAYDEN) No, absolutely not. In fact, he is flat-ass wrong. Alright, we got it wrong, I have said publicly that this was an intelligence failure. Now look, the policy guys welcomed what we were telling them. It reinforced their pubic argument for war against Iraq. It wasn’t the only reason they felt going to war with Iraq was the right course of action. And the WMD story was one, Paul Wolfowitz has said this publicly Brian, the WMD story was one they could easily articulate but they didn’t have to make it up and they didn’t have to pressure us to make it up. That’s what we believed, I was in the room when (FBI director ) George Tennant and the other three letter guys, NSA, NGA, CIA and so on, when we voted on the national intelligence estimate, I voted yes. There were only two dissents and frankly, they were very narrow dissents from the DOE and the Department of State on the nuclear program. So there was broad agreement across American intelligence that he (Saddam Hussein)had a WMD program and by the way Brian, every other intelligence service on Earth agreed with us. Now, we were wrong and obviously I feel very badly about being wrong but beyond being wrong, here is the grievous sin, when we communicated our conclusions to our clients, the President, congress and so on, we did not communicate our ambiguity to our clients. But as far as what candidate Trump said, (he was) absolutely wrong.
