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American Morning

Two Dozen Iraqis Dead in Latest Attack

Aired March 01, 2006 - 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: Good morning. I'm Soledad O'Brien. More attacks rock Baghdad this morning. We're live on the very latest on this developing story.
And President Bush makes a surprise side trip to Afghanistan. It's his very first visit there.

In India, protesters are already preparing for the president's second stop. Take a look at some of these pictures.

And teenager Lionel Tate, remember him? He's back in court. Right now, a judge decides today if he's going to go back to prison, possibly for life.

Good morning, welcome, everybody, Soledad O'Brien. We've got a split edition this morning of AMERICAN MORNING because Miles is still on the Gulf coast. He's taking a look, a closer look at the six month anniversary after hurricane Katrina blew through the region. We were in New Orleans obviously taking a look at the good and the bad there. Now you've moved a little distance away to Mississippi.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Yeah, Soledad, good morning. I'm 70 miles east of New Orleans this morning. We're in the town of Pass Christian, not far from Gulfport and if you've been watching all morning, we've been in a tent city. They call this place the village. This used to be the little league baseball field across the street. That's Second Street. We've come across the street.

Take a look at this, all along here has sprung up kind of a modular central business district because of course the real historic central business district of Pass Christian is gone now and if you just take a peek inside, this is a place you can get, is it super friendly -- super happy ice available in here and various sundries to cater to peoples' needs. Little things like this mean an awful lot in this hurricane-stricken part of the world where the grocery stores are not operative.

The mail doesn't come right and to have just a little place where you can go and get a soda or whatever and a bag of chips is worth its weight in gold here. So in many respects, people are responding to needs in an immediate way and in the larger picture, there are a lot of needs which remain unmet. So, it's kind of a mixed bag here in Pass Christian. Soledad.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: Certainly they talking about baby steps in little stores like that, exactly what they mean. You can't really get started until you got a place to buy food and water and milk and really just get some things, the basic necessities of life. All right, Miles, thanks. We'll check back with you in just a little bit.

We got a developing story out of Baghdad we want to get to this morning. More violence in a neighborhood that was already devastated by a car bomb on Tuesday. Today's attacks leave more than two dozen people dead, many more injured. Let's get right to CNN's Arwa Damon. She's live for us in Baghdad this morning, Arwa good morning.

ARWA DAMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning Soledad. That's right, 23 Iraqis were killed at least and around or over rather, 58 were wounded when a car bomb detonated in an eastern Baghdad neighborhood, the neighborhood called New Baghdad. Now, the bomb exploded on the main road that runs through this neighborhood. It's a r road that's always packed with Iraqis going to the shops, to the market place, stopping by the bank, going to the post office, just going about their daily lives and it is important to point out, too, this is an area that in the last 24 hours has been targeted twice. Yesterday an attack there next to the post office killed four Iraqis and wounded another 44. Earlier on Tuesday, an IED detonated at a bus station killing three Iraqis and wounding another seven.

Now, in the last 24 hours in Baghdad alone, at least 80 Iraqis have been killed and close to 300 have been wounded. Although it is very challenging to pinpoint exactly what those numbers are given that there are a lot of attacks that are not reported to the authorities. Soledad?

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: No surprise in that. The pictures look terrible. Arwa Damon for us this morning. Thank you for the update there.

Another developing story that we're following this morning is President Bush's Asian trip. He is due to arrive in New Delhi later this hour. Before heading to India, though, the president made a surprise stop in Kabul, Afghanistan where he met with President Hamid Karzai. Let's get more on the president's trip with CNN's Satinder Bindra. He is in New Delhi where thousands of people are protesting President Bush's visit. Satinder, good morning.

SATINDER BINDRA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Soledad. The president is scheduled to arrive very shortly and even before he does, there have been large protests here in the capital in New Delhi. These protests conducted mainly by Muslims, according to one police officer. There were 100,000 people out in New Delhi streets today. They were carrying placards and they were shouting slogans saying Bush is a global terrorist, death to Bush, Bush go home.

Now, Soledad, we expect these demonstrations and protests to continue tomorrow. That's when India and the United States will be trying to stitch together a historic nuclear deal. Now, under this arrangement, India's 15 nuclear reactors will be divided into two categories: civilian and military. The civilian reactors will then be placed under international safeguards and today, Soledad, just before leaving Afghanistan, the U.S. president, yet, again, stressing the importance of doing this nuclear deal.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It's in our interest, in the interest of the United States. It's in the interest of countries around the world that India develop a nuclear power industry because that will help alleviate demand for fossil fuels. And by alleviating demand for fossil fuels, it takes the price off of gasoline at the pump.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BINDRA: Now Soledad, if this deal doesn't go through, some analysts suggesting it could take the shine or the sheen off the president's visit. But the president forewarning that there is more to India/U.S. relations than just discussions about energy. In fact, the president categorizing this relationship as strategic. Back to you.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: Satinder, let me ask you a quick question, you see these pictures of these protests and you gave the estimate of 100,000 people in the protest, but actually I thought the president was pretty popular in India.

