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Amanpour

Syrian Government Forces Retake Qusayr; Verizon Phone Records Handed Over to Government

Aired June 06, 2013 - 15:00   ET

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

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour.

Tonight, Bashar al-Assad winning major battles in Syria. But will he win the war? Despite many predictions that he would not last, the Syrian leader has clung tenaciously to power by all means necessary. The clearest evidence, the city of Qusayr. After weeks of intense fighting, regime forces, backed by Hezbollah, retook the strategic city, which had been in rebel hands for over a year.

Qusayr is vital to both sides because of its location; just 6 miles from the Lebanese border, it gave the rebels a route to arms, food and medical supplies. And in a sign of who's really making hay out of the bloodbath in Syria, Iran and Hezbollah celebrated their victory in Qusayr along with the Assad regime.

U.S. Senator John McCain recently traveled to Syria and he came back with no doubt that the tide is turning in Assad's favor.

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SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZ.: We are seeing unfortunately a battlefield situation where Bashar al-Assad now has the upper hand and it's tragic, while we sit by and watch.

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AMANPOUR: And President Obama remains fiercely opposed to intervening in Syria, despite reshuffling his foreign policy team this week. The course of the war, though, remains far from certain.

The heavy outgunned opposition is not giving up. But they may next face a fierce offensive from Assad's forces in the strategically important city of Aleppo, which has been locked in a bloody stalemate for about a year.

So what does this all mean? In a moment, I'll speak with a reporter, one of the very few who's been in Qusayr since it fell.

But first, a look at the other stories we're covering tonight.

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AMANPOUR (voice-over): The hunt for terrorists takes to the telephone. With the government monitoring their calls, average Americans are asking Big Brother, can you hear me now?

And does President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping go to California, imagine Beijing having second thoughts about North Korea.

And giving its best friend a dose of tough love.

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AMANPOUR: All of that in a bit. But first we go straight to reporter Ali Hashem, who just left Qusayr. He spoke to me on the phone just as he reached the Syria-Lebanon border.

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AMANPOUR: Ali Hashem, welcome to the program. Thanks for joining me. Tell me how you got out and what you saw before you left Qusayr.

ALI HASHEM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It was today, morning, we went into Qusayr. Actually, we can say it's a destroyed city from its north, its south, the west to the east. It's just a city of rubble.

We -- I went around with the team that I was with all the day, and I wasn't able even to find one place that wasn't destroyed. I -- it was -- it just reflected the fierce battles that were fought over this and also the bombing that was taking place by the Syrian army and the Hezbollah on Qusayr.

AMANPOUR: Did you see any evidence of any remaining opposition forces? And what about civilians who may have been trapped, wounded?

HASHEM: Yes. Actually, I went -- as I told you, I went around; there is no fighters, opposition fighters anymore in Qusayr. We went all the places, even to the barracks, or what they used to call their headquarters. So I went -- the -- no one is there. Actually, even you can't hear any bullets. There is nothing that reflects that they are a -- kind of pockets of resistance in the city anymore.

So this regarding the opposition partners (ph). As for civilians, and this is the main question. This was a city with 50,000 people at least. And as it was said, up -- there were no civilians in this city anymore.

AMANPOUR: Ali, do you think that people are expecting the Assad forces to turn their sights on Aleppo next?

HASHEM: Are they going to Aleppo? This is another question, but you know, today, with what's going on in Turkey, it seems after the second -- a lot of confidence and where they held off is where allies maybe he might be able to at least not take the whole -- the whole area, maybe at least take back the border with Turkey.

And whatever he is able to do with the borders with Turkey, both the borders with Lebanon and already the borders with Jordan isn't doing that good, then he might be able to close any site, any spillover of weapons into Syria. (Inaudible) help in maybe, you know, endangering the presence of the opposition.

AMANPOUR: All right. Ali Hashem, thank you so much for joining me, just out of Qusayr.

HASHEM: My pleasure.

