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Saddam Hussein's Trial Delayed; Hurricane Wilma Strongest Hurricane Ever Recorded; Landmark Reopens in New Orleans

Aired October 19, 2005 - 09:00   ET

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

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Saddam Hussein on trial for his life. The former dictator in court, accused of torture and murder, defiantly proclaiming his innocence. Special coverage of the trial is just ahead.
And Hurricane Wilma now the strongest hurricane ever recorded. A Category 5 and moving through the Caribbean. We're tracking this sudden monster on this AMERICAN MORNING.

ANNOUNCER: From the CNN Broadcast Center in New York, this is AMERICAN MORNING with Soledad O'Brien and Miles O'Brien.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: You know -- good morning to you -- it's difficult to overstate the fear that people have just seeing Saddam Hussein. Jane Arraf was talking about how she still sees him and it gives her a flash of fear.

S. O'BRIEN: Almost every single guest we've had as well has reiterated that. Octavia Nasr also said that she knew so many people who fled Iraq because they were so fearful. Just to watch him today in court sitting among seven others as they're all facing their trial has been quite a remarkable thing.

M. O'BRIEN: It is a piece of history. It has been an extraordinary morning watching Saddam Hussein arguing in court, his life at stake. Talk about the tables being turned.

The rest of the trial has been put off until November 28 in order for the attorneys to have more time to assess the evidence. Charges were read, the accused did make their pleas. The prosecutor laid out the bare bones of the case.

Aneesh Raman live from Baghdad on this momentous day -- Aneesh.

ANEESH RAMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Miles, good morning.

It was defiant at times, and at other time resigned. Saddam Hussein in the courtroom on this, the first trial where he faces crimes against humanity for the incident in Dujail back in 1982.

At the beginning it was a combative Saddam as the judge laid out -- specifically asked the defendants simply to state their names. Saddam embarking essentially on a speech, questioning the legitimacy of the court, questioning the process by which it was created, saying that something false cannot be created out of something else that was false, alluding to what he have heard from Saddam's defense, Khalil Dulaimi, that part of the strategy for the defense will be to say that this entire war, the U.S.-led war in Iraq is illegitimate, and that is essentially what gave birth to this Iraqi special tribunal.

We saw at other moments Saddam with a glare staring at the chief prosecutor as he in detail outlined the charges that they face specific to Dujail. And the prosecutor, interestingly enough, it seems had an ink-stained finger, a sign that he voted in this weekend's referendum.

The presiding judge, Rizgar Mohammed Amin (ph), a Kurd, 40 years old, exuded as well extreme confidence. The two of them really the face of the new Iraq, confronting this country's brutal past, tyrannical rule of Saddam Hussein, who in the process of today's some three-and-a-half-hour session really started, it seems at least, to come to grips with what he is facing.

This is the first of perhaps 12 trials that Saddam will endure on multiple charges in this special tribunal. Crimes against humanity here. He will also face charges of genocide, as well as mass murder.

I visited Dujail, Miles, a short time ago, and the residents there were so keen for this moment. They have been waiting decades to see Saddam Hussein face justice. And as you say, many Iraqis still feel fear, very real fear, at the mere sight of Saddam Hussein.

Christiane Amanpour, who was in the courtroom, described a moment when the cameras were not rolling when Saddam was trying to leave during a recess. Two Iraqi guards came forward to take him by his arms. He glared at them for some 45 seconds. He wrestled with them, and in the end they simply walked alongside him.

Many Iraqis still fear this man. And this is now just the latest in a continuum of changes in his image from the tyrannical despot that ruled them, to the man that went in hiding after the U.S.-led war, to the man that was pulled from a spider hole and then was searched by doctors in that dramatic video with scraggly hair, his tongue being checked. And then to the man that was sitting in a courtroom last year as he was arraigned, and then again today.

And for them, this is decades long in the making -- Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Aneesh, it's now 4:00 in the afternoon there. And I suspect many Iraqis spent a good part of their day either listening to this on the radio, watching it on television. I know you've been kind of glued to it. But have you had a sense at all as to what -- how this has rippled through society today?

RAMAN: Well, we've been to a few places, Sadr City, for example. We know there people gathered in front of the television. We visited one family who had their neighbors over because their neighbor's generator was out, they had no electricity in order to watch this trial.

Iraqis are really unclear in terms of the specific legal mechanics of this Iraqi special tribunal. They will understand today it has been postponed now until November 28. The defense filing a motion to further review the evidence.

