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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Ebola Virus; U.S. Hits Terrorists in Somalia; Islamic Group Issues Fatwa Against ISIS; Cameron Requests Laws From Parliament

Aired September 02, 2014 - 12:00   ET

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

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: That's it for us @ THIS HOUR. I'm Michaela Pereira.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm John Berman. "LEGAL VIEW" with Ashleigh Banfield starts now.

PEREIRA: 6'3".

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone, I'm Ashleigh Banfield, and welcome to LEGAL VIEW.

The Ebola academic is, quote, "spiraling out of control." The virus has now infected more than 3,000 people and killed more than 1,500 since December. And before it's all said and done, the World Health Organization says that 20,000 people could be infected around the world. At any moment now, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Tom Frieden, is expected to address what's being called the worst Ebola outbreak ever. He's also talking about what he saw at ground zero of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

I want to bring in our senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen, who's been watching this along with me.

Elizabeth, one of the statistics I cannot believe - in fact, you know, Elizabeth, let me hold my questions for you for a moment because Dr. Tom Frieden's about to start his address. Let's listen live.

DR. TOM FRIEDEN, CDC DIRECTOR: The men, women and children I met and spoke with, the health care workers who are responding, the people from within countries, patients, the survivors and relatives of those who died will always be with me. The bottom line is that despite tremendous efforts from the U.S. government, from CDC, from within countries, the number of cases continues to increase and is now increasing rapidly. And I'm afraid that over the next few weeks, those numbers are likely to increase further and significantly.

There is a window of opportunity to tamp this down, but that window is closing. We need action now to scale up the response. We know how to stop Ebola. The challenge is to scale it up to the massive levels needed to stop this outbreak.

This is really the first epidemic of Ebola the world has ever known. By epidemic, what we mean in public health is that it's spreading widely through society. But it's not spreading in new ways according to everything that we know. It's spreading from just two routes, people caring for other people in hospitals or homes and unsafe burial practices where people may come in contact with body fluids of someone who's died from Ebola. That is really the Achilles heel of this virus. We now how it spreads. We know how to stop it from spreading. The challenge is to do that everywhere that's need.

In order to do that effectively, speed is key. The number of cases is increasing so quickly that for every day's delay, it becomes that much harder to stop it. There are three key things that we need. The first are more resources. This is going to take a lot to confront. The second are technical experts in health care and management to help in- country. And the third is a global, coordinated, unified approach because this is not just a program for -- this is not just a problem for west Africa, it's not just a problem for Africa, it's a problem for the world, and the world needs to respond.

I'll start with what's happening now and some of the things I saw. I met a young woman. I'll call her Fatima (ph). She's 22. She's in the fourth year of a four year program at university. And her sister-in- law came to visit from Sierra Leone. She is Ghanian (ph). Her sister- in-law's young child, daughter, 10 years old, was ill. She held the child in her arms and comforted her. That's how she became infected with the Ebola virus. Because other people in her family had also become ill and been diagnosed, she learned early that she had Ebola and she was able to go to the treatment unit and she was able to be saved. Earlier treatment with the tools that we have at hand saves lives and reduces spread in the community.

While she was in the treatment center, I asked her, what was the hardest thing about it? And she broke into tears, and she said that she was next to her big brother when he died horribly from Ebola. She was horrified by the symptoms he was having. She was horrified that she couldn't help him. She was terrified that she was next. That's the kind of reality that people in this region are dealing with every single day.

I went into the Ebola treatment unit that Doctors Without Borders or MSF has set up and there I saw patients surviving, patients recovering, but also tremendous needs. MSF is working under incredibly difficult circumstances.

BANFIELD: Dr. Tom Frieden has been giving a live update having just returned from West Africa on the crisis that is emerging with regard to the Ebola virus spread. The World Health Organization calls this the latest outbreak in history. You can see the death tolls on your screen. This is affecting Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone in West Africa. Our senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen still with me.

