tv Today in Washington CSPAN August 17, 2010 2:00am-6:00am EDT
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africa. they have the highest percentage hiv-infected people anywhere in the world. president zuma has changed that. we were in south africa last year this month. we saw first hand, on the ground, what a difference it makes 20 president says, you know, we will start treating people. we will work with drug manufacturers to produce more drugs. we will open more clinics. we are appointing a health minister who is young, dynamic, and very committ. it was stunning and wonderful to see. so leadership matters. we can go into countries and deal with emergencies and we can even set up parallel systems, which we have done in many places because there was no other way to do it. clinicsun our own health coul and immunization programs and save lives and impve the quality of life. but if there is no buy-in from
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the leadership, this is not sustainable. not just in africa, but in asia as well, there are some who are becoming quite wealthy in one respect of of natal resources. yet you e very little of the money going into health. at some point, which is really the underlying what the global health initiative is attempting to do, we have to tell countries we cannot help them any more than they are willing to help themselves. maybe their help is just getting the right people appointed to the right jobs because they do not have any more resources than that. but sometimes it is allocating their own resources so they have skin in the game, so to speak, and they all the seven care about where that money is going. some of it -- and they all o a
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setting care about where that money is going. some of it is having government show their commitment. leadership is the outside and mas to whether you're going to have sustainable, effective health care in any country. i amoping that, through this partnership, this global health initiative, we will see greater buy-in by leaders. our argument has to be that this has to be a comprehensive approach. of course, you need a road to bring people to the clinic, but it cannot be won or the other. we also want to do more work --
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it can be one or the other. we also nt to do more work with ngo's and other institutions. we would like to see more integration globally. we're talking with countries that have programs in the countries that we are doing the global health initiative and we try to see where we can maximize the impact of our resources. ideally, someday, i would like to see a map of the world all lit up. if the united states is doing a health system in country x, then the scandinavian countries take the resources and go to countrywide, which the united states cannot do and -- angood to country y, which the united states can do. you can see how thican become the integrated system we hope for. but it is very difficult. we have also started
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discussions with china on development. at the last strategic and economic dialogue that i and secretary geithner lead in beijing, we put development beyonon the agenda. china are present in africa and asia. in africa, there are millions of chinese who are working and are involved in the contract and the businesses that are being developed to there. often, the chinese will offer some kind of development aid in return for a mining contract. what we'rerying to do is to make sure that, it they're going to do it, that it's somehow gets integrated. we have had conversations about
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one country where the chinese are building a road and we are building a hospital and we would really like it if the road would come to the hospital. [laughter] those discussions are ongoing. we are trying to look at is holistic way. both buttressing and supporting leadership, trying to get help higher up on nationalgendas has to be one of o biggest and diplomatic efforts because our development experts cannot accomplish what they are trying to do it they do not get the supporfrom the pilot -- from the country's. >> i am hopeful there are some students in the back who want to ask questions. >> madam secretary, my question is about the relationship between the health initiative and the mpg.
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a number of targets under the initiative, even if they are achieved, will still show up the mdg's. do you see them as no longer achievable? if you do, what sort of that comes will you be looking for in the suit next year in new york? >> i do see them as achievable, but i also see their achievement as taking longer than any of us would have hoped for when there were first adopted back in 2000. i'm looking forward to the summit during the united nations general assembly in september. i have agreed to participate. what we are doing is continuing on the path toward the millennium development goal. but we are also taking stock and we have met with the u.n. officials responsible for the summit and the work on behalf of un mdg's through the various
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organs. everybody takes stock. we'll have to ask ourselves where we have made progress n.y., where have we fallen short and what, what do you do to fill in the gap as we continue to the path ward achieving the goals that were set forth? i am sensing a greater openness to accountability, to measurement. it is not enough to carry locked and get -- to carry a lot and got into good -- to care a lot and go out and do good. you have to ask yourself what am i really doing? what am i doing to maximize progress toward mdg's and other goals that have been set? the picture in 2010 is a mixed one. i think we can take some pleasure and pride in the progress that has been made. child mortality is down, for
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example. there are some positive milestones that have been reached on the way to the goal. but we have a long way to go. we hope to use the u.n. process in september as a form for bringing a lot of the multilateral organizations and the country donors to get to have this very frank discussion. robert shaw has started this extraordinary usaid to maximize the use of science and technology in tackling and solving global development challenges. we have some great ideas. in the united states, we work to implement them, bute want to spark this kind of effort worldwide. we think that technology can make a big difference in collecting and disseminating information that will help us better educate people about what they can do for themselves.
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we see the glass half full, but it has a long way to go to get to the top. we are absolutely committed to mdg process and the eventual achievemt of them. >> ok, the last question hopefully from a student. you are very eager back there. we will call on you in the green. you have been would patiently waiting. >> my name is allison, an incoming student here. what metrics do intend to use to measure the success of the global health initiative, specifically with regards to promoting women's health? >> we will b rolling out metrics, right guys? [laughter] let me answer that in a brief, non-scientific, non-statistician way. another initiative thatraj and
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eric had taken, cdc is the epicenter of the statistical evaluation and reporting. they can give the rest of us some real guidance and help as to how best to do that. there are many different indicators on women's health, for example. we are focusing on maternal mortality because that is so measurable. we know where we have a better idea of what works and what it will take to have mor women deliver babies successfully. there are all kinds of interventions from the very simplest, like a safe birthing kit, a piece of twine and a clean razor blade and a bar of soap and a piece of plastic to put under the woman, all the way up to treasury care for complicated pregnancies. we do will see the ad comes of how many women safely are able
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to deliver a healthy baband how do we best meet the needs along the way. that is built into our country ownership concept. we will also be looking at family planning distribution. i believe strgly is that better access to family planning is directly related to lower and fraternal child mcanally. people will be able to better -- child mortality. women will be better able to space their children and the births will be safe and successful. we also would ke to see ineases in the legal age for marriage. we know that young girls are more likely at physical risk for pregnancand delivery. this is another way that development and diplomacy work together. we are encouraging countries to pass stronger laws and enforce those laws against child marriage so you do not have
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children between ages a of 10 and 16 trying to deliver babies. we're looking at access to care, which is the variable that i gave. hiv aids now has a woman's face in africa. -- hiv/aids now has a woman's face and africa. continuing sexual abuse of girls and women by men infected with hiv, some have the very unfortunate superstition that having sex with a young girl cures you of the disease. so there are a lot of educational component of how we tried to change bavior and protect girls and women. those are just some of the examples of how we will, on a broad matrix, a judge ourselves, but also try to get partner countries. we would really like to see with
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themdg's, which sortf upset the format, i agree to our measurements. we do have some, but we do not have enough. they are often more in the breach than in the actual implementation. i think there is a lot that we can do by just pulling together what we already know and trying to, frankly, publish it in a more digestible, understandable form. it was fascinating to me, in our last strategic dialogue with afghanistan, both when i was there last month and then there recent visit by president karzai and members of h government. their number one development request was to help on the issue of maternalorlity. when you think about it, year round back all the way to the first question about foreign policy, diplomacy, and
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development. there are varying degrees of latitude within afghan culture about -- degrees of attitudes within afghan culture about health. working with other partners, in a concerted effort on maternal mortality in afghanistan, the u.s. and others, it gives you an opportunity to connect with segments of the population that may or may not be particularly supportive of anything else that we and others are doing. you have to look at how this fits into the overall strategic goals that we have in foreign policy. that is why i would end where i started. sometimes, a humanitarian emergency, like we are seeing in pakistannd with the 80th, you just a. you just do -- and with the
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heavy earthquake, you just act. you just do it because you have the moral imperative to do so. but once the disaster has receded and the wreckage of andan cost of death o destruction and injury and farmland is left, then we have both a humanitarian and a strategic imperative. we are at our best when we are able to produce results where people see us as we see ourselves. the american people see us, and i certainly see our country, as incredibly generous nation that has gone time and time again tohe aid of others with whom we do not have much of a connection and perhaps the col realpolitik would not dictate
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that we did so, but we have. if we're going to be investing time, money, blood, in our efforts, i would like to see that we go into it with a clear view of what we're trying to accomplish and that we take into account the value and culture -- the values and culture of others as we do so. there certain things we have to address, wh leadership absolutely at the top. i am optimistic about the global health initiative, about what it can mean in terms of results, and what it can also represent as a new model for a -- as a new model, how we better presenter sells to the world, where the united states leads by our values and the world can see what that means to them. thank you all very much. [applause]
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>> on tomorrow morning's "washington journal," ryan avent will discuss -- and sara carter will speak on the taliban in afghanistan. and we will look at financial regulation law with james chessen. washington journal, every morning on c-span. the heritage foundation releases policy positions on the budget, the us economy and foreign policy. live coverage at noon eastern.
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testified last month before the british iraq inquiry. he said they used poor intelligence sources. this is an independent panel examining involvement in the war. from london, this is almost three hours. >>, good afternoon, and welcome. -- the good afternoon, and welcome. we are welcoming everyone this afternoon. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2010] the executive chairman of the commission or inspection from
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the first of march 2002, for 2003. and you have overall responsibility for the inspection process in iraq. this is from the 27 of november 2002. before the commencement of military action. this was a couple of days before the commencement of military action. ace and the stage it had reached by the time the inspectors were withdrawn from iraq on march 18, 2003. now i say on every occasion and i repeat it this afternoon, we recognize that witnesses give evidence based on their recollection of events and we of course check what we hear against papers to which we have accessnd which we are still receiving. i remind every witness on each occasion you will later be asked
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to siga transcript of the evidence to the effect that the evidence they have given is truthful, fair and accurate. with those preliminaries out of the way i will ask sir martin to gilbert to open the questions. martin? >> dr. blix, we would like to begin by looking at the history of inspections in iraq and in particular the legacy of the unscom inspections in the 10s that set the context for unmovic's creation and your subsequent work. you were of course at the time the director general of the international atomic energy agency, which also played a significant part in iraq. we have of course read your "disarming iraq" and all your reports. could you start by explaining to us what the wmd-related obligations of iraq were following the conclusion of the 1991 gulf war and the adoption of unscr 8711? >> right. yes.
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they were set out inesolution 687 of 1991 and iraq was to declare its weapons of mass destruction and the logistics of it to the facilities and such. then unscom was to verify the biological and chemical and missile part of the program and the iaea was to verify the nuclear part of the program. both unscom and iaea were to ensure the destruction of items they had fnd proscribed. the leverage were the sanctions, and the sanctions were quite draconian, simply that no state was allowed to import any oil from iraq. so they were cut off. this question should have
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referred to unscr 687 altogether from their income. now the resolution 687 also foresaw that when everything was destroyed and eliminated there would be monitoring by un inspection and there was no time limit set for that. so they assume that the ban on import or weapons wod remain for an indefinite period of time. at least it was not decided when. secondly, that monitoring would be there for a very long time. now the means to verify the iraqi declarations were by the right to go anywhere and to request to see anybody, and to check with exporters and to receive intelligence from national intelligence organizations. the thought was at the time that it would be a relatively short time for disarmament, that i would be quick, that the sanctions would be so effective that iraq would decla everything. that proved a false assumption.
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the iraqis did not declare any biological program at all and they first denied there was a nuclear program, but very shortly thereafter they came up with some declaration and they enlarged it as we went along. now due to this lack of cooperation by the iras, the suspicions arose. there was no confidence at all between unscom and iaea on one side and the iraqis on the other. a verification developed from a checking of their statements to a hide and seek as we saw it. in reality we know by now that saddam ordered the destruction of the weapons of mass destruction already in 1991. some would declare some chemicals remained and were later destroyed under unscom's supervision but a very large part was destroyed unilaterally by the iraqis without inviting the inspectors, which was of course a violation of the relution.
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>> can i ask what were the particular areas in which unscom was successful and what were the areas which it was unable to resolve? >> i think that rolf ekeus, who was the first chairman of unscom, is fond of saying that more weapons of mass destruction were destroyed in iraq during the period of inspections than during the gulf war and that may well be right, though most of it perhaps was destroyed by the iraqis without the presence of the inspectors. so it very much was discussed and someone has said this was really achieving disarmament without knowing it is going on. at the same time, ofourse, there was an attempt by the iraqis to keep as much as they could of their capability -- well, ateast of their resources, that they saw huge buildings that had been used for the weapons program, and they would be judged, or
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sentenced for destruction. they presumably felt they could use them later for some other peaceful purpose or perhaps even to think one day they might revive the program. so they were trying to preserve as much as they could, and on the missile side there was -- they had a particular chance to do so, because the missiles were not proscribed except for those that reached, attained a range of 150 kilometers and more. so that meant that continued work to the missiles area was legitimate. they could keep their engineers, they could keep their research institutions, and that also enabled them to stretch a bit and to exceed what really was acceptable and we discovered that later on, as we will probably come to. now i sometimes ask myself could one have, and i have seen the question has been asked in
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this commission before, could there have been a somewhat less exacting approach? the approach both we had and the unscom had, and that came originally from iaea, was what we called the material balance approach. we got their declarations. they had so-and-so much before the war started with iraq. they consumed so-and-so much during the war. they destroyed so-and-so much, and was there something that should be left? this was the material balance. there were uncertainties in this. how much actually had they consumed in the wawith iraq and how much had they destroyed, and moreover there was the question of how meticulous was their bookkeeping? i for one agreed with the majority that the iraqis were very good bookkeepers. it was a well organized state. therefore i became suspicious
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if the figures didn't tally. afterwards i think we have to recognize that perhaps itas not all that good, especially at the end of the gulf war. there was a rush and things were hurriedly buried and i think the british found some in the south of iraq after the war that had been hurriedly buried. there was not a recording of all of that. could there have been this meticulous material balance approach, could one have had a different one, less exacting? it is not easy to devise one, but i remember well that in the iaea when we in 1991 said that the safeguard system that we had was inadequate, inspectors were not allowed to go to places they were not declared, and we switched then -- developed the reinforced safeguards, the so- called additional protocol. at that time we also said it is
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a bit too mechanic a approach in the material balance and this was easy and good for department of administration, bureaucracy to have such a rigid and simple, straightforward system, but didn't one have to exercise one's common sense as well? didn't one have to look at the country as a totality? some people complained to t iaea and said, "look, you are spending more time on canada than you are doing on libya and that's not reasonable." we said that well, a police department, they can decide that this particular area crime-infested and therefore we spend a lot of time, but international inspectors are more like inspectors at the airport. we assume everyone could be violating the rules and whether you wear a tie or not we examine you the same way. so that was our defense, but at the same time we had to admit that yes, maybe you have to combine this approach of the
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material balance with looking at the country in totality. if they are well-behaved -- you wouldn't e that term, but if they were very good at reporting, if there was a good order and there was an openness, well, then a certain sort of rebate could be given. maybe something in that direction could have been used in the case of iraq. one has to admit that over the years this tremendous search for a few items, that was perhaps not worthwhile, that it would have been better to have something a bit more flexible. scott ritter who was an inspector for unscom came out after the war and said in his view iraq had been technically disarmed. well, i don't think he had
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sufficient evidence to back it up, but what he meant was probably that, yes, we knew after the war there were no nuclear weapons. there never were any, and moreover that the nuclear infrastructure was gone. so on that area the iaea, both i in 1997 and muhammad al- baradei in 1998 said that we did not think that they could resurrt a nuclear program within a very long time, but we could not guarantee there were not some minor items like prototypes of centrifuges or computer programs, etc. so we wantedo write off the nuclear program, but of course it was not for us, it was for the security council and i have seen from some testimo here that i think the uk also wanted tolose the nuclear dossier but the us refused, which we noticed at the time. >> if i could just go back to the general perception of unscom's work, our former foreign secretary jacktraw told us in his evidence, "the iraqi regime had for four years following the gulf war and
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notwithstanding the best efforts of unscom inspectors and intelligence agencies been successful in wholly concealing an extensive biological weapons program." what impact did this have on the credibility of the inspections as a tool for achieving disarmamen >> well they had, of course, destroyed -- at leasmost of the biolical weapons in 1991, but they denied in 1991 that they had the program and it was not -- unscom was on its track to it and by 1995 unscom had concluded and the iraqis had admitted to unscom there had been a biological program. the big breakthrough came in the so-call chicken farm, kamil, the son in law of saddam hussn who defected to jordan and admitted there had been a biological program. i think the fact that unscom did not discover is from the
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beginning, although there could have been suspicions, shows the difficulties of finding traces. iraq is a big country. there were many bases. they had suspicions -- they came into facilities where there was fresh paint, etc. so there were suspicions, but they didn't find the iraqis red-handed on it. nuclear in a way was easier, cause if you find a, nuclear, you say where is b? if you find b, then where is c? nuclear was the easiest and biological was probably the most difficult. >> can i ask you when you came into your own unmovic position, what lessons d you yourself learn from the unscom experience with regard to what your work would be, the problems and the prospects? >> well, one reason i accepted
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the task was that i thought that some of the resistance met by unscom was due to the way in which they conducted their inspections. at the iaea we often thought they were too "rambo," if i may say so. they thought that the iaea were like diplomats coming in with striped pants. i thought -- i never thought that humiliating iraq was a very good way. some of the content, i will not generalize, but some of it was i think humiliating. the iaea developed techniques of conversation, of seminars even with iraq, interviews and eventually we got ourselves a clear picture of the whole nuclear program. unscom i think also imitated some of that approach and learned a great deal, but this was one lesson that i took from
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e unscom affairs. otherwise we had many simil means. i mean, there was the inspection. we used overhead imagery received from the us and from france both at the iaea and unscom, and when we resumed in unmovic, we did the same. we also had people who were able to read these images. we also bought images then commercially, which was not doable in the 1990s. there were big differences in the approaches and techniques. unscom frequently had very huge groups of inspectors that came in swarms, 50 even up to near 100. they flew into bahrain through
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something called gateway, which was located in the american marine base. they were briefed there. they went inor the inspection. they came out. they were also debriefed at the american base, which i did not think was a very good idea. iaea did not use that. when we set up unmovic, we did not continue with gateway, but we set up a transit place in cyprus, which i think was a better arrangement. that leads me to another lesson which we drew. you recall that at the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2000 there was a scandal about unscom, that they had had very close relations with the intelligence in the us in particular, but also with the uk. there were inspectors in the teams who actually came from the intelligence services and performed a sort of dual function. how often i don't know, but this certainly happened and it
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exploded in the media and the whole of unscom was discredited at the time. this was one reason why the security council concluded they wanted to have a new agency, a new instrument. it was certainly my determination coming from the iaea where we would never have tolerated, if we had known it, any dual use of inspectors, that we would not have it. the cnd in the resolution that set up unmovic in 1284, it was taken that the staff should be under un contracts and un obligations. this was a leading idea for me. i came from the iaea where we saw ourselves as international civil servants in the tradition that was started by a famous brit, sir eric drummond, the first secretary general of the league of nations who was very firm on this, and louis avenol too, on this, although he as the secretary general also had under the charter political responsibility. but the secretariat was the same. they were to be international civil servants. this was the way we saw it and
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i would not go along with any too close cooperation with intelligence. if you set the rule, both mohammed al-baradei and i, that yes, we would love to have information from intelligence. we would love to have sites given to us by them, but the traffic is one way. they tell us and we try to find, use this intelligce, try to find out on the basis where if there was something, i think that we would probably -- i think we probably told those who gave us the intelligence that, "yes, this is what we found," or, "this is not what we found." however, if one had been rigid one would have said, "you listen to us in the security council," but i think it was a little more flexible than that, and i think that moreover had been reasonable. so we saw ourselves. this was even more good lessons. we were international civil servants. we had the mandate from the security council, not from the cia, the us government or the uk government. >> thank you very much. that's very helpful. >> i will ask sir roderic lyne to pick up the queions now.