But for them it is simply the basic issue of Saddam Hussein facing justice. The question they have asked since his fall, since his detainment, is, when will he come to trial? And that has been the difficult position of this court, balancing the very important meticulous nature by which they have to gather this evidence with the public demand for Saddam Hussein to face justice -- Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Aneesh Raman in Baghdad. Thanks very much -- Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: Our other top story this morning is Hurricane Wilma. The storm is now the most powerful Atlantic hurricane ever. Severe weather expert Chad Myers is at the CNN center for us this morning.

Chad, this one looks bad.

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: It certainly does. The deepest pressure ever recorded in the Atlantic basin, 882 millibars. That's deeper than what we call the Hurricane Gilbert record pressure that was years ago.

There was a stronger storm in the Pacific called Tip. It was lower in pressure. But this certainly has its set -- and its eyes set on the Yucatan Peninsula, possibly right up in through Cuba. And all the computer models taking a big right-hand turn.

We are watching a few things this afternoon and this morning. We will watch dry air get pulled off the mountains here in Honduras and Guatemala. That's going to start to rotate into the storm.

You can already see a few of these areas where the red is not as intense. That dry air, along with some wind up here, we call it wind sheer, will begin to decrease the energy of this storm. It will decrease the power of the storm.

This is such a very tiny eye. At a time, two-miles-wide eye. Now, you have to think about a storm that's this large and the center of it is only two miles around.

That's why the wind speeds got so high, 175, and recorded up in the atmosphere as the plane flew over 193 miles per hour in both directions. As it flew through the eye, it had 193 one way and 193 the other way.

So this is obviously a big, big storm to worry about. It is going to lose some power, it's going to lose some punch before it gets up here, 5 to 4, then possibly even to a Category 3 or Category 2 before it starts to approach the United States on Saturday -- Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: I know you're going to watch it, Chad. Thanks. And we'll watch it along with you, as well.

And you'll want to stay with CNN for complete coverage of Hurricane Wilma. CNN, of course, your hurricane headquarters. M. O'BRIEN: Saddam Hussein's trial has really been the focus of our attention all morning. It is now in adjournment, will be so for 40 days. November 28, a Monday, is when it resumes, giving his attorneys an opportunity to further review the evidence against him.

It goes specifically back to an event in 1982, the summer of 1982. Saddam Hussein and his entourage making an impromptu stop in the town of Dujail, a Shiite enclave. An assassination attempt occurred, and this trial is all about the retribution that followed.

Saddam Hussein obviously survived that attempt. One hundred and forty to 150 men and boys tortured and killed in the wake of that. The entire community, a quarter million acres of orchard and farmland, razed to impoverish those people. Just really a small glimpse of the kind of regime that Saddam Hussein ran for all those years.

Joining me now is someone who knows an awful lot about it, is former CIA analyst Ken Pollack. He's now director of research at the Saban Center at Brookings, has written extensively about Iraq.

Ken, good to have you back with us.

KEN POLLACK, SABAN CENTER, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: Thanks, Miles. It's good to be here.

M. O'BRIEN: This case up until recently was not very well known. I'm curious, when you were writing your book, "The Threatening Storm," how much did we know about this particular incident?

POLLACK: Not a whole heck of a lot. Basically, you know, you're right, there were a number of assassination attempts against Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. This was one that we knew was out there, but very honestly, we didn't know a whole heck of a lot about it.

And I think that we're learning a lot more now. That is, those outside of Iraq learning a lot more about it now, and probably the people of Iraq themselves are learning a lot more about it. Because even at the time, it wasn't covered extensively in the Iraqi press. Saddam had no particular incentive to publicize to the rest of his people that someone had taken a shot at him.

M. O'BRIEN: Well, it makes me think that there's a lot below the radar here that we still don't know. Because we know about the Kurds and the gassing of the Kurds. That rose to the level of our attention.

We know he drained the marshes and totally ruined a way of life for Shias. We know about the terrible way the Shia uprising was put down after the Gulf War.

What I'm trying to say is, on an individual basis, there are probably so many tales to be told here in the wake of this regime. I wonder if really what is -- what is -- what the Iraqi people want here is some measure of revenge.