And just before we went to listen in to the doctor's live comments, I wanted to ask you about this alarming statistic that roughly 40 percent, that actually more than 40 percent of the total number of cases of Ebola, Elizabeth, have occurred in just the past three weeks. This is an exponential crisis.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Right. And, Ashleigh, what it tells you is that we are not doing a great job of controlling it. That's what it tells you. In the beginning, back in the spring, when this happened, public health authorities said, we're going to get out there, we're going to get in front of this, we're going to control it. But that did not work.

BANFIELD: And also one of the issues that he was mentioning is that this is not spreading in new ways. It's the old ways. It's the caring for the sick and the burial.

COHEN: Right.

BANFIELD: Is this just a -- is it a public outreach campaign or is it more critical to get to the prevention and the treatment issues?

COHEN: You know what, Ashleigh, in a way this is much less of a medical issue than it is a public health issue. This is really like public health 101 that when I - that I learned when I was in graduate school. There are very specific things you need to do. And central to it is you need to go to people who are sick and say, look, who have you been in contact with, and then follow up with those people. And that is not happening as smoothly as people would like. The CDC knows that when they ask who have you had contact with, that they're not getting full lists. People are scared and they're not giving full lists.

They also know that there have been challenges with the follow-up, with keeping the database, with catching up with all of those people, with finding all of those people, with visiting all those people every day. These are tough things to do, especially when you're in an atmosphere where a lot of these people don't want you around at all.

BANFIELD: Yes, and we're just monitoring these live comments as well, Elizabeth. As you were just speaking, Dr. Frieden also said that he does expects this epidemic to get worse in the next three weeks. And I should also note to our viewers, Elizabeth, that right - just today, the first human clinical trials for an Ebola vaccine are beginning. So you've got your work cut out for you. Elizabeth, thank you.

COHEN: Thanks.

BANFIELD: Turning now to an international story that raises a very big question, did a suspected U.S. drone strike in Somalia wipe out a terror leader who was responsible for a deadly attack on a shopping mall, among other attacks? Just ahead, we've got the details on the U.S. mission and why America chose to strike now.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: The dust has now had time to settle on an apparent U.S. air strike targeting ruthless jihadis in a lawless and battle scared country. And this time, we are not talking about Iraq and we're not talking about Syria. We're talking about Somalia, the unhappy home of the al Qaeda-linked terror group al Shabaab. As the world first learned on CNN, U.S. forces carried out an operation, that's the Pentagon's term for it, aimed at al Shabaab's leader who was meeting with his top lieutenants in the group's stronghold south of Mogadishu. One Somali official tells CNN, quote, "I never heard such a huge and deafening blast."

The question today is, however, is this man dead? That's Ahmed Godane. Is he alive? Is he dead? Is he wounded? Is he unscathed? Did he get away? We hope to find out in a White House briefing that's scheduled for just a little later on this hour. A Pentagon briefing scheduled for this afternoon.

But in the meantime, I want to bring in CNN's global affairs correspondent Elise Labott, who's in Washington, D.C.

Elise, I think a lot of people have been expecting to hear daily news of strikes against groups like ISIS in either Iraq or Syria and instead we're hearing about Somalia and al Shabaab. Why this group? Why now?

ELISE LABOTT, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Well, Ashleigh, U.S. officials are very sensitive to the idea that because everything is going on with ISIS and the U.S. has a lot of attention focused there, that it can't walk and chew gum at the same time, if you will. And they say al Shabaab main (ph) continues to be a very potent threat, not just to Somalia but the region and to U.S. interests there and that this target of opportunity presented itself, which is this meeting of the leader of al Shabaab, Ahmed Godane, and some of his top commanders. And targets of opportunity like that don't happen all the time, Ashleigh, so they went for it.

BANFIELD: And tell me a little bit about this leader. His name may not be in common parlance amongst a lot of Americans but that doesn't mean that the administration isn't really aware of him.

