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CNN Presents

CNN Presents: "America Remembers, Part II"

Aired August 24, 2002 - 20:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

AARON BROWN, ANCHOR, CNN PRESENTS: Welcome to CNN PRESENTS, I'm Aaron Brown. The chain of events set in motion by the attacks on the country on September 11, 2001 have taken Americans from Ground Zero here in New York City to the front lines in Afghanistan.
In the days and weeks and months following September 11th, the country readied itself for war, went to war, taking the fight to those who try so hard to destroy this country.

Last week, we focused on that one horrible day in September, the Towers, the collapse, the losses; this week, Part Two of "America Remembers," a look at America's response to September 11.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR, "AMERICAN MORNING": It is almost 22 hours after the unspeakable terrorist incident that has forever changed New York City. Some of headlines Americans are waking up to this morning, The "Daily News" proclaiming "It is War," the "New York Post" saying "An Act of War."

UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: In the area of where the blast occurred from the commercial jetliners, it's like a nuclear winter, ash, soot, piled on top of cars three inches deep.

AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Yesterday was surreal. Today is all about reality. Today we're going to start to get a sense of the dimension of this.

RUDOLPH GIULIANI, MAYOR OF NEW YORK: We have been successful in recovering at least one other person and we're in the process of doing everything we can to try and locate other people.

DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Across America, the hope still goes on that many more people will be rescued from that rubble in New York City and perhaps even at the Pentagon.

BOB FRANKEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It is shortly after eight o'clock in the morning in Washington and at eight o'clock part of the Pentagon opened up for work.

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SENIOR PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: The Pentagon was insistent that it wanted to show that it was still in operation.

FRANKEN: The search is beginning inside now as they try and find out exactly the human tragedy of this test that has befallen the Pentagon.

KATE SNOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: All night long, Miles, the dome light on the very top of the capitol has been burning here. The Congress never officially went out of session. That light was on and I remember that striking me that it was so symbolic that they left the light on to show that democracy was still OK.

ZAHN: City officials have no idea what kind of reality they confront in the rubble of the World Trade Center. It was hell down there. It made me sick, made me sick to my stomach to see it. Then, we turn a corner and you would see these heroic rescue workers and these people were 24 hours on, 24 hours off, and they were not going to give up until they were 100 percent sure that one of their own wasn't left behind.

BROWN: There were trucks and police cars everywhere you looked. You couldn't move. Streets were closed. There was no place to get food. Nobody was going to work.

ZAHN: On the Nasdaq, the Dow Jones closed. All public schools are closed.

BROWN: And then there was no business for anyone to do and the city was weeping.

ZAHN: The mayor expects the fatality numbers to be horrendous. He called them "very, very high."

GIULIANI: The numbers that we're working on are in the thousands.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We thought this would be like Oklahoma City where you'd have injuries and amputations, to get people out of the heaps of debris, but there weren't any. Either you were OK or you were dead, basically.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: September 11 certainly opened the eyes of an entire nation. All I remember hearing apart from the grief, obviously, and the shock was questions such as why? Who are these people? Why do they hate us? We want answers. We want to know.

KELLY WALLACE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: U.S. officials confident that the evidence right now pointing to affiliates or associates of Osama bin Laden.

WALTER ISAACSON, CHMN. AND CEO, CNN NEWS GROUP: When it became clear that bin Laden was probably involved and that Afghanistan was at the core of this, we knew Nic Robertson was there. They started making plans to go to him.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Certainly Osama bin Laden is a figurehead, not only in Afghanistan but in this part of the world. Here's somebody that some young followers of Islam might look towards as a particular type of leader that they behold. GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against out country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: I think he was very forceful. He was clearly in charge. He was shocked like all of us and he was angry.

JUDY WOOFRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: I've just been told that the United States Senate is being evacuated.

SNOW: People are very much on edge here. There was a suspicious package and that's why they're evacuating the members of the House.

