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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown
White House May Have Received Hints of Terror Attacks Before September 11
Aired May 15, 2002 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good evening again. I'm Judy Woodruff sitting in for Aaron Brown. Since September the 11th, there has been a feeling that the best thing to do is move on, get back to normal, try not to look back.
But over the past few days, we have seen documents emerging about hints before the 11th that an attack might have been in the works, and tonight we got late word about what the President himself was told before al Qaeda launched its murderous plan.
We look at these hints, not to point fingers. This is a case where looking to the past may help the future safer for all of us - may make the future safer. And so, our whip begins tonight with that late story from the White House. John King is covering it, John the headline.
JOHN KING, SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Judy, we learned tonight for the first time that in the weeks just prior to the September 11th strikes, President Bush was warned in his daily intelligence briefing about the possibility, emphasis on possibility, that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network could try to hijack a U.S. based airliner.
Now officials say the information was very vague and that there was no information at all about the possibility a plane would be turned into a bomb, as was the case on September 11th.
The White House officials say appropriate agencies were notified. They say the President, that was all the information the President had and he did everything appropriate at the time, likely to raise questions in the Congress though. Judy.
WOODRUFF: All right, John King, and we'll get right back to you in just a moment; an intriguing story bringing together the Secret Service and American schools out to stop school shootings, Kathy Slobogin covering that tonight, Kathy a headline.
KATHY SLOBOGIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Judy, school shootings like Columbine, West Paducah, Jonesboro, don't have to happen. Now the government has a new how-to manual for preventing them.
WOODRUFF: All right, Kathy, and we'll talk to you shortly as well. Now to CNN's Technology reporter Bruce Francis on why high tech has Hollywood running scared, Bruce, the headline.
BRUCE FRANCIS, CNN TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT: Judy, tonight "Star Wars" fans are waiting in line to see "Attack of the Clones" but some fans aren't waiting in line at all. They're going online and downloading it. It's Hollywood's biggest fear these days, but it also just might be the computer industry's saving grace. Judy.
WOODRUFF: Thanks, Bruce, and we'll see you a little later. Also tonight, the story of a Senator who became a majority leader at lightning speed, who would go on to become a president, Lyndon B. Johnson. We'll talk with author Robert Caro on his latest LBJ biography, a book so massive it could double as a barbell.
And it is a strange story indeed that can bring together Mullah Omar, "Attack of the Clones" and the murder of journalist Danny Pearl. Strange perhaps but an important one that we will try to put together tonight. We're going to talk about the power of technology at its most dangerous and most uncontrollable, all that coming up.
But we begin with the news from the White House that President Bush knew that al Qaeda was planning to hijack a U.S. airliner and he knew it before September the 11th. Let's go back to the White House and CNN's John King, who begins our coverage tonight. John.
KING: And, Judy, we want to be very careful in how we say this because of the potential sensitivities. But the White House is disclosing for the first time tonight that the President was warned in his intelligence reports last summer about the possibility that al Qaeda might try to hijack a U.S. based airliner.
Now U.S. officials telling us that a hijacking was a number of a range of options in the President's daily intelligence briefing, as officials raised concerns with the President and other senior U.S. officials about the possibility. They viewed it as the increasing likelihood that the bin Laden network would try to launch an attack, either on the United States or on U.S. interests overseas.
Now officials stress that first and foremost, the appropriate agencies were notified about the possibility of a potential hijacking and they also say though that there was no information at all about a specific date, about a specific target, about a specific airline, and most importantly they say, there was no information at all that this would be the use of a hijacking to then turn the airplane into a bomb, as what was done on September 11th.
U.S. officials say it was very vague. It was considered credible but not specific. They say the President made sure this information was passed on to appropriate agencies and that he did all he could. Of course, it comes at a time when there are questions in the Congress about whether the government was prepared for what happened on September 11th, so it's likely to be debated and questioned in the days and weeks ahead.
Again, for the first time tonight, the White House acknowledging the word "hijacking," the potential of a hijacking was raised in the President's intelligence reports in the summer just prior to the September 11th attacks. Judy.
