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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Hong Kong Protests: Thousands Defy China; Intelligence Failures

Aired September 29, 2014 - 16:00   ET

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

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Blame game. President Obama says it was not his failure that the threat of ISIS wasn't anticipated.

I'm Jake Tapper. This is THE LEAD.

The world lead. President Obama pointing a finger at the intelligence community, saying it is their fault for not warning him that ISIS was rising to power. What did intel folks have to say in response?

Meanwhile, ISIS says the bombs the U.S. vowed would roll back its terror campaign aren't doing a damn thing.

Plus, the other big world story we're following, it looks like 1989 all over again, student protesters flooding Hong Kong streets. Now that Beijing has shut down social media, is it only a matter of time before the Chinese roll out the tanks? Are we witnessing Tiananmen two?

And the national lead. It's been two weeks since anyone's seen 18- year-old Hannah Graham. But now police say the man they think kidnapped the UVA sophomore may be, may be linked to the death of another Virginia college student. Did police just catch a serial killer?

Welcome to THE LEAD.

We are monitoring two major stories breaking across the globe right now.

First, a potentially explosive situation as riot police take on thousands of protesters in the street in Hong Kong, a semiautonomous state, where democracy advocates, mostly students, ditched their classes to protest the Chinese's government decision to renege on a decades-old promise to allow free and fair elections in Hong Kong.

Now protesters are scrubbing the burning sensations from their eyes after riot police showered them in tear gas. It's getting ugly in Hong Kong and it's almost guaranteed to get worse. The Chinese, needless to say, have a history of violently confronting those seeking basic human rights. It's a tinderbox over there.

You're looking at live pictures right now from Hong Kong. The world is watching to see what the Chinese superpower will do. Much more on that ahead. But we first are now going to discuss the Middle East, where there are 1,600 U.S. troops in Iraq and over the skies of Syria trying to kill the terrorists of ISIS. We're watching for fresh airstrikes this hour as the bombing campaign there enters its second week. In the middle of this all, President Obama sat down with "60 Minutes" to try to explain why it falls upon the United States to take point on stopping this terrorist group.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: America leads. We are the indispensable nation. We have capacity no one else has. Our military is the best in the history of the world, and when trouble comes up anywhere in the world, they don't call Beijing, they don't call Moscow. They call us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: The president also gave a very clear message as to how his administration misjudged the terrorist threat of ISIS.

To paraphrase Harry Truman, the president said, the buck stops there, at the desk of the intelligence community. The president made no mention of his reference in the "New Yorker" magazine in January to ISIS as a J.V. team of terrorists. Either way, the U.S. is now in the fight.

In an interview, an ISIS fighter told CNN they have been ready for this for some time, adding the airstrikes aren't doing anything to slow their jihad. And now ISIS is surrounding a Kurdish stronghold in Syria, Kobani, and could lay siege to the city in a matter of days.

Here now with more details, CNN chief national correspondent Jim Sciutto.

Jim, we heard the president say last night that the U.S. misread how grave a threat ISIS posed because the intelligence on ISIS, he said, was just flat-out wrong.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: I will say I have heard questions, shall we call them, about the idea that it was the intelligence community alone that underestimated ISIS, because the fact is that there were warnings both in public comments and in classified intelligence reports about ISIS' growing ability and its growing ambitions to capture territory across Syria and Iraq and beyond.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO (voice-over): The message was clear, the president seeming to place responsibility for underestimating ISIS' rise firmly and solely on the intelligence community.

OBAMA: Well, I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria. SCIUTTO: Listen to the public testimony of intelligence and

administration officials in recent months, however, and the early warnings appeared clear as well.

Here's the administration's point man on Iraq, Brett McGurk, from February 11 this year, four months before ISIS' sweeping offensive in Northern Iraq.

BRETT MCGURK, U.S. DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE: Its current leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is a designated global terrorist under U.S. law and we believe is currently based in Syria. His mission, as clearly stated in his own statements, is to carve out a zone of governing territory from Baghdad through Syria to Lebanon.

SCIUTTO: And here's the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Michael Flynn, one week earlier.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How imminent of a threat does the resurgence of al Qaeda affiliates pose for the region's stability there?

LT. GEN. MICHAEL FLYNN, DIRECTOR, DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: It's increasingly a concern that we're going to have to pay very close attention to.

SCIUTTO: And here's McGurk again last November, a full seven months before ISIS' advance.