BROWN: A building here in Midtown Manhattan has been evacuated because of what's being described as an unspecified bomb threat.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Damn terrorists.

ZAHN: All of a sudden I saw everybody moving off the rooftop. I said, "What's going on?" They said, "It's a bomb scare."

BROWN: People in the city, as you can imagine, are enormously tense. We were living, all of us, in this odd cocktail of fear and rumor and vulnerability.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He called me at 10 to nine and said, "Our building has just been hit by a plane."

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There was the second plane that came around and slammed into the building.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When he went to work, his mom said goodbye, gave him a big kiss and never saw him again.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And I said, "Oh God, John, please get out of there safely."

COHEN: We're at the corner of Lexington and 26th Street in Manhattan. We're at the Armory, where hundreds of families are lined up behind me trying to get information about their missing loved ones.

When we first arrived there, my producer Miriam Falco (ph) and I, we were concerned because we did not want to thrust ourselves at these people.

We felt very strongly that if they didn't want to talk to us, we didn't want to talk to them and we weren't going to hound them.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm looking at my own nephew.

COHEN: But, in fact, it was the opposite.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've been here over two hours. They told us once they'd take us next.

COHEN: Several different people stand out in my mind from September and one of them is Vinny Kamasz (ph). He was the first interview that I did on camera. He was looking for his father. His father was a window washer at the World Trade Center.

If you think your father might be out there somewhere what would you want to say to him?

VINNY KAMASZ, VICTIM'S SON: I want to tell him that we all miss him. His little nephew Luke misses him and that we're strong and got hope.

COHEN: Thank you.

KAMASZ: Thank you.

COHEN: Aaron, I've been talking to these families for two days now and all of these stories are very much like this. People are just hoping that their relatives are out there somewhere and they're begging us...

It was just so moving to hear from this young man how he was just searching and searching for his father.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If anybody sees my daughter.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He has a daughter seven months old.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I want him to come home.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We're not going to give up until we find you. We love you.

COHEN: When you interview person after person who is missing someone who is so special to them, so important, fathers, mothers, sisters, wives, husbands, children, I don't know how you can help but cry.

UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: This is part of the prelude to this prayer service that was called yesterday by President Bush when he said today would be a day of national prayer and remembrance.

JOHN KING, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: A striking picture if you just look at the pews. You see the former presidents. You see Al Gore there.

BUSH: So many have suffered so great a loss and today we express our nation's sorrow.

KING: The most interesting moment of the day was after the president spoke and he came back and sat down in the pew and his father reached across and just grabbed his hand, and it was sort of an atta boy, you know, good for you.

BUSH: I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

KING: I think people understood what he was saying and you could see it in the reaction.

UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: Do you want bin Laden dead?

BUSH: I want him, hell, I want justice and there's an old poster out West, as I recall, that said "Wanted Dead or Alive."

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are one country today, unified in the pursuit to find and punish and obliterate those who committed that horrible act against this great nation.

LOU DOBBS, CNN ANCHOR, "MONEYLINE": The emotion here is rising dramatically. Everybody is moving into position.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our heroes will now open the marketplace.

DOBBS: The determination not to allow terrorists to shut down our financial system was absolute.

The markets today tumbling right from the opening bell, the Dow Jones Industrials plunging more than 650 points.

Over the course of the next five days a trillion dollars in market capitalization was ripped out of our financial markets, a trillion dollars.

BROWN: What I remember most about it, the days and weeks and months after is the smell. I don't know what that smell is, jet fuel mixed with burning steel, mixed with human tragedy.

I remember thinking how small the city felt, how sad the city was. Oh God, it was sad.

ZAHN: There were hundreds of funerals that were packed with New Yorkers who had never met these firefighters before, and I think that says a lot about the healing that went on here. We all wanted to feel like we were doing our part to say thank you.

BROWN: This is Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Down below us a prayer for America memorial service here in New York.