WOODRUFF: John, are they saying at the White House, why they didn't let the public know before now that the public - I mean that the President was briefed, was informed, that there might be an al Qaeda hijacking?
KING: No they are not and that will raise questions, because this comes at a time when there are questions being raised in Congress, because of a memo from an FBI agent that you'll discuss later in the show, discussing the possibility that terrorists might be training in U.S. flight schools. Because of the arrest of that suspect, Zacarias Moussaoui, who many believe would have been among the hijackers had he not been in custody.
The White House has said in the past and sources telling us tonight that dating back to the Clinton Administration, the President's daily intelligence reports from time to time do raise the volume, if you will, about the possibility of an al Qaeda attack.
What is new to us tonight is that we are told specifically that the word "hijacking" was used, that the President was told there was a possibility the al Qaeda network would try to hijack a U.S. based airliner. That, of course, will be significant because of what happened on September 11th.
Officials also saying though that the word "hijacking" has a very different meaning now after September 11th, now that we know the horror of what happened, planes turned into weapons, than it did when it was reached here at the time, and they also stress again the information was very general.
There was no specific date, no specific target, no specific information at all, just reporting. Again, they call it chatter in the intelligence community that a hijacking was among the range of possibilities the al Qaeda network might use.
WOODRUFF: All right, John King at the White House. And as John just mentioned, the FBI had another concern about foreign students at U.S. flight schools and what they may have been studying. For the very latest on that, CNN's Kelli Arena has been working on the story.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KELLI ARENA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Osama bin Laden's name was specifically mentioned in a memo written by an FBI agent in Phoenix last summer, urging headquarters to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in flight schools. It's just the latest bit of information to trickle out about the classified memo, which came to light back in October.
SEN. BOB GRAHAM (D-FL), INTELLIGENCE CHAIRMAN: It was directed at flight schools in the Arizona area, which were alleged to have an unusual number of Arab students and the suspicion that they had been sent there in a coordinated plot by Osama bin Laden.
ARENA: The mention of bin Laden did not lend special credence to the memo, as he's been at the top of the terror radar screen since 1993. But FBI Director Robert Mueller last week admitted headquarters gave the memo too little attention and offered this defense.
ROBERT MUELLER, FBI DIRECTOR: There are more than 2,000 aviation academies in the United States. The latest figure I think I heard is something like 20,000 students attending them, and it was perceived that this would be a monumental undertaking without any specificity as to particular persons.
ARENA: But consider this. There was a note sent from an agent in Minneapolis about Zacarias Moussaoui, suggesting he might be planning to fly something into the World Trade Center. That sounds pretty specific. But several officials point out it was merely speculation at the time.
MUELLER: Red flags went up. The agent in Minneapolis did a terrific job in pushing as hard as he could to do everything we possibly could with Moussaoui, but did we discern from that that there was a plot that would have led us to September 11th? No.
ARENA: Moussaoui, you may recall, is in U.S. custody and investigators believe he was supposed to be the 20th hijacker. The FBI is undergoing a major overhaul, shifting its focus from crime fighting to intelligence gathering and it's going to spearhead the fight against terrorism from headquarters, not from field offices.
NANCY SAVAGE, PRESIDENT, FBI AGENTS ASSOCIATION: We know that it still takes a case agent to make a case and I don't think anyone's trying to change that. They just want to make sure that all of the information is coalesced in a central point, because these are national and international rings.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ARENA (on camera): While the basic outline of the reorganization was made public months ago, specifics are still being ironed out. Mueller is meeting with special agents from around the country this week to fine tune his plan. Judy.
WOODRUFF: All right, Kelli Arena, thanks very much. I know you've been working on this story for some days. We want to bring in now Virginia Senator George Allen. We had asked him on the program originally to talk about former President Jimmy Carter's visit to Cuba, but that was before these stories broke tonight, and we are grateful, Senator, for your versatility. We want to point out that you are formally dressed because you've just come from an event honoring former President Reagan. Nancy Reagan is in town.
