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American Morning
Deadly Crash of Marine Refueling Plane in Pakistan Reminds Us How Dangerous Military Mission Over There Is
Aired January 10, 2002 - 07:38 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: The deadly crash of that Marine refueling plane into a mountain in Pakistan reminds all of us how dangerous the military mission over there is, but nevertheless, it does go on with no small amount of success.
Joining us now from Washington to talk about a couple of the tangential issues, if you will, is Kelly McCann, CNN security analyst and CEO of a company called Crucible Security -- Kelly, nice to have you with us. Thanks for joining us.
J. KELLY MCCANN, CNN SECURITY ANALYST: Thanks, Jack.
CAFFERTY: The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Richard Myers, is talking about how we may have succeeded in heading off additional domestic terrorist actions here in the United States with the capture of laptop computers, cell phones, computer disks and other intelligence that was rounded up in Afghanistan.
What kind of information would you expect they might be onto there?
MCCANN: Well, of course, anything that you would save to a disk is exploitable. You know, there are high technology methods of scrubbing disks, where you can retrieve information that if you just go through a normal delete sequence is not really deleted from the computer hardware. So...
CAFFERTY: Yes, nothing ever leaves a computer, right?
(CROSSTALK)
MCCANN: Exactly.
CAFFERTY: It's all there.
MCCANN: Exactly. And we've got the most expert people in the world able to go through that process and cull out information, which then has to go through the process to become true validated intelligence, which is exploitable.
CAFFERTY: Is it too big a reach to say that the recovery of this stuff could have prevented additional terrorist activity here? After all, these missions are planned, in some cases, years in advance. There are sleeper cells, according to the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, that still exist here in the United States. We're not out of the woods on this thing yet, are we?
MCCANN: Oh, not by a long shot -- not by a very long shot. No, I think that it's not far out of reach to say that, because obviously we're going to learn about tactics (UNINTELLIGIBLE) procedures. We may learn about the methods of infiltration, how those sleeper cells initially got here legally or illegally. We might learn about planning, you know, operational planning that was constructed on someone's computer and saved and then deleted later. So there should be a wealth of information, depending on whose computer it was that we can get.
CAFFERTY: What's your take on the fact that apparently the Afghan government just turned lose a bunch of fairly high-ranking Taliban officials? People that if you had a lick of common sense would have been recognized as being important to the United States military and intelligence communities.
MCMANN: Well, a couple of things. When we went into this, we have very parallel objectives with the Afghanis. Now, we're seeing a divergence of objectives, and I think that this is basically an indication of that. The longer that this thing goes on -- I mean, Karzai is going to have to stand on his own, or he'll be accused of being a puppet by his own people. So he's going to have to push back, and he's going to do some things that we find distasteful or, you know, detrimental to what our overall objectives are. But he has no choice.
The other thing is that we have kind of a lack of understanding about what those people are all about. There are things that are just always going to be unacceptable to us here in the U.S. that is a part of their culture and a part of their lifestyle. So it may be wrong for us to try to mandate that they accept us and our culture completely. So I think you're seeing a troubled marriage forming.
CAFFERTY: What about the decision to move these detainees, which I guess is what the government is calling them -- the prisoners of war, the people that were rounded up during the military operations -- shipping them off to Guantanamo? What's your sense of the thinking there?
MCMANN: Well, I think they're going to move them to a nice spot. I think that much too much has been made about, you know, these guys. Are we going to sedate them? I know about 200,000 Marines that would love for one of them to just up in the middle of an airplane right now, you know.
CAFFERTY: Yes, exactly.
MCMANN: I mean, these are not supermen. Let's not forget that this is a failed fighting force.
CAFFERTY: Right.
MCMANN: They are no more. So basically what we're going to do is we're going to move them down to Guantanamo. They don't have a right to privacy. We're going to employ a lot of interrogation methods that are humane and safe and controllable, and we're going to go through the whole process that you would with POWs, try to reeducate and repatriate them, because there has to be an end game to these guys. They can't live in Guantanamo on our dime for the rest of their lives.
CAFFERTY: Good point. Kelly, it's good to see you. We've got to wrap it up, but we'll do some more of this down the road -- appreciate you being with us.
MCMANN: Thanks, Jack.
CAFFERTY: Kelly McCann, CNN security analyst and president and CEO of a company called Crucible Security.
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