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New Day

Details Emerging About Suspected Ottawa Shooter; Interview with Jim Munson

Aired October 23, 2014 - 08:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

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

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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: Plus, breaking overnight -- another White House fence jumper, this time the man apprehended just moments later.

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, and welcome back to a special edition of NEW DAY.

I'm live from Ottawa, Canada, following what is only described as a chaotic and terrible day, a gunman opened fire, leaving a Canadian soldier dead in an attack. The prime minister is simply calling terrorism, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Yes, Chris.

Yes, I'm Alisyn Camerota in New York.

Those attacks bringing homeland terror into focus, not only in Canada but, of course, here in the United States as well. So, Chris, we've talked to our security experts who said the number of people here on the no fly list in the U.S. is 800. So, we'll get into how they monitor those people.

But, first, give us the new details from Ottawa.

CUOMO: Look, the big headline has to be this is the future, and it's not to scare. It's to create urgency, little attacks by small-minded people who can buy in to some perverse notion of jihad. That's the threat and that's what we saw here. It started at the National War Memorial, then the parliament building, and literally brought Ottawa, put it back on its heels in a crippling gridlock. Downtown was in lockdown for more than 10 hours mostly because of the confusion created by this, so many eyewitness accounts there were two, three, five shooters.

Now authorities say there was one man and he is dead. His name for what it's worth, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, raised in Canada. He has a troubled criminal history and apparently had converted to Islam, clearly didn't understand what the faith is supposed to be about, radicalized probably himself, wanted to go to the Middle East.

How do we know that? Officials in Canada saw enough information about him to flag him and take his passport.

So, right now, there's a big coordinated effort going on between the U.S. and Canada to figure out how this man got to this point and what it means going forward.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STEPHEN HARPER, PRIME MINISTER, CANADA: We will not be intimidated. Canada will never be intimidated.

CUOMO (voice-over): Prime Minister Stephen Harper promising justice after what he calls, a terrorist act on Canada's capital.

(GUNSHOTS)

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! Move, move.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All the sudden I just hear a shot, and, just, pow!

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

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The 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.

(GUNSHOTS)

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

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

JOHN WINGROVE, REPORTER, "THE GLOBE AND MAIL": We are sort of flanking down the hallway. It looked like the guy 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: I had a chance to talk with Prime Minister Harper.

CUOMO: President Obama says we have to remain vigilant.

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 there are our neighbors and our friends.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CUOMO: The sun is now up here on the national memorial, on what is certainly not just a new day but a new reality here.

Let's bring in Deb Feyerick.

All right. We have two layers of analysis. The first is the shooter, who he is and how he got to this point relevant only for what it teaches us about detection and prevention. Otherwise, he is a meaningless individual as far as we're concerned. And then what does this mean about this threat here in Canada and in the U.S., going forward?

DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, both excellent questions. Look, treating terrorism is a very organic process. Canadian authorities believe they were doing the right thing by essentially confiscating this man's passport because he had an intention to go fight jihad.

Because they couldn't hold him, that was the flaw, that was the vulnerability. They could not detain him. They couldn't hold him. So, they had to keep him under surveillance. They had to monitor him the way they monitor 90 other people. That clearly will be a major topic of discussion.

Also, these lone wolf attacks, it's virtual impossible to stop, individuals that act on their own. Oftentimes, they may send out signals on social media, Facebook, Twitter, letting people know their intentions, their passion for extremism and radicalism.

But what authorities cannot do, is it's almost virtually impossible to know when they're going to strike, how they're going to strike, you know, whether the confiscation of the passport brought this man to the brink, brought them to the edge, whether he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.

Look, one of the things that you mentioned, Chris, and this is the whole lone wolf thing, is there's a lot of crazy out there and when you're dealing with these kinds of people, it's not simply that they think they're going to go out as heroes, but they also are pre- disposed to this kind of behavior.

There is a sort of psychosis in them, that they want to do something to be remembered by to fight for the cause.

CUOMO: The deranged, the disaffected, thinking that mistakenly Islam, as they see it, is some avenue to dignity for themselves.

