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Tavis: Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia has been a leading figure in the U.S. Senate for more than 20 years now. Prior to that, he served two terms as governor of the Mountain State. Among his Senate duties, he is the powerful Vice-Chairman of the Select Intelligence Committee. And tomorrow his committee begins confirmation hearings for John Negroponte, who if confirmed, would become our nation's first-ever National Intelligence Director. Senator Rockefeller joins us tonight from the nation's capital. Senator, nice to have you on, sir.

Jay Rockefeller: Thank you, Tavis, very much.

Tavis: Glad to have you with us. Let me start, before I get to these hearings kicking up tomorrow in your committee, to some news that didn't really get the kind of conversation it might otherwise have received, given that it was overshadowed by the passing of Pope John Paul II. But I don't tell you something that you don't know, but I remind you that last week, the Presidential Commission on Intelligence released the report--we refer to it basically as the Robb-Silverman report, named after the two persons responsible for making it happen. But I want to quote from one line of that report that we didn't get to last week, again because of the Pope's passing. The line I quote from says simply this, "Intelligence community--the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure." Are we going to learn anything in this report that we didn't already know?

Rockefeller: To be honest with you, Tavis, I'm not sure that there's a great deal in the analysis of the intelligence part of leading up to Iraq that's new, that we didn't know either from the 9/11 Commission or from the Senate Select Committee report that we did a year ago. But what's important about that commission is that it only could do half the job, and this story hasn't been told, either. That is, since it was the President's commission, he did not allow the members of that committee, of commission, to discuss any of the misuse, hyping, exaggeration, you know, mushroom-cloud-type statements that were made by administration people between the time of the vote in the Senate and then, you know, much later, when we finally went to war in March. And that is a major flaw, because by law, the intelligence has to not only be correct, which it was not, but it is not the intelligence community which makes the decision whether we go to war or not. It's the administration. And the administration hyped the intelligence long after we knew that it was wrong. I had changed my opinion--the only Democrat, I think, to do so, on the Senate floor and say my vote was wrong, this intelligence is wrong, we found that out. But the administration went right ahead, made their case, warned of, you know, the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda and all kinds of things that didn't exist. And that, you see, would have embarrassed the administration, and thus the commission was not allowed to even take that subject up.

Tavis: What's your sense of what ought to happen, then, where this administration is concerned, given what you've just shared? I was a little stunned when I heard you say that, because if we knew in the midst of this the intelligence was wrong and the administration kept hyping it, I'm wondering where the rest of the persons in charge of oversight in the Senate were when you were on the Senate floor.

Rockefeller: No. When we were on the Senate floor--first of all, you can't talk about intelligence on the Senate floor. And after we cast our vote to authorize, not to tell the President to go to war, but to authorize the President to go to the United Nations and if that failed then to give him the authorization to go to war as a last resort. They just took off. I mean, my whole theory, Tavis, on this is that the President had made up his mind more or less, and the more rather than the less, within a week after 9/11, that he was fundamentally going to be going to war in Iraq, that Afghanistan wasn't going to be big enough, the Taliban weren't big enough, although that's where the al Qaeda connection was, and that the plan had been pretty much set. And so, the next couple of years were really preparing the American people for the administration's predetermined decision to go to war. That is not, in my judgment, the way an administration properly behaves.

Tavis: All right, so how does your committee advance the ball even farther down the field?

Rockefeller: Well, for example, we're having Ambassador Negroponte tomorrow in front of us for his nomination hearing. And that's one of the questions he's going to get asked by me and, I'm sure, by a number of others. That hyping of intelligence--you know, you can have the best intelligence in the world, but sometimes it's only known by a very few people. And it's not known entirely to the Senate or the House Intelligence Committee. Some of it's reserved just to the executive branch and then maybe a few others. That he has to, as the number one intelligence man, probably one of the three or four most powerful people in the United States, he's going to have to stand tall to the President and say, "Mr. President, you can't say that, and you can't do that, because that's not backed up by intelligence, and it's not right."

