It's important that I address these misstatements because the American people must know just how reliable American intelligence is on the threats that confront our nation.

Let's talk about Libya, where a sitting regime has volunteered to dismantle its WMD program. Somebody on television said we completely missed it. Well, he completely missed it. This was an intelligence success.

Why? Because American and British intelligence officers understood the Libyan programs.

Only through intelligence did we know each of the major programs Libya had going. Only through intelligence did we know when Libya started its first nuclear weapons program and then put it on the back burner for years. Only through intelligence did we know when the nuclear program took off again. We knew because we had penetrated Libya's foreign supplier network.

And through intelligence last fall, when Libya was to receive a supply of centrifuge parts, we worked with the foreign partners to locate and stop that shipment.

Intelligence also knew that Libya was working with North Korea to get longer-range ballistic missiles.

And we learned all of this through the powerful combination of technical intelligence, careful and painstaking analytic work, operational daring and, yes, the kind of human intelligence that people have led the American people to believe we no longer have.

This was critical when the Libyans approached British and U.S. intelligence about dismantling their chemical and biological and nuclear weapons programs. They came to the British and American intelligence because they knew we could keep the negotiations secret.

And in repeated talks, when CIA officers were the only official Americans in Libya, we and our British colleagues made clear just how much insight we had into their weapons of mass destruction and missile programs.

When the Libyans said they would show us their Scud-Bs, we said, "Fine. We want to examine your longer range Scud-Cs."

It was only when we convinced them that we knew Libya's nuclear program was a weapons program that they showed us their weapons design.

As should be clear to you, intelligence was the key that opened the door to Libya's clandestine programs.

Let me briefly mention Iran, and I will not go into detail. I want to assure you of one thing: that recent Iranian admissions about their nuclear programs validate our intelligence assessments. It is flat wrong to say that we were surprised by reports from the Iranian opposition last year.

And on North Korea, it was patient analysis of difficult-to- obtain information that allowed our diplomats to confront the North Korean regime about their pursuit of a different route to a nuclear weapon that violated international agreements.