LABOTT: That's right. Well, since he took over al Shabaab, he's really pushed for a much more militant group that will expand its influence outside of Somalia. And you've seen al Shabaab in recent years undertake attacks in the Westgate Mall in Kenya, and in Uganda, and so really al Shabaab was on the backfoot (ph) in 2011. But since then, instead of being this kind of local militant group in Somalia, it has really expended its influence outside. And so he is one of the people that have been pushing for the group to become more closely aligned with al Qaeda. So now if, in fact, he has been killed and we haven't had that confirmation from the U.S., I think they want to wait to see if they have some DNA evidence there.

It remains to be seen what the future of this group is. Do they stay with their affiliate with al Qaeda? A lot of members of the group have pledged their support for the aims espoused by ISIS. And so it's really unclear what the future of the group would be.

BANFIELD: Well, since we're talking about terror groups, how about this -- since I have you, as well, this big terror bust in Saudi Arabia. What can you tell me about that?

LABOTT: Well, the Saudis just announced 88 men arrested, 59 of them have been arrested in the past and they were either in the final stages of planning a plot or about to execute a plot. Most of them were Saudis, a few of them Yemenis. But, you know, this goes to show that even though Saudi Arabia was in the news several years back for militancy and terrorism in Saudi Arabia, you haven't heard about that, but these are continuing threats that the Saudis face, and they say that this is the project of months-long surveillance on these individuals, 88 of them arrested today, Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: Elise Abbott reporting live for us, thank you for that.

And now to fighting terror on another front. Elise alluded to it. It is the group ISIS. That is an organization that uses some pretty slick Internet postings, believe it or not, showing pictures of corpses that are smiling. Corpses that are smiling. Jihadi fighters happy in death. All of this in an effort to lure people to join the cause, showing the glory. But a former jihadist shows us how he's fighting back now against all of these myths that are hooking in recruits.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: It's no secret ISIS draws in jihadi wannabes by using highly produced videos on social media, but if the means are 21st century, the message, say Islamic scholars, is all too often medieval, mythical even, designed not to inspire or inform but instead to delude.

So now the forces of reason are fighting back, as CNN's Atika Shubert explains.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Scroll through the Twitter feeds and Facebook pages of self-declared jihadi fighters and you'll find videos like this one that they say shows the righteousness of their cause, photos of dead jihadi fighters smiling, claims that their bodies don't decompose, and their blood is perfumed with musk.

After some digging, we were able to connect online with two jihadi fighters now in Syria, one of them, British. I asked if they truly believe the claims.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Inaudible) which we believe is to keep us (inaudible).

SHUBERT: Fantastical accounts like these are leading to a twisted interpretation of Islam says Usama Hasan, an Islamic scholar who was once an Islamist fighter himself.

USAMA HASAN, SENIOR RESEARCHER, QUILLIAM: I heard the same thing myself 25 years ago when I was 19 and went to Afghanistan to fight, the idea that if you were martyred or killed, you would not feel any pain whatsoever. You die with a smile on your face and that your blood would smell of musk, for example, or perfume.

And, luckily, those I was with had a more analytical, rational approach to things and they said, hold on, we've heard that before. Nowhere does it say that it happened on Earth.

The teaching about your blood smelling of musk is about the hereafter. What ISIS do is use medieval justifications. They are stuck in a medieval mindset, especially around laws of war. SHUBERT: Ironically, much of what Hasan describes as medieval thinking

is propagated online.

So to counter this, Hasan and other Muslim scholars in Britain have released a fatwa, a religious ruling that declares ISIS an heretical, extremist organization that is haram, prohibited, for believers to support and join.

And the fatwa quotes not only the Koran but also the Geneva Convention.

HASAN: This was deliberate on our part, to show that Islam, like any other world religion, can and must be reconcilable with modernity.

Otherwise, it makes no sense living in the modern world and accepting or using things like technology, mobile phones, Internet, videos, which ISIS do, and modern weaponry, but rejecting all of the civilization and human rights that come along with it.

