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President Obama Speaks About Nice Attack; French Terror Investigation Continues. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired July 15, 2016 - 15:00   ET

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

[15:00:01]

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: -- because of their tribe or their ethnicity or their faith or their color.

And those impulses exist in all our countries. And those impulses, when we do not speak out against them and build strong institutions to protect people from those impulses, they can take over, they can be unleashed, so that all of us have responsibilities, not just a few.

I want to say that, even as we are relentless against terrorists, it is also worthy for us to recognize that our nations have worked together for security and peace and human dignity around the world.

I want to thank so many of your countries for the partnership that we have forged, the progress that we have achieved together over these past eight years in rescuing the global economy and securing vulnerable nuclear materials, a comprehensive deal to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, halting the spread of Ebola thereby saving countless lives, in Paris, the most ambitious agreement in history to fight climate change, a new sustainable development, set of goals to end extreme poverty and promote health and education and equality for all people, including women.

And through the efforts of many of you, we have continued to try to move beyond old conflicts, supporting the transition to democracy in Burma, forging a new partnership in Vietnam, deepening our new chapter of engagement with the Cuban people, helping to support the efforts in Colombia to end the decades-long conflict.

That's the power of diplomacy. That's what's possible when our nations and our peoples work together in the spirit of mutual interests and mutual respect.

And what a contrast to the death and nihilism that terrorists offer. What a powerful reminder of the progress and opportunity and hope that we can advance when, as nations and as peoples and as individuals, we refuse to be defined by our differences alone, and we remember that we are all part of one human race.

Even on difficult days like this, that's what gives me hope, and that's what should give us all hope, because on this planet of more than seven billion people, the hatred and violence of a few ultimately is no match for the love and decency and hard work of people of good will and compassion, so long as we stand up for those values and so long as we answer those who would undermine those values.

I'm very proud of the work that we have done over these last seven- and-a-half years, in partnership with your countries, and so long as I have the privilege of being the president of the United States, I Well, continue to stand alongside you to promote those values all across the world.

Thank you very much, everybody.

(APPLAUSE)

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, so you have just been listening to President Obama describing what happened here in Nice, along this Promenade des Anglais as tragic and appalling. He specifically mentioned the two Americans, the father and 11-year-old son from Austin, Texas, who tragically lost their lives here on vacation last night. Said he had met with the French ambassador last evening.

And, of course, the U.S. stands in solidarity with one of our longest allies here in France.

Gayle Lemmon, let me bring you in from the Council on Foreign Relations here, because I want to bring up a point. Of course, we have heard the president unfortunately have to make this point over and over and over, as we're talking about all these terror acts. He said, we won't be deterred, we will take out ISIS leaders, we will destroy them.

But my question to you is, yes, despite major gains of squeezing these terrorists on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, isn't this evolving into a totally different kind of war?

GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: Yes. I mean, I think this is the issue that's been present for a while, which is you can counter terrorism. You can kill terrorists. But how do you kill an ideology?

This is a challenge that everybody who has been fighting the ISIS fight I think has faced from the very start. And if you talk to administration officials who favored greater intervention in Syria early on, they will say our biggest fear was that the cost of inaction was not fully weighed and that you would have a Club Med for extremists created in a power vacuum that was Syria and that the actual conflict was driven by the Assad regime and the fight to end it.

[15:05:10]

BALDWIN: What about the politics of all of this? Because I definitely heard -- he didn't name -check Newt Gingrich, but he said, some have suggested tests. Right. We know about the Newt Gingrich comments last night, the former House speaker talking about how there should be some sort of Muslim test as to whether or not you ascribe to Sharia, and the president specifically using the words, saying that that would be repugnant. Not so subtle of a jab against the former House speaker.

LEMMON: Yes.

And, look, part of what these attacks are designed to do, right, is to terrorize, mobilize and polarize. And I think the fear that is seen a lot among civil society folks even here in the U.S. is that you will see an us vs. them tear at the American fabric. And yet there is real fear.

