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At This Hour

Missing Girl's Parents Plead for Help; Trackers Find Alleged Cop Killer's Rifle; Three Afghan Soldiers Missing in Massachusetts; Fmr. Marine Capt: Ground Troops Play into ISIS Plans

Aired September 22, 2014 - 11:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: A college student goes missing. Police say someone knows where she is and needs to start talking, the latest on the investigation in the Hannah Graham case and the parents' emotional plea for help.

Three soldiers from Afghanistan come to the United States and disappear. This morning, the search is on. So is there reason for concern?

And how could one of the most secure places on planet Earth have been so vulnerable? How could someone get through a door at the White House with a knife? This is a security meltdown that shocked even Secret Service agents.

Hello, everyone, I'm John Berman. Michaela Pereira is off today. Those stories and much more ahead @THISHOUR.

And, this morning, the brokenhearted parents of a missing college student are begging for help from anyone to get their daughter back. Eighteen-year-old Hannah Graham was last seen more than a week ago in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, about a mile from the University of Virginia campus.

Her parents have been in the area desperate for word of their daughter since she disappeared, but they had not appeared in public until yesterday. That is when they came out to plead for help.

Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN GRAHAM, HANNAH GRAHAM'S FATHER: I think that the reason that Hannah has such marvelous support is that this is every parent's worst nightmare. I'm certain that everybody in this room and those watching knows that what happened to Hannah could happen to their child. We need to find out what happened to Hannah and make sure that it doesn't happen to anybody else.

But Hannah is also our little girl. She's our only daughter and she's James's little sister. She's also -- Hannah is also the oldest granddaughter to both of my own parents and Sue's parents, and she's actually my parents only granddaughter. She's enormously precious to us all.

Did you see Hannah? Did anybody see Hannah? Did you see Hannah? Did you see Hannah? Who saw Hannah? Somebody did. Please, please, please, if you have anything however insignificant you think it may be, call the police tip line with anything that just might help us to bring Hannah home.

This is Hannah's favorite white rabbit Bibi. He was give to Hannah by one of my friends when she was less than a week old. Bibi helped out in Tuscaloosa, and he was Hannah's constant guardian, companion, friend, and guardian angel until last month when she chose to return to Charlottesville without him.

Constant companion, that is, except for about six months when Hannah was three years old when he was lost at nursery. We found Bibi and we brought him home to Hannah and to us.

All we want to do now is to bring Hannah home safely and I appeal to anybody who knows anything, please, please help us. Thank you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Now as Hannah Graham's parents hope and pray their daughter is found, the investigation into her disappearance is intensifying.

Charlottesville's police chief is calling out this man. Law enforcement sources say Jesse Matthew is the man seen on surveillance video walking behind Graham last weekend at this downtown mall.

Listen to the chief.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHIEF TIMOTHY LONGO, CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, POLICE: I believe Jesse Matthew was the last person she was seen with before she vanished off the face of the earth, because it's been a week and we can't find her.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Now, over the weekend, Matthew showed up at the police station. He asked for a lawyer, authorities helped him find one, but he ended up leaving the station without talking to police.

Now, police say they do not have probable cause to tie him to this case, but the chief says he is expected to get results today from the search of Matthew's car and apartment.

Now, joining us is someone who knows how Hannah Graham's parents feel. Patrick Session's -- his daughter Tiffany was a student in the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1989. In February of this year, police say they believe she was murdered by a serial killer.

Patrick, thanks so much for being with us. I am sorry it is under these circumstances.

PATRICK SESSIONS, FATHER OF TIFFANY SESSIONS: Thanks for having me.

BERMAN: Now, you heard the parents of Hannah graham speak about their daughter. We all heard it. But I suspect you come at it from a different perspective.

So tell me what you make of it.

SESSIONS: Well, I think it's great that the family themselves came out and asked everyone to help, personalizing it. You know, we've all seen the pictures of her, and we all -- and particularly me as you can imagine why this is so similar to what happened to Tiffany, just kind of disappeared off the face of the earth.

The huge difference here is that they have a person of interest, if 's this what you want to call him. And that gives law enforcement and the family something to aim at, something to ask for.

And if this guy -- my understanding was drove off in a car, and they haven't found that car, I haven't seen anything in the coverage that I've read or heard of what that car was that he was driving, and they don't need to be looking for it, just the police

They need to put that out there and they need to have everybody in Charlottesville looking for that car. They'll find it. They've got a chance here.

We didn't have anything like this. We never had a break. It took me 25 years to find out what happened to Tiffany and that doesn't have to be the case here.

