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New Day

Details Emerging About Suspected Ottawa Shooter; White House Fence Jumper; Canada PM Calls Ottawa Shooter "Terrorist"

Aired October 23, 2014 - 06:00   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Breaking news, we are live in Ottawa, Canada, a nation on edge, worrying what comes next. A deadly shooting terrorizing the nation's capital, a soldier is dead. Lawmakers forced to flee for their lives. The prime minister vowing resolve.

STEPHEN HARPER, PRIME MINISTER, CANADA: Canada will never be intimidated.

CUOMO: This morning, new details on the gunman, his past and his conversion to Islam. The victim, a soldier and a father. And the hero sergeant-at-arms who reportedly gunned down the shooter, stopping him cold. Plus, new fears. Will there be more attacks like this?

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Breaking overnight, another White House fence-jumper, this time the man was tackled within moments by Secret Service dogs and the entire incident was caught on video.

And police and protesters clash in Ferguson, Missouri overnight. Protesters demanding justice for Michael Brown and the arrest of Officer Darren Wilson.

CUOMO: A special edition of NEW DAY starts right now.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CUOMO: Good morning. We're coming to you live from Ottawa, Canada, where just hours ago, it was a scene of utter chaos. Following a shooting, the prime minister here flatly says it was carried out by terrorists --Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Yes, Chris, great to have you there for us this morning. I'm Alisyn Camerota in New York. We want to welcome our viewers across the country and around the world.

The attacks raising new questions and fears about home-grown terrorists, not only in Canada, but of course, Chris, here in the United States as well.

CUOMO: The two very much connected. Not just by a border, but by a source of concern here with these types of shooting. Now the confusion here cannot be exaggerated. People didn't know what was going on. They didn't know how many shooters. But here's what we figured out so far. Officials say it was one shooter and that shooter is now dead. The lockdown here is basically over. The streets behind us are still sealed off around the National War Memorial as you get towards the parliament.

But the man in the crosshairs this morning is the shooter and here's what we know. His name, for what it's worth, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. He was raised in Canada. He has a troubled and criminal past.

He had apparently converted to Islam, but didn't understand it and had become radicalized. He tried going to the Middle East, but had his passport revoked and that's a big point that we are going to be going after this morning.

His passport had been pulled so how closely was he being monitored? What was his ultimate plan?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HARPERWe will not be intimidated. Canada will never be intimidated.

CUOMO: Prime Minister Stephen Harper promising justice after what he calls a terrorist act on Canada's capitol. At 9:52 a.m. --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Guys, there's a shooter on the loose.

CUOMO: Shots ring out at the National War Memorial in Ottawa.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Out of the way!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I heard a shot and just -- pow.

CUOMO: The shooter, 32-year-old Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a Muslim convert, but officials say he had a trouble past and was planning to fight overseas.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A guy came from the side and came out with a rifle and shot at the man and then the guy went falling down.

CUOMO: The suspect fatally shooting Canadian Corporal Nathan Cirillo, the 24-year-old father was one of two soldiers standing guard. Then, around 10:00 a.m., the shooter hijacked this car and continued his rampage just a few hundred yards away. Entering through doors meant for officials, he starts firing inside Canada's parliament building.

JOHN MCKAY, CANADIAN PARLIAMENT: I was literally taking off my coat, going into the caucus room and I hear this boom, boom, boom.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, down, down.

CUOMO: Police scrambling to protect Canada's top officials, rushing them outside to safety. Some lawmakers in the building huddled in the caucus room, piling up chairs against the door to barricade themselves in as police exchange a barrage of bullets with the shooter.

JOSH WINGROVE, REPOTER, "THE GLOBE AND MAIL": We sort of flanking down the hallway and it looked like the guy either popped out or they saw him. They fired a lot. A tremendous amount of bullets fired.

CUOMO: Amid the chaos, Parliament sergeant-at-arms Kevin Vickers, fires the fatal shot, but not before three others are injured. Vickers killing the suspect near the parliamentary library, fellow officers calling him a hero.

JOHN VICKERS, SERGEANT-AT-ARMS VICKERS' BROTHER: When you hear those gunshots and know that your brother was in the middle of all of that, it was a very surreal experience and horror.

CUOMO: This is the second time this week Canada waking up to headlines of terror. On Monday, Canadian authorities say a radicalized Islamist hit and killed a Canadian soldier with his car.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: I had a chance to talk with Prime Minister Harper.