BINDRA: Well, you have to put these figures in some perspective. That's 100,000 protesters in a country of 1.2 billion people. There was a poll recently and the question asked was do you think the president is a friend of India? And 66 percent of the respondents said yes. And even though there are some concerns about the president's policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, many Indians also do like him for his stance against terrorism. They think he's tough against terrorists and he's a fighter against terror in the world. Soledad.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: Satinder Bindra for us this morning in New Delhi. Thanks for the update and, of course, we'll check in with you when the president actually is on the ground and arrives in New Delhi.

Lots of other stories to tell you about, as well. Carol's got that. She's in the newsroom this morning. Good morning again.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. We could hear more this morning about a deal involving U.S. ports in a Dubai-based company. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is set to go before lawmakers later this morning. He is officially expected to discuss his department's budget, but will likely be asked a lot of questions about that Dubai agreement.

Overseas now, an air strike in Gaza. Palestinian security sources say the attack killed a commander for Islamic jihad. He was apparently traveling in his car. Israeli forces deny any involvement.

We're also hearing that two Israeli men are in critical condition after shootings in the west bank.

Lionel Tate back in court and he could be facing life this time. Tate made headlines for killing a young playmate while wrestling but he couldn't stay out of trouble. He allegedly robbed a man at gunpoint while on probation and that means he could be sent back to prison. The hearing set to begin any moment now. A showdown between Northwest Airlines and thousands of its pilots and flight attendants. A bankruptcy judge set to rule today on whether the airline could impose pay cuts and change work rules. If a deal is not reached, Northwest pilots could go on strike.

And Howard Stern under fire. CBS, his old employer, is suing Stern, his agent and Sirius radio and not for chump change, but for $218 million, plus punitive damages that could equal $500 million. The lawsuit charges multiple contract breaches. CBS also claims Stern used radio time to promote his move to Sirius. Stern calls the lawsuit a personal vendetta and says CBS is just trying to bully him, so it could get really ugly, really fast.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: Yes, and everyone will be watching for that.

COSTELLO: You got that right.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: All right, Carol, thanks. Let's get right to the forecast. Chad's got that. He's at the CNN center this morning. Hey Chad, what are you looking at now? CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: The only ones getting rich is that whole thing are the lawyers.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: That's the way it always is, right?

MYERS: I'm just thinking that I should have been a lawyer.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: Before you change careers, what are you looking at this morning weather wise?

MYERS: Very hot weather in Texas today, 86 in Dallas. Look at some of the numbers from yesterday across Texas as warm air has been pumping up for the last couple days. Here's the record heat across Texas. These are records that have been broken, 40, 50-year-old records. In Wichita Falls, 87, Ponca City, Oklahoma, 81 yesterday. A bigger story is the lack of rainfall. Dallas, Texas, in the past 12 months, they should have actually had about 35 inches of rain or so, 36 inches of rain, 37, there's the number. They only had 18 inches. They are 18 inches below normal in the past year. Everything is brown there. We're wondering why there was so many fires before, 54 in St. Louis today, a little bit warmer down into parts of Oklahoma and Missouri and Texas.

There will be some snow across the northeast for tomorrow. I'll update that in a few minutes, probably three to six inches in New York City, but it's drying out in California. Soledad, back to you.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: All right Chad. Thanks a lot. We got much more of our special Gulf coverage just ahead. Miles has got an update as well. Miles?

MILES O'BRIEN: Yes, Soledad, we have been working on this -- I've been telling you all morning about this March 15th deadline on possibly this tent city, the plug being pulled by FEMA. We've been working on this. As a matter of fact, we've been making a lot of phone of calls to FEMA. We got the assistant city administrator here. We have a development to tell you about. We're working on this right now. Stay with us. Back with more in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: Welcome back, everybody. Obviously, we've got a split show this morning. I'm reporting from New York and Miles O'Brien is reporting from Pass Christian in Mississippi where the problems there are representative of the problems many of the smaller areas, smaller towns and cities have. We're going to catch up with Miles in just a few moments and meet a family that we met six months ago, a family uprooted by Katrina. They weren't sure if they would ever move back to New Orleans. Well, they finally made up their minds. We're going to talk about that.