FEYERICK: Well, that's exactly right. And as you mentioned, look, this is somebody who had a criminal history, sort of a low-level criminal but he was raised in what appears to be a very good family, his father's a businessman, his mother works for the immigration department here. So, he had all opportunities in order to succeed. There are reports also he went out to western Canada. He was working out there as a laborer.

So whether he was in search of himself, whether he just wasn't having very much success it's unclear. But a lot of these fighters, these terrorists, actually many of them are raised in decent surroundings. So, it's a balance.

CUOMO: Small-time guy but every intelligence expert I've spoken to on both sides of the border says this is a much bigger thing to work on than a group that wants to kill thousands with a big bomb.

FEYERICK: And look at what they've done, Chris. CUOMO: Yes.

FEYERICK: This entire town was shut down so one man, and now there are images of lawmakers barricaded inside parliament that are being used by ISIS propaganda. ISIS is taking credit for this simply because it succeeded. If it failed nobody would know with this. But you see the lockdown, this is what ISIS and all the other terrorists want.

CUOMO: Right. But at the same time, it's also a message of what a horrible definition someone can have of success and that's something that should certainly be condemned of anyone of sound mind.

Deb, thank you for the reporting. We'll check back in with you.

And as Deb was mentioning, imagine being a member of parliament in this massive building and gunfire just rocketing around inside of it, the sounds are so booming and not knowing where it was coming from or from how many.

One of the men who had to survive that is Senator Jim Munson. He's a member of a Liberal Party here in Canada. He was inside parliament during the attack.

Your wife, Senator --

JIM MUNSON, SENATOR, LIBERAL PARTY OF CANADA: Yes. Good morning. Nice to see you.

CUOMO: -- was near the memorial where it began.

MUNSON: She was just right behind the other side of memorial. She let me off at work yesterday morning, and was parked just before the light the memorial, saw a brown car parked there, unusually no flashing lights, saw the gentleman get out of the car, seemed rather strange, got to the passenger side of the car, picked up what appeared to her a blanket. And so, that's really strange, and watched him walk up and as she slowly went by the car there's a traffic jam, she looked up again, couldn't hear anything but saw maybe a flint of light.

As a gentleman was leaving, she saw him coming down what she thought was a pipe, but obviously the gun was wrapped in that blanket. So, it was unnerving for her, for sure.

CUOMO: Oh, absolutely. And you know, again, thank God that he had a sense of deranged purpose that didn't take him in her direction.

MUNSON: We could have had a worse tragedy here in Ottawa. We lost our innocence yesterday in the capitol. We recognize what happens in Washington with barricades and so on and so forth, and Westminster in London with the security of the machineguns and so on and so forth.

We have good security here, but it's an accessible place, accessible Parliament Hill. At least --

CUOMO: More than most capitols, right? I mean, you have millions of people who go through to visit. But the hill is used for yoga, and people see it as a place to hang out and relax and the security reflects that.

MUNSON: Right, but you know what? That should never change. That can't change. We'll probably have a bigger police presence, obviously, that will happen.

But we can't change the way we are as Canadians. We're in part of a coalition and we've got to expect these kind of things to happen in our country.

CUOMO: So, what happens, Senator, when you're in that building and you start hearing the booming?

MUNSON: First, before the booming, security guard ran in, we had a committee going on, and began to yell, "Get out, get out! There's a gunman here. Get out, get out." I thought it was surreal, it was not happening, there was no sense of panic.

But then, moments after that, we heard the pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, the sound of guns in the hall of honor. We thought it was outside, but it was inside. We went to a place in Parliament Hill and spent nine hours there, it was a minor inconvenience to what we're thinking of today in this country.

You know, you have lost a lot of soldiers. When we lose one, we hurt, and it's, right now there's a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier there, been there for years. Now we have a soldier who died on that Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He's a known soldier and as a nation we are grieving for him.

CUOMO: Well, I'll tell you -- in the U.S., when you lose one it hurts.

