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He still believes weapons of mass destruction will be found -- but says Congress should investigate whether intelligence was cooked.
Jun 12, 2003 | On Wednesday evening, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the No. 2 Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, continued his call for hearings on prewar intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But he's also downplaying it as a standard postwar congressional review.
"I hesitate to reach any conclusions until I have complete information and all sides of an issue are heard," McCain said in a telephone interview with Salon.
A supporter of the war, McCain says he is confident that evidence of WMD will be found. He allows, however, that media accounts of intelligence officials accusing the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to justify an invasion reinforced his belief that the Senate needs to review the entire war, top to bottom. This would include not just questions about WMD, but friendly-fire incidents, the president's use of discredited forged intelligence during his State of the Union address, the "brilliant" battle plan, and on and on.
With some Democrats calling for hearings as soon as possible -- and many Republicans trying to stymie such requests, arguing that arms inspectors should be permitted more time to hunt for WMD -- McCain told USA Today on Tuesday that the Senate hearings should take place as soon as possible. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has told the committee's members that hearings will be held in approximately two weeks.
On Wednesday, however, the chairman of the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said that his committee's hearings would be a closed-door affair. Information would be made available to the public only "when the committee deems it appropriate," Roberts said, according to the Associated Press. Calls for more than that were "simply politics and for political gain," he said.
The issue -- a potentially embarrassing one for the Bush administration, which justified the war in Iraq by painting a picture of a clear and present threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -- isn't going away anytime soon. Bush's war coalition partner, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is facing a political fight in England, and other allies are asking tough questions about whether U.S. intelligence was accurate -- or misrepresented. And while the White House has sought to extricate itself from the controversy by lowering expectations as to what evidence might be found, or some intriguing wordplay, the Intelligence Committee's vice chair, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., fully stepped into the fray on Wednesday, charging that he thought it an open question "whether they [Republican Senators] really want to get to the facts of what actually happened."
Though McCain -- who has been something of a thorn in President Bush's side since the two fought tirelessly, sometimes bitterly, for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000 -- backed the war, his call for hearings seems to place him more on the side of Rockefeller than on Roberts'. Salon caught up with McCain on Wednesday afternoon to get his thoughts on the controversy:
As the No. 2 Republican on the Armed Services Committee, have you been privy to WMD intelligence that the rest of us haven't seen?
No.
Why haven't any WMD been found yet?
I don't know, but I still believe that it's there. And why do I believe that? Because it was there in 1991. It was there in 1998, according to the U.N. inspectors and according to President Bill Clinton. And why in the world would the guy [Saddam Hussein] obfuscate and commit self-immolation if he had nothing to hide? It doesn't make any sense.
Do you think it ultimately matters if we find them or not?
I think it probably matters to the Europeans. I think most Americans support the president after they saw the 9- and 10-year-old boys come out of prison and the mass graves and other testaments to the oppressiveness of this regime. But I think it matters to our European friends.
Does that matter at all, whether or not the Europeans are mad at us?
I think it matters. We're always concerned about world opinion. But is it a terrific blow? No, I don't think so.