CUOMO: President Obama says we have to remain vigilant.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: When it comes to dealing with terrorist activity, that Canada and the United States has to be entirely in sync, not only is Canada one of our closest allies in the world, but they're our neighbors and our friends.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CUOMO: So today it's all about what we know about how this was able to happen. What happened here in Canada on Monday, and yesterday, were they coordinated, probably not. But were they connected, maybe.

So that begins with what we understand about the man who was killed yesterday. Let's bring in Deb Feyerick. She has more on the suspected shooter and how he got to the place where he was, Deb.

And to be very clear, this man is not a major asset. He is not some glorious jihadi, as I was told by the FBI last night, he's a loser who had a gun.

DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, exactly. And that's exactly what law enforcement is trying to determine right now. They are trying to determine exactly what his network was. Did he speak to anybody directly? Was he self-radicalized online?

What was his digital footprint? For example, did he simply become radicalized by watching a propaganda video? ISIS recently put out a statement saying, if you don't have an IED, if you don't have a bomb, use a car in a hit-and-run.

Use whatever you got, a rock, push somebody off a building, get your hands on a gun, so all of this is under surveillance right now, all of this is being questioned.

They're looking at his travel. They determined he went to the United States four times. All U.S. law enforcement is running his name through a database. It's not just that name that you mentioned, Michael but also, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. It is also Michael Joseph Hall.

And he recently changed his name to Abdullah. So all of that they were looking at as well. He just turned 32 years old last week. His father is Libyan. His mother works with the immigration office here. She is with the federal government. He had a relatively an interesting upbringing.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JANICE PAMELL, FORMER NEIGHBOR: I know that you know the mother was very, very caring and a very involved parent. Actually both parents seemed to have been. You know the boy seemed to have had a very good upbringing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FEYERICK: You know, that is one of the things that they were looking at, why does somebody who seems so normal, all of a sudden go off the deep end? There are reports at his mosque his behavior was very disturbing so they wanted him out.

All of that is under investigation. What triggered this sort of flip to cause him to do what he did? And it began right here behind us at the National War Memorial.

CUOMO: Well, if you have the combination of a past of addiction, criminal behavior, conversion to Islam. The experts will tell you that that checks 10 out of 10 on the volatility score of one of these people.

There's a confused picture they're trying to figure out. Seems disturbed, went awry, why was he flagged? Why did he have his passport pulled? Why was he one of the people being monitored?

FEYERICK: And it's very interesting because right now Canada is monitoring at least 90 people that got those people on radar. The man on Monday who used his car as a weapon to kill a shoulder, he was flagged.

This man also was flagged. His passport confiscated because in both cases they showed an intention to go overseas, travel and fight jihad. When that effort was thwarted, now they're going to look into to see and to determine whether in fact that caused them to act out here.

They could not detain either of these men because they had not committed a crime here on Canadian soil, but they were watching.

CUOMO: All right, Deb, thank you very much. I know you'll keep digging. When you get stuff, you come back. We'll be here and get this right. Thank you very much.

All right, so now, we want to get perspective of two different things. One, the actual event, we're going to have Josh Wingrove, had some sound from him in the piece you saw before. He's a reporter for the "Globe and Mail." You know, the headline this morning certainly in the local paper is "Attacked." He was inside, he heard and he understood what was going on. That was his footage that you just saw. We also have Michel Juneau Katsuya. He is a former senior officer for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Very important perspective this morning because you have to figure out whether this is somewhat of a new normal, not in frequency, but in the nature and character of what tough look out for and already being monitored.

But let's start with what happened. Thank God you're safe and you're here. What was it like inside that building when this started?

WINGROVE: It was certainly chaos at the beginning, there was some two rounds of gunfire, if you will, the first one sounded different than the second. We presume that's because it included the guys shot. Not just guards.

CUOMO: You heard it sounded like a boom, a canon and obviously.

WINGROVE: A book shelf fell, actually.

CUOMO: But he did have a long single-shot rifle and that would have sounded right and then the barrage of small-arms fire you believe was the retaliation.

WINGROVE: That's right. You see it picked up in the video right there. So that was coming around. This is in the grand entranceway of parliament. Called the Hall of Honors, where we had our memorial for Afghan soldiers, our soldiers who died in Afghanistan.