SEN. GEORGE ALLEN (R), VIRGINIA: That's right. The Congressional gold medal.
WOODRUFF: We appreciate your being with us. Senator, this new information that the President did get a briefing in the weeks leading up to September the 11th, with strong suggestion that al Qaeda was planning a - might be planning a hijacking, what does this tell us? Should the administration have done more since it knew more than we now - we now know that it knew more.
ALLEN: The administration did everything that they could. The President is constantly getting briefings. The administration has known that al Qaeda was a terrorist group. We had seen al Qaeda being suspected very strongly in other terrorist attacks over the years, even prior to this administration. The administration did everything they could with that information.
I think what we should not do here, and I think you've been reporting this very responsibly, is start trying to blame Americans. Our FBI agents, our CIA, whether it's overseas or FBI here and law enforcement did the best they could with the information they get and their systems. In fact, the fact that Moussaoui was arrested showed that.
WOODRUFF: But when you put together the briefings the President was receiving on the one hand. On the other hand, what FBI agents were finding out, the arrest of Moussaoui, it's so easy to look back. We do have 20/20 hindsight.
ALLEN: Sure.
WOODRUFF: But is it legitimate at least to ask questions about whether more could have been done?
ALLEN: Of course. I think as we go forward, we are asking questions and we're also looking at ways to make it better. One of the things we need to do is adopt and utilize technology that is used in the Enterprise systems to manage this data, to coalesce this data, to allow interoperability between local and state and federal law enforcement agencies from Customs, from FAA.
So that when somebody is on a student visa and they don't know where they are but all of a sudden they're arrested for something in Florida or they're taking a course in flying or anything untoward, that information is flagged and it's not only a specific agent, but also supervisors, and technology can help us manage the literally thousands of bits of information that are suspicious.
WOODRUFF: So we can, I think we can count on the fact that there will be more questions asked in the Congress among your colleagues.
ALLEN: More questions will be asked, but most importantly is what do we do in the future to make sure that our law enforcement agents can utilize technology to help them protect us and secure our safety.
WOODRUFF: Senator very quickly, we had asked you originally on the program, as we said, about former President Jimmy Carter's trip to Cuba. You've been very critical of this trip, and yet in his speech last night, he forcefully asked the Cuban president, the Cuban people to change their system of government.
ALLEN: Well first, I was disappointed that former President Carter breached the trust of the secret briefings, top secret briefings, as far as the biological potential for offensive weapons from the biotech facility in Cuba. Now...
WOODRUFF: You're saying he breached?
ALLEN: Sure. He got a top secret briefing that is accorded to all former presidents and he goes down there, believes whatever Castro and his minions say, and say "I asked the United States officials if they had any evidence" and they said "no." Now that was unfortunate, especially for someone who was President of the United States.
His speech last night, he did touch on some good things, and I'm glad he did. For example, he talked about the Varela Project where there's 10,000 individuals in Cuba asking for a referendum. But you know what, on TV right now in Cuba what they might see, they see former President Carter and Fidel Castro at a baseball game.
We need a hardball foreign policy not softball, and you know he mentioned some good things but I don't think it was forceful. You know, I just came from an event for Ronald Reagan. When Ronald Reagan went to the Berlin Wall he said: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall." Jimmy Carter goes, President Carter goes to Cuba and what he does is he tears down American policy as far as our embargo, to try to get those reforms.
WOODRUFF: But if he were sitting here tonight, I believe he would say it's one thing to continue to press the Cubans to change the leadership, to change the system of government, but it's another thing to look at this embargo and to raise serious questions about whether it's had any good effect.
ALLEN: President Bush is the President of the United States and we should not have our country looking divided with a country such as...
WOODRUFF: But the White House signed off on this trip, I've heard.
ALLEN: If the White House didn't let him go, he would have had hissy fits over not being able to go. He was going down there and I think some good could have come from it and some may, but unfortunately I think Fidel Castro got the photo op and propaganda that he wanted out of it.
WOODRUFF: All right, Senator George Allen, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, we thank you very much for being with us tonight.
ALLEN: My pleasure, Judy.