And I think there is a challenge in addressing real fears about how do you fight the weaponization of daily life, right? If daily life becomes where people are attacked, how do you attack that fear without undermining American values?

BALDWIN: Gayle, stand by.

Let me bring in Suzanne Malveaux, who's at the White House, who -- Suzanne, I think -- I brought this up a moment ago, but here's the president, at the White House, speaking about this terror attack here in France. Days ago, he had to cut his visit short to Warsaw to come back to the United States to deliver a eulogy for the slain officers in Dallas, Texas.

Talk about just, what, the last week or two for this man.

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It's been really extraordinary, Brooke, when you think about it, because the president did something that was quite unusual, which is that he did cut his schedule short overseas, coming back to deal with kind of the immediacy, the urgency of the moment.

But also the heaviness, the weight that so many Americans are feeling now, when you have those five officers gunned down by a sniper, and then previously you had these two African-American men killed by police officers in suspicious circumstances, there is a sense at the White House and the administration that we are at a turning point here in our country, that we have to deal with coping with the violence that's in our own country, but also the feeling that we are seeing from others around the world, that we are being put upon, that our way of life, our democracy, our very being is threatened and is being challenged here.

And the president very typically does not want to give in to those emotions of fear, of resignation. We heard the president, the French president, Francois Hollande, telling his people earlier today that they have to live with terrorism, that that was just an honest assessment, immediate assessment, after such a horrific attack and after many attacks in France.

That is not necessarily the message that this president wants to deliver to the American people. He wants to tell people to be resilient, but also to appeal to their better angels. I think that's what you're seeing from him. I think that's what he sees as his role as a leader of this country, and that is the message that he is trying to convey. And, also, Brooke, I thought it was interesting. In the briefing

today, they said it is much too soon to say this is the work of ISIS or ISIL. And yet we did hear the president go back and talk about that fight directly, because the U.S. is so closely partnered with France in going after ISIL in Iraq, in Syria, and intelligence-sharing and how important that is.

And so he is at the same time trying to convey this message of strength, of resiliency here, and just telling the American people to live their lives. That is how he wants us to think about what we are doing and how we're feeling during this very difficult time, Brooke.

BALDWIN: Obviously, it is all interconnected. The U.S.-led coalition, the gains, the territory gains and the losses for ISIS mean, as we have been covering the last couple of weeks, these different terror attacks throughout Europe and beyond.

Suzanne Malveaux for me at the White House, thank you, Suzanne.

And let's go from the White House to talking about some news out of the Department of Justice in Washington and our justice correspondent Evan Perez.

Evan, what are you learning from the DOJ?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brooke, the Office of Community-Oriented Policing is going to be doing a review of the police response at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

As you mentioned a little while ago, there's been a lot of criticism, a lot of questions about how the police responded to that shooting. As you know, it began at 2:00 a.m. and it wasn't resolved until 5:00 a.m. We have heard repeatedly from John Mina, the Orlando police chief, that really this began as an active shooter, and then transitioned into being a hostage-taking, if you will.

But there's been still some questions especially from some of the people who were stuck inside that bathroom where the shooter was holed up and before they were finally rescued. So now they have invited -- the Orlando Police Department has asked the Justice Department to come in and do a review of what they did.

[15:10:03]

And we have a quote from John Mina, in which he says: "This is not only for the benefit of the Orlando police. It will serve," he says, "to provide all law enforcement critical guidance and recommendations for responding to future such incidents."

Obviously, there is a lot of lessons that could be learned as to how the police department responded there; 49 lives were lost and it is not clear whether any of them would have been saved if the police had been able to break in any sooner, Brooke.

BALDWIN: OK. Evan Perez, thank you so much on Orlando here. We're talking about Orlando; 49 people lost their lives. As we stand here along the promenade here in Nice, where 84 people were killed last evening when this madman, let's call him what he was, just mowed down just dozens and dozens of people here as they stood taking in the celebration, the Bastille Day fireworks, the music, families, descriptions from eyewitnesses, of children in both arms as they were walking along trying to run for their lives.