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>> i would like to move the story forward to the autumn of 2002, getting into the frame of reference that we are really focusing on in this inquiry. unmovic, as you say, was set up by resolution 1284 passed on december 17, 1999. march 2000 you had taken up i think your new duties. then on september 16, 2002 iraq finally makes an offer to allow the inspectors, the unmovic inspectors to come into iraq. y it was that iraq at this point, having rejected the inspectors up to then,urne around and invited them to come in? >> i think the main reason was the military build-up by the united states.
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the idea had begun gently in the spring of 2002 and it accelerated in the summer of 20 and in august 2002 you had the us national security, what's it called --doctrine or paper in which they said some sensational things. to me at any rate it was sensational. they said that the us can use force without -- when it sees a growing threat. i had always seen and still see the un charter as a fundamental progress in the international community when it says that states are not allowed to use force against other states in territorial integrity, etc, with two exceptions. one was the self-defense against an armed attack and the other is when there is an authorization from the security
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council, but the us here did not even refer to the un charter article 2, paragraph 4 or article 51, but simply said that in the time of nuclear weans and of missiles this doesn't apply. of course, this was against the background of 9/11 and the whole reasoning that with 9/11 you cannot sit and wait for a danger growing. if you do that, then it gets too late. you have to do something befor well, that is a very fundamental issue even today, because if you say that you must wait forhe aack to occur before you can do something, well, then it is rather late. on the other hand, if you say that you can take action before that, then you have to rely upon intelligence. there is something in between this and that is the imminent threat which already came up in the 19th century with the
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famous case between the uk and the us. if you don't have to wait until they cross the territorial border, but if you see the rockets coming, then you can intervene. well, that was probably not good enough for the united states. we have seen other strains on this. it is still fundamental today. we saw in kosovo how there was a bombing without an authorization by the security council, much criticized by many since, and i am not convinced myself it was a legal action. we saw the british intervention in sierra leone. we saw the indian gobbling up goa, or an even better place perhaps nyerere's attack on uganda, amin's uganda. that was also not without an authorization. so there has been some stretch on this, but the us in 2002 at the time you refer to, threw it overboard, i simply say. i think they were high on military at the time. they said, "we can do it." >> you commented in your book,
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"disarming iraq" you said and i quote, "i did not see that increasing military pressure and armed action necesrily excluded a desire for a peaceful solution." in this particular case, as you just said, the military pressure -- had from your point of view the useful effect of getting you and your inspectors into iraq. >> that's right. >> at that point -- this is before resolution 1441 is actually passed -- what were the timelines under which unmovic was expected operate and was it focused just on verifying the destruction of weapons or also of programs? >> well, resolution 1284 was a sort of -- not a resignation.
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that's saying t much, but they certainly took a step back. they felt that the approach the had was too rigid, and things were not moving in the un's direction. the inspectors were out in 1998. the sanctions were eroding and there was also disagreement within the security council between those who wanted tdo away with the sanctions altogether and those wanted to retain them. however, under the leadership of mr. amorim, who is now the foreign minister of brazil, they came to an approach which was less rigid than the 687. they said that you are not -- the emphasis is to identify key unresolved disarmament issues. i say not the whole lot necessarily, but key unresolved
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disarmament issues, and if we were to report that iraq had cooperated to achieve this 120 days in a row then the security council would consider suspending sanctions, not lifting sanctions but suspending sanctions. the third element that was new then was that we should also have international civil servants. they wanted to cut off the connection with the intelligence. so unmovic mandate was a milder one than 687 and 1441 that came later was sort of clawing back or at least giving the impression of greater impatience. unmovic gave us time lin, but they werto start inspections i think, present a work program some 60 days after we had gone in, which curiously became to be defined as i think in march 2003. i don't remember quite why, but it was rather late at any rate. they wanted to give us time to find our way through inspections before we formulated
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our work program, which was a reasonable thing to do, but they didn't put any end to unmovic inspections. it was 120 days and if we were to report that the iraqis were not cooperating, then they would suspend -- they would impose sanctions again. so there was no end set except one was sure monitoring would continue. >> but it therefore appeared that 1441 had changed a timeline from 120 days to 60 days, although it was not expressed as a final deadline, it was a period within which you were asked to report. is that right? >> well, 1441 did not give any other timeline than update in 60 days after we have started inspection. i am a little puzzled i must say at how they calculated, because the impression was that the invasion would take place
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through turkey and that it would occur even in the beginning of january, and that would have given very, very short time to the inspections. as it turned out, we only got three and a half months, but had they gone into turkey it would have been even shorter. there was nothing in 1441 to saye could not continue beyond march. >> were you consulted on the drafting of 1441? >> yes, but not on this particular point. the first draft -- the american drafts were draconian, more than draconian in the beginning and i thought absurd, and i think the community in new york felt it also. over time it became more reasonable. i wanted the resolution for different reasons. first of all, i think we were in a new ball game, and secondly, they wanted to strengthen the rights of the inspectors. i thought that was very important, because unscom had so many conflicts with iraqis about their mandate and i thought, "let's settle that." muhammad al-baradei and i had negotiations with iraqis and settd a great many of them but not all.
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eventually the security council in 1441 said, "on those points which blix and al-baradei have not been satisfied we decide the iraqis have to abide by what they said." so it was the first time in my life that anything i had written in a letter was elevated to world law, which was nice, but the main point on it was really that it strengthened our position and we thought we could thereby avoid having a lot of debates with iraq about the mandate. >> so you were broadly content with 1441? >> i was content with it and there was one other reason. that was i liked the idea of a new declaration. the declaration i felt might give iraq a chance for a new slot. they had weapons, which i thought might very well be the case, they had an opportunity now. here it is, and they could put the blame on some general or other. so i was hoping for that. i was in favor of the
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resolution. >> did you feel that it gave iraq a realistic possibility of meeting the requirements of the resolution? >> yes, except that it was very hard for them to declare any weapons when they didn't have any. >> no, but we didn't know they didn't have any. i mean, i ask the question because we have had at least one witness that has said that actually the way it was drafted was actually as a trigger for military action, but that's evidently not what you felt at the time from what you have just said. >> no. there is this big discussion as to whether a second resolution would be required. i for my part thought that to me it was clear that a second resolution was required. i have seen from some of the testimony that some of the british felt that it was desirable, but it was not absolutely indispensable. i saw that jeremy greenstock had said that he certainly wanted a second resolution, but
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he also recognized that the views in the security council were very divided on it. i think it was ambassador meyer who said there were the three groups. there were the americans on the one side who said, "no, nothing is needed." there were others who said, "you need a second resolution," and the british were somewhere in between. now the resolution, as you recall, simply says that if something happens, in the inspectors' report or status report there is a violation, then the council shall convene and they shall consider the situation. well, in diplomatese of new york maybe this implies that something will happen, but i don't think that's necessarily how i would readt as a lawyer. if i sat on the other side of the security council, i would say, "no, we will convene and reconsider but it is an absurdity that we should hand it out, give a free hand to anyone in the security council to decide that this resolution has not been respected and
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therefore we have the right, unilaterally, individually, to take military action." it would accrue to the russians, to the chinese, to anyone. thiso me was not a very reasonable invitation. >> in your book, just talking about the divided views, y say that the french consent was given on the understanding that a material breach could only be registered and acted upon on the basis of a report from the inspectors, i.e. from yourself. now some witnesses have argued to us that when the french were voting for resolution 1441, they were fully conscious of the american position that no further security council decision was required to determine a further material breach. were the french really of the view that the council would have to take a further decision or had they, as some witnesses
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have put it to us, lost that battle? >> no. i don't think they had lost the battle. i think they were aware of the american interpretation. they had wrangled about it. my reading is that the french and the germans too had tried to get it clearly put into the resolution that there would be a new resolution needed, but they had not succeed. they had to give up on that one. so they went into the resolution accepting it with the open eyes that some interpret it one way and others interpret it the other way, which not a very exceptional event in the un, i may say. but reading simply the words of it, i would have said that "convene and consider" does not really give an authorization to go to war. i think jeremy greenstock first also was of that view but later said maybe it could be interpreted otherwise. >> so was it then your understanding that it was the
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reports of unmovic which would be the element that would determine whether or not there had been a further material breach, or did it leave it open to members of the security council to determine on the basis of the reports you made a failure by iraq to meet its obligations? >> well, i think our job was to provide evidence and we might say that, yes, we think this is a breach of their obligations, but in the last resort i think it would be for the security council to judge whether in theiview it was a breach or not. not ly that, but also decide would it follow from there that they would authorize armed force? this is not what 1441 said. this was sort of implied and i think jeremy greenstock in his testimony said, you know, there was an expectation that the council would take action, but i
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would have sided clearly with the french and the germans that this was not a necessity. i find it also sort of absurd that the security council would sit there and say, "yes, if any one of us comes in and maintain this is a breach, then any one of us can take military action." i don't think that's the way the security council operates or we want it to operate. giving it a clean hand -- i am sure they will be more cautious in the future about drafting their resolutions and not leaving any such implication open. >> so, just to be clear, there are really three points there. the first is that the responsibility for determining the material breach did not rt with you. you were providing evidence on which the security council would, as you say, make a judgment. >> no. >> that we are agreed on. secondly, your interpretation of 1441 was that a judgment needed to be made by the security council. having a discussion was not enough. there was an implication that a judgment was needed, that iraq
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was in further material breach. am i right on that? >> also a decision to authorize. >> then the third point is that before using military action, in your view, an actual decision was needed to authorize that? >> an authorization, yes. >> this was absent from security council resolution 1441. i know you are among many other things a very distinguished lawyer and the legal argument has been made that you didn't need a decision, because you reach right back to security counciresolutions 678 and 687, which had not been revoked, which would authorize military action against iraq in the event of a breach of the ceasefire conditions. so was it necessary to have a further decision? >> yes, i still think it was indispensable. first of all, the 687 and the earlier resolutions, they were auorizing use of force againstn iraqi aggression
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against kuwait. we were not in such an important situation now. secondly, i think that when condoleezza rice, for instance, said, and i quoted in my book, when she said that the military action taken was simply upholding the authority of the security council, it strikes me as something totally absurd. here you are in march 2003 and they knew that three permanent members, the french and the chinese and the russia, were opposed to any armed action, and ty were aware that they could not get a majority for a resolution that even implied the right to military action. to say then that yes, the action held the authority of a council that they knew was against it i think strikes me as going against common sense. >> although the military pressure from the united states had helped to uphold the authority of the security
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council, because for the first time in ma years iraq had paid some attention to the security council resolutions. >> yes. >> so your distinction is between pressure and action. >> that's true. threat is a different thing from actually taking action. >> but at a certain point someone calls your bluff is the problem. >> that's true. you might be called a paper tiger eventually but the charter prohibits you from using armed force. it does not necessarily prohibit you from exerting pressure. there is a grey zone there. you are not allowed to go too far in the pressuring either. in any case i would have tolerated that and i think that's frequently done, economic anmilitary pressure. today we have economic pressure against iran. i do not think that's illegal. i think the use of weapons or force against iran today would be illegal. >> without a security council resolution. >> without a security council authorization. as you say, the americans, to them, it was indifferent. they had already a doctrine that said, why should we have a permission slip from the
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security council? so they didn't need it. i admit i agree with you that the pressure was the one that moved the iraqis and as the pressure mounted, yes, they became also more cooperati. >> i think we will want to come back to that a little late on in the story. i am going to turn to sir lawrencereedman in a moment. we are in for quite a long afternoon and it would very much help with the transcription if we could take a measured pace. thank you. >> just following up from what has been said, i mean, you have made the point about the americans suggesting that they were upholding the security council resolutions and you noting that the security council as a whole did not seem to go along with that at that time, but, as i recall, part of the american argument was to challenge the security council to uphold its own resolutions.