POLLACK: Yes, I think there's no question, Miles, that -- that there are a great many Iraqis who feel like they have been personally wronged by this regime in one way, shape or form. And I think you're also absolutely right that, you now, what the west and even what Iraqis tend to know about are these big instances of mass murder. And obviously these need to be punished as well, justice needs to be served for those cases.

But so much of Saddam's regime consisted of little day-to-day incidents of murder, of torture, of other forms of abuse of the Iraqi people. We just don't know how many tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis were brought in for routine questioning and tortured, tortured to death, how many people were executed on the whim of a dictator or just because someone else inside of his regime didn't particularly like him.

That was the great terror of Saddam's regime. And that is the greatest legacy that the Iraqi people still have to bear.

M. O'BRIEN: You know, you write about it in your book. You talk about a regime that will gouge the eyes out of children to force confessions, a regime that will crush the bones and feet of a 2-year- old girl to force her mother to divulge her father's whereabouts, a regime that will hold a nursing baby at arm's length from its mother and allow the child to starve to death to get that mother to confess.

All these little things are huge things.

POLLACK: Absolutely.

M. O'BRIEN: I mean, there is -- there is no -- you know, we say, well, this is a lesser event. There is no lesser event, is there?

POLLACK: Absolutely. And for the people who went through these circumstances, for the people who had to suffer through all of these instances, and their relatives as well, each one of these was a major traumatic event in their life. And there are unfortunately tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Iraqis who have been affected in this way. And even those who weren't personally affected heard about stories from relatives, from friends.

Everyone knew about these stories. And everyone was terrified. And this is the problem.

This is why Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi dissident, wrote a book called "Republic of Fear" about Iraq because Saddam had so terrorized this entire population with these day-to-day instances of torture, abuse and murder.

M. O'BRIEN: It's so egregious, the scars are so deep, is there anything in that courtroom which can redress that?

POLLACK: Yes. This is I think one of the biggest questions looking forward, Miles, is whether the Iraqis are going to see in this process some form of catharsis, whether they can see in getting justice from Saddam a way of putting all of this behind them to move forward. You know, this is what we've seen in other instances like this, in South Africa, in Eastern Europe, and other cases where you've seen oppressive regimes fall. It's been critical for people to have some feeling of closure, of justice, to move beyond it. And what we've seen is that in those cases where they've not gotten that sense of closure and justice, oftentimes that's greatly contributed to the political problems moving forward.

I just don't think we know right now what we're going to get from the trial of Saddam Hussein.

M. O'BRIEN: Ken Pollack is director of research at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution.

Always a pleasure, Ken. Thanks for dropping by.

POLLACK: Thank you, Miles. Good to be here.

M. O'BRIEN: Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: We are back in just a moment. We're going to continue to cover the trial of Saddam Hussein, also the approaching Hurricane Wilma. And then this story from New Orleans, locals who say they could spot tourists by the powdered sugar on their faces.

New Orleans's most popular landmark, Cafe Du Monde, is back in business. We'll bring you to their reopening just ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

S. O'BRIEN: Amid all the breaking news coming to us out of Iraq we missed a big reopening coming to us out of New Orleans, the opening or reopening of Cafe Du Monde.

Scott Escara is the general manager. And he joins us from the French Quarter this morning.

Nice to see you. Thanks for talking with us. Wow, it looks busy behind you. How's it going?

SCOTT ESCARA, GENERAL MANAGER, CAFE DU MONDE: It's going OK, thank you.

S. O'BRIEN: Just OK?

ESCARA: No, it's been quite a fanfare this morning. We had a jazz band, and a couple of other news crews. And it's been quite busy.

S. O'BRIEN: Tell me a little bit about the history of Cafe Du Monde, because you have been around for a long time, and it's been in your family for a long time.

ESCARA: Yes, ma'am, it's been around since 1862. We were a family that purchased it in the early 1940s. And we've grown it from three tables and a few waiters to what you see behind me now today.

S. O'BRIEN: It also has a history as a big tourist enclave, as well. And the closing of Cafe Du Monde really, I think, took a lot of the wind out of the sails in New Orleans, frankly. You think that's fair to say?

ESCARA: Yes, I would say so. We're the very beginning of an area called the French Market, and we're one of the first stops. We hope for a traditional breakfast and a nice way to get started in New Orleans. And being closed, a lot of the other shops told us they were waiting for us to open so they'd open their doors.

S. O'BRIEN: Well, we're looking at some pictures of what you looked like before the storm, busy, busy. What kind of damage did you suffer in the storm?