BERMAN: Yeah. At this point, we simply don't know how connected he is, this person of interest, as you say. That's not the term the police are using right now, but we don't know how connected to this case other than the fact he's on the video as you say. The police still very much want to speak with him.

One thing that struck me as we listen to Hannah Graham's parents was the father holding up the stuffed animal. You called it an attempt to personalize her. To me, it seemed like trying to humanize her, as if trying to send a message perhaps to whoever might be holding her.

SESSIONS: I think that's true. I know that we called out for a long time to whoever had her, please bring her back, and I think that's what the father is doing. And whether he knows it or not, he's personalized her, and I think it's wonderful he's doing that. He needs to do more of it.

And, frankly, the family is not restricted as much as law enforcement is as to who they think is a person of interest or a suspect or anybody else. They can ask -- if the law enforcement is holding back because they think naming this guy can put them in some sort of jeopardy, legal or otherwise, that's absurd, and there's no reason they can't put out a description of that car and say if anybody has seen this car, we're looking for this car.

That isn't illegal. It's not going to get them sued. It's not going to be anything.

So, you know, I learned early on that as a family member you have a lot of rights to do pretty much whatever you need to do to find your child. You don't want to go crossways with the law enforcement.

But they've got a great team there. I checked with my friends at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They have a team on the ground there. They've got obviously a big effort going, but they need to think out of the box.

Law enforcement tends to stick with the rules, as they know them, to stay out of trouble. They do that. This is a case where there's still a chance of finding this girl. We're not talking about Tiffany 20 years ago, 25 years ago, and they need to take advantage of everything they can do.

And they need to -- and if law enforcement won't do it, they need to do it. And I'm not knocking law enforcement. Please don't misunderstand me. I don't know what they know.

But I do know that they need to expand their area, they need to expand their searchers to everybody in Charlottesville, and I think the family took a big step with that this morning.

BERMAN: Yeah, you bring up a great point. The interest of law enforcement not necessarily 100 percent coinciding with the interests of the parents here.

Just in closing, you know, quickly, what advice do you have to the Graham family right now?

SESSIONS: Not to give up, take care of themselves so they can continue to help find their daughter, and take every advantage they can to get her name and her face and personalize her even more than they already have.

They need to be out even more than they have, and I just wish them the best of luck.

BERMAN: Listen, Patrick Sessions, thank you so much again for being with us to provide your insight. I'm sorry this is something you have to talk about, but if anything good can come of what you went through I'm sure you welcome that.

Thank you so much.

SESSIONS: I do. Glad to help.

BERMAN: Ahead for us, police say they are closing in on this alleged cop killer in the woods of Pennsylvania. We will show you what trackers found. That's ahead.

Plus, the historic White House visit that is nothing to be proud of, the agency charged with protecting the president's life lets an intruder with a knife get inside the building. How will the Secret Service make sure this never happens again? (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: Welcome back, everyone. You're looking at live pictures right there of Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett. He is speaking right now about alleged cop killer Eric Frein who is believed to be on the loose, on the run in the woods of northeastern Pennsylvania.

The governor there is urging people in that region to use common sense, this as police and also the governor say they believe they are closing in. They believe they will catch this alleged cop killer as he hides in the dense woods of that region.

Trackers have found items that police believe Frein hid or abandoned, including his AK-47-style assault rifle, also ammunition.

School was canceled again today, and police have asked hunters to avoid the woods in the area.

Police say the self-taught survivalist had been planning a confrontation with law enforcement possibly for months. They believe he is still armed. He is still dangerous.

Now joining me to talk about this, law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes, a former FBI assistant director. Tom, thanks so much for being with us.

We hear the governor say use common sense. We know they've closed schools, but I've also heard from law enforcement personnel over the last 24 hours that they believe that this man is really mostly a threat cops, to law enforcement, and regular citizens don't have to worry as much because they say, if Eric Frein wanted to kill regular people, he would have already.

TOM FUENTES, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Yeah, I don't know that I buy that, John. You need to warn everybody and keep that warning up for the public as well.

We're talking about somebody, if it's true they're closing in, which they believe, and by finding the AK-47 and some other material, they believe they have gotten closer to him, he's a cornered animal. He's a killer.

He's murdered a police officer, but he has nothing to lose, so what's to stop him from doing a home invasion and taking a family hostage to seek shelter, food, water, electricity -- if he wants to power some equipment -- or doing a carjacking and taking a family or a person hostage to take their car or steal it?