Tavis: But you and I both know that there have not been those kinds of folk around this president. If he's been accused of anything, respectfully, he's been accused of having people around him who do not disagree with that hawkish view that so many in that administration seem to have. What gives you reason to believe, if you do have reason to believe, that Mr. Negroponte is up to that task, given that what I keep reading at least is that his confirmation really is a foregone conclusion?

Rockefeller: I think you're right that it's a foregone conclusion, but that doesn't mean that we don't have oversight of him and that we can't get honest answers out of him. I think the main reason, frankly, Tavis, is that this is the most important job he'll ever hold in his life. He's about the same age as I am, and it's probably his legacy, so to speak.

Tavis: Mm-hmm.

Rockefeller: And he was not part of the inner circle to the President. He's a little bit from the outside. You know he's Ambassador to Iraq, sure, but before that, he'd been in the Foreign Service for about 40 years, so he has a long, long reason for self-esteem and self-confidence. He's a very proud man, a very crisp person in his decision-making, a very clear thinker. I can't promise good results, but it's my feeling that he will tell truth to power, so to speak.

Tavis: He will certainly be challenged, though, because there are a number of, shall we say, unruly agencies that he has to interface with. There are certain to be, I suspect, some power struggles. I'm still not sure that I'm clear on what oversight this Intelligence Czar actually has. I just know that of all places, there are people in Washington who think they have power fiefdoms, and in the midst of that, you set up a guy who's in charge of all the intelligence. How is he actually going to pull this job off?

Rockefeller: I think in part because it needs to be pulled off. The American intelligence establishment is in disarray. You have 15 different agencies. There is tremendous competition between the CIA and the Department of Defense and a variety of others. The FBI, for example. Can the FBI really do domestic intelligence in a proper fashion? I don't think that's decided yet. And the other thing is that this is--the light is going to be shining on this man like no other person in this country, with the exception of the President. I mean, he's going to get a whole lot more publicity than Vice President Cheney, because every member of the press corps is going to be bearing down on him, as well as the oversight committees, but particularly the press corps, frankly, observing every move he makes, and when he has his first test of will, for example, with the Defense Department--and I guarantee you that'll come--when he makes the decision, what's also going to be very important is does the President stand behind him.

Tavis: Mm-hmm.

Rockefeller: Because if the President doesn't stand behind him, he will lose stature very rapidly in this city. This is that kind of a city.

Tavis: Well, he was not the President's first choice. We all know the President went down the list, respectfully, to even get to Mr. Negroponte.

Rockefeller: That happens. You know, that doesn't bother me.

Tavis: All right. Let me ask you if this bothers you, as an exit question. This report that we spoke of earlier, that got buried last week because of the news about the Pope, suggests that three years after 9/11, that the intelligence community still knows--these are their words--"disturbingly little," "disturbingly little," about nuclear programs of the world's threats like Iran and North Korea. So the President has talked about the axis of evil, but this report suggests the community--the intelligence community doesn't know much about it.

Rockefeller: Well, that is correct, Tavis. You have stated it correctly. The part that you're talking about is heavily redacted. And what I mean by that is that 98% of everything in those two chapters, chapters 10 and 11, I think, are blacked out.

Tavis: Right.

Rockefeller: And the only things that remain are precisely what you have said, and that is that we know very little about the situation and that we're not very good in our coverage, and it didn't refer to just Iran and North Korea, but other countries also. "Other adversaries," as they said.

Tavis: Well, we'll be watching the hearings tomorrow to see what comes of Mr. Negroponte's confirmation process and more importantly watching the work that we hope comes out of this new position in the coming months and years, with regard to our first-ever Intelligence Czar. Senator Rockefeller, thank you.

Rockefeller: He's got--he's got a lot of pressure on him, Tavis, a tremendous amount of pressure.

Tavis: And you guys have a lot of oversight responsibility as well.

Rockefeller: We do.

Tavis: Yeah. All the best to you, sir. Thanks for coming on.

Rockefeller: Thanks.

Tavis: Glad to have you. Up next on this program, actor Anthony LaPaglia. You know this guy from CBS' "Without a Trace," but he's now in a new movie called "Winter Solstice," so we'll sit down and talk to Anthony LaPaglia in just a moment. Stay with us.