SHUBERT: But the lure of the battlefield is particularly strong for young Muslim men, including the two we interviewed, who see the fight as the right of spiritual passage.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We see people from around the world here. They are rich. They are poor. They are well built. They are skinny. They are single. They are married. But what makes them mujahadin is one who (inaudible).

SHUBERT: A fatwa is only one small step in countering the myths of groups like ISIS, Hasan admits.

There is still a long ideological battle ahead to win back the hearts and minds warped by extremist believes.

Atika Shubert, CNN, London.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BANFIELD: Let me catch you up on some other news right now.

The European Union is thinking up new ways for making Russia pay for invading Ukraine. Wire restrictions on bank loans and exports are likely, although final decisions aren't expected until Friday.

Ukraine and the West say a thousand or more Russian troops backed by heavy artillery may be fighting to open up a land bridge all the way to Crimea. Moscow, however, is still denying everything.

President Obama is leaving today for Estonia, a NATO member that also borders Russia, and very much fears a Russian incursion could be next. Estonia's president today says he wants permanent NATO bases on his territory.

The NATO summit in Wales later this week is expected to focus on a rapid-reaction force specifically for eastern Europe. And now to the threat of violence from homegrown terrorists. The British prime minister is pushing for a law that allows the government there to take away the passports of citizens who support terrorism abroad.

Could anything like that ever be passed in the United States? Even so, could it even prevent attacks here? We're going to get the LEGAL VIEW on that, straight ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: Some 500 British citizens have uprooted their lives and traveled off to Iraq and Syria to join the jihadi with ISIS, and while the British government is certainly concerned about their citizens joining that fight, they seem to be even more concerned about an attack at home.

And that's prompted the prime minister there, David Cameron, to propose a new policy, one that might not fly here in the U.S. Any British citizen just suspected of associated with ISIS could have his or her passport confiscated. They could also be barred from ever coming home to Britain again.

Here's CNN's Karl Penhaul.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID CAMERON, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER: Mr. Speaker, dealing with this terrorist threat is not just about new powers, it is also about how we combat extremism in all its forms.

KARL PENHAUL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: British's prime minister lays out his battle plan, a radical new proposal to ban Britons from coming home once they join jihadi ranks abroad.

CAMERON: We're clear in principle what we need is a targeted, discretionary power to allow us to exclude British nationals from the U.K.

PENHAUL: He wants to confiscate passports before they travel, and ban other suspects from boarding planes.

CAMERON: Passports are not an automatic right.

PENHAUL: Lawmakers question if some of the toughest plans are legal.

DIANA JOHNSON, OPPOSITION MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT: As a number of MPs spoke today, they made reference to the fact that would breach a whole range of legal and international legal obligations that this country has.

PENHAUL: She backs tough action but insists there must be a balance.

JOHNSON: I cannot categorically say that civil liberties will be a big issue in any debate we have about any new powers. PENHAUL: Measures to safeguard citizen's rights ring hollow to this

person. In 2006, he was detained by British security agents under anti-terror laws. He says he was going to Syria to volunteer help orphans. The Syrian civil war hadn't started. ISIS didn't even exist.

CERIE BULLIVANT, FORMER TERROR SUSPECT: Suddenly, you go on the basis of secret evidence, without knowing why, from being an ordinary member of the public, to being kind of the worst of the worst.

I mean, terrorists and terrorism is seen as the most heinous and horrible of people. And I didn't even know what I was accused of.

PENHAUL: Bullivant believes he came under suspicion because he had unwittingly, he says, become friends with the brother of a jailed terrorist. Bullivant was never arrested, never convicted of a crime, never told what evidence security services had against him.

The British government imposed a control order on him, banning him from traveling, from meeting friends, and subjecting him to a curfew. Two years later, a top court exonerated him.

BULLIVANT: A couple of times a week, the police would just come by, let them come in, and you can't stop them. They come and search your house.