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there was a concern that from the late 1990s a number of key security council members had lost interest in pursuing this question and therefore this whole exercise might peter out. do you think that was a reasonable concern? >> well, i think there was at least implied from the us side that if the security council doesn't agree with us and go along with our view, then it sentences itself to irrelevance. i think that's a very presumptuous attitude. i think the us at the time was high on military. they felt they could get away with it and therefore it was desirable to do so. i think this has changed with obama. obama says yes, they will still retain the rht to -- they reserve the possibility to take unilateral action but they will try to follow international rules. >> even before 9/11 and the bush administration even there
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was a concern that the security council was losing a grip of this issue. >> well, from the cold war, of course, the security council was paralyzed. the security system of the un did not work during the cold war, but i think it changed completely with the end of the cold war. in 1991, 1990 the russians and the others went along with the action against iraq, and bush the elder, the president, said that this was a new international order. well, that collapsed with his son and i think that the world has changed dramatically with the end of the cold war. it is only recently in the last few years some american statement with samman and others have said, well, we ought to re-discover, the cold war is over. so the security council in my view was not paralyzed in the 1990s. they are stillot paralyzed. that's why it is reasonable to look to it and to have respect for its decisions. >> thank you. what i want to ask you about is the various assessments that were published on iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
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there is a number published in 2002, the september 9 one by the institute for strategic studies, the british government's dossier of september 20 and then there was an american one in october 2002. i would just be interested in your views of these assessments at the time you saw them and read them. obviously we are particularly interested in your view of the british dossier. >> right. well, the british dossier was shown to min new york. i read it and i said to the young diplomat who took it to me that i thought it was interesting, useful. i think i probably also said, as he has quoted me saying, that i did not think it was exaggerated. however, i said this at a time we had not restarted inspections even.
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much oit of the dossier was taken based upon unscom's accounts, but there was this big difference that unscom never said these items exist. they said these are unresolved issues. in fact, i don't think there is any resolution of the security council in which they assert affirmatively that the weapons exist. so this was a big difference. however, it seemed plausible to me at the time, and i also felt -- i, like most people at the time, felt that iraq retains weapons of mass destruction. i did not say so publicly. i said it perhaps to mr. blair in september 2002 privately, but not publicly because i think there is a big difference between your role as a trustee of the security council, "investigate this and report to us," and the role of a politician. individual governments here could prosecute and say, "we are accusing you, you have this," but that was not my role. the security council did not assume it and therefore i didn't
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say anything about it publicly. privately, yes, i thought so. there was one particular type of weapons of mass destruction of which i was suspicious and that was the anthrax. we had an inspector in australia, rod barton, who later wrote a book about the whole thing. he came to me and said, "here is the evidence we have on anthrax." it seemed to me to be very convincing. it had one element that was worrying me. that was that it relied on some cia document, finding. they were not willing to show it to us. i was not willing to say or affirm then that, "yes,e assert that there is anthrax," but we were veryuspicious. i came out right from september 2002 on to the very end when i said, "yes, there might be weapons of mass destruction." i had this imind. i could not exclude that others existed but when i saw this dossier that was taken to me, yes, i thought it was plausible, because what unscom has said in its report 1999 was these things are missing and
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they assert that is there. they might have had information which we have not had. i hoped that at any rate. so that was my view on the british dossier. the american dossier differed somewhat. in some respects it was a little milder and others a little tougher. the institute, iiss, i have not been able to recheck, but they were fairly severe as well. they a went in the same direction. they were not directly useful to us, because they didn't say how did they come to this conclusion or where was the stuff. they simply asserted "yes, it is here." >> just then to confirm what you have just told us, your feeling at the time was that there probably was something there. >> yes. >> and that, as you say, you were sharing quite a broad consensus. i would just be interested in your views at this point about the difficulty of modulating assessments of this sort.
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whethera question of iraq was in violation of past un agreements which could actually have been quite trivial amounts of material or non- disclosure ofocuments, but would nonetheless strictly be a material breach. there is questions about the degree to which iraq was preparing for reconstitution should the opportunity arise. there are questions aut whether they actually had a program and stocks working at the time. was it your view that these things could get rather muddled up in the wathat the issue was being discussed, whether in these papers or in the wider public debate? >> well, in september 2002 i don't think anyone really was talking much about the reconstitution, but it was about the actual existence, and the british dossier simply said that iraq has b weapons, it has
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c, and it has missiles. it didn't assert nuclear. i think it was talking about the possibility of reconstitution and bush certainly in the autumn of 2002 pointed to various buildings and said these were connected with nuclear in the past and they are now rebuilding them. the iraqis shortly thereafter opened the buildings to journalists and they were empty. so at that time i don't think the reconstitution was a major problem. on the nuclear side we were fairly sure -- we were sure in 1998 there was hardly anything left. like i said, we wanted to close the dossier. this waan area that i was no longer responsible for, it was iaea, but in the autumn of 2002 we began to hear about the contract allegedly made with niger about the import of raw uranium, of uranium oxide, and i reacted -- that was perhaps the first occasion when i
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became suspicious about the evidence because i thought to myself, "why should iraq now import raw uranium which is very far from a weapon? they have to refine it. it has to go through enrichment and all these things." so i became a bit suspicious about it. that was muhammad's responsibility. as we know, in march 2003 he came to the security council and the iaea had eventually got a copy of the document and concluded i think in less time than a day that it was a forgery. he said it was not authentic. it was a diplomatic way of saying it was fake. perhaps it would have been better if they had said that. that to me and also the nuclear business about the aluminum tubes which figured very long -- i forget which one was in the british dossier but they mentioned one of them. they also mentioned the mobile laboratories i think. the niger document was scandalous. if iaea could conclude in a
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day's time that this was a forgery and this document had been dancing between the italians and to british and the americans and to the french and they all relied upon it and bush alluded to it and mentioned it in the state of the union message in 2003, i think that was the most scandalous part. >> i would like to say something about the niger question just in the light of what you have said because the butler committee, which you recall, concluded the british government had intelligence from several different sources, that the visit to niger was for the purpose of not actually the acquisition of uranium but acquiring it, the forged documents were not available to the uk government at the time it made its assessment. so the fact there was forgery does not actually change the british government's assessment on the niger issue. i thought for the record i should just say that. >> i am glad they didn't manage to misinterpret that one.
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>> just then to conclude this bit here, i suppose what i am interested in is the question of threat. your job really was to say this is the evidence. it was not up to you to say you should be really worried about this. your job was to say, "this is the evidence of the extent to which ere is a breach of un resolutions," based on the evidence you had. it was not to go further than that. >> well, i think you would have to distinguish between different types of revelations or evidence that you find. you know we were given sites to inspect by the uk and the us and we wanted these sites and felt, "these people are 100 per cent convinced that there are weapons of mass destruction, but they also then should know
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something about where they are." we went to these sites and in no case did we find a weapon of mass destruction. we did find engines that had been illegally imported, we found a stash of documents that should have been declared. they did not reveal anything new. so there is evidence of more or less grey things. even the missiles i think falls into that category. they certainly violated their obligations on the missiles, but we concluded that the al- samoud 2 type missile was prohibited, because it had a longer range than 150 kilometers and they had performed a test flight i think with 180 or 183 kilometers. so our international experts that we consulted concluded they were banned, but still it was on the margin.
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perhaps even more serious was their plan to combine several engines and make missiles of much longer range than they really had tried. here in answer to what you said i think that yes, you still have to retain your common sense, that there are some things that are more serious violations than others. >> just on that, i mean, i recall an argument i think from rolf ekeus that it would not be surprising if the iraqis were concentrating on delivery systems because it is not that difficult if you are determined and have the know-how to rebuild your stocks of chemical and biological weapons but there is no point in doing that unless you had a delivery vehicle. would that be -- would you share that view? >> yes. above all, they were allowed to have this. so it enabled them to continue to do research and development, and to che a bit which they did. >> thank you very ch.
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>> dr. blix, i have really a single question, which is about the burden of proof and wheret la i know from your book you have formed a view about it. so here we are. we have resolution 1284. we have resolution 1441. now we are at the end of 2002. there is much international concern about iraq's failure to comply with the will of the international community and some nations more troubled than that about possible holdings of weapons. so was it up to iraq to prove through your inspection regime that it, saddam's regime, was innocent, or was it up to the international counity through yourself to prove that iraq was guilty? which way did that go, because it was both a political question, i take it, and a legal question? >> i think the iraqis tried to
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say that t general legal rule is unless you are proved guilty, you must be presumed innocent, and i tried to explain to them that this was not a parallel when it comes to a state, that a guy may be accused of having a weapon illegally and if he is not proveguilty, then he will be innocent. however, i said with regard to iraq, you had these weapons, and people would laugh at me if i said i should presume you were innocent. we make no assumption at all. we do not assume you have weapons and we do not assume you don't have weapons. we will simply look for evidence. of course, it was difficult for th. it is difficult for anyone to prove the negative, to prove they didn't have it. they said so, "how can we prove this?" i admitted in public, "yes, it is difficult for to you do so but it is even more difficult for us. you after all have the archives
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and people, etc. you must make best use of this." >> in effect then the work of your inspectors could go forward without having to form a final view. that would be for the security council in your judgment. >> yes. >> yes. thank you. i think i will ask sir martin gilbert to pick up the questions. >> i would like to turn now to the iraqi declaration which was received by unmovic in baghdad on december 7, 2002. unscr 1441 required that iq make "a currently accurate full and complete declaration of its wmd holdings and programs." how important did you expect the declaration to be in assisting you in your objectives? >> well, my hopes were that they would declare whatever they had.
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i did believe at that time that yes, they might well have something and that this would be the occasion to put the blame upon some authority or some general in iraq. so i was quite hopeful thathis would come. now th was also the reason why i was very disappointed when it came. it was 12,000 pages. it could have been slimmer if they hadn't repeated several things several times over, but they had only had one month and it was a lot of work. so i was very disappointed. it did give some news regarding the period 1998 to 2002, and especially on the biological it gave some news, but it didn't really resolve any major point on the unresolved issues. >> what were the major deficiencies you saw in it at the time? >> i don't think that anyone would have been satisfied unless they had come up with a report that, "here are the weapons." certainly the americans would not have been satisfied with
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anything less thanhat and i was also perhaps unfairly saying this is a deficiency in the document. they had the difficulty. they could not declare something very much because they didn't have it very much. >> but in terms of the material breach did these deficiencies as seen by you at the time constitute a material breach? did they go some way towards resolving that? >> no, we were disappointed that they didn't come out with them, but we had never maintained they had them. so i didn't -- i certainly could not construe it as a material breach. >> i mean, looking back now with the benefit of hindsight and what we know, is there more that iraq could have done with this declaration? >> yes, maybe, because when we look forward to the 2003 in february and march, then they became more proactive, as the term was. the resolution required active,
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unconditional and immediate cooperation, and as the us pressure mounted and they really saw the dangers, then they also became more active. ybe it was also a difficulty for the iraqi leadership, i mean under saddam, to persuade him to go along with something. that is possible, but certainly i have been criticized and people said that at the end of january 2003, "you were very critical of the iraqis, but then february 14 and march 7 in your statements you became more upbeat." they say, "why did you change your opinion?" i say, "look here, if i am there to observe and the circumstances change i damn well ought to also change my report." that is what happened, the iraqis became more cooperative. let me take examples. a major matter was what had they unilaterally destroyed in 1991?
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unscom had undertaken some excavations things, places where they had destroyed things, but not all. some places they had not dared to, because it was dangerous. the iraqis then in february 2003, i think it was in february, offed that we will excavate some of these things again. they came -- i remember we were in baghdad, mohammed and i. they said, "look, with modern techniques we might even reconstitute and re-find the volumes that had been destroyed." i was a bit skeptical, as a scientist. i thought if you pour 10 liters of milk in 1990 will you be able to ten years later find there was 10 liters? i was a bit skeptical. our scientists said, "yes, we can go along and excavate and look for this." that was one thi the iraqis did in 2002 and it did give results, actually, because the place we dug up, they did not find the anthrax or chemical weapons but they found the fragments of the bombs that had been exploded. they were able to reconstitute
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them and come up with a conclusion that the iraqi statement had been fairly correct. so it was an active cooperation. i take another example. that related to who participated in this destruction, and we said, "look here, you must have some idea of who did it. can we talk to them? can we interview them?" they came up with quite a number of numbers actually. i think 50 or 60 names, maybe more. i said, "if you have a list of people who participated, don't you also have lists of what you actually destroyed." they had shown earlier on a diary of somebody who did something but not so much. that was another one. another item was interviews. i was always skeptical about the interviews of iraqis because any interview in iraq would be -- they would probably know about it. they would have a tape recorder hidden somhere if they were alone or they would have a minder. very frequently the witnesses wanted to ve the minder present because thereafter they coulhave their testimony that
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they had not revealed anything they should, but we were given both on the us side, especially on the us side b also from the uk, they say that -- why don't you take them abroad? at first i had the feeling they just wanted us to kidnap these people and take them abroad. i thought it was an atrocious idea. later on there was a great deal of pressure and i concluded that you must ask the iraqis to say that u will release people to go abroad, but i must say i never thought we would get very much from them even abroad. the americans said they can take their whole family with them, ten people, but they will still have some relatives, someone against whom reprisals could have been taken. now in retrospect we know they would have said they did not know about anything. these were areas in which the iraqis were forthcoming in the end of february and the march, under us military pressure, to be sure, but nevertheless that was a big change.
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i wacautious in reporting it to t un security council, saying, "i note these things but at the same time we must see how much does it actually produce." so i was cautious all the way through, but this was the reason why i changed my view. i talked to prime minister blair on february 20, 2002 and then i said i still thought that there were prohibited items in iraq but at the same ti our belief, faith in intelligence had been weakened. i said the same thing to condoleezza rice. both condoleezza rice and prime minister blair, i sort of alerted to the fact that we were skeptical. i made the remark that i cited many times, wouldn't it be paradoxical for you to invade iraq with 250,000 men and find very little. so certainly iave some warning that things had anged and there might not be so much. >> thank you very much. >> just for the record i think you were referring to a discussion between yourself and prime minister blair in 2003. we heard 2002.
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>> yes >> by the way, it would be very helpful if we could keep it as slow as possible. >> i talk too fast. >> i will now turn to sir lawrence freedman again. >> there was a lot of interest in the potential of the smoking gun and you have already given an indication that's certainly not what you found, but you have mentioned a number of other things that you did find which were small in themselves but not without significance. i think you have mentioned the chemical warheads didn't have chemicals in them but they could take them, the missiles, nuclear documents. was there anything else you found in addition to those that were prohibited items or indicated something suspicious? >> well, there were the missile engines. the warheads i think was the most important, i think that was in january that we found them, and i remember i was in
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london at the time when i was told abo this, and i thought, "well, maybe this is it." maybe this is the tip of the iceberg that we are now seeing and maybe we will find more. as time went by and we really found more fragments, i think -- i concluded that it was an ice -- might well have been an ice that had been broken long ago and tse were e flows that remain of it and that was the reality, but in january, yes, i still thought that maybe you find more, but as to actually findings, no. it is true that we were -- we were looking for smoking guns, and rather towards the end the us when they wanted to discredit us came and said that, "look, we know that you have found the pile of automatic non-piloted --"
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>> the drones. >> the drones. "you have not reported that. you have also found a contraption for spreading of chemical weapons." i talked to our people about it and they said, "yes, we are dealing with these things, but they are not really significant" and these things disappeared. so there was very little we found. the missile was the most important. of course we ordered them destroyed even though they did not exceed the permitted range very much. we had time to destroy about 70 of these missiles, which was quite a significant thing. >> in terms of the things you have mentioned how did the finds come about? was it because of just regular inspections, because the iraqis had declared them or because of intelligence that you had received? >> the chemical munition was something that we found ourselves and it w at the site that had been declared by the iraqis.