So we see the guards going down the Hall of Honor to pursue this guy. It was more of a hunt than a chase. They were going slow. There's a calm between the two rounds of shooting and --

CUOMO: It's a big place, right?

WINGROVE: It is a big place and it's got nooks and crannies and hallways and stairways and he could have gone anywhere.

CUOMO: How many hours were you locked down?

WINGROVE: We were locked down from about 10 a.m. until about 11 p.m. It's a long time and they didn't give us any information. We were left connecting the dots. As they gathered us, we were all over the building, a place where people could be safe.

As they gathered us, they swept us into one main room. People coming up to me and saying, I wasn't I.D.ed. I wasn't pat down. They didn't have our bags searched, is there an accomplice in our midst?

CUOMO: They've got a lot of eye witness accounts of multiple shooters that they actually had to deal with, right?

WINGROVE: Now we're talking about on shooter. It's funny, when you're in lockdown. It was a bit of an echo chamber. We didn't know there were people outside who knew more than we saw. It's a horrible day and afterwards, we heard about the death of a Canadian soldier. It's a heartbreaking day here in Ottawa.

CUOMO: Obviously, he was there for ceremonial purposes, the memorial right behind us and a young man with so much to look forward to in his life to be taken out so senselessly is horrible. Am I right in thinking that it was your recollection that you saw someone slumped over at some point there? That was you? Tell us about that.

WINGROVE: At the end of the second round, there must have been two dozen shots or so. It was a lot and nearly all of them if not all are from guards, it wasn't a sort of exchange fire situation as I could tell.

At the end of that, they were shooting some towards right in front of us, the library of parliament and a body sort of slumped over there. At the time we presume it was the shooter. Now we know he seems to be the only one that died in the parliament itself.

So we saw him slumped over. Appeared to check on his pulse or check him quickly and their next priority was to start clearing the area and we got yanked out of there. It was stay away from windows. They were breaking down doors. They didn't know if they had someone else on their hands.

CUOMO: All right, so Josh, you weigh in as you think is appropriate as we talk about the intelligence aspect of this. Michel, thank you for joining us especially so early in the morning.

You have many different layers of analysis to do. It seems from a security perspective, four homicides in the last year here in Ottawa. Of course, it's the nation's capital. This is not a high-crime area. It's not like Washington, D.C. by any stretch of the imagination.

Security there is soft. Inside, they seemed caught flat-footed in terms of coordination. Do you believe that this is going to be a real wake-up call for what you have to be ready for, even in Ottawa?

MICHEL JUNEAU-KATSUYA, FORMER SENIOR OFFICER, CANADIAN SECURITY INTELLIGENCE SERVICE: I think Canada lost its innocence here to a certain extent. We have been prepared for after 9/11, as a matter of fact, statistics speak by themselves.

The RCMP and Sesus, our national agencies have been capable to intercept and to stop any plot and we have no attack at all in Canada and yet we've convicted over 25 people and the vast majority of them are now going to be spending their life inside.

But this is also the sad reality of ISIS. ISIS is sending its Jihadis, international jihad to attack with all the means that they have. As a matter of fact, a month ago, you will recall there was a video threat that was sent worldwide.

And they were saying take a rock and bash their head, take your knife and stab them. Take your car and run them over. So it's basically sending the signal.

CUOMO: To anyone who is stupid enough to respond to it.

JUNEAU-KATSUYA: Go for it with whatever you have.

CUOMO: And this man was like the poster child for that, drug past, which shows his mental instability. A convert, but he was somewhat rejected by the mosque, right, and he had some kind of contact with this guy, Yusefzai out in Vancouver, who they believe who was much more motivated.

He returned. He is off the radar right now. But here's the confusion, you knew enough to pull the guy's passport, but not enough to keep an eye on him here. Getting a long gun is easy wherever you are, even in Canada. But how do you deal with that disconnect? Why did they pull his passport?

JUNEAU-KATSUYA: The challenge is that for any law enforcement authority. It's one thing to know that a guy is a bad guy. It's another thing to prove in court that the guy is guilty of something, and that's what we have to sort of collect.

Currently, the government has already announced that they will be looking at the law, the criminal law and the anti-terrorist law in order to be capable to see if there's some adjustment that can be made to give more tools and ammunitions to the law enforcement.