Also, Miles will be talking with the governor of Mississippi. He praised the Federal Katrina response six months ago. Six months later, we'll get a sense of what he thinks about that response now. Those stories ahead. Stay with us. We're back in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MILES O'BRIEN: Welcome back. I'm Miles O'Brien reporting live from Pass Christian, Mississippi. This is an area that was just devastated by hurricane Katrina. We're on the six-month anniversary. It's Ash Wednesday and we've been talking about Mardi Gras and the mixed bag of emotions that has come along with that.

There's also a big story to tell about getting relief to people who need it most. We're in a tent city here in Pass Christian. They call it the village. A lot of people aren't sure what the next step is. Among the people trying to help them out is the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour. He joins us now from Jackson. Governor Barbour, good to have you with us. We're at the six-month point. Do you care to offer just kind of a general assessment of where you think you are right now?

GOV. HALEY BARBOUR, MISSISSIPPI: Well, Miles, here, of course, at ground zero Pass Christian and the two towns to the west, Bay St. Louis and Waveland (ph), along with Long Beach to the east were the hardest hit. They were obliterated as you can see and hopefully your viewers can see. We've made progress every day. Some days a little progress, some days a lot of progress. But the point is we have a huge mountain in front of us that we have to get over. Issues like debris removal with the long-term issue of affordable housing.

We've got our kids, our families are back. 90 percent of our kids are back in school on the coast. Some of them are not in the same school because the school was destroyed. We have (INAUDIBLE) board of education, about 90 percent of the coast school kids are back in school on the coast. The big employers are back open. In fact, we have a labor shortage there. We've got a huge amount of temporary housing, but, as you know, these travel trailers, particularly we've got 36,000 of them, they are not a good solution and they will be a very bad solution if we have a bad hurricane season.

MILES O'BRIEN: Let's talk about that for just a moment. As a matter of fact, Soledad just a little while ago spoke to the acting head of FEMA Mr. Paulison. Let's listen to what he had to say about planning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVID PAULISON, ACTING FEMA DIRECTOR: This is not really a Federal issue, but we can't walk away from it, so it has to be a combination of the Federal government, the state and the locals all working together to come up with the plan.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MILES O'BRIEN: You know, the one thing when I hear officials talking about the plan, we all thought there was a plan prior to Katrina. How are things different now, governor? What are you doing differently? And you do have the complication of people in tents and trailers and all kind of unprotected structures.

BARBOUR: Well, it means you have to have a very different plan. Let me just say, we have a plan and that's one reason we never lost continuity of government in Mississippi. It's one reason that our first responders were on the spot, the afternoon, the evening of the storm. And while the Federal government did a lot of stuff wrong, they did a whole lot of stuff right. Those Coast Guard kids who came in on helicopters the night of the storm hanging off of helicopters on ropes in the pitch black darkness pulling Mississippians off the top of their houses and out of trees. Ultimately 1,700 Mississippians were saved by those young Coast Guard kids risking their lives.

Yeah, there were real problems with the logistical system but we adapted to them. We adjusted, we made do and we did it because we had a good plan. Now, our plan has got to take into consideration that we have 36,000 travel trailers temporary housing that can't stand up to a bad thunderstorm, much less to a real hurricane. So, we're going to have much more evacuation capacity. We're going to have to sort of be hair triggered on evacuating. That's going to be hard. But that's what we got to do.

I hope and I've testified before Congress and met with administration officials. I hope we had learned from this that the travel trailer is the sole, temporary housing element is really not the right way to go, particularly in an area like ours where we had 70,000 units of housing that were uninhabitable. It will take years to build those back and people can't -- these travel trailers weren't designed to be lived in that long and they're not sturdy enough to withstand the elements, if we have even a minor hurricane.

MILES O'BRIEN: So, I guess the logical question then is, what is, what is next after the travel trailers? There is no - as you put it, there is no short-term easy solution because to build these structures requires a construction boom that would be unprecedented to get people into housing. How are you going to answer that one?

BARBOUR: Well, it if we build 10 times as many houses every year as we normally do on the Mississippi Gulf coast, it will still take five years, but there are some solutions. Here in Mississippi, we've designed and created what we call the Katrina cottage. It is a small, modular home that can be expanded. They're less expensive in the long term than the travel trailers, but they'll stand up to a category three hurricane.

There are other forms of modular housing, transitional housing that are a much, much better solution. They have more permanence and one of the problems is the law that we have right now doesn't allow FEMA, as Mr. Paulison said, they're not allowed to build permanent housing. They need to when the permanent housing is, A, less expensive, B, more suitable for living in for a year and a half, which is the norm for these disaster housing, according to experience.

And, finally, they can move on to where when families get back in their real house then we can have transitional labor, transient labor come live in them. We've got a huge labor shortage on the coast. It's going to get worse and worse because of the construction that has to happen. So, there are solutions, just unfortunately the law's going to have to be changed, in my opinion, should be changed, so that we can have better solutions in effect for the next time and, frankly, we'd like to see most of these travel trailers replaced with that kind of housing. These travel trailers are not going to last as long as there's going to be a need for temporary housing on the Mississippi Gulf coast and I suspect the same thing is true in Louisiana, although I don't know much about it over there.