MCGURK: The more that this al Qaeda network gains strength and gains roots in Western Iraq, the greater the threat will be. That's why we have to go after that in a very serious way.

SCIUTTO: Intelligence officials tell CNN that the agency's issued multiple reports warning of ISIS' rise in the months before it expanded from its base in Syria into Iraq, detailing both its growing capability and its growing ambitions to take over territory as far as Baghdad, the threat to the capital highlighted the very month before ISIS stormed across the border from Syria.

Just last week, CIA Director John Brennan said the CIA also issued a broader strategic warning about ISIS.

JOHN BRENNAN, CIA DIRECTOR: Well, I think certainly that the intelligence community did a very good job on both those issues as far as trying to ensure that the policy-makers were informed about the evolving facts on the ground.

SCIUTTO: The White House defended the president's statement today.

JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Everybody knew that there was a threat that was posed by ISIL. But what nobody could predict, as the director said, is the willingness of the Iraqi security forces to stand up and fight for their own country.

SCIUTTO: Where all sides were surprised was the lightning-fast dissolution of the Iraqi army in the face of ISIS' advance, something that apparently no one saw coming.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: I spoke today to Representative Adam Schiff. He's on the House Intelligence Committee. He made the point that there is an intelligent report about just about everything. So it's one thing, Jake, of course to say that there's a report about this.

It's another thing to say that the intelligence community singled out a particular report or particular threat in the mountain of threats that the administration or that the intelligence community frankly is dealing with.

On the other hand, fact is this administration chose to withdraw troops from Iraq, chose not to get involved in Syria earlier. And both those things, I have been told as well by multiple officials, contributed to both those places being relative intelligence black holes. There's a lot of blame to go around here on ISIS, both on underestimating but also in setting the pieces in place so that you couldn't get the best intel possible on the threat that they faced going forward.

TAPPER: Brett McGurk made it very clear last year that --

(CROSSTALK)

SCIUTTO: Last November.

TAPPER: Jim Sciutto, excellent reporting. Stick around.

I want to talk to you about these riveting scenes we're getting out of Hong Kong. But we're going to stick in the Middle East right now.

While ISIS rampaged through Iraq and Syria faster than anyone may have anticipated, just how did the U.S. intelligence community and the U.S. government flub their assessment of this threat so badly?

Joining me now is former NATO supreme allied commander, author of "The Accidental Admiral" and dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, Admiral James George Stavridis.

Admiral, thanks for being here, as always.

You just heard our Jim Sciutto report that senior intelligence officials produced multiple reports on ISIS running roughshod in Iraq, including the plans that ISIS had to target Mosul and Baghdad. But President Obama said last night that he was surprised by what ISIS was able to do and suggested the intelligence wasn't there.

This is not new, obviously, the idea of a president blaming things on the intelligence community, which for the most part can't do anything to contradict the president. But how do you interpret this? Is he just trying to cover himself?

ADM. JAMES STAVRIDIS (RET.), FORMER NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: I think the first thing is recognize that intelligence is imperfect, Jake, but so is analysis.

So we get a lot of raw reporting. The question is, how capable are you of analyzing it and predicting outcomes? I think that's the failure that we have seen here. And then secondly, Jake, it was the lack of having boots on the ground when the U.S. troops were pulled out.

It's not always about boots on the ground. It's about eyes on the ground as well. So lacking those two things, I think we have seen an intelligence failure here and one the president has admitted.

TAPPER: So what about these anonymous intelligence officials telling Jim Sciutto and other media outlets that this isn't true, that either he wasn't reading the intelligence or he's not being honest right now, the president?

STAVRIDIS: Well, I haven't seen the intelligence reports personally. So I would be loath to comment on them.

But let's face it. Intelligence is never going to be precise. And even a decision-maker like the president who is faced with such a huge volume of intelligence can misanalyze it, misconstrue it and not make the right decisions himself.

TAPPER: If one takes the president's words at face value and what the director of national intelligence, General James Clapper, told David Ignatius, that there was a failure, they didn't anticipate how strong ISIS would be and how weak the Iraqi army would be, one might ask the argument, why does Clapper still have a job?

STAVRIDIS: Well, any intelligence official is always skating on thin ice because of the nature of those jobs, obviously, a decision for the president.

But I think General Clapper, who's a previous head of the National Security Agency, as well as being the current director of national intelligence, brings an enormous amount of experience to the job. My guess is the president does not want to simply let that go at a critical moment like this.

