Here's part of what he said on the Today show this morning, with emphasis added. Follow the link for the rest.

COURIC: Well, we'll get to that in a moment. But you say nowhere did you ever see evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Well, an intelligent person would draw the conclusion that those charges were being trumped up by the administration as a rationale for the invasion.

O'NEILL: No, that's not what I've said. I have a very high standard for what represents evidence. If you told me that you put your hands on weapons of mass destruction, I'd probably believe you because you are a public person. If someone that I believed in told me they'd actually seen it, that's evidence for me. But it's possible -- and certainly there were lots of inferences and circumstantial things that the national security assessments pulled together in looking at this question of mass destruction. I'm not denying or gainsaying the fact that one could make a case. What I have said is I never saw anything that I considered to be concrete evidence of weapons of mass destruction. I think the fact that we haven't found them makes the point. That also doesn't make a point that we shouldn't have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein. I'm not making that case. I'm making the really clear case that I know the difference between evidence and what is allusion and assertion and the rest. That's my point.

COURIC: Well, do you think an invasion of a country should be based on allusion and assertion?

O'NEILL: Well, I think one has to look very hard at the apparatus we have with the national intelligence assessments. And it's why we have presidents. At the end of the day there's one person who gets to decide is what he considers to be convincing proof of basis for going to war, and we elected George Bush and he decided it was good enough.

COURIC: Well, let's talk about your assessment of the president and, I guess, his leadership style, for lack of a better term. You do describe him as disengaged. You do describe, I think if I can, sort of, try to assess your description, as policy having no process, kind of, being put together willy-nilly. You do describe him as a blind man in a room full of deaf people. So what are you saying about the way policy is established in this White House?

O'NEILL: Well, I'd say several things in response to your question. One, in hundreds of hours of conversation with the author -- let me not put this off on general case. I used some vivid language that if I could take it back, I'd take that back, because it's become the controversial centerpiece. And I am afraid that it will cause people to have an impression without actually reading the book. I hope people will read the book. But having said that, I want to also say this: This is Ron Suskind's book. This is not my book. I have no economic interest in it, contrary to the inference in the Wall Street Journal this morning. I hope people will read it because I think it makes a contribution to illuminating, especially for young people, what I consider to be a bipartisan, broken political process.