I believe he's a serious threat as long as he's out there. He's a killer. He's hunted. And if he's cornered, he's going to be a cornered animal.

BERMAN: I think that's great advice. A man with nothing to lose is on the loose right now. The question is where.

Knowing what you know, do you think a guy like this stays in the general area, maybe because he knows those woods so well, or do you think he might have taken off, trying to get as far away from the northeastern part of Pennsylvania as possible.

FUENTES: I think that if they just found that AK-47 recently and had searched that area before, if that's an area that they thought they had covered, then that would be a good indication that he's stayed in the area.

And if they have as much -- 400 officer officers and federal agents in the outer perimeter of that and into the woods it may be difficult for him to get out of the area undetected. I think that the common sense for the public would be, you know, check if there's evidence that somebody went through your trash. Maybe he's going to come in and look for food. We had that in the Eric Rudolph case when he came into town and a police officer found him going through a dumpster after he had been out for months in the Appalachians.

So, there are signs that may indicate that he's still throughout or that they are closing in but there are residents in that area. His car was found by somebody walking their dog. So, you know, keep an eye on your property, keep an eye on your trash bins and other aspects of your personal possessions to see that maybe he may come out of the woods to seek something.

BERMAN: Be careful, Tom Fuentes, great advice, really appreciate it.

Ahead for us @THISHOUR, more threats from ISIS as the U.S. pounds away at targets in Iraq. But at least one former Marine captain says the air strikes and the idea of ground troops are exactly what ISIS wants. So does the U.S., can the U.S. perhaps defeat ISIS by not attacking them at all? We'll have that discussion coming up.

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BERMAN: Three soldiers from Afghanistan are missing in Massachusetts. They were last seen on Saturday at a mall in Hyannis, that's on Cape Cod. Military officials along with state and local police are now searching for these men.

Our Deborah Feyerick is here with the details. What do you know about these guys?

DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN NATIOANL CORRESPONDENT: It's not just the state and local police. Now the Afghanistan defense ministry is also involved as is the U.S. military, the FBI is aware, they're also looking into the backgrounds of these men and the international security assistance forces, or ISAF, in Afghanistan, they are also finding out who these three men are. We know they were here in the United States taking part in what amounts to a team building, a coalition building kind of exercise. They were doing computer simulations, tactical scenarios.

This is one of those situations where you bring countries together, they train with Americans so that when you train in times of peace you can obviously interact much better when you are engaged in times of war, and so they were here, they're highly vetted. These were a major and two captains that simply disappeared when they were at a shopping mall and so now the search is on. The question is, are they here just seeking asylum, for example? Did they disappear because they were seeking asylum? Is there something more sinister?

BERMAN: Were they out clubbing?

FEYERICK: Well, are they out clubbing? But you have to go to the worst-case scenario and dial it back. So the question is could they be here for other reasons than just this general training.

BERMAN: You say they're heavily vetted and that this is program that's been in place for a while. Have people gone missing from this program before?

FEYERICK: That's always one of the risks. That's why these people are hand picked. In this particular case they are -- they didn't seem to be at risk and the base has made it very clear that they don't seem to pose any specific threat, however we do know that there were several Afghan security forces who were here just a week ago. They were training with the drug enforcement agency -- administration and they went missing. They basically disappeared to seek asylum, so they just didn't want to go back to Afghanistan. So, yes, it does happen. But obviously when these people are being vetted and picked, the one thing that everybody wants to avoid is them coming and not wanting to go back.

BERMAN: Right now they want them found to find out if there is any reason. Deborah Feyerick, thank you so much, appreciate it.

Western powers are vowing a tough fight against ISIS. That after the leader of the terrorist group released a new audio recording calling for lone wolf attacks against the west. The ISIS spokesman is heard urging followers to quote, strive to your best and kill any disbeliever whether he be French, American, or from any of their allies. This is a direct translation here which is why it's so choppy. He goes on to call for the deaths of civilians or military saying, both of them are disbelievers, both of them are considered to be waging war.

The U.S. and France are the two countries that have been conducting air strikes on ISIS targets in Iraq. The state department had no comment to CNN when asked about the message but France's interior minister says this call for the murder of civilians along with the execution of hostages and mass slaughters that ISIS has been carrying out justifies a tireless fight against the terror group.

British authorities called the message propaganda and they say internet providers should pull it down. The battle against ISIS is one of the key agenda item this is week here at the U.N. General assembly. The battle against ISIS you can bet will be a major of topic -- major topic of conversation here in New York.