TAPPER: A Syrian ISIS fighter told CNN that the coalition airstrikes so far in Syria are not working, they will not stop ISIS from advancing. Do you think that he's grandstanding? What are you hearing from the military community about how effective the strikes in Syria have been so far?

STAVRIDIS: I think they're starting to bite.

Any kind of campaign like this where you're really going after the resources, the logistics, really knocking down that supporting infrastructure, takes time to build momentum. I will also make the observation I saw the same report, and the individual making the report was wearing a mask that covered everything except a tiny slit over his eyes.

If ISIS is so bold and so fearless and so invulnerable, I'm not quite sure why everybody I see talking for them is wearing a mask. So I would say, let's give it some time. And as we bring the Peshmerga from the north, revitalize the Iraqi security forces from the south, bombing the west, and put ISIS under a three-front war, I think we will discover they're not 10 feet tall.

TAPPER: Admiral Stavridis, thank you so much, as always, for joining us.

STAVRIDIS: Thanks, Jake.

TAPPER: Our other big world story today, they have been bombarded with tear gas, hit with batons and pushed back by police in riot gear, but still protesters in Hong Kong are defying orders to disperse. Could this turn into another Tiananmen Square?

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD.

You're looking at live pictures from Hong Kong, where it is 4:16 in the morning. And look at that crowd.

This is our other world lead now. Hong Kong, seemingly out of nowhere it's become a powerful symbol of democracy. The umbrella, thousands of protesters using them to shield themselves from a relentless rain of teargas as the protesters flood the streets in Hong Kong demanding what China promised to them almost a few decades ago -- the freedom to choose their own leaders, something that China's politburo decided, eh, we don't want to give you that anymore.

Andrew Stevens is in the thick of it in Hong Kong for us -- Andrew.

ANDREW STEVENS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Jake, thanks very much.

Yes, we are -- as you know, it's 4:00 in the morning here, and there are still tens of thousands of people out on the streets of Hong Kong. Twenty-four hours ago, we saw teargas and pepper spray being used on the citizens of Hong Kong, mainly students.

And it looks very much like that strategy by the Hong Kong police has backfired. A lot of people have come out in response to that. They say they've come out to show solidarity against the reaction of the police, which is interesting. And they say they are now here for the long haul. This is as you say, about democracy fundamentally. They want the chance to choose their own candidates to elect for the next leader of Hong Kong. They have now come out onto the streets and they say they are going to stay on the streets of Hong Kong until they get their demands met, Jake.

TAPPER: Andrew, these look, at least superficially, much like the protests that preceded the Arab spring. That's what it looks like from here. Does it feel that way to you on the ground? STEVENS: Well, I think superficial is probably the word to use at the

moment. Certainly, if you take a big-picture view of this, it is all about democracy. It is being led by youth.

I think the differences though, the key differences here is that Hong Kong has a lot of freedoms as it is. There's a freedom of association. There's the freedom of speech. The media is very much alive and noisy here in Hong Kong, compared with the oppression that Egyptians were feeling during the Arab spring and other nations in that region.

So, yes, there's a broad similarity. But at the moment, if you drill down a bit, there's still quite a long way apart. And Hong Kong is -- you know, they want to do things peacefully all the way through. The question becomes, Jake, if there is another heavy-handed response, what happens then? How do these people -- how do these students here deal with what's going on?

TAPPER: All right. Andrew Stevens, stay safe. Thank you so much.

Let's bring back our national security correspondent, Jim Sciutto. He spent seven years in China and Hong Kong as a journalist. And also, he spent a little bit of time at the U.S. embassy in Beijing. So, he's very familiar with China's promises, but Hong Kong's expectations.

Jim, how big a deal are these protests? Give us some perspective.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: They're a big deal. They're a direct challenge to Beijing's leadership. They're a direct challenge to the freedoms and hopes that Hong Kong people have become used to.

And one reason Hong Kong people are very worried is that the Chinese government is using a lot of the same term they used in advance of the crackdown in the Tiananmen Square 25 years ago. They're calling the protesters radical activists. They are blaming hostile foreign forces for organizing this. They've even single out a 17-year-old student leader saying that he has ties to the U.S. government, and the black hand behind the protests. It all sounds very Maoist.

I was there in Hong Kong in 1997 during the hand over to Chinese rule, and I know that the Hong Kong people -- they truly value the freedoms they have there. But they're also worried about what Beijing is capable of.