So, again, I'm Brooke Baldwin here live in Nice, France. It is just about 9:00 in the evening here as we're learning a bit more about what happened last evening in France. Trying to learn a bit more about this man.

All right. Let's go to Nic Robertson, who is standing by outside of the home of the -- who we believe to be the attacker here in Nice.

Nic, what are you seeing, what are you learning?

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Yes, Brooke.

Mohamed Bouhlel, the attacker, the butcher of Bastille Day, if you will, who took that 19-ton refrigerated truck and drove it for almost a mile-and-a-half through the crowds who were just coming off the beach celebrating the end of Bastille Day, celebrating the fireworks, celebrating this such important -- such an important national holiday for France.

He lived in the apartment behind me. So pretty much after the police shot him dead, discovered his I.D. in the truck, his cell phone, a pistol, a fake pistol, two fake automatic weapons, an AK-47 and an M- 16, both fake, and a fake hand grenade, they were here. They came here to his apartment and raided his apartment. They broke in the door.

We have been able to look through the keyhole there, see the apartment. You can see drawers out strewn on the floor. You can see the cupboard doors open. Police say they took away telephone equipment, they took away Internet equipment and they took away documents.

What the French prosecutor has told us now is that Bouhlel had a propensity for violence, that he had been recently convicted, given a suspended prison sentence, six months' suspended prison sentence, only a couple of months ago for threatening behavior with a gun.

He is separated from his wife and three young children. The police have his wife in custody. They're questioning her right now. But we have had a chance to talk to some of his neighbors here. What is emerging is a picture of a man who was quiet. One of his neighbors says he was odd, that he didn't ever really kind of look at her. He was just staring. He didn't say hello, didn't even really nod hello.

She said how easy it would have been to do that? Everyone we have talked to commented about how they'd always see him everywhere he went, coming in and out of the apartment, up and down the stairs, carrying his bicycle with him, sometimes having a bottle of alcohol with him. Odd, we understand, because he is a Muslim. That would be against the tenets of his faith. One of his neighbors did say that he was friendly towards her, helped

her out. She was absolutely shocked by the news that he is a mass murderer. But the picture that emerges here is a man recently separated from his wife and three young children, a man with a propensity of violence and a man who appeared odd to the vast majority of his neighbors who viewed him as some kind of a loner.

What the police don't have on him -- they have this criminal record, but what they don't or didn't have on him until this point was any indication at all that he had any ties to radical Islam. They say that they hadn't opened (INAUDIBLE) that is the sort of opening document for beginning collating gathering intelligence on an individual.

That hadn't happened for him. Of course, that whole picture has changed now as the investigation begins to gather more pace, Brooke.

BALDWIN: But that's the curious part, that he was a -- quote -- "virtual unknown" and other than some petty crimes and all the anecdotes that you just recounted, we still really don't know, and also the fact that he had these fake grenades and fake ammunition. It is just entirely puzzling and horrendous just to know what happened here along the promenade not even 24 hours ago.

[15:15:04]

Nic Robertson, thank you so much for that.

Let's really focus though on those who lost their lives. We have details about the 84 people killed in this attack. Those details, they're starting to emerge. Tourists. People who are from the Nice area. Business owners. We have learned about now some American college students.

But these next images truly illustrate the most gut-wrenching part of this story. Children, 10 children are among the number of dead, many watching the fireworks with their families under these beautiful skies, toys and belongings dropped in the street as this madman went around plowing people down and just opening fire.

A service vehicle collecting unclaimed strollers, you can see. Many of these kids were separated from their parents as everyone just heard this chaos and started running in different directions.

With that part of the story, let me bring in Will Ripley.

And, Will, again, I go back to this, but it is the kids. It is all these children who were out for the fireworks and the music here to have a good time and they haven't been able to match some of the kids back with their parents.

WILL RIPLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: There are still three children in comas right now. Out of the 25 who are comas, 52 people critically injured, three kids, and then the 10 who died out of the 84.