And today, we're planning a procession of members of parliament, organizing around the Cenotaph, the unmarked grave, and hopefully this becomes a gathering moment for you to figure out what to do going forward because look -- you know, the senator was a long time journalist by the way and covered a lot of the same issues we're dealing with today. It's easier to deal with an organized group that wants to kill thousands than stopping deranged people who want to kill one.

MUNSON: You can't arrest somebody for what he or she thinks. The gentleman in province of Quebec that ran over the two soldiers, the police were on to him all the way through but they took his passport away so he couldn't go to the place he wanted to go to kill, so he chose to kill here.

And this is the kind of society that we live in, in a free society and we should never back down from that. But I worry sometimes, sometimes, there's complacency. Somebody said to me, or I heard this morning on the radio, it was only one man and one gun. Well, it was only one man and one gun with JFK in 1963 which changed the face of the world. I don't want to overdramatize this but this is the reality. CUOMO: But also, look, and pinpoint of terror -- and not to ascribe

too much intelligence to the action that we saw here yesterday and Monday, but the goal of it is to create fear. What is more frightening to your daily reality, the idea someone will fly a plane into a building and kill thousands, or that someone randomly can come out from around a corner and kill you specifically?

I think the answer is obvious and that's why you have to figure out how to deal with the threat.

MUNSON: We're all looking over our shoulders, everybody now in this country. We thought an ocean separated us from the realities of the world in Europe and the Middle East. We thought a border separated us from some of the problems in the United States. Well, that's no more, and there are people who are radicalized in this country, and I expect we'll see some kind of random attack.

CUOMO: So, what do you do here, you have a burgeoning Muslim community by per capita, much bigger than in the United States. You have about 200,000 Muslims coming into the country a year. You have to presume, you know, predominantly they are people who just live their faith the right way.

MUNSON: Absolutely.

CUOMO: What do you do to deal with monitoring in such a balk situation?

MUNSON: Well, that's for the security and police to do. I think we have to show empathy today for the Muslim community because the Muslim community --

CUOMO: The true Muslim community.

MUNSON: Yes, absolutely, because they're being stereotyped and I think we have to be sensitized to their beliefs and what they are doing, and I think that security, police, social media, wherever we're at, that we've got to reach out to the Muslim community that we do care about.

CUOMO: Well, this is a situation obviously we keep saying Ottawa, four homicides last year, it is not a city that is used to being under the threat of great violence. But now, this was a wake-up call, we see the situation highly policed.

Senator, good luck --

MUNSON: Pleasure to talk to you.

CUOMO: -- on finding ways forward and the U.S. is coordinating heavily because this is the real threat we're dealing with.

MUNSON: It's good to have a good neighbor.

CUOMO: Senator, good to have you here and thank God you're safe and your wife as well, probably more important. MUNSON: Yes, absolutely. Thank you.

CUOMO: Alisyn, back to you.

CAMEROTA: Chris, it is fascinating and different to hear how differently their capitol operates than ours. And, again, to your point, only four incidents of violence last year.

CUOMO: Yes. And yet, even in the U.S. capital where things are supposed to be somewhat safer, people just hop the fence in our capitol, one of them got into the White House, happened again last night. The threat of small-timers doing small things that can kill people is very difficult to deal with and contend ways.

But we have to find ways, Alisyn. That's a challenge, and a big reason we're in Ottawa this morning.

CAMEROTA: Yes, we're going to talk to our security experts about that momentarily. Thanks so much, Chris.

Let's get over to John Berman. He's in for Michaela with some other top stories.

Hey, John.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Thanks so much, Alisyn.

Breaking overnight -- protesters call for Officer Darren Wilson to be arrested. This was a planned demonstration. It comes after Michael Brown's autopsy results were leaked, claiming the unarmed teen was shot at close range.

Now, some analysts suggest the findings corroborate Officer Wilson's story that he and the teen struggled in or near his patrol car before he shot Brown dead.

A 3-month-old girl from the United States was killed and eight others hurt when a car slammed into them at a Jerusalem tram stop. The driver identified police as a Palestinian from east Jerusalem, died after he was shot by officers as he tried to get away. Officials say they are treating this as a terrorist act. With they say the suspect had been locked up in prison for, quote, "terrorism."

