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Wolf

Israel-Hezbollah Conflict De-Escalating; Jordan Wants Proof Pilot Alive Before Releasing Female Bomber to ISIS; Battle Over Iran Sanctions; New Details on Final Moments of Flight 8501; Is Mitt Romney a Presidential Candidate?

Aired January 29, 2015 - 13:30   ET

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

ELISE LABOTT, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Yes, those clashes were on the Lebanese border, but the real tensions are in the Golan Heights where the prime minister says Iran is trying to build a new front of terror through Hezbollah in the Golan Heights area. As you know, it's been relatively quiet for decades. The warning is to Iran, don't change the rules of the game, you cannot have another front on the Golan. And in fact, that's why, Wolf, even though the Israelis are not admitting it, that's what that strike against those Hezbollah commanders and that Iranian general were about. They think they're trying to plan something on the Golan and Israel is not going to allow it.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: And Israel sent that message. That was a week ago. And Hezbollah sent a message to Israel yesterday, killing those two Israeli soldiers and injuring seven or eight others.

Nima, you're in Beirut. We know the leader of Hezbollah is expected to speak tomorrow. Any indication of what he might say?

NIMA ELBAGIR, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It is very difficult to read. He can be unpredictable at the best of times. But the sense is that this is an opportunity for Hezbollah to reassert their Lebanese-ness, to extract themselves from the broader geopolitical battles that are being fought with Iran and Syria. They've had a huge presence in Syria in the last few years, during the fighting back of the uprising there. This is the opportunity to remind the Lebanese people that they're a political force here, first and foremost. And Israel has given them that opportunity to turn back. That's how it's been read here, that Israel has pointed to a fork in the road. We are happy to put this at the feet of the people where we think this belongs, i.e., Iran and Syria, this is an opportunity you can take. People are starting to relax a little bit. Until the Hezbollah leader speaks, there won't be a sense these tensions have fully dissolved -- Wolf?

BLITZER: All right, Nima Elbagir, in Beirut, Elise Labott at the border, close in Israel, but she's close to Lebanon right now.

Thanks very much to both of you.

Up next, the Israeli prime minister's invitation to speak before a joint session of Congress on the situation with Iran. We're going to talk to Senator Bob Casey about the political uproar that has generated. We'll also talk about the battle over new U.S.-led sanctions against Iran. This is a complex but clearly critical issue.

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BLITZER: Welcome back to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Wolf Blitzer, reporting from Washington.

Another ISIS deadline passes, still no word of the Jordanian journalist or a Japanese journalist held hostage. Jordan wants proof that its pilot is still alive before releasing the female would-be suicide bomber. Even if she is released, it's not clear what that would mean for the Japanese journalist.

Joining us to talk about that and a lot more, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee overseeing the Middle East. He currently sits on the Senate Finance Committee as well.

What do you think about this proposed hostage deal? If it goes through, Senator, does it set some sort of dangerous precedent negotiating with terrorist groups like ISIS?

SEN. BOB CASEY, D-PENNSYLVANIA, & FORMER CHAIRMAN, SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE: I don't think necessarily, Wolf. I think it's a decision the Jordanian government has to make. I'd be the last one to say I could recommend a course of action. But they are a very strong and committed ally of ours, but also a very important part of the coalition that our government, led by President Obama and Secretary Kerry and others, have developed. The coalition is together now some 60 countries against ISIS. So and I'll say as well, the Jordanians have done almost super-human work when it comes to accepting refugees from Syria because of the horror that's played out in Syria. So they've borne a lot of the battle, so to speak. We just hope that they can have a resolution that that's in the best interest of the Jordanian people.

BLITZER: Yeah. The kingdom of Jordan deserves enormous credit, not only for the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, but earlier, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees, helping them survive.

Let's talk about this latest escalation of tensions between Israel and Hezbollah. Two Israeli soldiers were killed yesterday. A few days earlier, the Israelis went after a convoy. They killed some Hezbollah militants as well as an Iranian general there. The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, is blaming Iran for this escalating tension. What are your thoughts?

CASEY: Well, look, I think it's another reminder that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, one of the oldest, one of the most sophisticated and capable. And one of the reasons they have that capability, of course, is because they are funded by the Iranian regime. It's another reminder that even as we're debating how to approach the nuclear negotiations with Iran, that Iran, all the while, is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world. We know that. And it's played out for years. Hezbollah is not some far-off organization that our country is unfamiliar with. They not only have targeted Americans, they've killed Americans. By some estimates, Hezbollah has killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization, or maybe they're number two. They have a predominant influence not just in Lebanon, but in the region. The prime minister has every right to point the finger where he did, at the Iranian regime. And also Israel has every right to take action in retaliation.