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AMANPOUR: And as we dig deeper into this situation, we turn now to photojournalist Robert King. He has been covering the Syrian war and spent time in Qusayr over the past year, but most recently he's been in Aleppo, where he met with opposition snipers who've made it their job to try to pick off and kill Assad forces.

Take a look at some of the dramatic reporting that he's just filed from there.

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ROBERT KING, PHOTOJOURNALIST (voice-over): Residents of Aleppo, still cautiously carrying on their day-to-day lives the best they can in the midst of a war zone.

Now that the battle has largely transformed into one fought by the snipers, the simple act of crossing the road can be deadly.

KING: Do you remember your first confirmed kill as a sniper?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (from captions): It was in Gendola inside a bus for shabiha. Upon hearing the detonation on the bus' door, I realized then, that's it. My hit had been confirmed. Afterward, we kept on shooting all of them.

KING: If you were looking through your scope and saw Bashar al-Assad, what would you (inaudible)?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (from captions): You can be sure that I won't kill him with bullets. I will grab his neck and suck his blood for the sake of all the children slaughtered by him.

KING: And he's willing to fight and die for freedom?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (from captions): Not only, but with my kids. I have nine sons. Two of my kids were martyred (ph). I'm willing to sacrifice all my sons for the sake of our freedom and dignity.

KING (voice-over): Only hours after this interview, that is exactly what happened, and he died for his cause.

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AMANPOUR: And Robert King joins me now from Istanbul.

Welcome back to the program. And let me get straight to the heart of the matter. You've just come out of there quite recently.

Do they feel that they are next on the list for a major Assad counteroffensive?

KING: Thank you for having me on your show. I tend to agree with you that, you know, they do feel that Assad will mount a offensive on their city, especially on the rebel-held areas. You know, they're still lacking basic supplies, medical supplies, weapons.

It's the same story that was taking place in al-Qusayr years ago and the same underfunded group of FSA fighters that have been taking on this government for the last -- working on the third year now.

AMANPOUR: Robert, I spoke to a fighter inside Qusayr just before the city fell, and he said, you know, we're trying our best but we really are outgunned. We have RPGs and AK-47s and Hezbollah and the Assad forces have missiles and air assets and heavy artillery.

And obviously, if the idea is to close off the Turkish border areas, as you heard our previous reporter say, they're not going to get any weapons even into the Aleppo area and into the areas that they hold right now.

KING: Yes, it's going to be a humanitarian disaster. You know, once again, we're going on the third year and the West has refused to try to establish any type of humanitarian corridor. You know, even in al-Qusayr, you had Dr. Kassim (ph) pleading to the international community to allow him to evacuate up to 300 wounded civilians.

And those pleas fell upon deaf ears. And Aleppo could be magnified by 100 times if not 1,000 times to the civilian population that still reside inside Aleppo.

AMANPOUR: Who are you seeing are the fighters there inside Aleppo?

And I guess related to that, obviously sniping as you described, the way the war is being fought there, is one of the most personal ways of war. You have to look down your sight and pick off somebody who you see, the shape of their head. It could be a man, woman or a child.

What has the war come to in Aleppo? Describe what it's like there.

KING: Well, you know, now it's become very, you know, personal security is an issue; there's many types of groups that are fighting against Assad, and there's also, you know, some internal fighting that has been taking place.

You have foreign fighters that are there. I personally didn't see large numbers. The snipers that I had interviewed were tailors, laborers and small business owners that picked up the weapons after the events that took place in Daraa, where the revolution began.

AMANPOUR: And that was more than two years ago now.

KING: They do their best, yes. So they do their best to identify the targets as in, you know, it's not in the snipers' interests on the Free Syrian Army side to snipe at civilians because a lot of these civilians are crossing over from rebel-held territory into Assad-controlled territories to work, to buy goods that they normally are not allowed -- they can't find in rebel-controlled areas.

AMANPOUR: And what about the morale of the fighter who you were with? Do they sense that they can keep going and they're going to go onto victory? Or do they see the reality of being outgunned, of no intervention and now they've seen Qusayr fall?