ESCARA: The storm itself caused very minimal damage to the store. It was predominantly cosmetic. Some awnings down, some fans blown down.

No floodwater. The bulk of the damage seemed to be more inward. We were very lucky to be close enough to the river, and high enough not to sustain any major damage.

S. O'BRIEN: So now that Cafe Du Monde is open again, what do we read in to that about the health of New Orleans?

ESCARA: We hope it will start bringing everyone back as tourists and get the hotels filled. And people just want to enjoy the city and the food and the culture all over again.

S. O'BRIEN: Normally I know you're open 24 hours a day. Do you feel the pressure to kind of return to normalcy? Because you are, to a large degree, setting the tone for everybody else in the neighborhood, and maybe even -- and maybe I'm exaggerating this, but maybe even in the city.

ESCARA: Yes, ma'am. We would love to be open 24 hours. But right now, there is a self -- there is a curfew imposed by the mayor. So, we do have to close by midnight.

But, due to the shortage of housing here in New Orleans, quite a few of our employees have lost residences. So we need to get a full staff before we can attempt to do anything of that magnitude, so to speak.

S. O'BRIEN: How many folks do you have working for you? How many do you normally have? And where's everybody living?

ESCARA: Normally we have about 150 at this location. And we're lucky right now to have between 45 and 50. And that's split between two shifts.

Most of them that we've spoken to, they do live in, or they are living in Houston, Dallas, Mississippi, Vicksburg and so forth. And they're just waiting to be granted permission to come home and have somewhere to live to come home to.

S. O'BRIEN: Well, hopefully you'll all get back soon.

Scott Escara is the general manager of Cafe Du Monde. The restaurant has been in his family's business, his wife's business, for a long, long time.

Congratulations on your reopening. It seems to be going very successfully -- Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Can I just look at those beignets one more time?

S. O'BRIEN: No, you may not.

M. O'BRIEN: Look at that. They look so good. I want a beignet and a cafe au lait so bad.

There they are.

S. O'BRIEN: Ooh.

M. O'BRIEN: Oh, my goodness. Now that is good eating. That's why you go to New Orleans, one of the many reasons right there. Too bad television just cannot do the full Monty here.

S. O'BRIEN: It's just not the same, is it?

M. O'BRIEN: It's the beignet. Now, if we could come up with that, we wouldn't be working tomorrow. As a matter of fact, we won't be working tomorrow if we win the Powerball.

As a matter of fact, folks, if you turn on tomorrow morning, and it's test bars and tone, we won, because we're all in on the $340 million power ball jackpot. And, you know, we were thinking, of all places, a good place where people could use $340 million -- who can't use that? Well, Bill Gates. But anyway, would be in Metarie, Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans, where folks are lining up.

Ed, you've got to play to win. You in?

ED LAVANDERA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Oh, I'm in.

M. O'BRIEN: Oh, good. OK. Just checking. Just checking.

LAVANDERA: I've been in for a couple -- I've been in for a couple of days already.

M. O'BRIEN: All right.

LAVANDERA: You know, they play this lottery in 27 different states. And it's been kind of weird, where we've heard stories over the last couple of days where these ticket sales for this record lottery, $340 million, have been rather brisk in all these states.

But here in the New Orleans area, what we found is kind of a mixture. Remember that the -- this is advertised usually on billboards and on gas stations when people come in. But many gas stations are closed, billboards are knocked down. So what we found in talking to people over the last day or so is kind of a -- that not many people knew that the lottery had reached such a high level.

So, for example, the convenience store we're at here this morning here near the New Orleans airport, we've seen a lot of workers, people here involved in the reconstruction process. And quite frankly, people just passing up, grabbing their coffee and doughnuts for the morning and going off to the work site.

So many people passing it up. But the people who are playing do say it would be poetic justice if someone from the Gulf Coast area could cash in on this huge jackpot.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Three hundred and forty million?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How many Powerballs you want, babe?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Give me $20 worth.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Twenty dollars worth?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It would be absolutely wonderful, because we've been through a lot, everybody. Everybody has a story. And we've had some bad times. But everybody's trying to pull together.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Repair the House, rebuild it, make it better.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LAVANDERA: And the gentleman there at the end there saying -- some people joking they have a better chance of being hit here again by Hurricane Wilma than by winning this lotto. The odds of winning, one in 146 million.