BLITZER: You're blaming Hezbollah for the bombing, blowing up of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in the early 1980s, and the bombing of the Marine barracks outside of Beirut that killed 240 U.S. Marines, is that right?

CASEY: Exactly. And they -- so they've shown over decades now that they will engage in terrorism against anyone, at any time, anywhere. And that would not be possible or they would not be as capable were it not for the Iranian regime backing them up.

BLITZER: Are you with President Obama right now when it comes to his appeal to everybody in Congress to do a little pause right now, not pass additional sanctions, legislation against Iran, to give them some more time to see if there can be a nuclear deal with Iran? Are you with the president?

CASEY: Well, I was part of a letter that a number of Democrats signed. We worked together to send a letter to the president which outlined frankly our skepticism about the possibility of an agreement with Iran. I have real skepticism. We also outlined a number of our concerns. What we did say in that letter is that we wanted to give this process more time, at least until March 24th, so that a framework could be developed. We want to be optimistic. But I think it's a reasonable approach to take right now, but at the same time, I'm a sponsor of a bill -- a new bill on sanctions that just got through the Banking Committee today. We will hold that -- at least the group of us will hold that in abeyance, so to speak, until we get through that date in March. After that, I'm not sure -- I'm not sure it makes sense to -- to have a delay because we have to make sure that the Iranian regime knows that there's a bipartisan consensus here to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapons capability. And I emphasize that last word. And I think that's bipartisan, the right approach, even as we want to be hopeful about and optimistic about the chances that there could be an agreement.

BLITZER: I just want to be precise because we're out of time. There's not going -- in other words, if you have your way, any new anti-Iran sanctions legislation that will reach the president's desk between now and the end of March?

CASEY: That's correct. Or at least until the 24th of March.

BLITZER: OK. Just wanted to be precise on that.

Thanks very much for joining us, Senator Bob Casey, of Pennsylvania.

CASEY: Thanks, Wolf.

BLITZER: The disastrous events that led to the crash of AirAsia flight 8501 happened extremely fast. Now we're getting new details on the timeline and the person in control of the plane at the time of the crash.

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BLITZER: Indonesian officials are revealing new details of the terrifying final moments of AirAsia flight 8501. They say the co- pilot was flying the plane when things went terribly wrong, and they went wrong very fast.

Tom Foreman is with us right now.

What are we learning? What happened in those final moments?

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You said "moments," and these really were a matter of moments. It was three minutes and 20 seconds. Something like that maybe. The co-pilot was at the helm at that moment. The pilot was overseeing what he did. They very often trade back and forth. What we do know is more details of what happened at that time. The plane was wobbling to one side and they had already asked to go higher in this bad, bad weather. In then in fact, they started climbing very dramatically and the stall warnings started going off inside the cabin -- in the cockpit. That doesn't necessarily mean they were stalling because those warnings can be setoff if the plane simply starts doing a very dramatic climb like that or a dramatic decent. It doesn't necessarily mean it is stalling, but it means it's in the circumstances where a stall could occur. They ended up climbing from 32,000 feet to 37,400 feet in 30 seconds. So this is around twice the rate of climb that would you would ever expect from a plane like that. That's very aggressive and can set up the entire air stability of a plane like this in a very, very bad way, on top of which, the bad storm.

BLITZER: But the co-pilot clearly didn't have as many flying hours as the pilot. In a situation like that, wouldn't the pilot take charge?

FOREMAN: Well, he had about half as many. He was experienced. Not like he was a novice. I don't know that the pilot would necessarily take charge. You might think that might be the thing to do at the time. But we don't know yet what the pilot was doing. If they were experiencing some other problem, the pilot may have felt it was more important to address the other problems there. Again, a short period of time. Not like they endured this for 15 or 20 minutes.

BLITZER: Obviously, they've got a lot more investigation to do to get more information.

Tom, thanks very much.

FOREMAN: Thanks, Wolf.

