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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Clapper: "We Underestimated" ISIS; Can't Win A Ground War?; Alibaba IPO: Bigger Than Google And Facebook

Aired September 19, 2014 - 16:30   ET

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

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: If I could just add one point. Anheuser-Busch is getting all sanctimonious about the NFL.

If we want to talk about domestic violence in this country and the influence of alcohol on domestic violence, it makes the NFL pale in comparison. So let's have a little less sanctimony from Anheuser- Busch.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Fran Tarkenton, I want to get the last thought from especially when it comes to the influence of the sponsors on this, they do seem to be talking a big game. But at the end of the day, the only action I've seen has been Radisson Hotels pulling their advertising from the Minnesota Vikings. Do you think that these sponsors need to be putting their money where their mouth is or taking it away, rather?

FRAN TARKENTON, FORMER NFL QUARTERBACK (via telephone): They should. The NFL like the United States government, like Wall Street has gotten to be too big to fail and they are popular. They're multibillion- dollar enterprises, the one piece of content on cable television and on network television that can get it a big audience Thursday night -- they could play Saturday morning at 8:00 in the morning and they'd have a big audience.

And sponsors want eyeballs. So it's all about eyeballs. The NFL can give you eyeballs, can give you ratings like no other movies, content, sports of any kind. And that's the power. But these owners, these 32 owners -- again, Roger Goodell doesn't have the ultimate power. He doesn't pull the strings. They pull the strings.

They ought to be in a meeting right now saying, we're going to take action. We're going to clean up this league and clean drugs out of this league, cocaine and PEDs and address this domestic violence -- they talk about getting it right. That's getting it right.

They ought to do it today and stop having these committees and we'll give more money to all the women's organizations, which is a nice thing to do. That's just buying time until this thing goes away.

TAPPER: Gene, let me ask you. I mean, look, Fran has an excellent point if you look at the listing of the top ten most watched TV shows in world history. They're almost all football games, if not all of them. The bottom line is especially in this media world today, if you want to get eyeballs, you advertise on a football game. Is there anything that you would recommend if you were working for any of these owners, is there anything you would tell any of these team owners to do to get ahead of this or is it just kind of, sit back and wait it out, you'll be OK, people are still watching?

GENE GRABOWSKI, CRISIS MANAGEMENT EXPERT: I don't think they can sit back. What you saw today with the news conference, it actually made things worse because there weren't enough specifics. They really have to come forward with some real plan.

And I agree that kicking it over to a committee and talking about having it by the Super Bowl is only going to raise the ire of the critics. Now having said that, one of the advantages of the NFL is that its fans are very supportive and very rabid.

Very few corporations, very few services and products in this country have that kind of support. So I don't think people are going to stay away from watching the games on TV or in the stadiums.

However, the kind of a program, the kind of pressure that's being brought to bear now may a few weeks down the road if the NFL doesn't really show itself to be more responsive and more concrete create enormous pressure on Roger Goodell and make his situation very tenuous.

TAPPER: All right, Gene Grabowski, Jeffrey Toobin, Fran Tankerton and Michael Smirconish, thank you all. Appreciate the conversation.

Coming up on THE LEAD, the nation's top intelligence official admitting he and others made a critical mistake about ISIS. They underestimated the group's will to fight. How did U.S. intelligence once again get it so wrong?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD. We are turning now to the World Lead, did you see the trailer-style propaganda video that ISIS released a few days ago? It looked like something out of Michael Bay's worst nightmares.

It was a trailer for a full-length 55-minute video released today. Terrorists have really stepped up their production values since the days of Osama Bin Laden, seen on a microphone in a cave.

And now the nation's number one spy is explaining what the U.S. got so wrong about ISIS initially? "The Washington Post" is quoting the director of national intelligence, General James Clapper, as saying, "What we didn't do was predict the will to fight. That's always a problem. We didn't do it in Vietnam.

In this case, we underestimated ISIL and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi army. I didn't see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming. I didn't see that."

Well, maybe he would have seen it coming if someone had e-mailed you about. I want to turn now to James Woolsey, he was director of the CIA during part of the Clinton administration. Now he is the chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy.

Mr. Woolsey, thanks so much for being here. In January, President Obama referred to ISIS or ISIL as a J.V. Team. And I guess we've seen examples in the past of U.S. intelligence kind of catering their analyses according to what the president or the vice president think.

And I'm wondering, what do you think came first here, the chicken or the egg? Did President Obama not want to believe in this and so the intelligence agencies reaffirmed that or was it the other way around?

JAMES WOOLSEY, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: It's hard to say. This is a complicated subject because al Qaeda's prodigy such as al Nusra and so forth, they don't just talk about violence, they do talk about it and they conduct it and do it in horrible ways.

The Islamic State is a little more complicated because their publications and the speeches of Al Baghdadi and their leading people are focused principally on establishing a caliphate.

TAPPER: They want to rule.