WOODRUFF: Good to see you, we appreciate it.
ALLEN: Thank you.
WOODRUFF: To the Middle East now where Yasser Arafat took a step today to address American and Israeli demands for reform in the Palestinian Authority. In a speech today, Arafat called for new elections, a restructuring of his cabinet, a crackdown on corruption, and he said he would take additional steps to prevent acts of terror. The speech was received cautiously by the White House and skeptically by the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Coming up next on NEWSNIGHT, how schools can tell the warning signs of a student who might turn into a killer.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
WOODRUFF: A story of hindsight led our program tonight. We pick up the thread with a very different story that also involves the notion that death and bloodshed could have been prevented.
It is a litany of towns and tragedies, Jonesboro, West Paducah, Littleton, small towns now known across the nation because of a deadly school shooting. No one can turn back the clock, of course, but the Secret Service has been working with the Federal Education Department on a guide that school authorities can use, what warning signs to look for that may stop a troubled child from becoming a killer. Once again, here's Kathy Slobogin.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Jack said he has to, she better get away or something like that because he was talking about people in his band and how he's going to obliterate everybody. I don't know, like blow them up.
SLOBOGIN (voice over): What should happen when a student brings this kind of information to a teacher?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: With everything that's going on, all the violence and all the school shootings, how could this be any different, you know?
SLOBOGIN: This simulation is a training video the Education Department and the Secret Service will take to schools around the country this summer. It's part of a guide to prevent school shootings like those at Columbine. It will be released in the next week.
The headline is that most school shootings are preventable. Experts in the Secret Service studied 37 school attacks and found a predictable path to violence that can be blocked if adults know what to look for. Two-thirds of the shooters had no history of violence, but two-thirds felt bullied or persecuted, three-fourths were depressed or suicidal, two-thirds had a history of gun use.
Secret Service experts found that nearly all the attackers told friends of their plans, yet none of those friends told adults. Not one of the school shooters had a strong trusting relationship with a grownup.
The Education Department guide says schools have to promote a climate of safety, where every student feels connected to at least one adult in authority and where students can come forward with information without fear of reprisal. Teasing and bullying should not be acceptable as part of the school culture. The guide contains a checklist of behavior to look for, as well as a blueprint for how to investigate threats. Although many schools have responded to the threat of violence with heightened security and zero tolerance policies, the guide says such measures are ineffective. Suspending a student who makes a threat could even backfire if he returns to school armed and angry. The report says fewer than one in five school shooters made an overt threat to their target before attacking.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SLOBOGIN (on camera): Far more effective, the guide says, is creating a school atmosphere where troubled kids can be detected and helped. Judy.
WOODRUFF: Are federal authorities confident, Kathy that they've got a handle now on a way to find out who these kids are?
SLOBOGIN: I think they really do. You know, they've reported before that there isn't really such a thing as a profile of a school shooter, but there is a profile of behavior that these kids, a path that these kids typically follow before these events erupt, and they really feel that if adults are on the lookout for this kind of behavior, that they can prevent most of these.
WOODRUFF: All right, Kathy Slobogin, thanks very much. And with us now someone with, I'm sad to tell you, a world of experience in this area. Paul Mones is an attorney and the author of "When a Child Kills." He's in Portland, Oregon. Paul Mones, thank you for taking the time to be with us.
PAUL MONES, ATTORNEY/AUTHOR: Thank you. Good to be here.
WOODRUFF: What do you think is new about the information that you and others doing this kind of research are able now to provide to educators, to teachers and others who work with young people?
MONES: Well, I think first of all, a lot of the stuff in the report that's just come up has been known for a long time. After the Columbine shooting, the Federal Government commissioned, as well as a number of foundations commissioned a number of studies which schools throughout the country already have.
The thing that's essentially new here is the absence of a strong line on zero tolerance. Zero tolerance really became the drum with which many schools thought they were going to have to follow to prevent school shootings, and I think it turned out that the net that was created by the use of zero tolerance got too many kids in and...
WOODRUFF: Let me just interrupt you...
MONES: Sure.