GIULIANI: In the days since this attack, we have met the worst of humanity with the best of humanity. We pray for all of those whose loved ones are lost and missing. We pray for our children and we say to them: "Do not be afraid. It's safe to live your life."

BROWN: I became a New Yorker in a day after 10 years of fighting it and not getting it. I fell in love with it. I fell in love with New Yorkers. I was so proud of how they were dealing with this terrible thing. They were committed from the very beginning to deliver their city from the ashes and build it back up again come hell or high water.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(VIDEO CLIP OF "America the Beautiful")

WOODRUFF: It was a week ago today that American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Boston for Los Angeles and crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. There has been a remarkable spirit of unity in this country since the September 11th attacks.

BUSH: My fellow citizens, for the last nine days, the entire world has seen for itself the state of our union, and it is strong. Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom.

FRANKEN: We have now learned that the U.S. Army is sending out deployment orders to units. It will involve various commando units, including the Rangers, the Special Forces, units that they call Special Ops.

LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: It was another painstaking day for recovery workers at the World Trade Center disaster site as more victims are confirmed dead.

BUSH: Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution.

GIULIANI: These terrorist cowards are not going to be allowed to break our spirit. In fact they made a very big mistake.

BUSH: Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.

JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SENIOR ANALYST: It was a perfect speech. I don't know that any president has ever given a speech where more of the country wanted him to succeed.

BUSH: Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you're with us or you are with the terrorists.

CATHERINE CALLAWAY, CNN ANCHOR: President Bush is warning the Taliban that time is running out for them to surrender suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.

MULLAH ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF, TALIBAN AMBASSADOR TO PAKISTAN: (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

BLITZER: Afghanistan's Taliban rulers say they won't give up Osama bin Laden without evidence, if at all.

ZAEEF: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) in Islamic country. Jihad becomes religious obligation of all Muslims.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Osama bin Laden.

PRES. PERVEZ MUSHARRAF, PAKISTAN: We strongly condemn this most brutal and horrible act of terror and violence.

BROWN: Much unrest now in Pakistan over the government's alliance that it has formed with the Bush administration.

ANDREA KOPPEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The hard work of building this international coalition continues today at the State Department.

COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: I've also had conversations with Portuguese Foreign Minister of Saudi, the foreign minister of Morocco and Tunisia.

KING: Secretary Powell more than 80 telephone calls, we are told, in the past 10 days to world leaders, his counterparts, other heads of states.

AMANPOUR: The Bush administration realized very quickly that they could not conduct a global war on terror or even a war in Afghanistan without building up a coalition.

BUSH: I want to thank the chancellor for his solidarity with the American people.

AMANPOUR: A coalition of sympathy and support that was a broad coalition that encompassed not just Western democracy but also Muslim states.

KING: What I am told by senior administration officials is the Pakistani government has promised to "fully cooperate."

AMANPOUR: The Bush administration needed these countries and it was remarkable how almost seamlessly and smoothly this incredible coalition was built up.

BUSH: Our war is against evil not against Islam. We don't hold any religion accountable. We're fighting evil.

KING: There's an old rule in politics whether you're trying to sell a tax plan or whatever message you're trying to sell, it's repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition.

BUSH: We do not fight against Islam. We fight against evil.

JOHN ASHCROFT, ATTORNEY GENERAL: Today we are releasing the photographs of 19 hijackers of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center Towers, into the Pentagon, and into the rural area in Pennsylvania.

UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: We finally saw the faces of evil, people who carried out the most mind boggling attack and assault on America who had claimed so many innocent lives looking into the eyes of these hijackers.

MIKE BOETTCHER, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: According to experts who have studied suicide bombing for a long time, these people aren't crazy. They're very rational. They thought this out and that's the scary thing. It is very difficult to spot a rational actor out there who is willing to take his life to take out thousands of people.

BUSH: The spirit of America is incredibly strong. KING: The administration, both from a psychological standpoint and from an economic standpoint, thought that it was imperative to try to make the case that it was safe to fly again.

