Colin Powell Quotes

No one from the intelligence community, anyplace else ever came in and said, ‘What if Saddam is doing all this deception because he actually got rid of the WMD and he doesn't want the Iranians to know?' Now somebody should have asked that question. I should have asked that question. Nobody did. Turns out that was the most important question in terms of the intelligence failure that never got asked.

You have multiple intelligence agencies. They all ultimately report to the director of national intelligence but, you know, it never comes in neat packages. So you have to make judgments on what you have, and it's not easy to do.

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.

For to err in opinion, though it be not the part of wise men, is at least human.

Our failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq thus far has been deeply troubling, and our intelligence-gathering process needs thorough and unbiased investigation.

America responded to the 9-11 attacks by invading Iraq, only to discover that Saddam Hussein had palaces of mass luxury, not weapons of mass destruction.

There should be a mass purge of the CIA for incompetence…. There were 3,000 people killed on September 11, and not a single CIA operative has been fired. They missed that; they missed the weapons of mass destruction.

But what if our intelligence is wrong?

We were almost all wrong

Even when you are experienced, sometimes mistakes happen.

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.

President Bush admitted that the United States went to war in Iraq based on bad intelligence. But he says knowing what we know now he would still do it again. So at least we're learning from our mistakes.

Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.

What we also know is we haven't found them [weapons of mass destruction] in Iraq - now let the survey group complete its work and give us the report... They will not report that there was no threat from Saddam, I don't believe.

We believe, from everything we have been told by the intelligence community, by 12 years of history with Iraq, by the experience of the U.N. inspectors and by other intelligence agencies in other countries that Saddam Hussein had the intention to develop weapons of mass destruction and to have such weapons, and that was a sound judgment which I still believe to this day because he had had them in the past, he'd used them in the past.

I think they got it wrong with Saddam Hussein. They thought he had the A-Bomb. Instead he had a bomb.

It remains our policy to change the regime until such time as the regime changes itself. So far, we cannot be sure that he is cooperating or he [Saddam Hussein] is acting in a way that could give us comfort, or should give the international community comfort, that he is giving up his weapons of mass destruction. He continues to give us statements that suggest he is not in possession of weapons of mass destruction when we know he is.

Saddam Hussein had nerve gas and used it against his own people, he had used chemical weapons against the Iranians and he almost had a nuclear bomb in 1981 and in 1991. And he had been caught with anthrax in 1995 by the UN inspections after denying that he had it.

The intelligence is clear: (Saddam) continues to believe his WMD programme is essential both for internal repression and for external aggression.

You should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense -- better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong.

Saddam's removal is necessary to eradicate the threat from his weapons of mass destruction

The biggest threat we face is the possibility of terrorist groups like al Qaeda equipped with weapons of mass destruction, with nukes, bugs or gas. That was the threat after 9/11 and when we took down Saddam Hussein we eliminated Iraq as a potential source of that.

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed.

I don't concede that Guccifer is a Russian agent. Officials also said, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Just because the intelligence services say something, as we know from history, does not make it true.

U.S. officials never expected that 'we were going to open garages and find' weapons of mass destruction.