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so it was a we-known site, and i thi that the us later on tried to blow it up a bit, but this was something we found. we received altogether some 100 ideas, tips about sites to go to and we had time to go to about 30 of them during the period, and in no case did we find a weapon of mass destruction, but we did find something illegally imported. i think the missile engine was on the basis of a tip from the uk maybe. the stash of nuclear documents also came from a tip from the uk. when i read some of the testimony made and given here, they seem to be very proud that, "yes, we made four hits out of ten." they should ask what was the hit? if the hit had been a weapon of mass destruction it would have been interesting, but these were hits of fragments. so they were not so important. >> so, just to conclude, what do you think these finds did
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indicate about iraq's level of compliance with past resolutions, including 1441? >> yes. i mean, they ought to have declared the documents. they should have declared the engines, etc. so that was a lack of compliance. you can say that. i think one can also say that was compliance with every detail of the instructions the most important, or was the weapons of mass destruction that we wanted? there is the differe value and different types of evidence and i didn't think the evidence we got was very important. >> tha you. >> i will ask baroness prashar to pick up the questions. >> thank you, chairman. dr. blix, i want now to look at the question of the iraqi cooperation with the inspection regime. starting first of all with issue of access to sites. access to sites was clearly a very key measure of iraq's willingness to cooperate. how did they measure up to this
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particular criteria? >> from the outset their cooperation on this score was good -- >> yes. >> and i said so. borrowing from muhammad al- baradei i made a distinction between cooperation on procedure and cooperation on substance. i said that iraq cooperates on the whole well on procedure, in particular on access. on no particular occasion were we denied access. in this sense, of course, it was a contrast from unscom which were frequently deni access, perhaps sometimes because they felt humiliated and they were frustrated and wanted to demonstrate, but, of course, that was interpreted as a will to hide something. we never had a denial of access. we had some difficulties of access when we came to saddam's palaces. i think there was a short delay of a quarter of an hour or something like that, but there
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was never a denial of access. so i tnk they had made up their mind, and that was in marked contrast to unscom and should have been noticed. on substance on the other hand we felt that, no, we did not get that proactive cooperation in the declaration or in january, and i said even in january my statement on january 7 that was seen as very critical of ira that they don't seem even to have come to terms with the idea of disarmament. it was a very harsh statement. perhaps partly out of disappointment, but also in part because i wanted to warn them that, "look here, if youre not more cooperative, this is the kind of repor you will get." i remember reuters reported from london that we had said that we would like to have the cooperation and if we don't get that, they will get critical report. so in january we came out with these very critical comments
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and then they changed, whether as a result of my comments or probably more as a result of a build-up, the military build- up, yes. >> you he already mentioned the question of minders. in your book you note that on one occasion you complained to the iraqis that the ratio of minders was about 10-1. how did you view ts heavy presence of minders? did it signify lack of cooperation or were they a source of obstruction to you? >> that case had regard to the helicopters i think. they wanted to have -- we said, "ok, you can send minders along with our helicopters." they said 10-1. we complained and they changed it immediately to 1-1. otherwise the minders, of course, were necessary, but they were not there to guide us. we could go anywhere we liked.
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the procedure was that in the evening before an inspection the chief inspector would tell the iraqis, "we will start at 10:00 from this place and you should have a minder to go along with us." heas not told where they were going. we never discovered or saw they had known in advance where we were going. then they were there to be a liaison, if you like. when you come to the site, if there is any problem, then they had authority and they could contact their authority. so minders were necessary, but 10-1 was an absurdity and they went away from there. >> did you find that obstructive, there were so many of them? >> i think they were a necessity. they were sometimes helpful. we had an accident in which unfortunately the chinese inspector died on the road. the iraqi minders were there and they helped us for a hospital and all that. so they were necessary. they cooperated on procedure. >> but when you briefed the security council on january 27, 2003, you noted some recent disturbing incidents and harassment? >> yes. >> now that was a question of demonstrations and so on.
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how serious were these incidents and what did they signify? >> well, it is hard to believe that they could have occurred without the consent or perhaps even authorization from the dictatorial state. so we took them rather seriously and i didn't say i immediately reported them to the security council, because that's the means of pressure i could have on them. i can't imagine they were spontaneous. i saw one testimony here we had given -- i forget who it was testified that the uk had given them a lot of sites and all they met were demonstrations and stones almost. that's not really true. we performed on 30 of these. yes, there was some harassment and some demonstrations, but by d large this was very useful. i certainly wanted to continue. we found material, but we didn't find material that was relevant to weapons of mass destruction. i think what was really important about this business of sites given was that when we
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reported that, no, we did not find any weapons of mass destruction, they should have realized i think, both in london and in washington, that their sources were poor. their sources were looking for weapons, not necessarily for weapons of mass destruction. they should have been more critical about that. we on the other hand had very rarely contact with any sources. we based our conclusions upon the overhead imagery or upon interviews, etc, and that did not hold these errors. intelligence will be used to this, that there are people that defect and give them intelligence and they want to get some reward for it so they will be inclined to give what they think the interrogators want to hear. we were not subjected to that danger. so the lesson from this site affair would have been, i think, they should have drawn the conclusion that their sources were poor. >> can i come on to e question of concealment, because throughout this period there
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were repeated allegations by the united states and the uk in particular that the iraqi regime was involved in concealment activity. how did you view these allegations and was there substance in them? >> well, we had learned from the whole 1990s that they might have been concealing things, and we -- to take the case of anthrax again, that was the prime case. where was it? 10,000 liters, where? did they keep it somewhere? so we assumed that they might be concealing something and we had lots of sites to inspect, inherited from unscom and also from the iaea. so there were lots of places we wanted to go. so we certainly did not exclude. no, no, we really thought if there is something, it will be concealed. >> i mean, in cases of small items, such as test tubes and technical documentation and so forth, what chances would there
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have been of you actually uncovering them? >> no. on very small items it will be difficult to do so and computer programs, etc, or protypes of weapons, but stores, stocks of chemical weapons or biological weapons is another matter. we went to military sites. we went to the biological laboratories. we went to industries, to places where it could be plausible these things would be kept. >> do you want a break? >> yes. i think we have been going for an hour and a quarter. let's break for ten minutes and then come back. thank you. >> ok. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2010] >> we were in the midst of some questions from baroness prashar. she is going to continue i think. >> i want to continue on the
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question of cooperation of the iraqi regime. can i look at the question of legislation? >> registration? >> legislation. you note in your book that the iraqi regime could perhaps have been much more forthcoming in some of its actions on the subject of enacting legislation, which you said could have been a requirement in iraqi law, the acquisition of wmd. where did this proposal first come from? where did it come? >> it might have come from resolution 687. i forget actually. i remember that muhammad al- baradei was the one who pushed it very hard when we saw the vice president ramadan and i always thought this is a dictatorship passing a piece of legislation, it should be easy for them, and i thought it was a bit of sloppiness that they didn't go along with it. they did enact something at the
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they had difficulties with that. we also had difficulties, and it took some talks with them to get the resolution. i wanted to have german drawn, and somehow this diluted their objections they made. this is this element of humiliation that the u.s. was humiliating them, but if they thought it was international, it was difficult, but it took some
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time. >> when was that? >> i think february. >> 2003? >> yes. the americans would not shy away, but there was persistence in the iraqi side, and i have a feeling they would try. >> my final thing has to do with interviews. how much importance did you give to interviews? >> interviews were important throughout. that was our experience that if you had direct talk with someone in science, a cautious conversation was helpful, and
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normal and believed he did get the truth out of them. i was pushed, and eventually i talked with them. it was also included in the solution. first i thought they would kidnap them and take them abroad. i asked the americans. they have relatives at home. do you think we should put them in jeopardy? they said they can take their families along. i said how many can they take a long? they said up to a dozen. i never thought we would have
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got much from it, so we would appreciate them saying this is what you need to do. you should order them to come along. i also thought they would get some people who would use the occasion to get out of iraq. >> just to be clear, you said you would have eventually done so if you had been given more time? >> yes, yes. the pressure from the british it. >> but how many interviews did you manage to complete by the time you left on march 18, 2002? >> well, it depends what youyou know, we had many, many>> in satisfactory conditions. let me put it that way. >> well, there were not so many, but there were a number --
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perhaps less than ten which had that there would be no minder present and no tape recorder. the iaea caved in and they accepted i think the presence of a minder. we said, "no. conditions, we don't do it at>> what assessment would you cooperate with you on the basis you conducted the interviews? non-cooperation? >> well, there was a reluctance certainly but it might also have had to do with the people whom we would call for the interviews. they must also -- they had nothing to hide after all. so that could not have been the reason. if the people said, "well, there are chemical weapons," then they would not have been telling the truth, so they
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couldn't really have been afraid of that, but they might also have felt, "yes, you are putting these guys in a difficult spot," and try to protect them. i don't i think asked my question -- we suspected, of course that, there were people who knew something that could reveal something, but the iraqis were in a different situation. they knew there were no weapons. >> thank you. >> on a side point, dr. blix, how did you manage for interpreters? did you bring in your own universally or did you accept locally-based interpreters? >> i am not sure i really remember how that was. we had some, but very few who spoke arabic. we had an american woman of lebanese extraction and she was the one who was --one of those who was active and when we found the stash of nuclear documents, which was quite important, because there were women in the house, and to be searched by male foreign inspectors in the
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house would have been objectionable to them. she was quite helpful, but i don't -- i can't really tell you whether they were local or not. >> thank you. i will ask sir roderic to pick up the questions. >> we have had the argument made to us that three and a half months was plenty of time for the iraqis to demonstrate whether or not they were genuinely willing to cooperate with the inspections process. by the time you left, by the time perhaps you finally reported to the security council, had iraq handled the inspections in a way that allowed you to think at any point that they were genuinely cooperating, that they really had nothing to hide? >> well, as i reported in february 2003, i was beginning to feel hopes. this was on february 24, i think. then on -- but very cautiously. then on march 7, i was a bit
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more upbeat, shall we say. i thought it was, both then and in retrospect, a bit curious that precisely at the time when we were going upward in evidencing cooperation, at that very time the conclusion from the uk side and also from the us side was that no, inspections are useless. they don't lead us anywhere. they don't cooperate. that was the moment when we presented the cluster document to mr. straw, who had read this document on the plane. i don't know whether he should have had it because he got it through the british member of the college of commissioners and the american -- powell had also got it through an american member of the commission and other members of the security council were not in that situation. anyway straw had read it on the plane and he was -- to him this was an enormous revelation, that here the iraqis had
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obstructed and they had concealed all the way. now that referred mainly to the 1990s. that was a description of unscom. our starting point was the unscom document 1999-94 which described all these cases. there were also descriptions in the amorim report. we had refined it and taken a lot of time and lot of work over this document. it was prepared because the resolution 1284 required of us to present a work program. that work program should zero in on key remaining disarmament issues. now in order to identify which were the key remaining disarmament issues, we had to look at all the unresolved disarmament issues and then cull and select from those which ones did we think were key. we had to vet that with the
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college of commissioners. this is what we did. it took longer time than i would like to, but there was not so much new in it. the unresolved issues from the 1990s remained. they were listed by unscom. there was additional information, yes, in the declaration of the autumn. there was additional information through the inspections already carried out, but not so much. it was not in my view a very revealing document. it was to be the basis for our selection of key issues, but when mr. straw read it on the plane, he felt, "well, this is it. this is how they behaved all the way through the 90s and this is the way they are behaving now." the only trouble was that at that very moment i was reporting to the security council, "this is not quite the way they are behaving now. they are behaving much better. they are changing, maybe under american military pressure, but certainly to me they are behaving much better." so to me there was something very ironic about the cluster document. we had made it available to the security council because the
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british were working on the benchmark resolution. they had concluded, as unmovic did, that maybe you cannot solve everything. unmovic said, "we will go for key issues." the benchmark approach was to find six -- six they settled for -- issues, solve these in the limited time and then we can come back and solve another six and that will show cooperation. now which issues were they to select for solution? it then occurred to me, "look here, we are working on a document here which will spell out the issues in the most update form and we will ourselves use it to select issues." so why should we make it available? we hesitated a bit to make it available, because here was the uk and others working on a resolution and it was not our task to side with anybody in the security council helped by resolution and others. i sounded out the americans and the others. there was no objection to our
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making this document available a bit in advance of the moment when it was to be an appendix to our work document. so we circulated it. so the intention was to help the uk delegation in selecting, in culling a number of cases which would allow more inspection and possible solution. instead then when it was on the table mr. straw was amazed and puzzled. why hadn't blix presented this earlier? he didn't say we had withheld it but he was amazed it had not been done earlier. this was sensational. i don't think anyone else took it as sensational. it was reporting of the concealment and obstructions in the 1990s but not much more than that. so it came to be used actually to the meaninglessness of inspections rather than as a means which would have helped to continue inspections.
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>> i think sir martin may want to come back on the benchmarks document in a minute. in terms of your broad judgments about cooperation resolution 1441 had demanded immediate, unconditional and active cooperation. had iraqi behavior at any point corresponded to that? >> well, the interpretation of what is immediate, what is active and what is unconditional is, of course, up to security council and was also up to us. i concluded in the security council that they had not been immediate, no. i had discussed it with condoleezza rice and she said, "at least you must concede that
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point." i said, "yes, that's true. it was not immediate." unconditional? well, one can discuss that. i said to the council -- i asked the question, "have they done that?" i said, "i have described what they have done. you judge for yourself. we can have a preliminary view, our modest, humble view on it, but on immediacy, no, i don't think i would claim it has been immediate." >> even under what was obviously growing, very serious military pressure, threat of military action, after three and a half months they had not opened the doors widely enough to convince you that they really had nothing to hide. they had had time to do so. they had given you some hopes, as you say, that the cooperation was improving after a long time under this pressure, but could they not have done an awful lot more. unconditional means unconditional, but clearly you had been hemmed in by obstructions of one kind or another which are de facto conditions. >> somewhat obstructed. they had opened the doors. i had said on some occasions it is not enough to open doors.
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you also have to be proactive. i think that's what they became when they came up with the idea of further excavations, for instance. that was a secondary response to our demands that they give us names of those who took part in the unilateral destruction. so i think they were coming to be proactive, but it was rather late. it was after three and a half months. >> you can see even more clearly i am sure than saddam hussein the build-up, and i am sure you could sense the shortening of the american timelines towards taking action. now if you felt that the americans had misinterpreted iraqi behavior and that iraq was genuinely cooperating, could you not have said very starkly to the security council that you really believed that iraq was now cooperating in a way that did not allow -- or did not make action appropriate? could you have been clearer in
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what you said to the council about this? >> well, muhammad al-baradei was a little more forthcoming. he said he thought there should be more inspection and it would be an investment in peace, i think that's the expression he used. i would not go that far. i would have felt a little presumptuous telling the council exactly what to do. i rather phrased the other way. i said, "people are asking me how much more time will be needed. i said it will not be weeks, it will not be years, but months." i mean, it would have been hard to give a general answer what is immediate, unconditional or active. proactive it was not done till february, and i think they certainly were scared, but would we would not have been able to come to that point even with 250,000 men next door? you see, that was the question -- when was the invasion to take place?
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there are several people, including some of your witnesses, who said that it could have been in the autumn of 2003. so the decisive time for responsibility going to the war is what they knew in march 2003, but to avoid the war i think it was more the diplomacy in the autumn of 2002 that was decisive. if they had kept this pressure that was so important to get the iraqis moving, if they had kept the pressure at 100,000 men or whatever it was and kept it up and sounded threatening, maybe we would have had the same cooperation, but once they went up to 250,000 men, and the time march was approaching, i think it was an unstoppable -- or almost unstoppable. the president could have stopped it, but almost unstoppable. after march the heat would go up in iraq and it would be difficult to carry out warfares. condoleezza rice denied the
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temperature played any role but i think reading other testimony i think it did play a role. the whole military timetable, as was rightly said, was not in sync with the diplomatic timetable. the diplomatic timetable would have allowed more inspections. uk wanted more longer inspections, but the military timetable did not permit that. as i have said, sometimes perhaps a little gruffly, the uk remained a prisoner on that train. >> you yourself, as you said, thought it would be presumptuous for you to state your own opinion on this more clearly than you did in the council. >> yes. i listed precisely what they had done. it was very fair, balanced reporting on the cooperation we had received and the hitches and the humps that we had met, and the council was perfectly capable of judging that themselves. >> you said a few moments ago
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that you sensed that the attitude of the british changed at a certain point. did you feel at the beginning of this period that the british were genuinely cooperating, genuinely keen for the inspection process to work so that military action could be avoided? >> yes. >> but at the end of the process did you still have that feeling or not? >> no. i thought that straw was giving up around march 10. they tried the benchmark approach, which i approved. i mean, i saw it as something hopeful, but said to your prime minister, "look, the benchmark must be doable. if they put something in -- which i realized iraq could not do -- then the conclusion after going through the benchmark will simply be no, they are obstructing and hence there will be an authorization to go to war." so i said they must be
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doable and i discussed the issue with the prime minister and we handed over this cluster document. but then my suspicion, and this is more speculation, is that the us at the time were not so keen on the benchmark approach. i think straw reports they were in favor of it but i think when you read what greenstock says he was not so sure about it. i think the americans probably saw the risk maybe they will comply here and succeed and then it is prolonged. whereas others like myself saw a chance that this would be accepted and we would go on to the next benchmark and we would be in april and it would have been too late for an invasion. so when it was seen then that the us will not go along with any prolongation of inspections
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and there would be an invasion, i think that was the moment when it was discovered that the cluster document indicated that inspections were meaningless. >> you also referred just now to pressure from tony blair, among others, on you to interview scientists outside iraq. more generally did you feel -- did you experience pressure from the british government while you were acting as an inspector? >> no. i must say we had excellent relations with the british extremely high regard for jeremy greenstock and i think we had very good cooperation with also very good all the way through. i had never any complaint. the americans also did not exert that much pressure i would say. at the beginning they came to us and said they thought we should carry out inspections in such and such a way. we should begin from the top and we should look for documents
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rather than anything else, and go in in big swarms. we didn't take their advice and they didn't complain. we knew what we wanted to do and they didn't complain. the only real pressure i felt was at the end when an assistant secretary of state came to me and talked about the pilotless, automatic planes and this contraption. this was the only moment. then he thrust some photographs on my table and i asked where did they come from. they said, "we are not going to tell you." i assumed then that they had some mole in iraq, there was leakage at least to the us, i never thought there was a leakage to the iraqis. i am not so surprised. some people thought we were bugged in new york. my only complaint about that is they could have listened more carefully to what we had to say. >> in an interview you gave in december of last year to the daily mail, the daily mail claimed, but it is not in
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direct quotes from you -- it is from the mail -- it claimed, "in an interview with the mail hans blix revealed that mr. blair tried to force him to change his mind about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in iraq to placate the americans." is that an accurate encapsulation of your views? >> no, no. >> it is not? >> i re-read the interview the other day and it's a lengthy one. it was made in my presence, and it was not given to me and i didn't request to have it submitted to me, but there are a number of things in it which i would not have chosen to subscribe today. i take responsibility for things that i have written myself and are on record, but, as you know, in interviews which are not checked, they can well slip in things that you do not feel that you are saying. this is one.