And we end on a little bit of irony, Miles. The last time the Powerball jackpot reached this level was back in 2002. It was a man in a town called Hurricane, West Virginia, won that jackpot -- Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Ooh, the poetry continues. All right, Ed Lavandera. Thank you very much.

LAVANDERA: OK.

M. O'BRIEN: You a quick pick guy, or do you pick the numbers yourself? What do you do?

LAVANDERA: Quick pick. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.

M. O'BRIEN: OK. Thank you, Ed. Check in with you later.

Still to come, the moon like you've never seen it. NASA has new pics zooming in on the old Apollo landing sites to see what we can see using the Hubbell. Why not? That's ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

M. O'BRIEN: Well, I suppose this is the scientific equivalent of squashing a flea with an anvil, using the Hubble space telescope to shoot the moon. I mean, we -- I can see the moon with my binoculars.

James Garvin is the chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and he joins us now.

You know, the Hubble can see literally to the very edge of the universe, the very beginnings of time, if you will. You went to the moon instead.

I'll tell you what we're going to do. While you answer this question, let's roll the tape. We're going to take you down slowly to the Apollo 17 landing site.

Why did you focus on the moon?

JAMES GARVIN, NASA GODDARD CHIEF SCIENTIST: Because, Miles, we want to go back and we want to use everything we've got to jumpstart lunar exploration. And here's Apollo 17, where men last walked on the moon.

We want to use Hubble's vision to understand what's there and how we can use it. And Hubble's vision allows us to look it in new ways and train us for the steps ahead to get people back to the moon.

M. O'BRIEN: All right. As we zoom down on this spot, let's freeze it right now, Michael, if we could. Remind me the name of this valley. What's it called?

GARVIN: Miles, this is the Taurus-Littrow Valley...

M. O'BRIEN: Taurus-Littrow. OK.

GARVIN: At the edge of Mare Serenitatis. And we landed just in that flat black area between the Massif, the hills.

M. O'BRIEN: OK. So right in -- tell me if I'm wrong -- right in this area is where they landed, right?

GARVIN: Absolutely.

M. O'BRIEN: The last man on the moon, Gene Cernan, was there. Jack Schmidt, the only scientist to go to the moon -- I know you like that -- was there.

What does this picture tell you that they couldn't tell you from being there back in 1971, '72?

GARVIN: 1972.

M. O'BRIEN: Yes.

GARVIN: Well, what it tells us is, Miles, based on this exquisite soil, full of this titanium oxide that we could even mine...

M. O'BRIEN: Titanium oxide, what does that do for you?

GARVIN: Well, you can take the oxygen away from the titanium and you can breathe it. And if it were on Earth, you could use the titanium to make sunscreen or other good things.

M. O'BRIEN: All right. Well, let's advance it just slightly, Michael.

I want to -- Jim, I want you to comment on this kind of three panel thing here. And tell me what this says. Using ultraviolet, you can see certain things in the soil that you wouldn't see otherwise, right?

GARVIN: Absolutely. In fact, the ultraviolet allows us to look at the sign, the sort of the signature of these kind of titanium oxides. And we've now validated that we can do that from Apollo 17, where people last visited.

M. O'BRIEN: All right. Now, this is the landing site. Matter of fact, this is a shot -- was this shot by Hubble? That isn't shot by Hubble, this shot here.

GARVIN: No, that...

M. O'BRIEN: That was shot by Apollo 17 guys, right?

GARVIN: Absolutely. They shot that, but we're just showing you what they saw. The crater you see in that field of view is the crater Shorty. And we have that in the Hubble picture.

M. O'BRIEN: All right. So, net-net, this helps you, this is just part of the process of the next step. Once the shuttle's done, we go to the moon, and we start mining titanium?

GARVIN: We go to the moon, we learn to live off the land, and then we get ready to go back to Mars.

M. O'BRIEN: Jim Garvin, thank you for that excellent and pithy, I might add, trip to the moon. It's always good to take a trip to the moon with Jim Garvin. We'll see you soon.

GARVIN: See you, Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Still to come on the program, Hurricane Wilma now the strongest hurricane ever on record. Ever. It's a Category 5 storm. I mean, it was, what, it was a Category 1 yesterday?

S. O'BRIEN: Category 2 yesterday.

M. O'BRIEN: Category 2 yesterday. So while we were sleeping a lot of trouble brewed out there. We will have a live report for you ahead.

Stay with us. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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