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Lone Wolf Attacks; El Chapo's Escape; Second Marine Victim IDed as Skip Wells; Tacking the Danger of Homegrown Attacks. Aired 9:30-10a ET

Aired July 17, 2015 - 09:30   ET

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

[09:30:00] JOE BIDEN, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Part of your generation that is probably the most incredible generation that this country has seen. Over 4,300,000 since 9/11 signed up and said, send me, almost certain they'd be put in harp's way.

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SUNLEN SERFATY, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: And Vice President Biden also promised that they will get to the bottom of what happened. But, of course, Carol, there are still so many questions that remain.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Oh, you've got that right. Sunlen Serfaty reporting live from the White House, thank you.

As Sunlen said, there are still a lot of questions surrounding the shooting, but it is raising fears again about the threat of lone wolf attacks. A recent study by the Southern Poverty Law Center is shedding some light on who these lone wolves are. Between April of 2009 and February of this year, there were 63 incidents of domestic terrorism. A clear majority, 74 percent, were carried out by lone wolves. When it comes to motivation, there's almost a split between anti-government sentiment and ideologies of hate. Firearms are used by 59 percent of the attacks and the attackers are overwhelmingly male.

But as recent arrests show, the face of these attackers aren't represented by just one community. On July 4th in Boston, Alexander Ciccolo, the son of a Boston police officer, was charged in a plot to carry out bombings on behalf of ISIS. In January, Ohio resident Christopher Lee Cornell was arrested for his plans to attack the U.S. Capitol. And last October, Zale Thompson was charged after attacking New York City police officers with a hatchet.

Here to talk about this, Matthew Horace, a former executive with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem.

Welcome to both of you.

MATTHEW HORACE, FMR. EXECUTIVE, BUREAU OF ALCOHOL TOBACCO AND FIREARMS: Good morning.

COSTELLO: So, Matthew, when you look at those statistics from the Southern Poverty Law Center, what goes through your mind?

HORACE: Well, you know, it really polarizes our difficulty in identifying pre-incident. We're left with the facts after these incidents occur, but how do we identify people when we don't know what their ideology is, what groups they're following, who's having impact, who's influencing them? And then, today, one month after Charleston, we're sitting here again talking about yet another incident.

COSTELLO: And, Juliette, as the Southern -- well, as we pointed out, these lone wolves come from every community.

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Right.

COSTELLO: I mean Ciccolo sounds like an Italian name to me. So he certainly wasn't a practicing Muslim all of his life.

KAYYEM: Right. And the majority of these domestic terrorism incidences are actually not Islam or Muslim related. They're actually white supremacy, at least according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Look, there's -- -- there -- you're not going to be able to target a group of people that have no common identity, right? So you can't just say, well, this group of people. They're coming from all over the place.

So, there's a couple solutions. One is clearly engaging communities, whether it's family, friends, community members, church, mosque leaders to identify potential people who may be radicalized, whatever their faith. And then the other is, of course, being smart about soft targets. But I want to make it clear here, guns are not the solution here. The idea of arming everyone who might be in a soft target is absurd. I mean then you're talking about schools, movie theaters. You'd -- you'd have a very different society. Guns are actually very easily attained by violent people, as we see, and so we can harden soft targets, but it's a delusion to think that we are going to be a country with harder -- with -- without soft targets.

COSTELLO: Yes, but I'm looking at this amorphous mass of people, right, that you're --

HORACE: Well --

COSTELLO: I mean, really the only commonality among these lone wolves is, most of them are young men in their 20s. That's a lot of people.

HORACE: Well -- well let's talk about several things. Number one, let's talk about the firearm issue. Criminals that want to misuse firearms are going to obtain firearms whether they buy them legally or illegally. That's the first thing. And look at this case, no signs. From all intents and purposes, everything we're hearing is, everyone is saying this was a great guy. He had good habits. He was an athlete. He was in church. No signs. Some of the other cases, all the signs were there but no one acted on them. So, very different, very unique.

COSTELLO: In fact, this guy actually reminds me of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, good looking guy, everybody liked him, he was popular in high school. KAYYEM: Wrestling.

COSTELLO: Very well educated. Both of them were wrestlers. And then something happened.

KAYYEM: And there's a gap in his biography as there was with the elder Tsarnaev brother, this sort of last two year period. And that's where investigators are going to be looking. Whether it was because of travel that we're hearing about, although I should say the government has not confirmed where he was, if he even left the country, or if it was on social media. We'll find out relatively soon where the paths are going to take this investigation. But, look, we're not -- their -- we're not going to be able to stop all of this all of the time and so we have to prepare ourselves by, you know, being resilient communities. It's just an unfortunate aspect of our modern society.

COSTELLO: It just doesn't sound like the greatest --

KAYYEM: Yes.

COSTELLO: I mean I understand what you're saying, but how sad, right?

KAYYEM: Yes.

HORACE: And think also, think about the challenge of securing recruitment centers. You have the idea that the military at that level, they're supposed to be ambassadors of the military. They're visible. The military wants them to be accessible by the public. And yet they're so vulnerable and this incident shows exactly how venerable they really are.