KING: I -- you know, they're definitely -- know they're outgunned and outnumbered. It's kind of hard, when you have, you know, reported Russian military advisers conducting this fight with the ground support of Hezbollah. So they lack basic training, basic skills, basic military tactics. You know, they're making do with what they have.

But I -- they understand that if they lose, they're going to be slaughtered. They're not going to be -- there's no amnesty for the fighters within the FSA. And they're very aware of that fact. So they will probably fight to their death. And if Aleppo falls, they'll retreat into neighboring towns and villages and try to regroup.

AMANPOUR: Robert King, thank you very much for your insight and, of course, both sides fear that there will be no mercy if either side wins.

And after a break, we'll turn from the war in Syria to what the Bush administration used to call the war on terror. In the Obama White House, they have dropped that controversial phrase, but they're still using some of the same controversial weapons, including the telephone records of average American citizens. Big Brother on the Potomac when we come back.

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AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program. A secret court order requires one of America's largest telephone companies to hand over its data, its call data, to the United States government. The U.K. paper, "The Guardian," published a copy of the court order last night, revealing that the Verizon Corporation must provide telephone records for as many as 121 million domestic customers.

If you're a Verizon customer, this means the National Security Agency headquartered in Maryland knows who you are, who you're talking to and how long your call lasts. Such warrantless surveillance began under the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks.

The secret program was exposed in 2006 and the following year Congress authorized the program under the supervision of a special court order, the FISA court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, responsible for the secret order disclosed last night. It's the first we've seen that the Obama administration is continuing this Bush administration practice on such a massive scale.

Jimmy Gurule was a senior law enforcement official under President George Bush, specializing in terrorist financing and he joins me now.

Thank you very much. Welcome to the program.

JIMMY GURULE, FORMER UNDERSECRETARY OF ENFORCEMENT, U.S. TREASURY: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

AMANPOUR: So is this fine? Is this great? Is this what the government should be doing to stamp out the threat of terrorism, prevent a Boston Marathon bombing? Is this what we are left with now?

GURULE: No, I think it's actually just the opposite. I think it's a blatant abuse of government power and perhaps a rubberstamping of this abuse of power by the FISA court.

The statute, the FISA statute specifically requires the court to find that the phone records, the phone data is relevant to an international terrorism investigation. And to me, it's inconceivable that the phone records of tens of millions of Americans could all be relevant to a terrorism investigation.

AMANPOUR: So let's just break this down so that we understand what we're talking about. Under this exposed mining that we've just seen, metadata mining, what can the government do? Can it listen to everybody's phone calls? What is it collecting?

GURULE: Well, it could. But in this particular case, the data that was collected was information regarding who Americans were calling from their phone, who was calling that particular phone, the days when these conversations were held and the length of the telephone conversations.

And this was done, again, with respect to all, you know, tens of millions of Americans. This data was collected with respect to this very large group and population of American citizens.

AMANPOUR: And now there is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, who's now claiming that the program was used to stop a terrorist attack in the United States.

Can you for the life of you think what he was talking about? Because it's certainly not been made public.

GURULE: Well, that's true, and but further and even more importantly, that's not how we justify the issuance of these types of court orders, not by the results. We don't look at the results and then come back and say, well, look, we found something positive. We found evidence of criminal activity, therefore the order was lawful.

Instead, there were specific legal standards that had been established by statute. And the court must find that those legal standards have been met for the court order to be legal in the first instance.

AMANPOUR: So you know, many polls show that certainly over the years since 9/11, you know, a certain majority of Americans have felt that, you know, in the interest of national security, in the interest of their own safety, in the interest of finding the bad guys, you know, it might not be too much of a hardship to give up some personal liberty.

How do you -- how do you explain that? And which way does this program look like it's going? Is it here to stay?

GURULE: Well, first, we're a democratic society that's governed by laws and legal principles, not by men. And so the -- it's important that the government comply with the law, that it comply with the legal standards that have been set by statutes that have been enacted by Congress.

