the intelligence community owes the president (an explanation) rather than the president owing the American people.

President Obama and his successors are dependent on the 100,000-plus people inside the American intelligence community - the people Edward Snowden betrayed.

The history of the intelligence community is replete with violations of the trust of the American people.

The intelligence community, for the most part, has no accountability at all; to the Congress, to us the American people, and so they feel that they above the law.

I suspect there will be multiple reasons, and none of them the easy reason - someone simply distorted the intelligence, they were pressured - I don't think that's the answer. I think the answer is far more complex because other countries also came up with similar estimates, and indeed, the U.N. inspectors themselves when they left in '98 drew a very stark assessment of Iraq's WMD program. So it was a series of people who made errors, and I suspect it will turn out to be a series of errors and not a single one. But we won't know until we conduct the investigation that's required to find out that answer.

The charges are out there, and if there was misuse or distortion [of the Iraq intelligence], we need to know it.