BLITZER: Coming up, is Mitt Romney planning to run again for president of the United States? The answer is, at least a lot of folks believe, the answer is yes. He already is setting his sights on Hillary Clinton. Gloria Borger, Dana Bash, they're both standing by to discuss this and more. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BLITZER: So Mitt Romney is sounding more and more like a Republican candidate for the 2016 presidential election, even going after the presumed Democratic Party front runner, Hillary Clinton. At the speech last night at Mississippi State University, Governor Romney attacked the former secretary of state as clueless on relations with Russia. Romney said, and I'm quoting him now, "Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cluelessly pressed the reset button with Russia which smiled and then invaded Ukraine, a sovereign nation." He also argued, if elected, Clinton, he said, would prove inept on economic policy.

Let's talk about this and more with our chief political analyst, Gloria Borger; and chief congressional correspondent, Dana Bash.

A lot of the Republican candidates are setting their sights on Hillary Clinton.

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BLITZER: They assume she's going to be the Democratic nominee.

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: Right. Right.

BLITZER: It's never too early I guess, from their perspective, to go after here.

BORGER: Right. And from Romney's point of view, when you talk to people close to him, he feels he was mocked mercilessly after the last campaign for saying, for example, Russia was America's number-one GOP political enemy. He's talking now about Ukraine and events that unfolded in Ukraine.

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BORGER: There's a lot of that in all his speeches on foreign policy. He'll obviously take on Clinton on the economy and say that it hasn't recovered as quickly as it could have. It sure sounds like a candidate to me.

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah. Obviously, the big question is, is he going to run? If so, when is he going to decide? Larry King, our former colleague, said he ran into him in the airport a couple of days ago and said Romney himself said he was going to decide in the next two weeks. I'm told that's the exact timing, for lots of reasons, most importantly is because, because he has done this before, he gets that he needs to either pull the supporters in, pull the donors in, or let them go to one of the 10,000 other candidates out there.

And I'm also told, if he does this, he might not go along with what the other Republican candidates have been doing, which is just kind of continue on with the PAC. He probably will form some kind of PAC, but it will be something short of I'm running, something short of an exploratory committee, but very serious. BLITZER: Gloria, there's also speculation now that Hillary Clinton

may delay some kind of formal announcement. Everybody assumes Hillary Clinton is going to run, knows she's putting together a team right now.

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BORGER: Right.

BLITZER: -- who has been working for the president, he is leaving in a few weeks, and he's going to work for her, former White House chief of staff during the Bill Clinton administration. So what's her delay?

BORGER: You know --

BLITZER: Why can't she say, I'm running, here's the exploratory committee, here the PAC, the details, and tell other Democratic potential candidates this is it.

BORGER: If there's no pressure on her to get in the race from other Democrats because -- they're not saying, let me know or get out of the way. Everybody assumes she's in the race. If she doesn't have pressure from other Democrats -- I argue, let the Republicans fight amongst themselves and figure out when you're going to get in. People like us pay attention to when you form the exploratory committee or the PAC. Most people assume, OK she's running for president. It's not like she's going to be invisible, although she has been largely for the last month. She will be out there. So this is an argument going on internally in the campaign. She has to have a way to answer these charges, such as what we heard from Romney.

BASH: You're exactly right that --

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BORGER: That's right.

BASH: There's a story on CNN.com now about the split with Hillary, whether to do it sooner or later. I talked to people arguing for doing it later, like July, really late. And for one big reason, and that is that campaigning isn't her thing. She's not bad once she's in the groove, but what she learned, or maybe what the observers learned in watching her campaign for surrogates and candidates in the midterm election is that she was a little rusty.

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BORGER: She was rusty on her book tour, I would argue.

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BASH: Right. And that she -- that they believe, unlike Romney, she would be good as a governor, somebody in the role, and not a campaigner. So if she doesn't have to declare early, why would she? Why would she get out there and do something not that fun and not that necessary before she has to? BORGER: Well, the only reason is, it might make her better. It might

make her a better candidate when she's used to being before audiences day in and out. She could respond to charges personally. People like to get a look at you, whether it's a month later. I don't think in the large scheme of things it matters. You can't be the inevitable candidate. It's not a campaign plan. And they're very away of that, that they don't want this to be coronation. So they have to figure out a way, if she is not really running against a serious contender, how do you make it look like it's not a coronation. It's hard.

BLITZER: We'll leave it on that note and see if other Democratic potential candidates will stay on the sidelines or jump in while she mulls over it, at least publicly. We all assume she's going to run.

Guys, thanks very much.

That's it for me. Thanks very much for watching. I'll be back at 5:00 p.m. eastern in "The Situation Room."

For our international viewers, "Amanpour" is next.

For our viewers in North America, "Newsroom" with Brooke Baldwin starts right after a quick break.

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