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i don't think that blair tried to persuade me. >> finally at this stage from me, when we got to the end of the inspection process clearly there was a range of views among members of the security council about the degree of threat posed by weapons of mass destruction in iraq. there was still a pretty widespread perception that iraq probably had some such weapons, particularly chemical or biological. this had not been dispersed or dispelled, but different countries saw the threat from that in different ways. did you feel these views were sincerely held, or did you feel some people were in one direction or another exaggerating their position for a particular reason, for an ulterior motive?
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>> well, i certainly think that mr. straw exaggerated what he was reading in the cluster document, because that covered largely things that had been open all through the 1990s, but i don't question the sincerity in the belief that iraq might still remain a threat, and after the war of course, when i saw what prime minister blair said, that even if blix had continued with his inspections, he would never have got the full truth about the iraqi programs. i think what would have happened is rather that we would, as we went on, more of the allegations that had been made in the dossiers in the uk and us and others, they had
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fallen apart. so the evidence they had presented would have been undermined by our continued activity. we would never have been able to clear up all the unresolved issues. as i said a while ago, the approach of 1284 was for key issues. the approach of the british benchmark was also to select some, not everything, nor was it reasonable to find this meticulous approach was not a reasonable one. so while there certainly could be a feeling that, no, we will not get to the truth, it was not -- it would have been difficult for them to base or justify an invasion on the basis of what the situation would have been, say, in april or may 2003. >> but they were not making it up, certainly as far as british decision-makers were concerned.
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even if it later turned out that what they believed wasn't substantiated on the ground, it was a sincerely held belief in their heads that these weapons were there? >> i have never questioned the good faith of mr. blair or bush or anyone else. i think to question the good faith, it will -- you need to have very substantial evidence and i do not have that. on some occasions when i talked to blair on the telephone, february 20, i certainly felt that he was absolutely sincere in his belief. what i questioned was the good judgment, particularly with bush, but also in blair's judgment. >> i would like to come back, if i could, briefly to the march assessment of the outstanding issues, which, of course, was entitled, "unresolved disarmament issues -- iraq's proscribed weapons programs."
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you have told us about jack straw's reaction and your comment on it. in his evidence to us he voiced his surprise that the document had not been available to the ministerial security council meeting in its discussions on march 7, 2003, and obviously given his view of the importance of the document, he felt it would have had a similar effect on other members of the security council as it had on him. was there any reason why it could not be made available in time for the meeting? >> no, except that it wasn't ready. we had worked on it for a very long time. it took a longer time than i wanted. we were not obliged to submit it until just before the invasion actually. what is it? march 19 or march 20. that was the occasion. it was to be the basis for the work program we were to submit. that was the purpose of it, but i found it could have been of
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use in the benchmark approach. >> but as he had had sight of it and you had had sight of it -- >> yes, he had sight of it by inadvertency in a way because we were to vet the documents through the college of commissioners. so we gave it to the college of commissioners and he got it, and also powell in washington got it a little earlier than all the other members of the security council. it occurred to me, as i already said, this may well be of interest in a benchmark approach and therefore i took care to feel my way in the council, did anyone object to us presenting this working document? it was a working document, not more. i found no objection to it. so i said, "yes." we circulated it. >> circulated it after this particular meeting? >> on march 7 in the security council. then powell and straw had it a day or two days in advance. >> thank you. >> i would like to ask another question or two about the more time issue in february/march. you said in your book that you had a discussion with condoleezza rice where she tried to pin you down, i think, and you said it wouldn't be years
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and it wouldn't be weeks, but it would be months. there is another dimension i suppose to this. is months more time to bring about the conclusive and verified disarmament, or is it enough time to reach a conclusion on whether the inspections process is moving forward in a substantive way? >> well, both actually. you look at the disarmament. i think the investigations we did into the unilateral destruction would have helped to clear up important issues. how much did they do away with? there would have been evidence of that, but the iraqi participation in this in producing witnesses, people that had taken part in the unilateral destruction, that would pertain more to their cooperation. it could well be that amir al-
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sa'adi and others, they could only act with the authorization of saddam hussein and saddam hussein was a tougher nut to crack. they might have been wanting to go further. in any case if we had continued i think, and with the remaining american pressure, i think it would have been likely we would have got more results. >> was there a dialogue or indeed a set of discussions between yourself and members of the security council on the timing question, because there were clearly different views at the security council. at one end you have the americans. >> yes. >> enough time, no more. the british would have liked a bit more time, some of the british. then the whole array of nations who would have liked an infinite amount.
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>> yes, there was such a discussion. 1284 did not specify any end, as i said. it could have gone on, but we sensed, we knew that the americans had a different timetable, and i asked prime minister blair to help to extend inspections and he did. i also talked to secretary powell about it. in my conversation with him, if i remember rightly, and i have written about it in my book, i suggested that we should go on until, what is it, middle of april or something like that. the canadians had another view. powell responded to me saying "that's too late." i think blair tried and also failed. he felt it was by the middle or end of march. the military machine had moved up to its goal by that time. so there was discussions about
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this. >> one separable aspect of that, irrespective perhaps of how much more time, had more time been available or been made available, jack straw's view in his statement to us was that you would have to have -- if you had a deadline, i.e. more time but with a fixed end point, you would have to have an ultimatum. in other words, if there is not sufficient compliance by that deadline, then something else has to happen, almost, what the french among others feared, automaticity of military action. was that a problem with the concept of more time? >> well i think he was right in saying that, yes, if there is an ultimatum it will sort of clarify their thoughts, but there could be difficulties in interpretation. had they actually fulfilled these targets? jack straw describes the six cases that he had put in. i had simply said they must be doable. i think the french and german objection to the benchmark approach -- they did object -- was based upon the suspicion that this is a gimmick in order to get an authorization.
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the americans wanted the authorization but they feared that maybe the iraqis will fulfill this. so they were i think lukewarm at best on the resolution. now when you look at the six cases they selected, one was a declaration, a strategy, a strategic decision by saddam i think. that should have been possible. the iraqis would have been able to formulate something even though they might not have liked to, and the second one was about the anthrax. now they didn't have the anthrax. as i think we have learned now in the duelfer inquiry, the iraqis apparently had destroyed anthrax and buried the remnants in a place near saddam's palaces. this needs to be checked but i read it somewhere. they didn't dare to admit that this had been so close to us.
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so i doubt very much they would have dared to go along and fulfill that condition. >> because they would not have dared to admit it to saddam himself? >> precisely, because of fear he would say, "what have you been doing?" that would have been hard. the other one was the mobile biology laboratories. they didn't exist. so what they could have done there, and we discussed it with them, can we set up some road controls, we will have helicopters watching, you will have check points at roads, etc. they were quite cooperative in discussing this and i remember amir al-sa'adi saying, "look here, the very idea of having mobile laboratories on our roads scares me." they had discussed it earlier and had rejected the idea. they didn't have them, so how could they have complied with that? in any case there could have been different interpretations as to whether they lived up to these benchmark cases, but i think what decided it was that the americans were not willing to give enough time for the benchmark approach, and once that was clear, it was dead.
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i think we are putting the blame now on chirac and saying chirac said he would veto this and that killed it, but i have a feeling it might just as well have been that the us would not have been willing to go along with more time. >> of course all that leads into the attempt to get a second united nations resolution, which would have been necessary for more time with a deadline. i will ask sir roderic lyne to pick up on that one. >> yes. i think briefly on the end-game in the un, first of all, obviously an awful lot hung throughout the first three months of 2003 on the exact words that you used in the security council, on the tone that you conveyed. did you feel that you yourself were bearing some of the responsibility in your reports for a decision on whether or not to go to war in iraq and
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did this affect the way in which you presented your evidence to the security council? >> no. i mean, evidently i wanted inspections to continue, and if there was anything today i would have liked to change, perhaps some formulations in the statement on january 26 and 27, 2002, when i said that the iraqis seem not even today to have come to terms with the idea of disarmament. that was fairly harsh. the only ulterior motive i had was to pressure the iraqis and to warn them that, "look, as un inspectors we are not satisfied. don't expect of us to be helpful." so it was rather the contrary, that we were very harsh and we
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said that later on, that, "time is ticking. we are close to midnight. you had better shape up and better be cooperative." so the statement in january perhaps was a tiny bit too harsh on a couple of points, but on the whole there are not many words i would have changed. i thought we took enormous care to be nuanced and very factual about it, but that particular phrase i think perhaps was a bit too harsh. >> did you try to rebalance that a bit when you next spoke to the security council in march? >> no, i don't think there was anything too mild there or too upbeat about it. on the contrary, i was rather restrained. i said, "here are things they have done and they are positive. however we have to judge them in the light of what results do they give, what the actual result is." so i think that was very balanced. i don't think i would have
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changed a word in that today. >> when the british started putting forward the idea of having a second resolution, did they consult you about that? >> about the benchmark approach? yes. >> but that was at the end of it? >> that was rather late, yes. >> at the beginning did they come to you and discuss it at all? >> no, no, no. >> so the way it was drafted was completely independently of your views? >> yes, except for selection of benchmarks. i also had a hand -- everybody was active at the time. the chileans and the mexicans were together. i also had a draft -- and i saw it also, an ultimatum saying, yes, this must be done, what a good idea. i shared the paper with the uk, i think, and the us. i did not play secretly with them, but every good hand tried something and i too. >> in your book i think you say that you thought -- this is referring to the text that was on the table on march 7 -- that here was something new. this didn't have benchmarks in
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it, but you said, "nevertheless i thought here on march 7 there was something new, a theoretical possibility to avoid war." so did you see that as a last effort for peace rather than a resolution that actually, as some have argued, was designed to provide legitimization for war? >> yes. i favored the resolution in the awareness even that the french and germans were against it. they interpreted it the other way. i thought, well, it's a chance. i saw that, look, you put up these benchmarks. there can be a discussion later on, did they fulfill about anthrax or did they fulfill about biological labs, etc, but i thought, yes, we will start something and once we go on with inspections here, you may be getting into something new. basically i thought it was sound to select something. that's what we were do in unmovic anyway. i thought it was sound. the french and germans did not criticize me for it. we had fairly direct
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discussions, fairly open with each other. it was rather friendly. they didn't mind i took this view. >> so your position was very different from that of president chirac or indeed the leaders of chile and mexico who declined to support the resolution. you wanted it to pass? >> the chileans and mexicans wanted to prolong inspections but much longer. it was not only a question of a few weeks but a couple of months, which i would have welcomed. no, no. i think they wanted more. they certainly wanted more inspections. >> but they were not prepared to vote for the resolution? >> no, no. >> yet you say you favored it? >> they might have shared the skepticism of the french that here was an ultimatum. >> but that's not how you saw it?
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>> well, i saw the risk, but i thought we would get into a new territory. there was a chance in it. i saw the chance, the germans saw the risk. >> lawrence, over to you. >> you mentioned a moment ago that you were concerned that the report you gave on january 27 was a bit harsh on the iraqis. do you think one of the consequences of that might have been to encourage the british government and others possibly to believe that you might indeed report serious non- cooperation, in effect a material breach, and therefore move the second, sort of the pressure, to bring this issue to a head, make that more intense? >> yes. i think certainly the americans felt, "this is dandy, he is really critical." they had been even more critical, but they thought, "fine, we will get support. this is what the inspectors will say," but of course i promised nothing but further inspections. so they were mistaken about that.
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we had a mandate from the whole security council, not from the us or from the uk. >> but it may well have created expectations? >> i think so, yes, and later on you can see from media in the usa that when i was more positive they say the us is no longer looking for help from the inspectorate. >> let's suppose that you have been able to report, as was done with the iaea, that effectively iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, that things had been destroyed. there would still have been a concern after the crisis was over that there might be a resumption of activity at some point. there was a suggestion that what was needed was a "reinforced system of ongoing monitoring and verification."
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could you just explain what that would have entailed and how it would have been implemented? >> well, the 1284 did not envisage the end of supervision of iraq even with the suspension of sanctions. it envisaged and expected a continuation of ban on import on weapons. so those parts of the sanctions would remain. in addition, as you mentioned, there would remain the reinforced system of monitoring and inspection. so un monitors would remain in iraq and we had an extensive system for monitoring them, but i think both blair -- especially blair has made the assumption that if they had dropped the military pressure and not gone to war, sanctions would have gone and nothing would have stopped iraq. he said, you know, with saddam
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being who he was and with the sons being there, there was every risk that they would reconstitute, and he was helped -- bush was helped by the isg, the iraq survey group. first kay went in and kay had been a strong protagonist of the war. he came out and said, "no, there are no weapons of mass destruction, but there are laboratories and there are programs, weapons programs." so that was seized and prime minister blair was delighted when he heard about the mobile trucks that had been seized. well, i'm not so sure happiness would occur to him, but he thought that was evidence. then came duelfer, and both were very professional. duelfer was also appointed by the cia to this job. i think both of them tried to give a straw to their governments to help them. duelfer said "no, sorry, there are no programs, but there are
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intentions," and the intentions he had gleaned from interviews with some of saddam's lieutenants. the fbi had also had an interview with saddam. i think it has to be looked at very carefully what was said in the isg report. i have not been able to check it lately, but the lieutenants had the impression that saddam would have done this. i think this is a very slim straw, what he would have done. the first reflection that occurs to me is that if the british prime minister or bush had come to their parliaments and said, "well, we are not sure that there are weapons of mass destruction but we fear they could reconstitute," i can't imagine they would have got an authorization to go to war for that purpose. secondly, i think it was wrong in substance. the monitoring would not have
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ended. it would have continued. hence there would have been an alarm installed. inspectors are not police dogs that stop. inspectors are watchdogs and they would have been there and there would have been an alarm. it might have been difficult to mount again an offensive, i agree, but nevertheless it would not be -- how long will a disarmament last? iraq has no weapons of mass destruction today, but what about ten years from now? this was too ambitious an approach. i think in reality they tried to excuse why they went in. i am not surprised, the politicians usually don't get any reward for admitting any errors. >> but just in terms of the practicalities of what was being suggested, this reinforced system of ongoing monitoring and verification, the point of that would have been that it would have been installed. it would have been in place. do you think it would have been
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difficult to sustain in place say without the prospect of a revival of military pressure? do you think it would have been possible for it to be there even if saddam thought this was a violation of his sovereignty and should be removed? >> yes. there could have been difficulties in sustaining it. saddam would have certainly tried to wriggle out of it and said, "there is no point. why should we even be subjected to this? they have now stopped the sanctions, etc," but still. if he threw out the inspectors, that would have been a sign, a warning sign. >> can i ask you about another proposal that was made at the time, this time by the french in early 2003, which was supporting inspections with a military capability so it would be possible, if necessary, to force entry into sites. this doesn't seem to have got very far. what was your view of that idea?