BUSH: We are serious about airline safety in America.

KING: You had Bush himself go out to Chicago and do the rally at the airport.

BUSH: Get on the airlines. Get about the business of America.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: You got the impression from listening to him that it was our patriotic duty to get back to work, to get in the air, to take that business trip, even though you really don't want to.

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: The Federal Emergency Management agency or FEMA ended its search and recovery efforts at the World Trade Center ruins today.

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: When FEMA announced officially that the search for survivors was over, it was a very sad time.

SAVIDGE: It's an inevitable stage. You have to reach it but it is a terrible point to reach because then you are admitting to the families and they have to admit to themselves that that dream, that that fantasy that their loved one is going to be found unconscious or maybe in a hospital room and unable to communicate or maybe trapped in a void at that moment is gone.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(INTERRUPTED FOR "BREAKING NEWS")

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our troops maintain a level of readiness.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are in a prepare mode.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We train every day for war and pray for peace.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're at a heightened state of security. We pride ourselves on being ready to go whenever the nation calls us.

MCINTYRE: We had a pretty good idea that war was going to start probably on Sunday.

BLITZER: Senator Edwards thanks for joining us. Welcome back.

SEN. JOHN EDWARDS (D-NC): Good to be with you. BLITZER: I was anchoring our Sunday program "LATE EDITION" and I was sitting there when they told me in my ear, get ready, this war has begun. We have a live picture that we're showing from Kabul. We're seeing some flashes over there.

UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: There was a big flash and then there was firing into the air.

BUSH: On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against the al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Operation Enduring Freedom opened up on October 7th like many other military campaigns, U.S. fighters and bombers taking out key Taliban targets.

MCINTYRE: On thing that the United States did realize it had to do right away was it had to get its own people on the ground, Special Forces, to help spot targets and direct the bombing to make it more lethal and more effective.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now I'd like to show you some gun camera footage showing target destruction. In this case, the picture speaks for itself.

DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: I've reflected on some of the questions that were posed at the last briefing about the speed of progress and questions about the patience of the American people. Today in November 1st and if you think about it, the smoke at this very moment is still rising out of the World Trade Center. In the end, war is not about statistics, deadlines, short attention spans, or 24-hour news cycles. It's about will to see this through to certain victory.

BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Officials with CNN now confirming with officials with the Northern Alliance that the town of Mazar-e Sharif apparently has been taken.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Northern Alliance claims to have retaken this strategic city in a surprise move which if true represents a dramatic setback for the Taliban.

AMANPOUR: I think people who really knew the Taliban, who really had experience in Afghanistan, were not surprised that the Taliban essentially turned tail and ran. They did not put up a fight.

DR. ABDULLAH ABDULLAH, NORTHERN ALLIANCE FOREIGN MINISTER: This was our plan not to enter the city and we had reached to the outskirts of Kabul as far as six kilometers north of Kabul last night, but then the Taliban withdrew.

AMANPOUR: I arrived in Kabul the day after it had fallen. People who had been here during the day have seen all the people of Kabul out on the street, the markets were bustling, shops were open again. Music was being played again. I can't emphasize how important that is, because music was one of those things that was banned by the Taliban, and people felt just relieved that the Taliban had gone.

The scenes of people joyous, you know, in the streets, women smiling, lifting their burkas shyly, children being able to be children again, men going to barbers and shaving off their beards, beards that had been compulsory and regulation length under the Taliban.

Of all the dramas in the Afghan war, the uprising at the prison, the fort at Mazar-e Sharif was perhaps the most dramatic. Here you had hundreds of Taliban and allegedly al Qaeda prisoners who had been rounded up.

ALESSIO VINCI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The incident began as some Taliban prisoners blew themselves up with some hand grenades creating a scene of panic and chaos. After that, some of the Taliban fighters managed to seize some weapons from other soldiers (UNINTELLIGIBLE) soldiers and start shooting all around them.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's hundreds of dead here at least. I don't know how many Americans were killed.

