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Accelerated Efforts Against ISIS; Cruz Courts GOP Establishment; Targeting ISIS on Social Media. Aired 9:30-10a ET

Aired March 24, 2016 - 09:30   ET

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

[09:30:00] ASH CARTER, DEFENSE SECRETARY:. You don't see ISIL forces riding down big convoys waving flags because we destroy them when they do.

In the case of our bombing campaign, in both Iraq and Syria, it's mostly driven by intelligence. And every time we find a target through our intelligence, we hit that target. Remember, that's not all we're doing. It's not just an air campaign. It's got to be a campaign on the ground.

Now that's one where we wage with local forces because we learned the lessons, strategically over the last decade, that if you're going to defeat a terrorist group or an insurgent group, the United States can help local forces defeat them, but we can't substitute for that. Because at the end of the day, they have to run the place. They have to govern the place. And we can't do it.

That's why we're working with the Iraqi forces and it's the Iraqi forces that took Ramadi. They couldn't have done it without our help. But it was Iraqi -- they're the ones who are in there now. Their police who are rebuilding the city, not Americans.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: I think that I read that supposedly would take a year to get -- to wrest control from ISIS. Is that still the timetable and when --

CARTER: Nobody -- nobody knows that.

COSTELLO: Nobody knows.

CARTER: This is a war. I -- I'm not prepared to say it will take an entire year. But I'm not prepared to give you a timetable either. This is a war. I think that we are -- need to do and we are doing everything we can to accelerate that schedule. And, by the way, Carol, we will be doing more. I can -- I predict for you, we will be doing more, because we're looking for more opportunities.

COSTELLO: Like -- like when you say more, like what?

CARTER: Well, as the Iraqi forces move north towards Mosul, they'll need all kinds of help. Not just our air power help. They'll need training. They'll need equipment. They need things like bridges to cross the Tigris River. They need lots of things. So we will be doing more to help accelerate the collapse of ISIL control in Mosul. My answer to when is, as soon as possible. If the Iraqi government

continues to support their own armed forces and we continue to support them, which we surely will do, there's no reason why we have to wait a year to -- for the collapse of Mosul.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: All right, Defense Secretary Ash Carter.

I want to bring you out to Brussels for just a moment. They're observing a moment of silence in the town square. Let's pause.

All right, just heartbreaking images out of Brussels. As you know, in those terrorist attacks, 31 killed, 270 injured and there is an intense manhunt still on going for two suspects.

All right, let's head back to New York now and I want to check in with military analyst Lieutenant General Mark Hertling to talk more about what the defense secretary said to me about the United States' fight against ISIS.

Good morning, sir.

LT. GEN. MARK HERTLING, CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Good morning, Carol.

COSTELLO: Good morning.

So you heard Secretary Carter tell me that the United States is accelerating its efforts against ISIS in Mosul. ISIS has been in control of Mosul since 2014. So read between the lines of what the secretary told me. When he says accelerating, what does that really mean?

HERTLING: Well, first of all, Carol, I don't have to read between the lines. I spent an awful lot of time in and around Mosul and I kind of know what the secretary is suggesting. First of all, on Iraqi TV this morning there was an announcement by the Iraqi government that the -- that the operation to retake Mosul has begun. And, in fact, in Arabic they call this Operation Conquest. They are starting in a town near Machmore (ph), which we heard about this weekend, when that Marine sergeant was killed by the rocket attack. Machmore is a town southeast of Mosul, critically important to set logistics bases. And if you think of Mosul, as the secretary said, as an arrow, this is at the base of the arrow. It is going into Mosul. And those kind of locations have to be secured first in a campaign.

You will soon hear other names like Shirkat (ph). All of those are towns which are critically important to set logistics bases to surround Mosul. The Iraqi army and the Peshmerga have been attacking from the north and the west over the last several months while we've been watching the political campaigns. Movement has continued. So the Iraqi Army, the Peshmerga, with some coalition force help, have been setting the conditions for this attack into Mosul, which I think many are predicting will occur before June because June 6th is the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan and then the beginning of the very hot weather in Mosul. COSTELLO: So let me ask you this. Let's say that Iraqi forces are

success in retaking Mosul and maybe Syrian rebel forces are successful in retaking Raqqa in Syria, which, of course, is ISIS' defacto headquarters, right? So if those two cities are retaken, what does -- what does that really mean? Does that mean ISIS is decimated?

[09:35:16] HERTLING: It does not. And that's the critical question. And you've asked the right one. First of all, you have to either kill or capture all the ISIS soldiers. And estimates that -- of the city of Mosul, which is a population -- has a population of about 1.5 million, there are only several thousand ISIS fighters in that city. But they are embedded very well. That's why you can't just bomb and obliterate the entire city.