Any American that's been to a fireworks show can imagine what the atmosphere must have been here for Bastille Day, except you're on the French Rivera. Think about this student, that U.S. student from Austin who died, a fifth-grader.

BALDWIN: Eleven years old.

RIPLEY: Eleven years old. Sean Copeland, his father -- Brodie Copeland is the 11-year-old. Went to Lakeway Elementary School in Lake Travis near Austin, Texas. He was here with his family to celebrate. What a story to be able to tell his new friends when he would have progressed to middle school in sixth grade.

And he's never going to be able to tell those stories. He's never going to be able to grow up and have those experiences. His fifth grade teacher actually gave a really, really emotional statement just a short time ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COLEEN SERFOSS, TEACHER: Words cannot really describe Brodie. But I have tried to put together something to give you a little idea of what he was like as a student.

Brodie was a superstar. Whether in class, performing on stage or the baseball field, he bursted with talent. He expressed his enthusiasm about the entertainment business. He enjoyed sharing his many productions with our class. He also loved baseball and proudly would show his many ring tournaments to us.

He always wore a huge smile and was admired by fellow students and the faculty. Our Lakeway Elementary family was honored to have known him and will miss his glowing personality.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Miss his personality.

RIPLEY: And you have a really special relationship with your fifth grade teacher. I still remember the name of my fifth grade teacher.

BALDWIN: Of course, Mrs...

(CROSSTALK)

RIPLEY: When you get to middle school, you start to kind of -- Ms. Brewer (ph) -- you start to kind of forget about your teachers and start thinking about other things, adolescence.

He's never going to have those experiences, Brodie isn't. His family is never going to get to see him grow up. There were other students, too, older students from U.C. Berkeley who were involved in this as well.

BALDWIN: Have you learned any bit more about them?

RIPLEY: Well, no. We just know that there were three of them. One of them, his name is Nicolas Leslie. He is 20 years old. He's still missing. There were three with really bad injuries. Talking about these catastrophic fractures, people that were right in the path as this truck was going through the crowd.

You have walked down these streets. They're narrow streets. There wasn't a whole lot of room for people to go. Even these young people who could have easily outrun it, when you have obstacles, as in other people in your way, and they still don't know. It's been chaos.

The hospitals, they're still trying to identify everybody. Let's hope that they find this young man. In this same school, there was a sophomore, Tarishi Jain, who was one of the 20 hostages killed in Bangladesh.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: U.C. Berkeley, that's right. That's right.

RIPLEY: U.C. Berkeley.

So, now yet again, this -- there is a connection all throughout the world when these things happen, when these terrorist happen. And so we're feeling it in the United States and feeling right with the people here.

BALDWIN: Hearts go out to the families. Never should have happened, especially the little 11-year-old out of Austin.

Will Ripley, thank you so much. It is so important to tell the stories of especially these young people who -- many of whom are still in the hospital. Doctors just saying they were unprepared to deal with some of the injuries because of what the truck has done.

Our live special coverage continues here from Nice. You will hear from eyewitnesses. We will talk to the vice mayor here of Nice live. Also have new information into the investigation and this attacker's past. I'm Brooke Baldwin and you're watching CNN.

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[15:24:05]

BALDWIN: It is just about 9:30 at night here along the promenade in Nice, in France. I'm Brooke Baldwin. You're watching CNN's special live coverage here.

We will begin this block with this attacker, this man who killed, murdered so many on this beautiful boardwalk, palm tree-lined boardwalk. Palm trees on one side, beautiful Mediterranean on the other. Got a picture for you. An I.D. card photo.

We know that he plowed through this crowd, fired several times at three police officers close to a hotel. This is according to the French prosecutor. He says police then chased the truck before the officers shot and ultimately killed the driver. One witness captured some of the gunfire and the sheer panic from here on the scene.

[15:25:10]

As we hear some of the screams and some of the sounds from just the sheer terror, let me just bring in some of my colleagues, Paul Cruickshank, our terrorist analyst, and senior international correspondent Clarissa Ward.