WINGROVE: In fact, the minister, the justice minister, Peter McKay, told us minutes before the shooting began. He was the last one we interviewed. That's why he was in the building. One of the main reasons we were all there. That's the story I was sitting down to write.

They were going to look for expanded powers, ways, to track these guys if they didn't have enough grounds to lay a charge and put them behind bars and minutes later is when the shooting began.

CUOMO: Listen, it's terrible that it happened. The only way to look at it is it could have been worse and we are going to talk about why it wasn't worse. This man was obviously following a certain understanding of what would bring him glory and we're going to talk about that later in the show.

Josh Wingrove and Michel Juneau-Katsuya, I'm sorry if I mangled your name and I appreciate you being here.

Alisyn, that's something we're going to be talking about here, what was done especially at this memorial, it has some meaning within jihad. There are a lot of layers to this that have to be understood.

But it starts with the understanding that this man was no glorious warrior, he was as the FBI told me, Alisyn, a loser with a gun.

CAMEROTA: Yes, Chris, it's great to have you on the ground there getting all sorts of information for us. We'll check back in in a minute. Meanwhile, we have more breaking news overnight to tell you about. With the U.S. already on high alert after the Ottawa shooting, there was another security breach at the White House.

This is new video to show you. It shows a man just after he jumped over the White House fence. And he's trying to fight off the Secret Service dogs who this time were released and took him down. This is the second such incident in just more than a month. But this time, the jumper did not make it nearly as far.

CNN's Michelle Kosinski is live for us at the White House.

What's happened, Michelle?

MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Alisyn.

Right, this happened just after 7:00 last night. Yes, another fence- jumper. The difference this time, though, was the takedown.

This time, Secret Service seemed to have no hesitation in using the dogs. And, in fact, you see it in that video, this 23-year-old fence- jumper from Maryland, Victor Adesanya, seems to be no match for the dogs, you see the dogs appear, he kicks at one. He seems to wrestle with another one. But the dogs get him down to the ground, and then moments later, you can see the Secret Service officers right there.

They say Adesanya man was unarmed. He was taken to the hospital, and the dogs were taken veterinarians, too, so they could be checked out and treated after this.

It's unclear what Adesanya's motives were, but at this point at least, it doesn't seem like it's related to a terrorist threat. A relative of his told reporters that he had been having mental problems lately. And that, in fact, he was arrested two months ago, here outside the White House for hassling Secret Service officers and wanting to talk to the president.

This morning, we don't see a substantial difference in security outside the White House. It was already very tight after that last fence-jumper, only a few weeks ago. You still have the temporary shorter fence about eight feet away from the tall fence.

So, it's interesting that somebody was still able to make it over. But law enforcement sources close to the situation tell us that, yes, unless something substantially changes, that would be a higher fence, that an agile person could still make it over fairly quickly. But they say what matters is the speed and effectiveness of the Secret Service response -- Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Well, absolutely, and this time, the system works and the dogs were released.

KOSINSKI: Thank goodness, right?

CAMEROTA: Thank goodness. All right. Michelle, thanks so much for that update. Well, the Canada shooting has triggered heightened security alert here

in the U.S. We'll tell but the instructions that ISIS has sent out to lone wolves and just how vulnerable the U.S. is to that type of attack. Our security experts are here.

Plus, new safety precautions to keep Ebola from spreading in the U.S. We'll tell you what the CDC is doing now.

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CAMEROTA: United States on guard this morning after the Canadian attacks, the deadly shooting in Ottawa was the second attack in Canada and on a Canadian soldier in just three days. On Monday, a man ran over two soldiers, killing one of them. That driver was suspected of being connected to ISIS.

So, how likely are attacks like those we've just seen in Canada to happen here in the U.S.?

Let's bring in CNN's national security analyst, Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, and senior law enforcement analyst and former FBI assistant director, Tom Fuentes. And Chris Cuomo, of course, joins us as well from Ottawa.

Tom and Juliette, thanks so much for being here. Let me start with you. Let play you something that Congressman Ed Royce told our Erin Burnett about lone wolf attacks here in the U.S.

Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. ED ROYCE (R), CALIFORNIA: We're taking every precaution, but the problem is that a request went out 30 days ago from ISIS to carry out lone wolf attacks against these targets, including France, the United States and our other allies. And clearly, Canada has put up a squadron of fighter planes against ISIS, so they're part of the target list.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Juliette if a request went out 30 days ago from ISIS, why haven't we seen a lone wolf attack here yet?