But once those Iraqi forces and Peshmerga go into the city, surround it, capture it or kill those ISIS fighters, what's going to happen next will always be important, and that is the Iraqi government rebuilding of the city, providing economic assistance, getting the businesses back up because, frankly, Carol, in the past, Iraqi army forces have often gone into Mosul to counter al Qaeda. But what's failed in that is the inclusion of the people and the citizens, those 1.5 million people in Mosul, in the rest of the Iraqi government. They see the Baghdad government as countering their best interests. So what will be important to watch is, will there be a relief effort? Will there be economy? Will the governmental sources be stood up again?

COSTELLO: OK, so let me ask you about that because the secretary addressed that issue too and he said Europe should really step up and help with that. It should help in rebuilding these cities that have been destroyed by ISIS. It should help in rebuilding bridges so that people can operate and troop can operate more effectively. Do you think Europe will really do that?

HERTLING: I think they could. And it's a -- it's a mixed issue, Carol, because in order to have others come in, whether they be from Europe or the United States or industry to rebuild the bridges, rebuild the towns, rebuild the roads, you have to have security first. And that's what's critically important. You have to gain that security before others will come in.

I guarantee you, if you can get security in Mosul and you seem like -- it seems like it is a well secured city and the population wants to advance, there will be a lot of businessmen wanting to go in there if the government supports it with the right kind of advantages and the right kind of funding.

COSTELLO: All right, I have to leave it there. Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, thanks for your insight, as always.

HERTLING: Thank you, Carol.

COSTELLO: You're welcome.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, Ted Cruz has become the unlikely choice for establishment Republicans, but could their reluctance to really rally around him do him any good at all? (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:42:10] COSTELLO: It's become a rallying cry for Ted Cruz and his message to establishment Republicans is clear, unite behind me to defeat Donald Trump. Well, this week, Jeb Bush joined camp Cruz following the lead of Carly Fiorina and Senator Lindsey Graham, but last night Graham paid a visit to Comedy Central where he talked about the race for the White House and gave this less than ringing endorsement of Ted Cruz.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's safe to say that you are/were/are not a fan of Ted Cruz.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: It tells you everything you need to know about Donald Trump.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, but I -- I don't -- I don't understand this. You -- you really, really, really don't like --

GRAHAM: Well, you're not from here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You don't like Ted Cruz.

GRAHAM: I don't dislike Ted. Ted and I have a lot of differences. I'm getting better at this. So --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: All righty then. Let's talk about that. Jason Johnson is politics editor for theroot.com and John Avlon is editor-in-chief of "The Daily Beast."

So, John, you write this about the crisis in -- for the Republican establishment. We'll see it in a second. We'll see it in a second. But, anyway, you wrote an article about it in "The Daily Beast" and it was really interesting and you said things like that could actually backfire on Ted Cruz, right?

JOHN AVLON, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, "THE DAILY BEAST": Yes. You know, we've got a -- the GOP's got a real problem. They can't -- it can't ignore it. I mean they've elevated Trump and Cruz. Sixty percent of the party supports them. The center right folks are backing, you know, Cruz instead of Kasich, who polls show is a better general election candidate than Hillary Clinton. And it really speaks to a certain impetus on the part of the center right or what's left of it that's trying to cloak its -- pretend it's a matter of expediency. It's not. That is a deep problem that needs to be addressed, whether now or more likely after the election. That's where the real work may begin.

COSTELLO: So, Jason, in instead of endorsing a guy you really don't like, what should establishment republicans do?

JASON JOHNSON, POLITICS EDITOR, THEROOT.COM: They have to stop what they're doing now. Like, you can just sort of see Lindsay Graham having to take like a drink of wine and say, OK, now I have to go out and pretend I like these people. At the end of the day, the Republican Party just needs to be honest about the fact that they don't want to support Donald Trump. And if you're an establishment person, rather than going out and saying you support someone you don't like, support some down ticket candidates. Just criticize Donald Trump. But going out and claiming that you're supporting someone that you're not enthusiastic about, that you have nothing positive to say about, it hurts Ted Cruz, it strengthens Donald Trump and it makes the entire party look foolish.

COSTELLO: OK, let's talk about these interesting polls that came out this morning. A CNN/ORC poll. You know, we talked about Donald Trump's, you know, appeal to the middle class, but when you look at this poll about -- and when the question is asked, who is more in touch with the middle class, Clinton comes out with 51 percent to Donald Trump's 36 percent.

[09:45:002] Does this surprise you, John?

AVLON: Well it surprises me only to the extent that the narrative has all been about how Donald Trump is going to appeal to middle class voters and reanimate the Reagan Democrats. But Hillary Clinton's campaign has been focused on messaging towards the middle class at least since the beginning. What's significant is in the Democratic Party she actually for a period was falling to Bernie Sanders in that key demographic.

And here is the big point, Carol, what we know. Elections are won in America by the candidate who connects with moderates in the middle class. So if you become kryptonite, and an insult comedy approach to running for president ends up alienating a lot of those folks, because it just doesn't meet common sense standards, then you're in deep, deep trouble. That's Donald Trump's problem, and by transitive property, that's the Republican Party's problem right now.

COSTELLO: So, Jason, are we overplaying the popularity of Mr. Trump?