WOOLSEY: Right. They need an empire and they want the empire to grow and they want to take after next probably Saudi Arabia because they want the holy cities. They talk about something different usually than the terror that they sometimes practice. So it's a complicated subject to analyse from intelligence sources.

TAPPER: I want to get your reaction on these sound bites. The first one is from Retired General James Madison. He is a former commander of U.S. Central Command, in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee yesterday. And the second is from the national security adviser, Dr. Susan Rice, today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RETIRED GENERAL JAMES MADISON, FORMER COMMANDER OF U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND: The best military advice would never take some of our capability off the table and if there's better military advice to be had, I would be eager to see it. But I think right now up against this enemy, we're going to have to take our own side in this and in that regard, it means we use all of our capabilities.

SUSAN RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: To be clear, as we've said repeatedly, our strategy does not involve U.S. troops on the ground in a combat role in either Iraq or Syria.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: What's your take on this? This is obviously a big debate going on behind closed doors and frankly out in the open.

WOOLSEY: I'm on Jim Madison's side on this one. I think we're paying too much attention at the top levels of the U.S. government to the narrative, as they say. The narrative is from the administration's point of view that terrorism was basically ended by killing Bin Laden. And that the war on terror is over to the extent that we don't need to fight any more wars and we don't need any big deployments. Turning down ideas when you still don't know exactly what's going on is not a good idea.

You may want to surprise an enemy, you may need to do things that you earlier said you wouldn't do. And I think it's a big mistake to try to -- for members of the administration to try to rule things out.

TAPPER: All right, former CIA Director James Woolsey, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Joining me now is Britain's ambassador to the U.S., Sir Peter Westmacott. Mr. Ambassador, thanks for joining us. I want to play something that former President Bill Clinton said on "The Daily Show" about this idea of no boots on the ground.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FORMER PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: We can't win a land war in Iraq. We proved that, but they can. And we can help them win it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Do you and Prime Minister Cameron, those ruling the United Kingdom, congratulations, by the way, do you agree with that? Is this a war that western troops cannot win?

SIR PETER WESTMACOTT, BRITISH AMBASSADOR TO U.S.: I think the western role is something which we've got to work out in the light of the coalition-building exercise, which is going on at the moment, and a strategy involving several different elements to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIS. We've been very clear. We're not putting combat troops on the ground --

TAPPER: But is it because of political considerations or is it because you don't think they'll work?

WESTMACOTT: I think what's going on is that we're clearly not going to get involved in another Iraq war. The United States and the United Kingdom expended a lot of blood and treasure there. We're trying to deal with the ISIS threat.

I think there probably will be boots on the grounds. But the views we are all taking is that we need to be there in support of the Iraqi armed forces assuming their own responsibility for security of their country.

And there's lots of things that we can do to support them, air strikes and a bunch of other things, which stops short of us putting combat boots on the ground.

TAPPER: There was a French jet mission earlier today. What militarily is the U.K. willing to do?

WESTMACOTT: The U.K. so far has done quite a lot, in addition to the humanitarian side where we've done airdrops and so on. We have provided aerial reconnaissance. We have provided heavy lift. We have taken machine guns and ammunition and other equipment to the KLG up in the north of Iraq.

We've done a number of other things. We're involved in some training, equip and advisory roles. I think doing more than that is a possibility. My prime minister said he's not ruling out any option in terms of the need to fight back against ISIS. So I think we need to wait and see patiently, intelligently with our

partners, what's the coalition up to, what is the new more inclusive require of its partners, without being asked by the Peshmerga in the north or Iraqi government for anything more at the moment than what we are doing.

But we need to work together, all of us, to ensure that we have a strategy that really works.

TAPPER: ISIS released a video of another British hostage, John Cantly, forced to deliver a propaganda message. What is the government of the U.K. doing to try to save this man's life?

WESTMACOTT: We're doing a lot. We've already lost one of our hostages. We know that it appears that there are Brits who are involved in these atrocities. We are looking very, very carefully.

We are putting a lot of resource into trying to find these people and give great priority to trying to secure their release. We can't talk about the detail of that.

But we're also working very hard trying to stop people from going to Iraq and Syria who have malevolent intent and try to stop foreign fighters with terrorist intentions coming back into our country.

TAPPER: Have you identified the guy in the videos that speaks with a London accent?

WESTMACOTT: I can't give you detail on what we've got to at the moment, but we are working on the case as a matter of very high priority.

TAPPER: All right, Mr. Ambassador, thank you so much. Appreciate your being here under a very difficult time.

Coming up, it might be the political ad of the year.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm. So when I get to Washington, I'll know how to cut pork.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Can this Tea Party candidate win a long-held Democratic seat in a swing state? Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD. Our Politics Lead now, Iowans had better get used to the spotlight. Of course, they already are, but from now until 2016, potential presidential candidates will be thick on the ground, just stopping by as Vice President Biden and Hillary Clinton both did this week.

The media attention's also ramping up, of course, because of the race for an open U.S. Senate seat. As we know, the control of Senate hangs in the balance. CNN polling shows a virtual tie between Democrat Bruce Braley and Republican, Joni Ernst with the midterm is just weeks away.