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>> with respect i think this was an idea that came up in discussions with the carnegie endowment, that they would have sort of armed inspections, the inspections would be accompanied by a platoon of soldiers and they would also have representatives of the p5 present there. i was aghast at the idea, because i thought that if you have some resistance --first of all, to appear like an occupying force was very far removed from my idea of conversations with the iraqis and trying to ease out any confessions from them. secondly, if you would have some little clash between the military protecting inspectors and others, then -- and i said it to wolfowitz, "you will be stuck with this. it is out of your hands." it is not a very wise thing. they withdrew it. this came up. yes, it was also part i think of the preparation for 1441, but it dropped out of it, and i never thought -- you refer to the french. >> i think it was a french proposal in early 2003. there was a proposal, you are right, in 1441.
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>> that i think was another one. i think the french at one point suggested we should double the number of inspectors. i thought that was not very sensible either. the problem was not the number of inspectors. we carried out about six inspections per day over a long period of time. we carried out all in all about 700 inspections at 500 different sites and in no case did we find any weapons of mass destruction. doubling the number of inspectors would not have helped. better tips, yes. those who were 100 per cent convinced there were weapons of mass destruction, if they had less than zero per cent knowledge where they were, that would have been helpful. >> i am going to do something which as a historian i suspect is rather dangerous, which is to look at the counterfactual and to ask what would have happened if there had not been armed force starting in the middle of march. there are a number of possible scenarios and you have just
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given us one, which is you would have completed your work, put in monitoring and verification that would have given continual assurance. perhaps that would have been the most benign outcome, but there are another two possibilities, one of which is the iraqis would never have been able to convince the security council as a whole, having been given more time, that they had fully disarmed, and that could have led to perhaps a second resolution, or alternatively that things would have just carried on as they were but the start of the military action would have been delayed. do you have any views yourself about the alternative possibilities at this time? >> well, i think it would have been desirable to keep a strong -- keep up a strong military
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pressure, but 250,000 men was impossible to stop it, and i think that the decisive moments were in the autumn of 2002. they should have said, "yes, we have a military pressure and we have the diplomatic diplomacy that needs to be backed up by force, but not necessarily by a force of 250 thousand." that should have been kept on even if they had gone for the british benchmark approach and they decided that yes, we are making progress. i don't see why they should have withdrawn altogether. they could have kept a good deal of forces in the area for -- i don't know. they would decide themselves how long the time. eventually they would have lifted or suspended the sanctions and monitoring would have remained. i think it could have been viable. >> from what you were saying before your overall sense was that the combination of the growing activity of the inspectors, the sustained pressure, was opening up new lines of enquiry for you so that you would have been able to
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move things forward to be able to give the sort of conclusion that dr. al-baradei was able to give? >> yes. we would have been able to clear up some things, but i think mr. blair is entirely right. we have never got the whole truth, nor do i think it was necessary to get the whole truth. the interesting thing -- was iraq a danger in 2003? they were not a danger. they were practically prostrate and could not -- it would have taken a lot of time to reconstitute in selling oil. what they got instead was a long period of anarchy. i think one conclusion i am inclined to draw is that anarchy can be worse than tyranny. it was, at one time. >> thank you. >> i too would like to take both a retrospective and perhaps a
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counterfactual look at what -- it goes back to something you said very early in this session, about what iraq might have been able to do following the passage of resolution 1441 to comply fully. you had believed i think you said iraq had a highly developed bureaucratic set of structures, certainly in the 1980s and perhaps into the 1990s, but you had come to the view perhaps during your inspections that really the whole thing had crumbled as a governing structure and was perhaps no longer capable, perhaps even since the gulf war, of responding with detailed accounts, data, statistics, whatever. if that were so, how much convincing evidence could iraq have provided after 1441?
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>> well, i think they could have done more than they did in their declaration. that's what they eventually did in february and march. i mean, they were not proactive. they were more holding the doors open. >> but the stuff was there. they could have produced and did eventually produce a mass of documentary material. >> some, not an enormous amount. when i say that they were not as accomplished a bureaucracy as we tended to believe, nevertheless it was not an incompetent bureaucracy. they had a lot of documents and i think they produced a good deal more for the isg. >> turning to an interesting set of observations you make in your book about disarmament cases internationally, and you report an argument made from the us side in the context of iraq
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that you recognize disarmament when you see it. that's the us being quoted. then they draw the contrast with south africa, eliminating nuclear arms under your leadership. >> yes. >> ukraine, kazakhstan when they gave up nuclear capability. there is also the later example of libya i suppose. basically were all these countries in a completely different place from iraq in 2003 or could iraq have been part of that if they had wanted to? >> you are right. i did refer and had some sympathy and understanding for the demand for a strategic decision, and i think i alluded to it in january and said that, "look, south africa took a strategic decision, they said, 'come, this is what we will show you if you want to go somewhere else, just tell us. here are the documents.
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if you want something more. just tell us.'" so that was a strategic decision. the ukraine and the others also came to the same conclusion. "we want to give confidence." iraq came to this in a different way. they extracted a commitment from iraq to declare what they had and to disarm. they did it unwillingly, and then perhaps i should not be so surprised that they are trying to go slowly or even to obstruct, to do as little as they can. so it was a fundamentally different situation, and perhaps only strong foreign pressure would achieve. >> they could have made -- saddam's regime could have made that strategic decision. i am still not entirely clear whether in your judgment by, say, february 2003 they had actually begun to make it. can you half make it? >> no, i am not convinced that saddam had come to that decision that they would do their utmost to cooperate. he took the strategic decision in 1991 to do away with the weapons of mass destruction, the biological, chemical and
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the nuclear. so there was a strategic decision but he wouldn't admit it publicly. one reason, again, the guess is he didn't mind looking dangerous to the iranians. >> that was exactly the question i was coming to and you have i think begun to answer it. can you with the benefit of hindsight make sense of saddam's behavior in terms of his own motivation, his own perception of his regime, his country within the region and in the wider world? was there a rationality about it or not? >> i never met him. muhammad al-baradei was very eager we should meet him. i was skeptical about it. i thought we will come away with some half promises and then the world will say, "the inspectors have been fooled again." muhammad i think with some
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i am quoting prime minister blair, "what that report shows is actually the extent to which saddam retained his nuclear and indeed chemical warfare intent and intellectual know-how. it is absolutely clear from the iraq survey group that he was concealing material he should have delivered up to the united nations, that he retained the intent not merely in theory but was taking action on, for
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example, dual use facilities that were specifically in breach of the united nations' resolutions." now that's tony blair suggesting what you might have said in different circumstances. do you want to comment on that? >> well, as i said a while ago, i think both kay and duelfer tried to help the government. they were appointed by the cia in the first place. they wanted to hand them straws. kay said they were programs and they had to go away from that. duelfer was concentrating more on finding what was the intent in the future, but i think one needs to see how strong was the evidence, first of all, about the intentions. this had come from his lieutenants i think, less from any direct questioning of saddam, and what saddam might have been dreaming of when he sat there as a prisoner is not terribly relevant. >> it is i think drawing heavily on the interrogation
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record, isn't it, of saddam in captivity? >> yes, probably, but what was the real danger even if he had even intentions? would he have had a chance to reconstitute his weapons? if we had continued with inspections and they had lifted the sanctions, as i said, you still have the monitoring that went on and they would not have lifted the ban on import of weapons. so i think this is really a straw that both in washington and london they tried to grab in order to get an absolution from law. >> thank you. i will ask sir roderic to ask what he has, coming to the end of our questions. rod. >> just really a couple of points of detail from earlier evidence we heard.
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one witness told us that it had taken unmovic quite some time to build up their capabilities and particularly with regard to the use of ground-penetrating radar. was that an important tool that you had or should have had, and were there occasions when unmovic inspectors arrived at sites where, if they had had ground-penetrating radar, they might have been able to prove the accuracy or inaccuracy of the intelligence that had sent you there in the first place? >> i don't really know whether there were any occasions where we would have needed. i remember and i have read that we got ground-penetrating radar from the uk, and it was used on occasions as well, and i think even with some success. we found something that was hidden, but it was not weapons of mass destruction. so it was a useful thing. iraq had buried various things. they had buried an airplane at some time. so it was not anything implausible, but it was not --
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it was a useful tool, but not a vital part of it. >> we also had a criticism that there were occasions when the british had provided information to help guide an inspection and then the inspectors had botched the event. one occasion was quoted to us where british information had pointed to what we thought was a buried missile, and an iraqi crowd had turned up and chased the inspectors away so that they couldn't then go ahead with the investigation. this was cited to us as one of a number of growing frustrations with the way the inspection process was working. were you aware that there was
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this sort of criticism building up in expert parts of the british system? was it fed back to you and do you feel there was any grounds for that criticism of the performance of the inspectors in the theater ? >> no. i read the statement, the allegation that we had botched an inspection. could be true. i don't know, but i was never told about it at the time. i was aware that there were demonstrations and there was some obstruction at a hospital i think where we were trying to dig up something, but this was not a major part. after all we carried out some thirty inspections, as i said, on the basis of site information, and in no case did we find any weapons of mass destruction. i think that the testimony that you had in early phase that what did we meet?
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we only met with resistance and "mobs" i think was the word used. well, maybe on one occasion or so, but it certainly was not a major thing. i did complain. if there had been significant things, i would have complained more in the security council, because this was our weapon, to report to the security council, "this is what they are doing." they had some complaints, but they were not over a very large number of cases. >> did you essentially feel that you had all that you needed for unmovic to operate as a credible and authoritative body or is there more that ideally you would like to have had to have really done the job? you have already said you didn't want a doubling of the numbers, for example. >> i think we had the tools. we had -- one headache that we did not have that unscom had and that was finance. we had 0.8% of the revenues from the oil for food program. that gave us all the possibilities. we did not squander money. we were very careful. we were subjected to the u.n. accountancy system, but that was not a problem. we could hire helicopters.
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we could hire airplanes, etc. this was a major reason for the independence. one reason why unscom was not independent was that they had to turn to government to get the inspectors and to get equipment and with the inspectors came also intelligence. so it helped us to remain independent. we did get help from government like the u.k. we got medical people, communications people from new zealand. we got the russians for the airplane, the french, etc. so there was some help, but it was nothing that impinged upon our independence, and no, i think we were reasonably well equipped. some people have said that our staff was not as high quality as unscom. well, unscom had very qualified staff, including david kelly, who tragically committed suicide here and whom i knew rather well, but, of course, they had links to the intelligence, which eventually discredit the whole operation.
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so i think we got fairly well good people. we trained them. we had selected them. we had interviewed them. all of them had more than one month of training while unscom came in and got on-the-job training. some of them had never carried out an inspection. they had flown into iraq to carry out an inspection. they learned a lot. they did an excellent job. i am not saying anything about that. but i think we had the tools, sir, yes. >> i think we are coming pretty much to the end, but sir lawrence has a question or two before we do. >> just with lessons learned, you have had enormous experience on both the nuclear and non-nuclear side of weapons of mass destruction. i would just like to ask a few questions looking forward to what lessons we might learn from this experience. we have had quite a bit of discussion with a variety of witnesses about this term "weapons of mass destruction." it includes a wide variety of capabilities. i wonder just to start with if
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you would like to say something about the distinction about the different types of capabilities that come under this heading. >> well, it's been a convenient term, w.m.d., weapons of mass destruction. of course, after the iraq war we talked about weapons of mass disappearance or other things, but it is not a very good term, because the core of it are three -- nuclear, biological and chemical, and missiles to deliver them. there is a vast difference between nuclear, on the one hand, and the biological and the chemical. so for iraq i think this has importance. there was no doubt in the u.k., i think not even to the end, that the nuclear was not a problem. that dossier was closed, whereas the u.s. kept it open. that was the most important thing. if one says that iraq remained a tremendous danger, we have to remember nuclear was not one of them. it was biological, chemical and missiles. they were certainly unpleasant
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and risky, but not of that category. i think the expression perhaps originally came also from a wish to play up weapons of mass destruction. you can say that twenty or thirty states have weapons of mass destruction, but you can only say that ten have nuclear weapons. so it is not a term that i think is very likeable, but it is a convenient one. >> i mean, one of the differences also is if you are going to have a nuclear capability, you need pretty extensive infrastructure. there are quite -- known forms of inspection. you know these very well, but with chemical and biological it is harder. are there particular lessons that you might draw for the problems of inspecting chemical and biological restrictions to see whether or not they are being upheld? >> well, we have an organization that is administering the inspection on the chemical weapons convention. i think they were even more
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advanced than the iaea, because they drafted their inspection system after the iaea and they learned from some of it. for instance, inspectors for the chemicals, they don't need any visa to go to the country. iaea inspectors still need visa with the possibility for obstruction there. so that is settled. biological is even harder. i was the chairman of a weapons of mass destruction commission, international commission. we examined the question of the biological weapons, and the american sunk the inspection and verification scheme that had been worked up to for a long time. i think it was 2002 that john bolton came and said, "no, no, we won't have any of that." there are real difficulties in doing it. there is a very big industry. there is big research going on. so maybe a different approach is needed to the biological. i did attend a seminar in the u.k. and there was some u.k. expert
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who said that he still thought the most dangerous biological, they were the most natural ones that would come. synthetic weapons were perhaps dangerous, but not quite as dangerous. i am not sure that -- the inspection techniques in general improved very much with iraq and the u.s. has given a lot of credit for this. above all, the environmental sampling, which means you take samples of bio-tar, or water, or air and you analyze it and very, very tiny amounts will tell you how they are dealing with enrichment or reprocessing. the u.s. discovered that early in the iraqi affair when american hostages who had been placed in baghdad, they came out and their clothes were analyzed and they found tiny particles that indicated there had been enrichment. so that advanced very much. the overhead imagery has also advanced very much.
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another element i think is the cooperation between intelligence and inspection. when we were working on the additional protocol in the iaea, muhammad al-barabei and i, we concluded, as i said, that it must be a one-way traffic, because otherwise we are there and we need their cooperation. if they see us as a prolonged arm of foreign intelligence, you will not get the cooperation that you need. i think the british accepted that. we never heard any complaints about it from the u.k. side. i still think that the cooperation is desirable, and already early in the 1990's we hired a guy, a brit actually, who worked us for in the secretariat to be a link to intelligence and to get tips from intelligence. he didn't get very much. in 2002 or 2003, yes, we did get intelligence. it was desirable to have, and i think it was desirable for us, because we got tips of where to
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go and what to look for, even though the dossiers were not very helpful, they were just assertions, but it should also have been of use to the governments. after all they are paying -- well, the iraqis paid for the inspections here, but normally it is the governments who pay for the inspection, and here are people who are on the ground. they are there. they can go in and see anything. if they give us tips, they can go to them legally. they have a right to go there. so inspectors can give something that the intelligence cannot, and intelligence can also give to the inspector something. it is a quality control for those who have intelligence to say, "what do the inspectors say? does this tally?" if it doesn't tally, i think they should be alerted and they say, "hey, there may be something wrong." there may vice versa also be quality control on the inspectors. "have you missed this?" in a way that was the message of colin powell when he came before the security council and said -- he was very courteous
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about us, but said, "listen, this is what we have found now." implicitly he said thereby, "these guys, the inspectors, they never found this." so their intelligence was superior. it was not. we were more critical. we also had the fortune of not being taken in by defectors and people who came with their stories. so that is the important -- yes, there is important lessons in this. >> that is very interesting. this is the last question. one of the arguments, perhaps very relevant to the idea of interviews and why the interviews were seen to be so important, is in the end the key capability is know-how. it is the knowledge that the scientists have developed, engineers have developed, and until you have got a sense of what is there, how much they know, how much they understand, there is always the possibility of the reconstitution in some sort of way, particularly i guess with chemical and biological.