The U.S. military will be tasked with training moderate Syrian fighters to defend Syrian territory rather than seize it back from ISIS. That is according to "The Washington Post."

The fighter will be flown to Saudi Arabia where they will be trained for eight weeks. The first units are expected to be deployed within six months. President Obama has made it clear he does not want American ground troops in Syria.

So, a mishap of sorts on the tarmac in Minneapolis. The two Delta planes clipped wings Wednesday night as they were taxiing away from the gate. I believe we have a picture of one of the passengers as he took it from the plane. There it is -- one flight was headed to Los Angeles with 171

passengers on board, the other headed to Louisville with 74 passengers. No one was injured but the planes were damaged and as a result, people were put on different planes bound for their destinations.

CAMEROTA: Yes, that's good. You can't fly when the ping is tilted up like that.

BERMAN: No, no, it's not supposed to work that way.

CAMEROTA: Yes, mishap in the tarmac -- I don't like those words together.

John, thank you.

We have more ahead on the Canada attack, the shooter's bizarre past and how it led to this violent end. What was his motivation? We'll break that down.

Plus, the White House's security scare went much better last time. We're happy to report. Another man jumps the fence but this time they released the guard dogs. He's facing charges. We'll show you what happened.

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CAMEROTA: This morning, we're learning the Ottawa shooter visited the U.S. at least four times. U.S. law enforcement now tracing his travels to try to interview the people that he came in contact with. They're looking for clues as to what might have motivated him to shoot and kill a Canadian soldier and open fire in the country's parliament.

Let's bring in CNN counterterrorism analyst and former CIA counterterrorism official, Philip Mudd, former FBI assistant director, Tom Fuentes, and, of course, Chris Cuomo will join us from Ottawa.

Phil, I want to start with you. Let's talk about some of the clues, at least that we're reading about the shooter's background.

According to media reports he was a bit of a petty criminal. He was mentally unstable. His friends described him as becoming more extreme. He talked about devils on earth and devils inside of him and he had his passport frozen by officials.

So, what does that tell you, Philip?

PHILIP MUDD, CNN COUNTERTERRORISM ANALYST: This tells me this is the same as 5,000 cases I saw at the FBI. That's the problem. You've got to do tiering of threat.

You're looking at so many cases, the public is looking at one in isolation today, the FBI at the Hoover Building in Washington is looking at 1,000, 5,000 of these today. You've got to look at individuals with this background and you got to play some poker. Which one's going to turn tomorrow and take a shot? That's what you

do when you're in the threat business day and that's why this is so frustrating. You just can't tell who is going to turn on that list of 1,000 or 5,000 every single day.

CAMEROTA: And so, Tom, the fact that he had his passport frozen, does that mean that they would have been monitoring him closely?

TOM FUENTES, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, it means they were monitoring him, but, you know, how closely is a matter of resources. You have, as Phil mentioned, thousands of people on these watch lists. The United States, the TIDE list, Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, maintained by National Counterterrorism Center, has 875,000 names on it, according to "The Washington Post" reporting.

So, you know, there's no way for these agencies to monitor closely. What is possible and the RCMP in Canada has a terrific outreach program, is to go to the mosque and have outreach in these communities because we've heard that this guy had trouble and the people in the mosque thought he was a troublemaker, and we saw that same thing with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston marathon bomber that was killed touring that week, that people in the mosque he went to threw him out because of the way he acted during prayer ceremonies.

CAMEROTA: You're right, people in mosques have been very helpful and instrumental to law enforcement to flag people within the mosque when they are becoming extremists.

But I want to play you something the Congressman Ed Royce told Erin Burnett last night about how many people are on the watch list. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. ED ROYCE (R), CALIFORNIA: One of the real challenges under British law and to some extent in Canada is that they're trying to monitor and follow known individuals with jihadist intentions, and trying to catch them in the act. And, of course, that's a very, very difficult thing to do, and Canada, there are 90 people on this list.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Philip, do we know how many -- 90 people on the list in Canada. Do we know how many people are on the list if there is such a list, the watch list here in the United States?

MUDD: This depends on how you count watch lists.

