NEWS TRANSCRIPT from the United States Department of Defense
DoD News Briefing
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
Sunday, Feb. 17, 2002
(Interview with Brit Hume, Fox News Sunday)



HUME : And what about the idea that you hear, this phrase "axis of evil," leads nowhere?

WOLFOWITZ : Look, I think what leads to a very, very dangerous place is the mixture of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists who, as they demonstrated on September 11th, don't even care about their own lives, much less the lives of other people.

We now, after September 11th, have a graphic, clear understanding of what commercial airliners can do.

We can't wait until we have a graphic, clear understanding of what biological weapons or nuclear weapons can do before we do something about breaking that connection.

HUME : Now, reports continue to come out of that area where the Predator bomb hit that say, no, no, hit the wrong people. Can you offer anything further on that?

WOLFOWITZ : We're looking into it. We're trying to figure out from what evidence we've been able to recover who it could have been. And we don't have the answer yet.

HUME : Well, it was said at the time at the Pentagon that it was believed it was a proper target and that it was, indeed, coordinated by the CIA with military planners. Is that the case? And do you still believe that this was a proper target?

WOLFOWITZ : Based on everything we know so far, we still think it was a proper target. But we don't know a great deal more than what we knew the day we took that shot.

But, Brit, you know, people should understand, too. I mean everyone wants us to get bin Laden and get the worst al Qaeda people. And they need to understand that every time we take an action, it's going to be based on intelligence that has gaps in it. That's the nature of the business that we're in. And, again, I think it would be important, because we're going to continue operations in Afghanistan for a long time, to understand that we've make judgments based on intelligence that isn't 100 percent perfect.

If you wait for 100 percent perfect intelligence, a lot of bad guys are going to get away.