[09:35:14] COSTELLO: Matthew, Juliette, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, if you thought El Chapo's brazen prison escape was shocking, wait until you hear how much time went by before anyone noticed.

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COSTELLO: Escaped drug lord "El Chapo" had a 35-minute head start before anyone started trying to find him. That's according to Mexican officials who say 17 minutes ticked by before prison guards even noticed he was missing. And then it took another 18 minutes for them to arrive at his cell. CNN's Nick Valencia has a timeline of the kingpin's dramatic escape.

[09:40:03] (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NICK VALENCIA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Almost a year and a half after going to prison, Joaquin Guzman had enough. Saturday night, 8:51 p.m., surveillance video captures the drug kingpin, known as "El Chapo," as he prepared to escape. The giant cartel figure in Mexico, reduced to a small cell. At 8:52, he places a few times, slips on his shoes and heads towards his shower. Just like that, he vanishes. What transpires is a frantic search. Within hours, finger pointing. U.S. and Mexican officials enraged. Guzman, the world's most notorious drug trafficker, slips through a hole in his cell, apparently undetected.

VALENCIA (on camera): This is where he kept his belongings.

VALENCIA (voice-over): A few days after his escape, our camera is allowed inside his cell to see firsthand.

VALENCIA (on camera): This access point to the tunnel. And it's that security camera that had that blind spot here behind that allowed him to escape.

VALENCIA (voice-over): More than a mile away, we trek through the countryside to find the tunnel's exit.

VALENCIA (on camera): The road to get up to the house where El Chapo is said to have escaped from, it's a bit tricky, so we're having to trek through this countryside. It is wet and pretty uncomfortable.

VALENCIA (voice-over): Authorities say it is from this rural home that El Chapo emerges.

VALENCIA (on camera): See, with a ladder, maybe about 10-foot, 15-foot ladder that leads down into that tunnel.

Here's another ladder leading down to another part, a deeper part -- section of the tunnel.

This motorcycle was on a track here. This is the bike that El Chapo used to ride out of the prison. It still has gas in it.

You could still smell the gas, this overwhelming odor of gas in this tight space. It really is suffocating.

The tunnel stretches for more than a mile, carved out earth here. And this modified train track for that mini motorcycle. You see here, the electricity lines. It's very difficult to breathe down here. A lot of dirt, dust. This here is for the ventilation system. Tight, tight space down here. But for a man known as El Chapo, I'm sure he had more than enough room to work with.

It's been nearly a week since his escape. And authorities have not made it clear whether or not they have any leads. And if they do, they haven't been making it known publicly. We're also learning he's been added to Interpol's list of most wanted. This manhunt has turned global.

Nick Valencia, CNN, (INAUDIBLE), Mexico.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: All right, still to come in the NEWSROOM, it's not just overseas, has the battlefield moved home for our military troops. The latest on the Chattanooga shooting, next.

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[09:47:13] ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news. COSTELLO: All right, more sad news to impart to you this morning. We now know the identity of another the Marines who were killed in the Chattanooga shooting incident. His name is Skip Wells. I'm just getting this in, so excuse my looking down and away from you. His name is Skip Wells and that's according to family and friends, and they did confirm that to CNN. Skip Wells graduated from Marietta, Georgia's Sprayberry High School in 2012. So he was just 21 years old. Many friends of Skip and his mother are posting tributes to social media. According to Skip's Facebook page, he was a student at Georgia Southern University. He was studying history and of course he was also a Marine reserve. And as I said, he was killed in the Chattanooga shooting incident. When I get more information on Skip and the others, of course we'll pass it along to you.

Another victim, Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Sullivan, survived two tours of duty in Iraq, but he was killed at home on U.S. soil when that gunman sprayed bullets into that those two military facility in Chattanooga. You could say the same of the other victims in Chattanooga. They were obviously targeted because they served our country. Although we've been saying this for a while, it is clear the battlefield has now moved home.

CNN military analyst General Mark Hertling joins me now to talk about this. Thanks so much, sir, for joining me.

LT. GEN. MARK HERTLING (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: You're welcome, Carol.

COSTELLO: So just tell me what -- I mean, you serve in Iraq, four tours of duty. You come home. You think you're safe. And you're gunned down.

HERTLING: This is unfortunate. First, Carol, if I may, I'll start off by offering condolences to the families of these terrific Marines, my brothers in arms. And it is, it's devastating, but it's another example of how this war is everywhere. And when we break it down, we see certainly there is combat action in Iraq and other places around the globe against ISIS and other terrorist groups. There are plots going on continuously which our law enforcement and our intelligence agencies are trying to thwart. But then there are these so-called lone wolf attacks. The ones that have been inspired by some type of extremist ideology. And what's interesting, those are starting to break down into different categories now too. The ones that are posting on Facebook and saying all sorts of things, and the ones that just come out of nowhere like this one seems to have in the attack yesterday.