BLITZER: Mike Spann, seen here in a high school photo, was a CIA operations officer. He had been gathering intelligence from Taliban prisoners at a compound near Mazar-e Sharif and was killed during their bloody uprising.

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: And on that day in Mazar-e Sharif, as we know, Mike Spann and his CIA colleague was questioning one of the captured, recaptured prisoners, John Walker Lindh.

WOODRUFF: In a CNN exclusive, a shocking discovery in Afghanistan, an American believed to be serving in the Taliban regime.

JOHN WALKER LINDH: I was a student in Pakistan studying Islam and I came into contact with many people who were connected with the Taliban. So I started to read some of the literature of their scholars and the history of the movement, and my heart became attached to them.

AMANPOUR: And, of course, as we've been saying, the focus is on finding Osama bin Laden.

BUSH: In terms of Mr. bin Laden himself, we'll get him running. We'll smoke him out of his cave and we'll get him eventually.

MCINTYRE: History has shown that it's very difficult to get a single individual. In fact in the past, the U.S. has tried to never build a policy around capturing a single individual because it's so difficult.

STARR: It was then believed by early December he was somewhere up in the Tora Bora region.

ROBERTSON: This has been a day of unbroken military activity by United States forces. In the sky, air activity, B-52 bombers attacking the White Mountains of Tora Bora behind me.

UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: What is the latest thinking now about where bin Laden might be?

REAR ADM. JOHN D. STUFFLEBEEM, JOINT STAFF DEPUTY OPERATIOINS DIRECTOR: Anybody's guess is the latest thinking.

ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: We do not know with precision where he is and that's the same status, same answer you've heard for quite a period of time on that.

STARR: By the end of 2001, all the major cities in Afghanistan had fallen. The Taliban had fled. But had they really? The Taliban are people who live in Afghanistan. They go back to their villages. They go back to their farms, to their families. The ideology is still there in many places in Afghanistan.

AMANPOUR: There is no doubt that the United States military intervention in Afghanistan has had a net positive effect for the people of Afghanistan. Their situation has not become perfect since, but it is incredibly and immeasurably better.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TOMMY THOMPSON, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES SECRETARY: The Centers for Disease Control has just confirmed the diagnosis of anthrax in a patient in a Florida hospital. Based on what we know at this point, it appears that it's an isolated case.

SUSAN CANDIOTTI, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: We first found out about anthrax when we found out about the case of photo editor Robert Stevens, who worked at American Media in Boca Raton, Florida, and here was a man who had contracted anthrax and no one could figure out where.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Some disease organisms are so tiny that a single drop of liquid culture may contain millions of them.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: We hadn't seen a case of inhaled anthrax for 25 years.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Breathing in only a few could cause infection.

GUPTA: Anthrax was certainly one of those things that we absolutely glossed over in medical school, just one of those, "Here's what anthrax is but you'll never really need to know about it."

HEMMER: The news at this time apparently is not good for that man.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Bob Stevens, 63 years old, passed away at 4:00 p.m. this afternoon.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The big question for investigators was it natural or was it bio-engineered.

CANDIOTTI: I remember getting a phone call early one morning, an anonymous source who called and said FBI is coming in with a full team to the area to try to track this down. This is serious. Everyone was asked to give blood, be tested for the presence of anthrax, long lines of people outside those offices as they were trying to find out whether they too were infected. And so, that's when things really started to grow.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is all new to everybody and it's changing second by second.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good morning, I'm Andy Langheim (ph) with NBC. I'm here with the mayor and with Bob Wright (ph) and Tom Brokaw and some of the mayor's key colleagues. This morning, as many of you know now, we received a positive test for cutaneous anthrax for one of our colleagues who works on nightly news.

BUSH: Our nation is still in danger but the government is doing everything in our power to protect our citizenry. The American people need to go about their lives.

ZAHN: And I've worked with Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather and Peter Jennings and so when it became clear that three media outlets had received either letters or something that contaminated the place, it's pretty darn scary.