MILES O'BRIEN: I suspect you're right. Governor Haley Barbour, thanks for your time as always, the governor coming to us from Jackson, Mississippi.

Now all morning long, we've been talking about this tent city we're standing in, the place they call the village. And we've been trading phone calls all morning with representatives at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA. We were telling you that the local officials here have been told that on March 15th, the FEMA support for this city, if you will, is being pulled. And that means the electricity and the water and the showers and the food service. And that leaves about 40 people with some big questions as to where they end up.

Our friends at FEMA have been watching and, as a matter of fact, we're joined right now by Nicole Andrews, who is a spokesman for FEMA, as well as the city manager here, Malcolm Jones to talk a little bit about this. First of all, I just want to get on the record, what have you been told, excuse me, assistant city administrator, what have you been told over the past few weeks about what's going to happen to FEMA support of the village?

MALCOLM JONES, CHIEF ADMIN, PASS CHRISTIAN, MS: That it would end on March the 15th. We've been trying to move the people from the village to other types of temporary housing and actually FEMA has been working pretty hard trying to do that. But as you say, we still have about 40 people that are eligible for assistance and haven't been moved yet according to the information I have.

MILES O'BRIEN: On March 15th the infrastructure that we talk about, the power, all the thing you can keep the tents, but that's not much use when you don't have everything else, right?

JONES: That's right. MILES O'BRIEN: To Nicole Andrews, who's spokesperson for FEMA and Nicol, are you on the line? Can you hear me all right?

NICOLE ANDREWS, FEMA SPOKESWOMAN: Good morning, Miles. How are you doing?

MILES O'BRIEN: Good morning, Nicol. Are you willing to extend that deadline a little bit, give people a little bit of a break here?

ANDREWS: I think what Mr. Jones and folks on the ground from FEMA have been discussing over the last couple of weeks is how we really help the folks that are there getting into longer term housing situations and that is the key to getting on with the recovery process. So it's really not a matter of extending or not extending. What matters is meeting the needs of the folks on the ground.

MILES O'BRIEN: Let me ask you this though. If come March 15th, there are people in here who haven't gotten those alternatives, haven't gotten a trailer or whatever, will you extend your support of the village?

ANDREWS: What we're doing right now is going through, continuing to go through the village and making sure that everyone who's eligible has access to the assistance. If there comes a point when, you know, we approach March 15th and there are -- there remain folks there, you know, a decision will have to be made whether or not it makes sense to continuing running the village at the cost of about somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 a day to, you know, serve a few families or if there are other alternatives that we can offer those families to keep them housed and keep them, you know, moving forward in their recovery. So, at that point a critical decision has to be made, but to be quite frank, I don't think that we're going to be facing that situation. I feel very confident that the folks that are there, that are eligible for FEMA assistance will receive that assistance prior to March 15th.

MILES O'BRIEN: Mr. Jones, she's essentially saying the people will be taken care of one way or another. $100,000 a day, that kind of surprised me. That's a big number. I can come in and run this place a little cheaper than that I think. What are your thoughts on that? Is that enough to make you feel a little better about this?

JONES: We've had good response from FEMA actually. They've worked with us. They really have come in and tried to help us out. I think that they are trying as hard as they can to help move the people to other housing. If they do that, then our problem will be solved.

MILES O'BRIEN: Nicol, why does it cost so much to run these facilities? $100,000 a day, really?

ANDREWS: Yeah and what we have here is an emergency situation and it was needed. Absolutely, you know, you've been around and your cameras have shown the American people, the kind of devastation that that Gulf coast has faced and it's awful. It's horrible. And what we can offer is the assistance to help get folks back on their feet, but there are critical decisions that have to be made and this is one of them.

MILES O'BRIEN: All right, so just to sum it up here though, anybody who is here March 15th who doesn't have a place to go, they won't be left out in the cold. We had talked to somebody earlier who is concerned that she might have to go live in her vehicle, her car.

ANDREWS: There is just absolutely no reason and I hope that she's in touch with the FEMA folks who are there, they're there 24/7 at the village to make sure that that doesn't happen.

MILES O'BRIEN: Mr. Jones, you happy with that?

JONES: I'm happy with the effort everybody is making on this, I really am. I know that we're going to help these people one way or the other.

MILES O'BRIEN: All right, Malcolm Jones, Nicole Andrews. We'll keep them honest in all this and we'll make sure that the folks here are not living in vehicles come March 15th. Thank you very much, hopefully made a little progress here. Back with more in a moment.

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