COSTELLO: I want to read you a quote from Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus. He said, quote, "While we expect our sailors and Marines to go into harm's way, and they do so without hesitation, an attack at home, in our community, is insidious and unfathomable."

So as a commander, what do you tell troops here at home on American soil now?

HERTLING: It's very challenging, because when you're talking about the two locations where this occurred yesterday -- first, a recruiting center, and most of the recruiting centers across the country are joint centers, meaning that they have Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines combined together for administrative purposes and for the best treatment of those interested in joining the services, you see literally thousands of these across the country.

[09:50:13] I'm not making that number up. There are quite a few of those in every community.

The other location, the reserve training and support center, the Marine reserve, that's the location of one unit out of a Marine artillery battalion. There are literally thousands of armories of National Guard and reservists across the country as well. In fact, Carol, you probably don't know it, but you likely pass by one or two of those on your way to work because most Americans do. They are just everywhere and it has the combination of having America's servicemen, being in America's population, the ones that are in the reservists and the guards.

So it's difficult. But we are not the first country in the world to experience these kinds of home attacks. This is going on in many centers. We may be the last, or one of the last, but this is happening throughout the world. Those of us who have served overseas have seen other countries in this so-called new normal who are concerned about attacks on their local population and we have to be ready for it.

COSTELLO: Well, you think you see military -- you see troops all the time wearing their uniforms at home, right? And they're not armed. Will there come a day when commanders might tell the troops, hey, don't wear your uniform at home, or if you do, be sure you're armed?

HERTLING: Well, I certainly hope not, and I don't think we'll get to the point where we're arming troops that are either on off-duty or a local area just going to and from work. Because I think America's military needs to associate more with the public.

I think we may be looking at this the wrong way, Carol. I would suggest this isn't a matter of saying let's make more defenses by our military, or those in uniform to include police and firemen, but what I would suggest is we have to look, just like we do in the military, what are the other lines of efforts we should take to counter this threat at home? And what I mean by that is we've already increased intelligence, but there has to be a continued approach by moderate Islamists and other religions to counter this message of jihad.

There also has to be, in my view, more gun control. We've talked about this for years and had no action on it. These are the kinds of lines of effort we should take to prevent these kinds of attack. And what I'd suggest, too, as many of us know who are following this, the jihadi attacks are only half of the number of the overall attacks going on. We've seen this recently in South Carolina. There have been more people killed in the last two years because of homegrown action as opposed to jihadi action.

So this is more than just defending ourselves against Islamic terrorists. This is we really have to get a handle on messaging, what's right, civility, and gun control.

COSTELLO: You know, it seems to happen every few days though now, General. And you bring up gun control and you bring up other methods. But we talk about it and we get angry about it, we go to our corners, but nothing ever really seems to change.

HERTLING: Yes, and I teach a course in leadership to a bunch of physicians, Carol, and one of the things I tell them is talking isn't doing. We do seem to be talking a lot about it, and there seems to be a bevy of activity as soon as one of these events happen and we see people like me on the news explaining why and other people in Congress talking about it, but we've got to have action. And so far I have yet to see very little action on the part of our legislatures and the part of our communities. There have been some things going on, but we need much more to counter these kinds of threats against human nature.

COSTELLO: General Mark Hertling, thank you so much for your insight. I always appreciate it.

HERTLING: Thank you, Carol.

COSTELLO: You're welcome.

New details about the victims in Chattanooga are still coming into the CNN NEWSROOM. This is Marine Skip Wells, the second victim identified so far. He's from Georgia and according to his friends and family's social media posts, he attended Georgia Southern University.

We'll have much more about the victims at the top of the hour.

[09:54:10]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: Continuing coverage this morning of the shooting deaths of four Marines in Chattanooga. Earlier, Chris Cuomo spoke with Tennessee's governor who says he is now fully involved with the investigation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. BILL HASLAM (R), TENNESSEE: I have been impressed with the FBI, the amount of resources they've brought in here to literally check every potential piece of information that they might have. And so their special agent this charge has assured me they will do everything they can to chase down every lead, and I was in on one of their meetings last night and I was impressed with quite -- with the detail level that they've already dug into.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR, "NEW DAY": In terms of likelihoods, is this about you having a sleeper cell down there or are they targeting this individual and what may have poisoned his mind?

HASLAM: Yes, I honestly don't think that they know that answer yet, and they're committed to doing everything they can to try to figure that out. In my -- as a non-law enforcement person but somebody who has been involved as a mayor and a governor, I have been very impressed with just their whole tactical approach to finding the answers to just those questions.

CUOMO: Does this open your eyes in terms of what is a potential threat and what is potentially threatened and in terms of what you may want to change?

HASLAM: Well, I think the concerning thing here is this is somebody that wasn't on anybody's radar. There were no set of circumstances where people said, OK, we need to be particularly wary about this individual or this circumstance. And I think that's maybe what's even more -- the most concerning to law enforcement and then to people in positions like mine, is there was nothing that would predict that this could have happened.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[10:00:01] COSTELLO: The governor of Tennessee. The next hour of CNN NEWSROOM starts now.

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