WOODRUFF: ... and ask you what do you mean by zero tolerance? What are you referring to when you use... MONES: Zero tolerance, the way it was interpreted after Columbine was kids who drew pictures of guns, kids who joked about guns, kids who brought nail files to school, kids who wrote stories about violence. All of those kids were brought into the principal's office, often with fairly rigid suspension guidelines, and you really weren't getting the kinds of kids that really are much more at risk for committing violence. And so you were bringing in a whole bunch of kids who really weren't the ones that needed to be addressed.
WOODRUFF: So how do you distinguish between the ones who were drawing pictures and those, you know, who have no harmful intention and those who may be seriously thinking about doing something?
MONES: Sure, well there's a collection of behaviors and unfortunately one of the things that the report doesn't focus on is that by the time you start looking at somebody in high school, for many of these kids, it's a little too late.
Some, a lot of the mental health research is looking at the fact that we can start tracking kids early on and some of the behaviors looking at kids in fourth and fifth grade is really where we want to start intervention.
But specifically, the factors that you want to look at are, have threats been made over a long period of time? Have the threats not only been verbalized but have the threats been carried out in any way? Have people seen this person use guns, do target practice? Have they enunciated the threat repeatedly about a certain person or a certain group?
Those are some of the factors, which over a longer period of time one can see. The problem is, is that - yes, go on.
WOODRUFF: Do you mean to suggest that literally as young as fourth or fifth grade, that it's possible to identify students, young people -
MONES: Well, the kids are...
WOODRUFF: ... who may be on a pathological, a path to do something dangerous?
MONES: Oh most definitely. Yes. In fact, the research on juvenile homicide shows that we contract conduct disorder behavior starting actually when kids are around eight or nine years old. The problem is, is putting the resources in. We know these kids because they have what's called an ascending level of basically anti-social behavior.
It starts with bullying kids in the lunch room. It moves on to more aggressive behavior on the school yard, and then these discussions follow with more graphic illustrations of violence.
WOODRUFF: But let me just though come back to my earlier question. You know for educators, for people who work in schools and other places, how does one or is it possible to distinguish between a student who may be seriously planning something and somebody who's just making idle conversation?
MONES: I think on a certain level we really make ourselves feel better to think that we're going to be able to prevent a school shooting. What the most you'll be able to do is look at kids who have what would be considered a high risk of committing a violent act, a higher than normal risk.
I don't think we're going to be able to get those kids on any kind of guidelines who are definitely going to commit an act of violence, but rather you will get kids who will fall more into the high risk category.
WOODRUFF: All right.
MONES: So for example, you're going to find - yes, go ahead.
WOODRUFF: I was just going to say, so those are the kids who would be most likely monitored. You would want to have monitored?
MONES: And I think you really want to monitor them before they get to high school though.
WOODRUFF: Right. Paul Mones, we appreciate that, and that of course raises all sorts of other questions that we hope we can address at another time, but thank you very much for joining us tonight.
MONES: No, problem. Thank you.
WOODRUFF: Thank you. A quick update now on the Dontee Stokes story, he's the Baltimore man accused of shooting a priest he once accused of molesting him. Stokes made his first court appearance by video hookup. The judge deferring a request for bail until Stokes undergoes a psychological evaluation. The victim, Father Maurice Blackwell, remains in serious condition in a hospital in Baltimore.
Next on NEWSNIGHT, we will talk about one of the titans of 20th Century American politics, Lyndon Johnson.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
WOODRUFF: Author Robert Caro is out with his latest biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson, all 1,200 pages covering the years when he became master of the Senate.
Caro comes to the conclusion that LBJ was second only to Lincoln as a champion for Black Americans, and yet on the very next page comes this anecdote, LBJ asking an employee whether he minded being called "boy" or worse, instead of his proper name. When Robert Parker cautiously suggested that yes, he did mind, LBJ exploded and used a word a lot uglier than "boy."
Well it seems like a contradiction, but it is just one of the countless details that Caro uses to give a complete picture of a great leader, but also a human being with human flaws. Robert Caro is with us now and we thank you for joining us.
