Bill Bennett: “given that opportunity, I will consume a few of those minutes to respond to the conversations about Iraq. I was in this…”

“given that opportunity, I will consume a few of those minutes to respond to the conversations about Iraq. I was in this body when we went to S-407 and heard the intelligence community brief us on the manufacture of chemical weapons taking place at what appeared to be a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan. We were told repeatedly by high officials of the administration this was a plant producing weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons; it had to be taken out by a cruise missile. Some of us asked to see the intelligence. We asked to know exactly what it was that led the administration to believe this was in fact a chemical plant. As we were given that intelligence, I found myself questioning it. I walked away from that meeting saying to myself: This is a little bit thin. There is not a lot of substance here. But administration officials were very emphatic in saying, no, we have gone through the intelligence. It is very firm. We have to take this out. The administration in this instance, of course, was the Clinton administration. The intelligence being presented to us was being presented by Secretary Cohen, the Secretary of Defense. We now know the intelligence was wrong. This was not, in fact, a factory for weapons of mass destruction. It was, rather, a pharmaceutical plant, just as the people said it was. We blew it up nonetheless. We killed some people with the cruise missiles we threw in there.”