14 January,2009 01:47 PM IST | | PTI
At the fag end of his Presidency, George W Bush has acknowledged his disappointment at the CIA giving him wrong information about the presence weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, on the premise of which America invaded that country.
"Are you angry at them (CIA)," Larry King asked the US President on CNN last night. "No. I'm disappointed, you know?" Bush said.
Bush had decided to attack Iraq based on American intelligence that the country had weapons of mass destruction.
"Were you angry at the people who told you there were? I mean, you didn't go inspect. You didn't..." Larry King asked on his popular show.
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"I didn't - I was unhappy... But rather than sitting around being unhappy, I decided to do something about it and to - had a full investigation of why things went wrong. And then we reformed our intelligence services," Bush said.
But then, the US President said, everyone else across the world also said the same. "It just wasn't the US," he said.
"At the time, we passed a resolution in the UN Security Council 15-0 that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. That was what France and Great Britain and the UN Security Council said, including China and Russia - to Saddam Hussein. The reason why they said that is because we all thought he had weapons of mass destruction," he said.
Though he was disappointed with the CIA but the agency is vital in the war against these terrorists, Bush said.
"There are still people out there, Larry that would look to come and kill Americans. And in order to have an effective response, you've got to have an intelligence service that is motivated, that is funded, that uses their skills to help you determine the desires and plans of the enemy.