TAPPER: You're looking at, those are actually live pictures right now. Again, it's almost 4:20 in the morning there in Hong Kong. And, of course, for those not old enough to remember Tiananmen, it was a crackdown on democracy protests in China and ultimately the Chinese rolled in the tanks and soldiers, and hundreds were killed, including students from the university.

Do you fear that happening here in Hong Kong?

SCIUTTO: It's hard to say. It is a different government than it was 25 years ago in that it's more worldly, it's got a more interconnected economy with the world, that kind of thing. That said, it is no less a repressive government. They still jail dissidents. They still control social media, the news media.

One thing you know as you talk to people in China, Chinese news media is not covering these protests right now. You can talk to people walking the streets of Beijing. They might not even know that this is going on unless they learn about it on the Internet or elsewhere. So, it's a real question.

Another point I would make is this: 20-some-odd years ago Hong Kong was essential to China's economy. It was basically China's connection to the world. Today China is much more connected. Beijing, Shanghai, there are loads of businesses there -- TAPPER: Yes, they don't need Hong Kong for that.

SCIUTTO: They don't need Hong Kong as much as they used to.

TAPPER: Let me go back to Andrews Stevens just for a second because we saw some people putting on some sort of gear, protective gear.

Andrew, what's going on in the streets of Hong Kong right now?

STEVENS: Yes, that's right, just in the last five minutes. Suddenly, everyone who's been relaxed, lying down, catching some sleep, some jumping up and putting on these plastic coats. There's a lot of very rudimentary protective gear here, cling film, eye masks and also these plastic bags.

What we're hearing, Jake, is that the police may be coming down from the direction the camera is pointing, coming down to clear out the crowd. Now, this is not uncommon. We get this a lot. Suddenly, the crowd comes alive, stands around, prepares for perhaps more teargas, perhaps more pepper spray. Nothing happens.

Certainly, the police in the past 24 hours since the use first of that pepper spray have been clear in calling for calm. And it has been calm. There's been absolutely no suggestion of any violence in the past 24 hours. All sides are saying, keep it peaceful.

So, what we're seeing here isn't unusual. There will suddenly be a ripple through the crowd. People will be checking out seeing what's happening up in that direction. We can't see anything. It's perhaps in another 10 minutes, it will go back to as it was before.

But, really, it gives you an idea of just how sensitive people are here and just how big an issue, how big a problem this is becoming for the Hong Kong government. This is the last thing they want.

Beijing and the Hong Kong government are lockstep about this. They both say this is an illegal gathering. But what they don't want is the images that we saw 24 hours ago of pepper spray, of teargas being used on Hong Kong residents, on students. So they are at this stage as we understand it, going an extra mile just to keep the peace.

But no compromise out of this at the moment because it's very clear that the demonstrators say they will stay until they get their demands met, which is: (a), the resignation of the current leader of Hong Kong and, (b), a change in the political system which will allow them to choose their own candidates for the next leader.

Beijing says this is an illegal gathering. The chances of Beijing changing its mind politically, bowing to the demands of a street protest -- highly, highly, unlikely, Jake.

TAPPER: All right. Andrew, we're going to stay with you and keep coming back to you as events develop.

Jim, I just want to ask you, obviously it's highly unlikely that the demand to -- for the leader of Hong Kong to step down will meet. But what the protesters are asking for is they want to be able to nominate their own candidates, they don't want them selected by some sort of Chinese committee.

SCIUTTO: This is not a promise that came out of nowhere. When the British handed over Hong Kong back to China in 1997, this was part of what was called the basic law, it was part of the treaty, in fact and said that Hong Kong would have universal suffrage for the executive by 2017, which is three years from now. As that date's come closer, people have wondered, will China fulfill that promise?

And the way they gotten it around is say, OK, you can have universal suffrage, but we're going to pick the candidates for you. So, something like 100 very powerful, pro-Beijing politicians are going to pick the candidates, so that in effect, that's not really an open election.

TAPPER: That's not democracy.

SCIUTTO: It's not even close to democracy. So, that's the reaction.

TAPPER: All right. Jim Sciutto, thank you so much. Appreciate your expertise.

Turning back to the Middle East now, a week into the coalition air strikes on ISIS in Syria, is the American public happy about the U.S. taking the lead? We have a brand-new CNN poll.

Plus, he's the only suspect in the disappearance of an 18-year-old college student. Now police say they have evidence linking him possibly to the murder of another student in 2009.

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