BROWN: We all did this thing in our minds, what have we touched? What have we opened?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Majority Leader.

SEN. TOM DASCHLE (D) MAJORITY LEADER: At about 10:15 a.m. this morning, a member of my staff opened an envelope.

BLITZER: The U.S. Justice Department has just released copies of the letters with anthrax that were mailed to Tom Brokaw, The "New York Post," as well as the Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

CANDIOTTI: The FBI wanted to put the letters out before the public to see whether anyone else might possibly recognize the handwriting. The message was virtually the same in a number of them: Death to America, Death to Israel, You die now.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What is your problem?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My breathing is very, very labored. I don't know if I have anthrax. I suspect that I might have been exposed to anthrax. I work for the postal service.

DOBBS: The anthrax attacks continue, today confirmation that two postal employees have died as a result of inhaling anthrax. CANDIOTTI: No one was really thinking, according to officials, that any of the spores could possibly have gone through the envelope and into the air to infect anyone. They were wrong and they were very tragically wrong because as they then came to learn, yes, people were infected in that post office too.

So while you had hundreds of people lining up on Capitol Hill being treated with antibiotics, that wasn't happening at the Brentwood Mail Facility.

BLITZER: A widening crisis, traces of anthrax are found in more government buildings.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A second NBC employee has contracted cutaneous anthrax.

CANDIOTTI: Traces of anthrax discovered at a CIA mail sorting facility.

TUCHMAN: A letter carrier has been affected.

DOBBS: Late today a White House mail screening facility also testing positive for anthrax spores.

BUSH: I don't have anthrax.

CANDIOTTI: Well this prompted incredible scares around the country because people didn't know whether they would be next. How many of these letters were out there? Would they get something in their mail that might be impacted with anthrax too?

GUPTA: In the end, five people died, 18 people were confirmed infected, and whoever was trying to do this, if they were trying to kill lots of people they failed miserably, and we proved to ourselves that this infection was something that we could get a handle on. We could treat people. Thirty thousand people were on antibiotics at one time or another but we beat that.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Breaking news this evening, the FBI is warning of more potential attacks against the United States.

TUCHMAN: While not specific as to target gives the government reason to believe that there may be additional terrorist attacks within the United States.

UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: Traces of anthrax have been found in at least four more post offices.

DOBBS: A major scare at a Greyhound bus station in Philadelphia today.

WOODRUFF: Federal officials at the nearby Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant received what is being called a threat yesterday. UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: We're watching things at Hartsfield International Airport after a person apparently breached security. The airport's been basically shut down and there are thousands of people stranded there.

KING: We are told Vice President Dick Cheney being kept apart from the president again just in case the White House is a target of a terrorist strike.

DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The enemy is resourceful and ruthless. We have to assume there will be more attacks.

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Officials were very scared that there would be another attack and there was a long laundry list of different sectors that they wanted to protect. Aviation, it goes without saying, a lot of attention paid there but they were also concerned about nuclear plants, about chemical plants, about the ports which are hugely vulnerable, about the borders which are very porous.

ASHCROFT: We urge Americans in the course of their normal activities to remain alert and to report unusual circumstances or inappropriate behavior.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Everybody is concerned about what's going to happen next.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You just feel so vulnerable now because you don't know what's going to happen, where it's going to happen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A lot of people are afraid. They're scared.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's overwhelming, the whole thought of it, the devastation.

SAVIDGE: In those days after the terrorist attack, we began to see terrorists on every corner and believed that they had an overwhelming ability to strike our nation.

ZAHN: In the name of homeland security, Attorney General John Ashcroft is asking law enforcement officials nationwide to interview some 5,000 people currently here on temporary visas.

ASHCROFT: We have in detention about 563 individuals who are being detained on Immigration and Naturalization Service items related to the events of 9/11.

CANDIOTTI: A lot of people were being rounded up and being held virtually incommunicado.