This is one of CNN's five races to watch. Our chief congressional correspondent, Dana Bash, looks at the race in Iowa.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Joni Ernst takes running for Senate quite literally. She doesn't march in this parade, she sprints. The lieutenant colonel in the Iowa National Guard recruiting potential voters for her campaign.

JONI ERNST (R), IOWA SENATE CANDIDATE: Being a veteran is a huge part of who I am, what I believe in, the greatness of America.

BASH: She an Iraq war vet, a little known conservative Iowa state senator that burst onto the political scene with the TV ad of the season.

ERNST: I'm Joni Ernst. I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm so when I get to Washington, I'll know how to cut pork.

BASH: She's a Tea Party favorite now trying to moderate her image to snatch Iowa's vacant Democratic Senate seat left open by retiring liberal icon, Tom Harkin.

(on camera): Would you be a senator in the mold of Ted Cruz?

ERNST: No. I am a senator in the mold of Joni Ernst, just an independent leader who will represent Iowa.

BASH (voice-over): Democrat Bruce Brailey argues he's the candidate who fits Iowa's problem-solving sensibilities.

REP. BRUCE BRAILEY (D), IOWA SENATE CANDIDATE: Iowans expect to have senators who are going to put aside partisan politics when the state's interests are at stake.

BASH: He invited us to this small town of Brooklyn, Iowa, where he grew up.

BRAILEY: The drugstore was also one of my customers. I baled hay, worked on farms, I was a truck driver, a conduction worker.

BASH: The four-term congressman is trying to beat back Republican accusations he's lost touch back home. He and his wife filing a complaint about a neighbor's chicken crossing on to their property. But potentially more damaging, he was caught on tape slamming Iowa's popular GOP Senator Chuck Grassley.

BRAILEY: A farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.

BASH: Dissing farmers, a big Iowa no-no.

(on camera): It looked like you had a problem with maybe putting your foot in your mouth? Is that a fair thing to say?

BRAILEY: All of us say things that we regret. And if you grow up in Iowa, the important lesson to learn is if you make a mistake, you take responsibility of it. And that's what I did.

BASH (voice-over): Brailey argues its Ernst who is out of touch, too conservative for the purple state of Iowa. On social issues, she co- sponsored personhood legislation in the state senate, which legally starts life at conception.

ERNST: I promote a culture of life. I promote life. That's the person I am.

BASH: And on pocketbook issues she opposes a national minimum wage.

ERNST: We really do need to have a minimum wage that is set based upon local economies. I think the state is best to do that.

BASH (on camera): So that means no federal minimum wage?

ERNST: Not one size fits all approach. I believe it has to be done by the state.

BRAILEY: I hope you'll consider voting for me in the United States Senate.

BASH (voice-over): Like many Democrats on the ballot this year, Brailey has to overcome an unpopular president, now at just 37 percent approval here. In Iowa where Barack Obama's big 2008 caucus win knocked Hillary Clinton off her White House path and Obama beat GOP rivals in both 2008 and 2012. Still, while Democratic candidates in red states keep their distance, not Brailey.

BRAILEY: If the president has time in his schedule to come to Iowa in this campaign, I would welcome him.

BASH: On this, they agree.

ERNST: I do. I think that would be wonderful.

BASH (on camera): Is it good for your campaign?

ERNST: I think so, yes. Come on, President Obama.

BASH (voice-over): Dana Bash, CNN, Spencer, Iowa.

(END VIDEOTAPE) TAPPER: Coming up next, get ready to up your selfie game. The iPhone 6 hit shelves today and predictably Apple fans went gaga for it. But is it worth shelling out up to $500 for one? Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD. The Money Lead now. It is the biggest company that maybe you never heard of and it just made history. Alibaba, the Chinese mash-up of Amazon and eBay hit the New York Stock Exchange trading floor just before noon today.

Shares soared, nearly $30 above the IPO price, which was bigger than Google and Facebook's debut prices combined. The company is a relative unknown outside of Silicon Valley and Wall Street cirles. It was started by former school teacher, Jack Ma, more than a decade ago.

Finally, long lines and the stench of technological superiority in the air, must be iPhone release day. Today's release of the iPhone 6 conjured up familiar images, long lines snaking around city blocks, rabid fans.

One of the folks to get a first bite at Apple's new phone almost had his day ruined when he fumbled the newer, sleeker, model on live television. Don't worry, the phone survived.

Apple's website went down and Apple stores couldn't handle all the orders. But despite those difficulties, industry leaders expect Apple to best its last phone debut and move well more than 9 million phones.

Make sure to follow me on Twitter @jaketapper and also @theleadcnn. Check out our show page for video, blogs, extras. You can also subscribe to our magazine on "Flipboard."

That's it for THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper. Have a great weekend. I now turn you over now to Wolf Blitzer. He is right next door to me in "THE SITUATION ROOM" -- Wolf.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN SITUATION ROOM HOST: Jake, thanks very much.