Look, let me give you a couple ways to think about this. There's a travel watch list -- anybody potentially who touches a terrorist, anybody who might have either purposely or inadvertently transferred money to a terrorist might be on a watch list just for a pull aside at the airport. That's a lot different than the kind of tiering you might do in the morning threat briefing at the FBI and you're sitting down saying, look, we've got to figure out top tier, not just who might have touched a terrorist but who merits something like 24/7 surveillance.

That's a very, very small list of people, because that's really difficult to do. It takes a lot of people to do it, and it's really expensive.

So, a lot of watch lists around but people like this are a dime a dozen, I hate to tell you. You can't follow all of them.

CUOMO: Right, so you know, listening to the conversation, Tom and Phil, weigh in on this perspective.

This is difficult. We get it. However, it is also very clearly the new and most distinctive threat that we have to deal with, not just in Canada but certainly in the U.S. On a lot of levels it would be easier for this to happen in the U.S. We know that the chatter is out there. We know that they are asking for this unsophisticated type to take up a deranged message and act on their own in a crude way.

So what do you do, Tom Fuentes? And then, Philip, give us your best take.

FUENTES: What you do, what we just mentioned with outreach in the community, try to get families, which we've had, report their sons to the police or the FBI, people in the mosque that think someone is maybe having mental problems and really isn't there because of true religious purposes but you know, that merits watching by law enforcement. So, you try to have the kind of outreach that people will report to you and let you know when someone's crossed the mind. The authorities can't watch everybody nor read everybody's mind to know when they go from thinking bad thoughts to doing bad things.

(CROSSTALK)

MUDD: Just from my perspective there's a couple of things you got -- there's a couple of things you got to think about here. One is the debate we heard after Edward Snowden, in a civil society in an open democracy, how much do you want your security services watching what people are saying online?

I don't know what this fellow said online, but I know there's a lot of people who use civil liberties in this country for hate speech. Should we be watching people who use hate speech as a way to spread a message that motivates people like that?

The second message, Chris, is really important, and that is -- if you're in the security service you want backup from your politicians. They've got to get out and say every time you have an incident like this, it's not an opportunity to go and ask what went wrong. Sometimes people just go bad and you have to have politicians say in a violent society with what we're seeing in Iraq, sometimes, bad things happen. And it ain't always because of security service makes a mistake.

CAMEROTA: Speaking of what happens online, I want to show you both and all of our viewer this is propaganda video that ISIS put out last summer that may help explain how Westerners like Canadians and Americans can get roped into this. This is a video that was reportedly put together by a Canadian convert to ISIS.

Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDRE POULIN, CONVERTED TO ISLAM: My brother in Islam here in Syria, I originally come from Canada.

I watched hockey. I went to the cottage in the summertime. I love to fish. I wanted to go hunting.

Then, (INAUDIBLE) guided me from the darkness of kurf, to the light of iman to Islam.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Tom, very quickly, I don't get it when I watch that video. It doesn't make sense to me, but he says he was guided to the light of Islam. And is that appealing to some people like this shooter who might be memory unstable?

FUENTES: Well, apparently, if you're a stupid, unstable 18-year-old, it sounds great to you.

CAMEROTA: Got it.

I mean, that's what -- that's who they're preying on, right, Phil?

MUDD: That's right.

In this case, what you're looking at is not somebody joining is. You're looking at an unstable 18 years old as Tom said, who is going out saying, I want to protect innocent women and children and there's other people like me out there. Let me go join.

CAMEROTA: Yes, Philip Mudd, Tom Fuentes thanks so much. It's always great to have your expertise. We appreciate it.

FUENTES: You're welcome.

MUDD: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: Over to Chris.

CUOMO: Alisyn, it's a shining light, the question is: who is shining the light on these people, when they approach what they think is Islam. That's one of the big challenges here.

Now, in Ottawa, as they look into this situation, to figure out why it happened, details are emerging, the investigation still very ongoing into why this Ottawa shooting happened at all, and what it means going forward.

What do we know about what this shooter's mission was ultimately? We have Ottawa's police chief joining us live to discuss.

Stay with us.

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