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is there any way of getting at that other than by actually sitting down with these people and talking to them? >> no. i think that was a good method of doing it, but although it is a crucial element, as you say, they cannot have the weapons of mass destruction unless they have the know-how, there are other ways of stopping it. if you ask me, "what is the value of inspection?," i would not say that this is the most important means of combating weapons of mass destruction. i think foreign policy is the most fundamental. that is what the european union foreign ministers also came to. you create detente so that there is not a need, not a perceived security need to acquire these weapons in most cases, but i don't see in the case of saddam. saddam's weapons of mass destruction was not for perceived security reasons. even though he could talk about the israelis, i think they were
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more for conquering reasons for iran and kuwait in that particular case, but in most other cases i think it has to do with perceived security, and the best way of combating weapons of mass destruction is detente, globally and regionally. that's where i feel a little more optimistic today than i did a couple of years ago when the bush administration was still working hard to create a new cold war in my view. then after that i would perhaps put export controls. if you have some customers who would like to develop weapons of mass destruction, try to make it as difficult as possible and export controls is part of that. it is not waterproof, but it is part of it. thereafter maybe you get down to inspection, which essentially is creating confidence, useful confidence,
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but it is also meant to be a deterrence from violations by risk of detection. so it has some value. states don't like to be caught violating. so it has some value there. it is also a basis, of course, for action for government. that's the greater problem. get the action. the iaea has signaled smoke coming up of north korea or iran. then what action do you get? so the inspections certainly have a vital function, but it is not a cure-all. >> thank you. that's very helpful. >> i should like to ask you, dr. blix, in a moment if you have further reflections on lessons out of the iraq experience and your inspections, but just to touch on one point, you said much earlier this afternoon, talking about a telephone conversation you had with former prime minister blair, where you said, "at that time i still thought there were prohibited items in
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iraq." was that because of the material balance analysis derived from the unscom era essentially? >> well, anthrax played a big role to me all the way through. of course, we could not exclude -- sometimes we get too much credit and say, "you were right. you said there were no weapons of mass destruction." we did not say so. we said, "we have not found any." after 700 inspections and going to sites given to us, we did not find any, which is not the same thing. we did not exclude, but we didn't -- i mean, mr. blair said that we didn't find the truth, but we found the untruth of some of the allegations, and that was important enough. we would have uncovered some of the truth, but not the whole truth. as i said, it was not necessary. you could have ended this affair without the whole truth. you asked me for a reflection. i think i have spent much time on my reflections. i gave one a moment ago. that was the value of the inspections. now here is a multi-lateral system set up by governments and enabling inspectors to go on to the sites. it is a very valuable institution. it must be independent.
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it must not be prolonged arms of intelligence. this is one experience that is useful for the future. the other reflection i have is a broader one about the going to war. i am delighted that i think your intention is to draw lessons from the iraq war rather than anything else, and i think that when can states go to war still remains a vitally important issue, and the un charter in 1945 took a giant leap forward in this and said, "no, it is prohibited to do except in the case of self defense and armed attack or authorization by the security council." well, here in the case of iraq you can see how the uk in the summer 2002 or the spring 2002 said, "yes, we might, but it has to be through the un power."
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self-defense against an armed attack was out. regime change was out. straw was adamantly opposed to a regime change. authorization by the un, yes, that's the path. so they insist upon 1441 and they get it, but it is a gamble. 1441 is if they had shown or if the iraqis had continued to obstruct, as it was expected, then they could have asked the security council for a second resolution and said, "look, they are obstructing and we now ask for authorization." they never knew whether they would get that. eventually they had to come with i think very constrained legal explanations. we see how mr. goldsmith, lord goldsmith now, wriggled about and how he himself very much doubted that it was adequate, but eventually said, "well, if you accumulate all these things, then that gives a plausible --"
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he was not quite sure that it would have stood up in an international tribunal. most of your legal advisers not think so either. nevertheless he gave the green light to it. i think it shows the uk was wedded to the un rules and tried to go by them, eventually failed and was a prisoner on the american train, but it is true at the same time that this rule against going to war is under strain. when you have missiles and you have discussions about preeveryonetive action, it is under strain. if you don't -- if you see a missile coming, that's one thing, but if you simply suspect that a missile site is activated, do you then have an all-out war against them? this is a difficult -- we have had also a practice in the un, as i touched on
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earlier, in which you have some trespassing of this rule, some erosion of it in tanzania or in kosovo or in sierra leone. >> could i just intervene a moment on sierra leone? is this in the same category? our understanding had been this was a legitimate sovereign government inviting help rather than an intrusion. >> yes. no, i am not critical of sierra leone. i myself am critical of kosovo. i am more skeptical about that. still to me the security council is there, and even if you go back to blair's speech in chicago, he talked about the duty to protect. that was something novel in the un charter. he outlines a number of things that would be necessary to go to war. it should be doable and should be the right case and so forth. i don't think he mentioned the approval of the security council, but i think that's actually what came out, that, yes, you must have in all these cases also the approval of the security council and authorization. people say, "what is the security council? the russians and chinese will obstruct." not after 1999 necessarily.
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they are there. if they had not been willing to go along with the use of force against iraq and they were not willing to go along with it in the case of iraq, i think that was probably their wisdom, and therefore it is legitimate to look at it. if we discover a terrorist movement someone is preparing, i would not be surprised if the russians and chinese would go along with some pre-emptive action, but in the case that some people maintain iraq was legal i am of the firm view that it was an illegal war. i think the vast majority of international lawyers feel that way. this can be discussed, but i don't think -- there can be cases where it is doubtful. maybe it was permissible to go to war. iraq in my view was not one of those. >> dr. blix, thank you very much for your evidence this afternoon. we appreciate it. this marks the end of today's hearings.
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we shall open at 10:00 tomorrow morning when our witnesses are general sir mike jackson and general sir richard dannatt, who were successive chiefs of the general staff for the two heads of the british army whilst united kingdom forces were in iraq between 2002 and 2009. general dannatt will be the first witness at 10.00 in the morning. with that i will close this session. thank you. >> book tv in primetime continues tonight with the focus on campaigns and elections. the election of 1960 is and 1932 about herbert hoofer. book tv all this week on c-span 2.
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up next on c-span, the conversation on the role young voters are playing in the tea party movement. after that, general george casey on the future of the u.s. army and topics on this morning's "washington journal" include china's economy, the future to have taliban and banking regulations. >> you guys are a good group. [applause] i am a program officer here at the american foundation. let me tell you a little bit about the foundation. we are committed to ensuring that young americans understand and are inspired by the ideas of individual freedom, strong national defense, free enterprise and the traditional values. as the principle of reorganization of the conservative movement, we accomplish our mission through conferences, seminars,
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internships and the national journalism center, and by providing speakers to students across the country. we also work to protect the reagan ranch in california. to learn more, please visit www.yaf.org. this panel is going to talk about the tea party, a big deal. [applause] absolutely. as i said in my introduction, young america's foundation is the principal outreach organization for years, young conservatives. so, the question that this battle is going to seek to answer is why should young people be concerned about the de party? america's foundation has proudly sponsored many departing gatherings and events, including the immensely successful 9/12 march in washington, d.c. given that we are primarily a
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student our reorganization, we want to decide that this is something young people should be concerned about. i personally think it is. the panelists will speak about that at length. our first speaker is john o'hara, a vice president of external relations at the illinois policy institute, and the author of a new book that will be for sale after the panel. please join me in welcoming him. [applause] >> i would like to thank young american foundation for putting this on. the the opposition, as many of you know on campuses, is one of radical liberalism -- in the default position, as many of you know, on campuses, is one of radical liberalism. a few years ago was very happy
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with the direction america was headed. a popularly elected president planned to transform america's spirit world news papers declared that the free market was dead. this president has been followed with a truly radical agenda. this radical agenda was not advanced without a strong, and in many ways successful, resistance. on february 19th, a man stood up and declared what is now become the "grand heard round the world -- rant heard round the world."
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it sparked a civic awakening which is now known as the modernity party movement. people began to organize using social networking tools like facebook and twitter, an old- fashioned tools like website and e-mails. [laughter] from this to the august protest to be enormously successful 9/12 march, more and more americans involved themselves in the political process. they are not only opening their eyes and dating to the streets, they're proudly reaffirming the founding principles of our nation, that you will fight for on campus. today, democrats still have control of congress and the white house. despite the concerns that they're confused, they showed no
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signs of relenting in delivering their promise of a great new america. i stand here more hopeful today that the state of our nation. tea party ears are doing more than partying. their politicking too, and they are getting results. if this reaffirms what most of us already believe and have witnessed, which is that our country is truly a center-right nation. people are more often than not in line with our principles. we're seeing incumbents drop out of grace is because they have competition. it just a while ago, our president, so sure he was going to usher in his audacious presidency with ease expressed his preference for a solid one- term presidency over a lackluster ticket term -- to
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good-term -- 2-term presidency. you forgot the third option, a lackluster one-term presidency. [applause] with his approval numbers dropping by the day, he may just get that. what is the de party exactly? -- the tea party exactly? one writer refers to a counterrevolution to the policies and tactics that we are seeing adopted day in and day out in the halls of washington and in state capitals across the country. i think that to party movement is that counter revolution. it is a distinctive backlash to a government that has grossly overstepped its bounds, as
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exemplified by the bailout and handouts, and the persistence in expanding the size and scope of the government. the tea party movement serves as an indication that the country is a center-right. people are realizing -- are rejecting the hope of big government as sole provider and protector. they're recognizing that obama is bringing us down a dangerous path. they realize the summit is going to have to pay for these bailouts and this -- that someone is going to have to pay for these bailouts and this reckless spending. it is you and me. not only that, we're realizing the small government is a practical and principled approach for all americans. this is not a group that can be won over by politicians. is not a club with a litmus test. is the core of what we are all
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fighting for, it is about limited government, free markets, and individual liberties. many people ask if they're libertarian conservatives. this is an uprising of people, more and more people, coming into the fold to work on what many of you have been working on on campus, but many of us here have been working on for years. polling indicates that the tea party is mainstream. broadly represent the country as a whole. more and more americans identify with the tea party movement. more and more americans think the tea party is on track compared to barack obama, compared to this congress. the tea party is really the very definition of mainstream. i think it presents a unique opportunity, particularly for young people, as a gateway into the conservative movement. i think you should look at it as an opportunity and we should all
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look at it as an opportunity. are you out there with them marching? who here is in the tea party? wonderful. who has organized a key party? fantastic. what can you do to harness the power of this movement? this is a popular way of grass- roots uprising. what are you going to do to ride a the way in your town, on your campus, to maximize the impact of this counterrevolution. while the tea party does tend to skew toward an older generation, the issues that indeed the party is focused on, and the most important issues that we are facing today as a nation, are very much about the future of our country. we are drowning in debt, roughly half a million in debt per taxpayer. do you have that in your bank account? are you going to be able to pay that when you graduate, or when increases in 5-10 years? ask your friends. maybe they will not see eye to
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eye with you. where do they expect that money to come from? unfunded liabilities like social security's, bailouts, hand out and spending are bankrupting our country, and our generation, your generation, is going to have to pick up the tab. these are not separate issues, but they are serious issues. i always added frustrating when people would tell me that i am passionate about what i believe in but i would not convince anybody. i would not change anybody's mind. people are the way they are. i reject that premise and i hope you do it too. otherwise, what is the point of being here? in this country, there is a press wadable metal that decides most elections. -- a persuadeable middle that decides most elections. the new lots of tax policy or the philosophical opposition to
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bailout without any supporting evidence is a boring. this is a high-stakes game, the high stakes that our country is facing. the game politicians are playing is with your future. if you know someone is graduating, explain to them have big government policies of of this and the last administration are suppressing job creation and thus employment opportunities for them. make the case to them of a white the tea party movement, the broad center-right movement public -- a quiet the tea party movement, the broad -- of why the department, the broad center-right movement, the conservative movement is right for them. this is not just for older people and politicians. what did the party is working for is very much your future, as
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much your future as it is for the year ended now. get out there, get busy, and do not lead a good counterrevolution go to waste. [applause] >> next we will hear from the president and ceo of a freedom works. his new book, but he party manifesto, will be released soon. -- a tea party manifest, will be released soon. you can pre order on amazon now. quotingt to start been buy bob dylan. does anyone here torture
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themselves by reading a "rolling stone magazine?" i slogged through. i found this quote. the world owes us and not a single thing. we have to take a hold of our own problems. the editor was incredulous. he said, who is going to solve our problems? that is what is going on in america today. there is a de-centralization of power and knowledge in politics and public policy that is unlike anything any of us have ever seen before. it suggests that this is not your typical political uprising where we all sort of notice after the fact how badly the politicians have screwed up our
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economy, both republicans and democrats, and we rise up, and it is too late to fix anything. we throw the bums out, and elect a new set of bums, and then we go along. what bob dylan is saying, as a public joyce scholar, is that politics is too important to leave to politicians. if you do that, you'll get burned every time. there are certain reasons what politicians disappoint us. they're responding to the people who show up. this is it the power of the tea party. every time you go to a political speech, what do you hear? it does not matter if it is a 20 year incumbent. they say they will go to washington and change in the washington culture. then they come back from a really screwed up washington and say it again. george bush promised to do it.
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barack obama promised to do it. nancy pelosi promised to drain the swamp and beat a fiscal conservative. they all say it, they all do it. what you need to understand is that we do not need to change the culture in washington. we need to change the culture into,. tacoma. people need to understand what the founders taught us when they said that you need to be eternally vigilant. if you are not, you will lose this country. they said it before the ink was dry on the constitution. somewhere along the way, we lost this tradition. somewhere along the way, we decided that publishing and 40 page white pages about social security was going to be compelling to politicians to respond to incentives and not
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ideas. it was about strategy. by 1998, i was serving a lot of leftist literature. i found a radical leftist group that helped start of the riots in a seattle during the wto meeting. they are the guys that teach young people how to blow up things. bad guys. when you went to their website, as far back as 1998, and they had a training manual, what did they pointed their recruits to? they said, look at the boston tea party. i saw that and thought, when did we give our tradition to the bad guys? should we not take that back? for a lot of reasons and that john and discussed, when rick said, let's have multi-party --
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a tea party, he was really suggesting that we get back to our original traditions. there is a lot of talk about the worries that the tea party is falling apart. that there is bickering and squabbling. people are down because obama passed his horrible health care bill and his financial regulation bill. i would argue that the opposite is going on. we have gotten further as a community in changing the dynamics of politics here in washington, public opinion, and our political prospects in the fall than any of us had a right to think of a year ago. if you had been here in washington year-and-a-half ago when everyone had said, this is the end of the world, we are done. what are real doing here? that is when the people took over.
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there is a decentralization that has been enabled by the internet allows people to go right around the republican party, right around the democrat party. you do not have to listen to three networks anymore to get your information. they go get it for themselves. if you look to blog and all of these competitive sources of information, it very much reflects what used to be called "the spontaneous order." the market process by which all the bits of knowledge in society came together through cooperation and produced market prices, produced acknowledges that allowed people to effectively organize their lives, to better their communities, and to create products that people wanted. that is what is going on in that he party movement. -- the tea party movement. did anybody here march on a
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9/12? a couple of you did. we were probably thinking we would get 100,000 people. it was almost an arrogant thing, because we have never organized 100,000 people in washington before we had to expand our microphone system. we had to expand and the number of toilets. we had to expand the security and permits. we got 10 times that many people. we got 1 million people. it's cut down the share the -- it shut down at the city. it shut down the mattress system. yet, there was not a single arrest, -- it shut down the transportation system. yet, there was not a single arrest, not a single fight. people were self-organizing and self-policing. that is because they believe in these values we're talking
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about. they believe in individual freedom and responsibility. it is very different from what you see on the press. none of the organizations here to organize 1 million people to come to the mall that day. is because there are tens of calls and the leaders across the country, each of them -- tens of thousands of leaders across the country, each of them organized people, through internet, through website, through ways to allow them for the first time in their lives to find people in the community agreed with them and wanted to do something. in the old days, the older days being 12 months ago, you used to have to -- part of my job as a freedom march her was introducing people in the same community to each other. we do not have to do that anymore. we can let them find each other. they organize themselves. they can go online and get that information.