And in this particular case, there is an appearance, at the very least, that these standards have been liberally construed; there's been an abuse of power. And the FISA court has not served as an effective check and balance on that abuse of power by the NSA.

AMANPOUR: And what about, you know, they say they're not listening to the calls, but the government could be secretly listening to calls. And they could be reading emails, right?

GURULE: Well, that's the concern. If there's an abuse of power here, there's certainly reason to believe therefore that there could also be an abuse of power with respect to the intercepting of communications, the actual telephone conversations.

With respect to physical searches based upon reason to believe that evidence of the terrorism that will be helpful to a terrorism investigation. So the broader question here is the implications. Is this an isolated situation? Or is this business as usual with respect to the NSA and the government in its efforts to combat the threat of terrorism?

AMANPOUR: Well, you've been on the inside. Is this something that's here to stay? Or is it isolated?

GURULE: Well, I think it's here to stay unless Congress intervenes and amends the statute to make it more difficult to obtain these types of court orders, to use a language that's not as vague and as ambiguous as the term "relevant." And "relevant," obviously, can be construed quite broadly. And apparently it has been here.

And further, I think it's important that the courts should be required to make a specific finding with respect to each of these phones and the subscribers, that they're linked to a terrorism investigation. They can't be lumped together in the tens of millions and a single court order justify the seizure of tens of millions of phone records related to American citizens.

AMANPOUR: You know, I'm really having a little bit of a sort of a brain check here, because I recall in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, everybody was saying, wow, you know, we just couldn't have got Tamerlan Tsarnaev's phone records or his -- what he was doing online or whatever because there's so much out there to get.

But you're now telling me that there's so much that's been drawn in with a fishing net. So if they're doing that, why couldn't they have at least figured out what Tamerlan Tsarnaev was up to?

GURULE: Well, you can't have it both ways. I mean, the government can't, on the one hand, say, oh, geez, it was just too difficult to get a court order to obtain the information with respect to the terrorist bombers in the Boston city bombing case, but on the other hand, they've been able to obtain a court order to seize the phone records of tens of millions of Americans.

And further, they have been doing this repeatedly for over seven years.

AMANPOUR: Jimmy Gurule, thank you very much indeed for your insight. Appreciate it.

And after a break, President Obama's foreign policy takes a left turn -- geographically, at least, when he flies to California to meet China's President Xi Jinping. It's the pivot heard around the world, especially in the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea. Some tough love for the Supreme Leader when we come back.

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AMANPOUR: And finally tonight, the setting will be idyllic when President Obama sits down with China's President Xi Jinping for an informal get-to-know-you-better in California this weekend. And yet very thorny issues, such as North Korea, are sure to be on the picnic table.

And imagine a world where Beijing now finally may be losing patience with Pyongyang as Washington has. Ever since the Korean War, China has indulged North Korea's erratic behavior, its saber-rattling and nuclear threats against both the South and the United States.

But according to Kurt Campbell, an architect of the administration's so-called pivot to Asia, China may be doing a bit of a pivot of its own, away from Pyongyang. Listen to what he told me this week on this program.

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KURT CAMPBELL, FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR EAST ASIAN AND PACIFIC AFFAIRS: I think the Chinese have just about had it with North Korea. They recognize that the steps that they have taken, nuclear, provocations, are creating the context for more military activities on the part of the United States and other countries that ultimately are not in China's best strategic interests.

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AMANPOUR: And in that vein, Reuters has reported on a cool meeting between Chinese and North Korean officials in a rare show of tough love, Beijing pressured its pugnacious partner to halt its nuclear testing, we're told, while the North apparently said no way.

But there's a slight glimmer of hope on the tense horizon. North and South Korea are now planning to hold talks for the first time in over two years, perhaps as early as next week. And this might lead to reopening the Kaesong industrial zone, which is just near the DMZ, the one joint commercial project between North and South.

It was closed back in April amid the much ballyhooed North Korean threats of advanced missile testing.

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AMANPOUR: And that is it for tonight's program. Meantime, you can always contact us on our website, amanpour.com. Thanks for watching and goodbye from New York.

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