BLITZER: Are there still, in your estimation, sleeper cells, al Qaeda sleeper cells roaming around the United States at this time?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: We have every reason to believe that there are still people out there who came into this country for the purpose of trying to hurt us.

BOETTCHER: The whole point of a sleeper cell is to blend in, you know, to become part of the population, leading normal lives, waiting for that point to be activated and then carrying out their attack.

MESERVE: Osama bin Laden lashes out at the United States and the United Nations in a videotape broadcast today by the Arab Language TV Channel Al-Jazeera. On the tape, bin Laden claims the United States has no proof to justify its attacks in Afghanistan.

OSAMA BIN LADEN (through translator): The White House reacts.

ENSOR: And Condoleezza Rice calls in the heads of the television networks and asks for restraint. They were concerned that there might be secret messages transmitted to sleeper cells on what to do next, what to hit next and so on in these tapes.

Time passes and we haven't heard from bin Laden and I get word, along with one or two other journalists, that there is another tape of bin Laden that has not been released, that it is a tape that bin Laden might not want released.

KING: U.S. officials say that when you see this tape you will have no doubt that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were the masterminds of the terrorist strikes on the United States three months ago.

BIN LADEN (through translation): Just hit the World Trade Center.

SHAYKH (through translation): Allah be praised.

BROWN: I saw them looking and laughing at it and there's something about that, you know, the toadies who were in the room kind of egging him on, making him seem like such a hero because there were 3,000 dead Americans and they didn't even think that building would collapse completely.

BIN LADEN (through translation): (UNINTELLIGIBLE) we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy who would be killed.

BROWN: It's beyond our expectations, he says. I did the calculations, he says.

You know, you want to wretch.

CALLAWAY: Aviation officials at Logan Airport saying that a man onboard American Airlines Flight 63 was apparently trying to ignite explosives that were in his shoes.

ENSOR: We were lucky. He didn't get away with it. Some courageous passengers and crewmembers wrestled him down and stopped him.

CALLAWAY: Officials saying that the man in custody was carrying a British passport, identified him as Richard Reid. They say he's about 28 years old.

TOM RIDGE, HOMELAND SECURITY DIRECTOR: We think it is very important since September 11th for America to remain on the highest possible alert.

ASHCROFT: We will take every possible action to make sure that this kind of injury, assault on America and on its freedom does not happen again.

MESERVE: The thing that is so scary is that it is impossible to protect all the things they need to protect.

RIDGE: We will be on alert indefinitely.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RUMSFELD: On September 11, the Pentagon and the Trade Towers were burning. The Taliban were in power and Afghanistan was a reasonable safe haven for terrorists.

BUSH: We celebrate Christmas in a time of testing with American troops far from home.

RUMSFELD: Today the fires are finally out, the Taliban have been driven from power. Their leaders are on the run.

BUSH: And this is a year we will not forget those who lost loved ones in the attacks on September the 11 and on the battlefield. They will remain in our prayers.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I want to tell you that my husband is a hero, not because of the way that he died but rather because of the way that he lived.

GUPTA: I find myself at a loss for words. I still do, when I think about this. It was too enormous. The pictures didn't do it justice.

ZAHN: It shakes your very foundation, shakes the core of who we are as people. We will never with the degree of innocence any of us ever had.

BROWN: We've had the sense for the whole of American history that the oceans protected us and we know that's not true anymore.

HEMMER: The first morning in New York, I came across a poster on a lamp post describing a man with brown hair and brown eyes, 36 years old, you know, 5'11", 175 pounds missing, and it was the exact description of me. The people in the towers could have been any one of us.

COHEN: What I took away from this is that even in the most difficult, even in the most sorrowful of times, that the human spirit emerges and can truly make a difference. You know, this wasn't a scene where there was no hope or no love. There was a lot of love.

BROWN: Nobody's going to forget the 11th. I don't care who you are. I don't care where you live. You'll know where you were and you'll know how you saw it and what you thought.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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