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they can find one of us or thousands of groups like ours to tell them how it is they can do what they are trying to do. that is the incredible power we have. i could count 7000 buses that came in at that had organized through our site, but that was one of 100 communities, most of whom i did not know, which is why we did not know how many people were coming. i think we had 70,000 people signed up, and we got a million people. the opportunity for us today is a threefold. first, we have to be to the republicans before we can beat the democrats. whether that is taking out bennett in utah or charlie crist in florida, the republican establishment is really angry at
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us right now. that suggests that maybe we are getting something done. they do not want to talk to is in charge -- they do not want to -- they did not know what to do. they want to talk to you is in charge and make a deal, but no one is in charge. no one can promise them what they will get from an earmarked for a bill. they do not care about any of that stuff. they care about basic things like that the government should not spend money it does not have dared the government cannot run a car company. the government should not take over my health care because they do not know how to do it. it is not in our constitution. it is not appropriate. this used to be -- i always thought this was a silent minority of people that held these values. as we discovered it through this
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movement and public opinion polls, the broad spread sympathy, this is a majority of americans to believe these basic values, but they did not know how to fight for them. they looked in both parties and said, i do not have a home in politics so i will opt out. palila my television and -- i will yell at my television and stand in the background as everything falls apart. but now, people feel they can do this. they are not alone. there are a lot of people all over the country just like me. we are moving into this, as eric erickson would like to say -- at some point we have to put down our sign and start showing results.
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what you're seeing is candidates and people who have embraced these values are taking out sitting republicans all across the country. it is happening everywhere. a black tea party candidate beat strom thurmond's son in south carolina. somebody should send the naacp a memo and let them know what is really going on. then we have to beat the democrats. they have jammed stimulus down our throats. they have jammed health care down our throats. november 2nd needs to be a referendum on obama-care. i am optimistic, even though i believe that republicans will screw it up, i believe there will be a sea change in the elections. i will leave you with this. the most important thing we can all do, if you want to be a part of this community, if you want
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to be a leader in your community, the most important thing we must understand is that november 3rd is more important than in november 2nd. it's great to throw the bums out, but if you that a new generation of guys -- even people you believe are there to do the right thing, if you leave them alone, the incentives in this town are all wrong. they're either going to become isolated and ineffective, or they will become part of the problem if you leave them on their on. you have to stay engaged. and this community has to stay committed not just to the values i am talking about, but to the idea that you are always there. you are always holding these guys accountable. it is a lifetime commitment. we cannot fix washington and go home appeared to me, what is interesting about tea party today, is that i think this
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is a sustainable. i think it gives a home to the majority of people that share these values, but never had a home in the political structure. that is where the power is, and i am looking forward to getting there. thank you. [applause] >> last is the political director at the american conservative union. this is something that our foundation has been proudly sponsoring for a long time. without further ado, here is lisa. [applause] >> how many people have been to cpac or are planning to go? dead.
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good. what many people do not know is party wasirst haltea held in 2009. it happened organically because people knew that a bunch of conservatives were going to be in town. i reference that because it shows how a conference can help to facilitate the movement. also, what you can do on your campus. i am going to tell the tale of two conferences. one of them is the "take back america" conference. these conferences say that they
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are the lefty version of cpac, but they're really not comparable. they have debates on whether the american health care system should be like cuba or whether it should be like canada. they do talk to us some things. are " theheir panels au pa economy,omg." down,them while they're how to handle the right." in the exhibit hall, most of them are unions. among the attendees, most of the
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young people are wearing coats and ties and sitting behind the tables. that means they're not they're on their own accord, they're being paid to be there. it is their job. is the least organic conference you have ever seen. a frequent theme at these conferences are the narrative. they adore using the word narrative. it is not about ideas, it is what you can say to people in order to get them to vote for you. what is great is that we actually have a great narrative, and that is the tea party. this is coming from the people, and the narrative is that it is the people who want to make a difference and make a difference in d.c. they want to get people out and but called on the obama agenda. one of the speakers at the conference said, "conservatism is a movement about nothing, and i do not think it can succeed. i implore the american people to turn their back on it."
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why all this imploring? they are in at the white house, the senate, the house. they're the ones in power. one thing you can point to is what each movements future looks like. at cpac 2010, more than half of the attendees were college students. if you compare that to america's future now, they had 3000 attendees. they didn't release an estimate on the number of students who attended, but they did have a straw poll, and of the 727 respondents, only 24% said they were between 18-24. by contrast, in the cpac straw poll, 56% of the respondents were under 25.
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i think you can look to that data to see where this movement is going. another thing i can talk about is that in the exhibit hall, we have a rich and organizations dedicated to reaching out to students, mentoring students. at take back america, they had 20 organizations in the exhibit hall, and over seven of them are unions. we fought for imports speech rights on campus -- for speech rights on campus. liberals honored a union boss, an acorn leader, and the chairman of an insurance company. the organizer of take back america said, we witnessed the
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gathering of a movement that has come into the sense of its own power. progressives feel confident that the american people are moving way.r whour this is no longer a protest movement. that is right. they no longer have anything to protest. the radicals from the streets are now running the government. we need to make sure that we are not going to let them be comfortable with that. a majority of those to go to your conservative campus lectures, the -- conservative opinion pieces in the school paper, will not become college republicans. they will not become activists or attend a tea party, but they ought to vote in november. that needs to be our ultimate goal, conservative victories in november. do not be afraid to engage people at a level that is going to get them interested.
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write a newspaper article, " snookie was right." "orange is the new black." believe me, more people saw watcheds grant then keith aldermen all week. -- rant than watched keith olberman all week. we forget that people who are considered the old guard now were our age when they campaigned for goldwater, campaigned for reagan. they did it all without twister, facebook or the internet. the stakes are high. the american people are on our
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side and they are willing to fight. do not forget that the conservative movement in 2010 started with the tea party. we need your help in gauging people on your campus to ensure that we have victories in november. thank you. [applause] >> and this is a wild guess, but that might be the only panel we have that discusses jersey shore. anyway, we are going to go ahead and take questions. we have to microphones up here. i'm sure you guys have a lot of questions. >> my question is about the new tea party caucus in congress. how does that hinder or help
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what is supposed to be a grass- roots movement? i guess the question is for anybody. >> it was michele bachmann denounced the tea party caucus -- announced the tea party caucus. i think it is a sign of success. i do not know if the caucus becomes important or not. we will wait to see what happens. but what you see is that you have candidates from both political parties, and even funnies. everybody is trying to pretend a day are a tea party guy now. we are like the cool kids, and everybody wants to get up on our stage. i do we have to continue to police our community so that we do not get phonies, we get people committed to those ideas.
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these are politicians, all due respect to them. >> what is interesting is that none of the republican leadership signed on. neither the wit nor the minority leader signed on. does that speak to anything about the republican party? >> dick armey was one of the engineers of the republican revolution in 1994. i worked on the capital in 1993 and watched this from the back benches. you always have to bring the republican caucus kicking and screaming on to good policy ground. i do not know exactly why that is, but just except that. this sort of like gravity, that is how they are. i think privately accused the republican leaders on the hill, they are more nervous about us than they are supportive. i think they agree with a lot of the things we are talking about, but they do not like the fact that they're not in charge. they're afraid we're going to push them to stand on the to do
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pure policy grounds -- on 2 pure policy grounds. someone came up with a "contract from america." a lot of challengers are signing that document. the republican establishment is telling their guys not to. we have to get them to come our way. >> a thank you. >> my question is format. matt. he mentioned that we should take control ourselves and not let the government take control. but there are certain situations, such as the oil spill, where almost immediately the obama administration stepped in to take control. should that not be in the hands of those with the education and those that made a mistake? >> i have a friend to do is an economist at george mason who had an interesting insight on
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that. argued that obama, given how he approaches everything, he approaches everything from the top down, i am in control kind of way, and they kept everyone else out of that process, including keeping materials and ships from other countries from coming over and helping because he supported the jones act and the union guys that liked that. given that that it was a unique problem that apparently no one was really prepared for, it would have been a better idea to have an open-ended discovery process where some innovative ideas might have come from some private sector company looking to, frankly, make a lot of money solving the problem. he did not do that, and i think a lot of ways he let the thing go on a lot longer than he should have. >> thank you. >> are these on?
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>> i am from georgia tech, in atlanta, and my question has to do with the impact that the tea party can have an overall. i know they will play a huge role in the november elections, but you also played a role in the primary elections. for every success we have seen in utah and florida, for example, in my home state of georgia, there have been failures of tea party candidates to win in a primary. do you think that the tea party can be most affected working within the republican party apparatus, or is it best as an outside move meant to put more pressure on both parties in an outside kind of way? is it an inside track or an outside track that will have the most success? >> i will feel this one.
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i do not think they are mutually exclusive. i think depending on where you are in the country, the republican party could be more in line with the tea party views. your question is very important. we must apply pressure to both parties. that talked about the day after the election being the day to remember. the reason we got into the mess we are in now is that people in this room, many of you, how many of you can of soda? almost everybody, right? -- vote?any of you can devot almost everybody, right? what reason -- you cannot trust the
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republican label. it is a sturdy vehicle. you need to keep them in check. you need to look not just at labels and personalities, but the substance of what they are doing. the short answer is a little bit of both. once people are in office, that is very important. >> a couple of additional thoughts, i do not think that third parties when -- i like to say that our job is to take over the party, not join it. [applause] the other thing that you need to appreciate is how the republican caucus will function in the house and senate and is always driven by the people that i call the legislative or to open doors. it does not need to be a majority of the caucus -- legislative entrepreneurs.
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it does not need to be a majority of the caucus. but in this new senate, i like to believe that you are going to have rand paul, marco rubio, mike lee, sharon and cool, you are one to have all of these guys -- going to have all of these guys. that is home to be the center of gravity in the senate. you are not going to win every seat, but you can fundamentally shift what issues you are talking about. when scott brown is on the senate floor and he is forced to vote whether or not to help the unemployed instead of extending benefits, which is a dead end solution, he can actually vote on the proposal to eliminate the capital gains tax to promote new jobs through the that is the dynamic we are shooting for. we should not let the perfect the enemy of the good, but we can shift the center of gravity.
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>> this question is pretty much aimed at you. a lot of people in the tea party, when it got started, felt like it was a populist movement and some people think that others are micromanaging the movement. it is turning some people off. as a former insider, dick armey is a former insider, he has tried to become head of the two party organization. the freedom has especially been targeted. >> >> you guys should be conscious of that and make sure that nobody takes over the two party. -- the mythology is that he wants to be in charge of this. this is a movement of the people there there are thousands
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if not tens of thousands of liters. i think -- all leaders -- of leaders. but the left wants to identify a leader so that they can destroy that leader and that is driving them nuts. they want to say that sarah palin is the leader of the tea party and then they go after sarah. you have to protect this egos in the movement. i think that our job is to be of service to leaders that want to do something. dick armey was majority leader and he brings some knowledge about how legislators act in congress and what went wrong last time. i used to work for the republican national committee. i consider myself a tea partyer, , but my job is to bring some of the things that i know -- not to
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tell people what to do, but to try to help them and grow this community. >> here is the difference between freedomworks and c-pac. c-pac and other groups are facilitators of activism. that sort of claim is the narrative that the media has put out there. you might have seen the piece in the "wall street journal" where unions were protesting nonunion shops for hiring non-union labor. it is very much a grassroots thing and groups bring some expertise to the table.
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i think i can say that was some credibility. that is my 2 cents. >> whoever wants to field this question, go ahead. i am from georgia. in georgia, there are a lot of participants in the two-party that are conservative leaning. the people that get appointed to leadership call the tea party to endorse candidates. should they let people decide on their own? >> i do not know if anybody heard who won the straw poll this past year, but i will jump on this question. things that endorse candidates, when it comes from a leader, it is just once ability to organize a small group of people can't organize and get a big
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results. as far as endorsing candidates, because there are so many tea party groups, you have to leave it up to what you want their goal to be. if there are people that identify themselves as a member of the key party, they are not politically minded and so it would help for them to know who is the conservative canada. there are others who are more motivated towards policy and action and ideas. you have to let those groups be who they want to be. it probably depends on the community and the individual leaders, as far as whether they endorse the libertarian treated as long as they endorse somebody who is libertarian minded, it will be the republican. >> [inaudible]
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walked is the take-home message -- what is the take-home message? >> i got to debate the head of the naacp the day after it came out because he actually called out army by name. -- dick armey by name. let's be clear. this is a political tactic that the left is using to change the conversation away from the issues that we were talking about earlier. the economy, the size of government, the proper role of
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government and whether or not this economic bill was a good idea. they do not want to talk about that because the american people are agreeing with us. it is a nasty business. the play the race card. that is because they do not have any other cards left in their deck. with that said, you have to be very aggressive about policing your local communities. this is a color blind movement. if you have every walked through a t party crowd -- a tea party crowd, some of our best rock star t party speakers across the country are not old white guys. this is what this is of the naacp so much. -- this is what pisses is the naacp so much. as a community, as decentralized
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as we work, we picked them out and we have to do that. there are leftist groups that will come to your of dense with racist signs and you have to ask them to leave politely. take their picture and posted on line and let them explain to their mothers why they are being such jackasses. [laughter] [applause] >> i sat down because i was -- that was almost entirely my question to it i was going to talk to you, john. he wore a contributor. -- you are a contributor. we got raked over the coals slightly -- lately.
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so, i want to ask your perspective on all of these different things. >> on the mainstream media raking us over the coals? basically, it is an explicit tactic. this was something called journalists. it was a left wing secretive e- mail exchange between journalists. so, one of the things that was leaked was an explicit tactic about how to divert attention away from jeremiah right during
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the election. they called him a racist. it is outrageous. there is no other card left in their deck and the american people do not believe in these ideas and so their results to tactics like that. -- a day resort to tax is like that. -- they resort to tax a boxed tactics like that. -- they resort to tactics like that. the bottom line was that it showed a hypocrisy and the people in the crowd were nodding their heads, agreeing with what she said. i do not think there is too much to it. the naacp cannot police their
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tea party are those that the activists are comfortable doing. some of them want to give political and want to endorse candidates and others do not want any part of that. i think that is fine. that said, i think that those of do want to be active should use the 50 state strategy. we have an organized community in every battleground state that matters on november 2. there is a lot of work being done by a lot of groups trying to figure out how to get out the vote. my group is offering some technology that helps them go to the right households and to maximize that effort. these are all new guys. they have never done this before. this is not the old republican 72 our program.
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i think -- 72 hour program. i think this will allow not just guys like rand paul to win, but you will see a way that is much bigger than 1994, which will elect a bunch of other republicans. some of them probably will not be worthy of that. you have to take them all and then try to discipline them once they get elected. >> [inaudible] >> i thanked the internet in these communities on facebook and the relationships that are built, the protests have a purpose. people begin to know each other and they become family. that makes this thing more sustainable. if this were the work -- if this
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were the republican national committee, you would work people to death and it would collapse on their conscience the next day and they would destroy the lists and the community would evaporate overnight. this community, because it is independent of that and is based on values and relationships, it has to be sustained past that and that is more important than the election. >> i encrusting campbell and i attend the university of alabama. i have the honor of speaking at a tea party rally, and i talked about this with my peers and explained to them what i was speaking and what it was important to me. it is not that they are not informed, is that they do not care. they do not have a desire to turn on the tv and watch in the news channel. i know that we can bring speakers to our campus, but how do we make them care? how we make them excited about it? how can we make them want to go and want to hear? >> i will take that one.
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i think you have to make it a must attend the event. when there are speakers to bring something could happen and you could be a part of it. even if it is just conversation, you and everyone in this room are able to get your circle of friends to vote more so than any speaker that will be here this week or anyone that you would see on tv. the personal relationship is what will get people involved. get them to events and then go out for a drink afterwards and talk about it. it does not hurt to bring the social aspect to it and let them start to be involved in that and tell them how it will affect them. them.
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