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American Morning

Terrorist Treatment; Katrina Hearings

Aired December 07, 2005 - 08:30   ET

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

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MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: The Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continues her tour of Europe this week. It's not been a great trip for the secretary of state, peppered with questions wherever she goes about secret prisons, so-called rendition and the possibility the U.S. may be involved in torture. This morning in Ukraine, she tried to clear up some confusion about U.S. policy on torture and appeared to shift positions.

Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, SECRETARY OF STATE: As a matter of U.S. policy, the United States' obligations under the CAT, which prohibits, of course, cruel and inhumane and degrading treatment, those obligations extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

M. O'BRIEN: Well, tortured prose indeed. CNN national security adviser John Mclaughlin, former head of the CIA, is in our Washington bureau now to talk a little bit about this.

And we got to say in advance, you got to be circumspect about all of this because of your recent position with the CIA. So let's talk about this sort of as generally as we can while giving people a sense of what's going on. First of all, the secretary's statement did you notice a shift there?

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN, FMR. ACTING CIA DIRECTOR: You know, Miles, I'll have to see the whole text and examine it carefully. I actually don't see a shift, in terms of my understanding of the law as it applies to U.S. officers.

M. O'BRIEN: All right. Let's talk about -- this is the war we don't know so much about.

MCLAUGHLIN: Right.

M. O'BRIEN: The intelligence war. And the people that are waging this war against terror are meeting with quite a bit of success. Would you agree with that? MCLAUGHLIN: Oh, absolutely. In fact, one of the things that we risk losing in the discussion of all of these individual cases is the broader truth that we are still at war. Most people think of Iraq when I say that. But, in fact, there's a war that goes on outside of Iraq every day, waged mainly by intelligence officers. The war on terror outside of Iraq is essentially an intelligence war. And it's been fought very aggressively, particularly since 9/11.

M. O'BRIEN: And this war, in order to have the tools to fight it, do intelligence officers feel as if they need to have a special set of rules in order to deal with this handful of people who really are at the top of the pyramid on this terror game?

MCLAUGHLIN: I wouldn't say a special set of rules. What I would say is that intelligence officers have to be free to fight this war aggressively because the people we're up against play by no rules.

And let me just mention the population of people we're talking about here is relatively small, not in the hundreds. We're talking about people who planned the deaths of 3,000 people on our territory, people who slit the throat of an American journalist, Danny Pearl.

People who killed our sailors on the USS Cole, people who bombed our embassies in Africa. These are the kind of people we're talking about and that we're going up against here.

M. O'BRIEN: Let's talk about the European reaction to this. They've been high on their moral horse on every stop that Condoleezza Rice has taken. Are they trying to maintain the moral high ground here for the West or are they being just simply unrealistic about the foe which the West faces right now?

MCLAUGHLIN: Well, you know, it's a little bit of each. And we could all understand where the Europeans are coming from here. When intelligence issues end up being discussed in the open, as they have been, everyone kind runs for cover and doesn't quite know how to handle it.

The truth of the matter is that the information that's been obtained from some of the people I've talked about has saved European lives. I can give you examples of that.

For example, in one case -- you can see it in the 9/11 Commission report, where they note that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the architect of 9/11, told us about a person named Eisa al-Hindi. Make a long story short, eventually, we found that guy and he's the man who was planning attacks in the U.K., serious bomb attacks.

He also is the man who did the casing reports on buildings like the CitiGroup building right there in New York City. And I would suspect the people working in that building this morning feel a little safer because we found out that he was in their building, he did the casing, he's now behind bars in the U.K.

So this is the kind of thing that comes out of these aggressive operations that intelligence has mounted since 9/11. M. O'BRIEN: All right, well, the crux of this whole discussion is when and if the end justifies the means. And I'm not asking you to acknowledge anything which you can't acknowledge here publicly, but are you concerned that if it does occur, if there is any flauting (ph) of our democratic standards, all the things that we hold dear, that ultimately undermines our ability to fight the war on terror? Because we expose a bit of hypocrisy?

