Gen. Tommy Franks, the retired commander of the troops that toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, says he was as convinced as anyone that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as his troops crossed the Kuwaiti border last year.
"I was 100 percent sure that those kids, our kids, were going to have WMD used against them. No one more surprised than I that that did not happen," Franks told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough in an interview Thursday.
Franks, who just released his first book, "American Soldiers" (ReganBooks/HarperCollins) detailing his experiences since 9/11, said he never had any doubt who was behind the 9/11 attacks. Then commander of U.S. Central Command, which includes both Iraq and Afghanistan, Franks says he said to himself, "bin Laden, I said al-Qaida, I said Afghanistan. .... I recognized that for a couple of decades, we had been observing the growth of terrorist hatred of our country and on 9/11/01 they brought it to our soil."
The full interview with Gen. Tommy Franks airs on Scarborough Country on MSNBC at 10 ET Thursday.