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, a lot of it is just finding the opportunity and someone who is going to be radicalized. I mean, the message from ISIS was sort of a message to the world -- anyone who would listen, from people in Syria, refugees in Syria to, of course, a Canadian guy, you know, a 20-something year old who is looking for meaning in his life. This is the challenging aspect of where we are in counterterrorism.

The good news, I think, taken out of this is two-fold. One is he clearly was on some list, as was the guy from Monday, which suggests that something is right in terms of the intelligence-sharing, it's obviously not enough. But we should learn the lessons of why were both men on some sort of target list.

And the other for most viewers to know is, while these are scary, they're not existential threats. I mean, these are lone wolves who are targeting killing one person here, two people there. But you're not seeing the kind of organized threat that brings down two buildings and kills 3,000 people.

CAMEROTA: Yes, that is a good point, though there's cold comfort in that if you're at a theater or you're at a mall.

And, Tom, I want to ask you about this -- there are thousands of shootings in the U.S. every year. And try as police might, they can't stop those.

So, how can they ever stop a lone wolf attack?

TOM FUENTES, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: They cannot. That's the simple truth of it. And, you know, whether it's the Canadian authorities, the U.S., the British, they don't just have enough resources to follow every person in these countries who thinks bad thoughts or says bad things, because we are free nations with freedom of speech and assembly. To read the mind of when a person is going to cross the line from just thinking bad thoughts to actually doing a bad thing, such as going out and carrying out a shooting or mowing somebody down with their car, that's hard to tell.

And it's hard -- you don't have the resources to follow 90 people in Canada would take hundreds of full-time people just to do that.

In the U.S., if you look at the numbers of people on our various watch lists, it approaches a million people. There are not enough resources in the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI or state and local law enforcement to follow every one of these people that expresses a bad idea about the United States.

CUOMO: So, Tom, the question becomes, what do you do? Because they knew enough to flag this guy and pull his passport. As you all know, on the panel, that is not a small thing. That's not just putting you on a watch list. That's not just saying, oh, this is some weird, online activity.

So, what do you do with somebody like this who you've had enough information, Tom, to pull the passport?

FUENTES: Well, the problem is, Chris, that's enough information to flag somebody as you said. Pull their passport.

And the question is, what kind of resource allocation do they have, to maintain a close-enough monitoring of somebody, you know, from that point on, and we don't know how many passports they have pulled in that country, how many other people or potential terror attacks they are watching. And a lot of times you don't know this and suddenly arrests are made and a small group of people are taken into custody.

And, oftentimes, you'll see a threat go up, a warning go up in Britain or in countries where shortly after, within a week or two, you'll see a small group of people taken into custody. Those people are already being monitored and watched and the investigation well under way, which actually helped be the reason for why the threat lists go up or the threat alerts go up.

CAMEROTA: Juliette, we know that this shooter from yesterday, he came in and out of the United States four times, authorities believe. So, how do they go about tracking who he made contact with when he came in?

KAYYEM: Well, this is where the cooperation between Canada and the United States is so significant. So, it's not like a country that we have difficult relationships with.

The FBI and internal intelligence in Canada are going to work hand in hand to figure out who did he meet with. What was he doing? Was he with others? Is there a potential other person here in the United States, who might be planning an attack?

One of the reasons in law enforcement, national security you're hearing a lot about this thing called countering violent extremism. It sounds kind of vague.

But one of the challenges that Tom addressed about resources, is that really, one of the aspects to sort of try to curb the number of lone wolf terrorists is to engage communities that they might be a part of in terms of reaching out, getting information, working with communities so that they don't become radicalized, because there's just no way in a free society, would we want to have the kind of surveillance that would say, you know, that would be watching a million people or 2 million people for potential lone wolf terrorist attacks, which may happen from someone we weren't even watching, given the nature of terrorism today.

CAMEROTA: All right. Such a great point.

Juliette Kayyem, Tom Fuentes, thanks so much for helping Chris and me and the audience understand all of this. Great to see you.

FUENTES: You're welcome.

CAMEROTA: All right. We are staying on top of this deadly attack in Canada.

But we're following another story for you, and that is preventing an Ebola outbreak here in the U.S. The safety rules that some travelers will be forced to undergo.

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