MCLAUGHLIN: Look, no one is more concerned about that kind of thing. I can tell you that American intelligence officers, who are honorable people, people of integrity. And, you know, all of the discussion about torture, to some degree, distorts the real question here. No one favors torture.

The real question, and the tougher question that people have to grapple with, is what do you do when someone comes into your hands who, with absolute certainty, has knowledge of plots to kill Americans in the future? Are you comfortable dealing with those people in a way that ensures you will never get that information? Is your conscience clear when you approach it that way?

But again, no one favors torture. And in a way, to discuss this in terms of torture obscures the real issue because everyone can easily agree that they don't favor torture.

M. O'BRIEN: Thank you very much, John McLaughlin. Tough subject, I know, for you to dance around the things that are still considered secret and are not. We appreciate you joining us this morning. Former acting director of the CIA, John McLaughlin.

MCLAUGHLIN: Happy to talk to you.

M. O'BRIEN: All right -- Soledad.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: More questions today on Capitol Hill about the response to Hurricane Katrina. A House committee will take a look at just what happened in Mississippi. On Tuesday, that same committee heard from survivors in New Orleans, who insist that racism was a factor in the slow government response.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The people of New Orleans were stranded in a flood and were allowed to die. What happened to us was foreseeable and it was preventable.

S. O'BRIEN: Emotional testimony on Capitol Hill, as the House investigation into the government's handling of Hurricane Katrina addressed the subject of race.

PATRICIA THOMSON, KATRINA EVACUEE: No one's going to tell me it wasn't a race issue.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Racism is something we don't like to talk about, but we have to acknowledge it, and the world saw the effects of American-style racism in the drama as it was outplayed by the Katrina survivors.

S. O'BRIEN: Five of those survivors, African-Americans from New Orleans, described their ordeal, often in graphic detail.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We slept next to dead bodies, we slept on streets at least four times, next to human fee sees and urine. There was garbage everywhere in the city. Panic and fear had taken over. The way we were treated by police was demoralizing and inhuman.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We are still living with the aftermath, still suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome. We're reliving this nightmare, sometimes two a night, night after night after night, and we still are crying day after day.

S. O'BRIEN: And a charge heard often during the hearing, the government didn't seem to care about their suffering.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think if it was not for African-Americans who would be most affected by this, there would have been a plan in place. There would have been equipment in place. There would of been everything needed in place to get folks out.

S. O'BRIEN: The Bush administration has denied racism played a part in the slow disaster response. The president addressed the controversy in the weeks after the hurricane.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The storm didn't discriminate, and neither will the recovery effort.

S. O'BRIEN: At one point during Tuesday's hearing, Florida Republican Jeff Miller took issue with victims comparing hurricane- shelter conditions to a concentration camp.

REP. JEFF MILLER (R), FLORIDA: I respectfully request that you not call it the Causeway Concentration Camp.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Respectfully, sir, I'm going to call it what it is! If I put a address on a pig, a pig is still a pig!

S. O'BRIEN: Committee members heard claims that three months after Hurricane Katrina, the poorest survivors are still not getting the help they so desperately need.

DYLAN FRENCH, COMMUNITY LEADER: I didn't come to represent me. I didn't come representing Dylan French Cole! I came representing the people who are sitting on (INAUDIBLE) Street right now, around a brick-made fireplace, because that's the only heat we have in December! The hurricane happened in August!

(END VIDEOTAPE)

S. O'BRIEN: She went on to say that she could not believe that three months later here in the United States there had been not a lot of progress to report. The House committee that's investigating the Katrina response is going to hear testimony sill from New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. That's coming up next week. M. O'BRIEN: A lot of emotion there.

Andy is "Minding Your Business." What do you got, Andy?