Just beginning with you, because we have not been able to go on the other side of this white partition, which is where the mayhem took place. You peeked earlier.

CLARISSA WARD, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I did

I was able to get behind the partition and take a look at the massive cleanup operation that is going on. You know, the thing that was the most striking, Brooke, it's so eerie, this is a promenade that would be teeming with thousands of people, French people, tourists from all over the world. It is exotic, it's glamorous, it's exciting, it's beautiful.

It is completely empty back there, aside from people who are sort of counting through the wreckage essentially trying to collect evidence, but also trying to sweep away the remnants of the mayhem that was left.

And I think the most striking image that I saw behind there was a large truck that was collecting bicycles that had been crumpled by the truck, and not just bicycles, but the thing even more disturbing, strollers.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: Strollers.

WARD: Baby strollers that have been crumpled under the force.

And you just really had a sense for the first time of the magnitude of this truck and the devastation that it wreaked.

BALDWIN: Hearing some of these witnesses describing fathers or mothers running with their strollers, two children in either arms, comes back to the why.

I'm looking at you, because as far as what we know about him, not a lot still. What are you hearing as far as any sort of jihadi ties?

PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: Well, he was not on the radar screen, Brooke, of French counterterrorism sources.

They had no sign whatsoever before attack that he had become radicalized in any way. The local mayor here now telling CNN's Max Foster that they have perhaps detected a few signs of radicalization now possibly, but we still don't have a complete picture of why he did what he did.

But, look, I mean, he tried to kill as many people as possible. He was relentless in that driving for two kilometers, killing men, women and very young children in the process. I think that suggests a deeply disturbed mind. To what degree was this a deeply disturbed mind because he had been radicalized by the propaganda ISIS has put out there?

I certainly think that that may well turn out to be a very, very strong factor, but they will be looking at other things as well. He's appeared, according to what we're finding out today, to have been a very volatile personality. He got involved in a violent altercation after a road traffic accident in January of this year. He'd thrown a wooden object at a driver.

He received a six-month suspended prison sentence for that. There appears to have been some problems on the home front. He was estranged from his wife, according to neighbors. There were lots of disputes going back and forth.

Was there some kind of trigger in his life that made him radicalize very, very quickly? Because everything we're hearing, this is not a guy that went to the mosque, not known in the local Muslim community as being really a practicing Muslim in the sense of being fervent in his belief.

BALDWIN: Actually, as I'm talking to you, this is the first time we have seen this look.

So, this is the part of the promenade where he was along the seawall. Correct? He came up where cars were.

WARD: Exactly. He was driving here for more than a mile. And now you see all these cleanup trucks trying to essentially take away the rest of the debris that still remains.

Earlier on, you had investigators combing through, obviously picking up the bodies, cleaning up the blood, taking away some clues or some DNA potentially to get more information as to the identities of some of the dead and wounded. But now it seems to be in a sort of final cleanup phase and potentially it looks like the promenade may even be open again tomorrow, which is just a surreal thought.

BALDWIN: Which just that takes me instantly back to Istanbul and the notion of, right, that airport and the shattered glass, and next day, Erdogan said, let's get back.

(CROSSTALK)

CRUICKSHANK: And the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, strikingly today saying that France is just going to have to get used to these kind of days, to these kind of attacks. This is the new normal. There are just too many radicals, too much energy in the jihadi system here in France for there not to be more days, perhaps even many more days like the one we just saw.

BALDWIN: Go ahead.

WARD: But, interestingly, when President Francois Hollande's motorcade went by here, people were angry. We heard people shouting murderer at him, so of people upset that the security situation here is not in a better...

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: But then you look at Euro 2016 and nothing happened, thank goodness, so, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Paul and Clarissa, thank you so much.

And as we continue on here, we are getting new information as far as what exactly happen here in France. We're talking to an eyewitness coming up, someone who witnessed this carnage firsthand right here along the promenade in Nice.

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