JOHNSON: No. But somewhere between everyone thought he was a flash in the pan and everyone thinks he's a revolutionary. You know, at the end of the day, look, I'm from Ohio. There are a lot of people who support Donald Trump, who like he who is. They think he's a salt of the earth, you know, asphalt kind of guy.

But the thing is he's offensive. He offends women, he offends brown people, he offends black people, he offends lots of white people. And if you offend people on a regular basis -- usually you can't win an election with people wanting to vote against the other guy, but that's what's going to happen right now. You got a lot of people who are saying never Trump under any circumstances, and all Hillary has do is not look offensive and she might be able to win the presidency.

COSTELLO: All right, I have to leave it there. Jason Johnson, John Avlon, thanks both of you.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, social media has been one of the most effective weapons of terror groups like ISIS. But is it also the best way to stop them?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:51:13] COSTELLO: Time and again we've seen social media play a critical role in ISIS recruiting and indoctrination in the west. In the aftermath of the Brussels, the hacking group Anonymous repeated its vow to wage war against ISIS by shutting down jihadist social media accounts and hacking their financial network.

CNN cannot actually confirm these things are really happening, but let's talk more about that and more with Charlie Winter. He's a senior research associate at the Georgia State University. He studies jihadist movements and how they use social media to spread terror. Welcome, sir.

CHARLIE WINTER, SENIOR RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY: Hi.

COSTELLO: So do you know if Anonymous is really having any effect on ISIS?

WINTER: Well, they're talking about it. And they do post these lists where they say they've identified key nodes in ISIS's social media nexus, and then taken them down. But I think that the actually effect they're having is fairly limited. I mean, it's good that they're throwing their two cents into the ring. But when it comes to actually limiting the overall reach that ISIS has, I think that it's not necessarily working. And I don't think we can really sit back and let Anonymous do the work.

Clearly, as we've seen this week, it took a matter of hours for ISIS's claim of the Brussels terror attacks to rush across, I mean, literally millions of telephone screens and computer screens around the world. They still are very, very good at delivering their message; very, very good at delivering their brand. And it takes more than a few hackers posting lists onto Twitter to remove that.

COSTELLO: But here -- here's one of the problems that I hear from officials within the government. They say, you know, it's tough to recruit people who can actually infiltrate ISIS through social media because people who can actually do that don't want to be seen as working for the government because it kind of blows their credibility. So how do you get around that?

WINTER: Absolutely. I mean, we have to kind of think about how to best challenge ISIS on social media, whether it's a question of monitoring and seeing exactly what they're up to, or whether it's a question of trying to get really deep inside the network itself and actually expose operational details. I would say that that latter prong is not really possible at this stage, certainly not possible from activists on the Internet who don't have a strong hand in whether it's hacking or whether they're actually infiltrating jihadist groups.

When it comes to monitoring, I think that, yes, there's an important role that people can play. Also challenging the space that ISIS has on the Internet. At the moment, it has a pretty broad monopoly on how it talks about itself. It can dictate its story to the media pretty much word for word. So I think the more people challenge that, the more that normal people start kind of contesting the ISIS narrative, the better.

COSTELLO: Talk more about the level of sophistication that ISIS has when it comes to, like, running its online news service and things like that.

WINTER: Well, I've done a lot of work an trying to map out the infrastructure behind ISIS's propaganda network. And it's vast. It's very, very sophisticated. And importantly, it's always adapting. So if something like Twitter becomes difficult for it to operate on, it will move, and it has moved onto Telegram (ph), which is a hybrid social media app which is more -- a little more encrypted, a little more secret, and does have limitations. But it moved very, very quickly to that when it looked like Twitter was becoming a difficult place to deliver its propaganda.

Now we have official teams who are disseminating propaganda, and then we have a second rung of individuals who are kind of volunteer media activists for the organization. These guys really came out in force in the wake of the Brussels attack announcement, which they were actually asked by the organization officially to engage with the media that the organization was putting out about Brussels, try and sabotage hashtags and really dominate the airwaves with what ISIS was saying.

And it's this kind of calculated planning that there isn't really any match for on the counterside of things. And I would argue there needs to be more appropriate response in terms of planning and also really capitalizing on the fact that 99 percent of people, whether they're Muslim or not, really hate ISIS, really would like to do something, activism, against it.

[09:55:14] And I think the Internet is a good space where people can engage with that and really start to challenge the narratives, challenge the attempts it's going for with (INAUDIBLE), trying to stoke anti-Muslim hatred. And I'm sorry, but hashtags like #stopislam (ph) just don't work. That's exactly, exactly what ISIS wants.

COSTELLO: All right, Charlie Winter, thank you for your insight and your good ideas. Thank you so much.

The next hour of CNN NEWSROOM after a break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: And good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me.

Any minute now ,we could get new information about the Belgium terror attacks. We're monitoring live events for you.

[10:00:02] The Belgian prime minister expected to speak any moment now outside of the parliament building as investigators hunt for terror suspects who may have slipped away.