ANDY SERWER, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: Well, Miles, Wal-Mart has some new policies this holiday season. Some of them may surprise you. Certainly a new tact by the big company.

Stay tuned for that on AMERICAN MORNING.

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M. O'BRIEN: I don't know about Jeffrey Wright, but Larry Bird, what a guy. Nobody better.

ANDY SERWER, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: Well, Jeffrey Wright is in a new movie with George Clooney.

M. O'BRIEN: OK, good. Well, he could be good. That's great. I'll watch that movie and then I'll get back to you that.

Wal-Mart -- Elton John is getting hitched to, is it Richard Furnish (ph)?

SERWER: I'm not sure his name.

M. O'BRIEN: I can't remember his first name, Mr. Furnish. Mr. John, Mr. Furnish getting hitched. And that's an opportunity to sell things at Wal-Mart.

SERWER: That is.

M. O'BRIEN: Is that right?

SERWER: That's right. That's right. That's a very good way of putting it, Miles.

George Michael also getting hitched.

The U.K. is going to be legalizing same-sex marriages on December 21st. Those are two notables who have decided that they will be tying the knot. And Wal-Mart's subsidiary in the U.K., Asda (ph), has greetings card to celebrate such unions. That's right, gay-and- lesbian friendly greeting cards.

Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs., one of they says. Happy wedding, Mr. and Mrs. -- or Mr. and Mr., I should say. See it's -- exactly.

And of course this would run counter to what you might think of Wal-Mart in the United States. In fact, we just got off phone with someone in Wal-Mart in Bentonville, Arkansas, and they told us they don't care those kinds of cards here in the United States.

Asda is run very differently than Wal-Mart here in the United States, as you might imagine. For instance, last winter, they had a sale on condoms, a Christmas sale, where they said they were rolling back the price of condoms for the Christmas season. That's right, I quote, and they said that the stores would be open late in case customers got unexpectedly lucky, this according to "The New York Times."

M. O'BRIEN: This is Wal-Mart's partying cousin?

SERWER: I guess so. It's a little different. Well, you know, they're allowing their stores to have autonomy and have different practices in different countries, I guess.

M. O'BRIEN: I should say!

SERWER: Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is getting aggressive here with its sales and pricing in the U.S. You may remember on Black Friday, they were very, very aggressive in slashing prices. This was after last year they did a very bad job. November sales up 4.7 percent, mostly because of Black Friday, Miles, and they're saying now that they still have some powder left. They may be -- they will be, in fact, being aggressive on pricing as we get closer to Christmas. They said, you know, we are really going to be slashing prices on high-def TVs, plasma screens, digital cameras, toys, jewelry, anything that's hot. So you know, they really are being very aggressive. And again, because they kind of blew it last year, quite frankly.

M. O'BRIEN: Powder is dry, huh?

SERWER: That's right. But none of these cards.

M. O'BRIEN: No cards there.

SERWER: No cards in the United States of those sort.

(CROSSTALK)

M. O'BRIEN: All right. Thank you very much, Andy Serwer.

Coming up a little later on the program, with pricey PCs and plasma TVs, that rhymes, topping the Christmas list everywhere, it can be hard to manage your money during the holidays. All we do is spend, right? So How do you get everyone on your list something without breaking the bank? We will talk to the master of cheap, Clark Howard, who will be here on AMERICAN MORNING in a moment. Stay with us.

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S. O'BRIEN: Tomorrow on American morning, we're going to take a look at John Lennon's legacy 25 years after his death, including some rare footage of the legendary singer/songwriter reflecting on his life. AMERICAN MORNING, reminder, starts at 6:00 a.m. Eastern time. We'll see then.

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S. O'BRIEN: Speaking of Saddam Hussein -- the trial of Saddam Hussein back in session now. Empty seat, though, where Saddam Hussein would be. So what's going on? We're going to check in live to Baghdad for that developing story. That's ahead on AMERICAN MORNING. We're back in a moment.

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