And along those lines, I want you to take a look at what one former Marine captain and State Department official wrote in the opinion section of "The Huffington Post". Quote, "In our rush to return to war in Iraq, we are playing into the Islamic state's hands just as we played into the hands of al Qaeda in Iraq in 2004 and into Osama bin Laden's larger strategy. In the short term, American bombs may hurt the Islamic state but in the long term it is what they need and want."

Now, that opinion belongs to Matthew Hoh, he is now a senior fellow for the Center of International Policy. Captain, thanks so much for being with us. You believe the recent beheadings are a kind of bait and the United States shouldn't bite, explain.

MATTHEW HOH, FORMER MARINE CORPS CAPTAIN: Good morning, John, thank you for having me on. Yes, I do. This goes back to the strategy that Osama bin Laden promoted. He said all we need to do is send two Mujahideen to the farthest point east, raise the flag of al Qaeda or jihad and the American generals will come running and they will exhaust themselves politically, economically, and militarily.

And we've seen that. We saw that happen after 9/11, we rushed into Afghanistan, we are now there over 13 years later. We've rushed into Iraq, mistakenly, and the conflict there is still going on. The costs have been tremendous to the United States. Harvard University estimates that we will spend $6 trillion on these wars, and we have had tens of thousands of casualties, including 250,000 traumatic brain injuries from these wars.

So I think the strategy that Osama bin Laden devised has been quite effective for al Qaeda and now for the Islamic state. And what it really does for them is it validates their narrative. These groups say they're defending the Muslim people against godless crusaders, to put it simply. That they're defending their faith, defending their people and their lands so by rushing into these conflicts we validate them and we also push the local populations to support them because they now feel like they are being occupied or they're being attacked by outside powers.

BERMAN: But, however, if you do not have a response, is that not, in fact, as some have suggested, de facto acquiescence to the existence of what they call this caliphate in the Middle East now controlling a huge swath of area in Syria and Iraq?

HOH: disagree. I disagree that the only option here is bombing which seems to be the bulk of what is coming out of Washington, D.C. on this, or other capitals. We've seen what's occurred. FBI Director James Comey last week in testimony to Congress stated that since the United States has started bombing Iraq again, support from the Islamic state has grown. This plays, again, right into their plans.

What we need to do is we need to find a political solution to the conflict. And none of us should be surprised at this for years, for decades, really, we have fostered a policy in the Middle East of playing one religion against the other, playing one sect against off the other. Our invasion of Iraq did this for the last several years. We have been adamant that we won't allow anyone to negotiate with Assad and that we are -- in doing that we were arming these groups. That then helped the rise of the Islamic state.

BERMAN: But captain, if you have a political solution, a political solution with whom? You say you want to negotiate with ISIS to try to somehow address their concerns?

HOH: Well, ISIS is just one part of a larger Sunni insurgency in the area. What you need to do is negotiate with the Sunni communities that are giving support to the Islamic state. But also, too, the Islamic state is capable of being negotiated with. We saw this past weekend they released nearly 50 Turkish prisoners they had in negotiations with the Turks. So -- and also, too, we negotiated with the same groups of people in 2006 and 2007 in Iraq that brought down the violence. Also, too, what I see with -- in terms of political solution is that you need to address the grievances of the Sunni communities.

So for years now the Sunni communities -- and this is the reason why they've turned to support the Islamic state -- the Sunni communities in Iraq have been persecuted, they've been subject not to just being thrown out of security forces, or cut out of the money flow but also, too, the mass arrests, mass killings, disappearances. So you have to address those grievances. So part of this also, too, is stop selling weapons to the corrupt sectarian government in Baghdad. Stop buying their oil and force them to answer some of the grievances of the Sunni population.

By doing so, that will then allow the Sunnis to divorce themselves from the Islamic state. They'll no longer need the Islamic state. They'll no longer have a utility in supporting the Islamic state. So until the Sunnis see a better alternative -- that's what's scary about this, John. The Sunnis know who they're dealing with here. They know they've aligned with this horrible group, but they've aligned with them in spite of their barbarity because they feel they're the best alternative. So you have to give the Sunnis another alternative.

BERMAN: You have to give them choices. Captain Hoh, I appreciate you being with us. It is an important perspective. I hope we can have you talk to talk about it more because in some cases this is a perspective not getting out there quite enough. Whether you agree with it or not, it is one that is not being heard.

Captain Matthew Hoh, thanks so much.

Ahead @THISHOUR, the intrusion that shocked security officials everywhere. How can a guy with a knife get through the door at the White House and how will the agency close this apparent hole in security? We'll have that discussion next.

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