ROBERT CARO, AUTHOR: Nice to be here, Judy.
WOODRUFF: Would there have even been a Civil Rights Act of 1957 if it hadn't been for Lyndon Johnson?
CARO: No. You know, no Civil Rights Act had passed the Senate since reconstruction, in almost 90 years, and when Johnson sets out in 1957 to pass it, the south still has all the power in the Senate. They're the chairmen of almost every major committee. They have the filibuster. It seems just impossible that anyone is going to get a Civil Rights Bill through.
WOODRUFF: So what caused him to change his mind? He was against it, as you say, right up until then.
CARO: With Lyndon Johnson everything, as you said before, is complicated. With Civil Rights, it's a complication between compassion and ambition. I believe that he truly wanted to help poor people, particularly poor people of color all his life.
I think I know that because when he was only 21, he asked to drop out of college for a year to make money. What he does is to teach in a Mexican-American school in a little Texas town called Petulia (ph). I wrote, no teacher had ever cared if those kids learned or not. This teacher cared.
The reason I felt that I knew the compassion was true was that he didn't only teach the kids. He taught the janitor. The janitor wanted to learn English. His name was Tomas Corondado. He said, "Johnson bought me a textbook. After school every day, we would sit on the steps of the school outside. Johnson would pronounce a word. I would repeat. Johnson would spell. I would repeat." But as long as Johnson felt, you know, he also -- the other thing said about Johnson from the day he got Washington, all he wanted was to be president. For a long time, for 20 years, the ambition and the compassion were in conflict. It wasn't until they were both pointing in the same direction that he started to move for civil rights.
WOODRUFF: But the question I have among many is that how could somebody capable of the things -- the ruthless things that you described he did in the first two Johnson books...
CARO: Yes.
WOODRUFF: ...also be someone of compassion?
CARO: With Johnson, you know, I have a line, he was a man of enormous passions. And they weren't any less powerful, because sometimes they were opposite. The racism that you described occurred. You know when he was a congressman of the United States, he used to play tricks on black gas station attendants. There was a stereotype in the hill country that all African-Americans were afraid of all snakes. So Johnson and his friends would catch a snake, sometimes a harmless snake, sometimes a rattlesnake, put it in the trunk of his car, and drive into a gas station.
And he would say my spare tire in the trunk seems flat. Would you take a look. One time in Austin, one of the black attendants got so angry, he lifted a tire iron. He said, "I'll make you bow tie out this." And this was Johnson, who was a congressman. This is the man who really did more than any other white government official in the 20th century help black Americans.
WOODRUFF: You say that these books -- this book is not just a book about Lyndon Johnson, it's book about American political power.
CARO: Yes.
WOODRUFF: So are you saying that this is something Americans should be proud of?
CARO: I would say that the book is an examination of a particular kind of political power, legislative power. You know, Judy, when people talk and write about political power in America, they're almost always thinking in terms of executive power or presidential power. Legislative power is very important in America. And there isn't very much done on how power really works in the Senate.
You know, Johnson once said, this is his saying, not mine, "Whatever else they say about me, I understand power. I know where to look for it and I know how to use it." When he becomes Senate majority leader, it's been a long time since the Senate really was an active body. He turns it into one, he really leads it. And that's really what this book studies.
WOODRUFF: You're writing about power. You are also obviously writing about Lyndon Johnson's life. You've spent, what, 20 years already writing about him, researching him. You've got, what, at least one more volume to go. Why so much of your life devoted to this man?
CARO: It's not just devoted to this man. That's a good question. What I'm interested in isn't -- I've never been interested in writing biographies, just to write a life of a famous man, Judy. I wanted to examine political power. Johnson's life allows me to examine political power, because nobody, in my opinion, in the second half of the 20th century, understood political power as well as he did, all forms of it.
WOODRUFF: Well, that is a perfect point to end this interview on.
CARO: Thank you.
WOODRUFF: Robert Caro, I promise you I have 100 more questions, but we'll be going on well past midnight if I asked all of them. Thank you very much for joining us. And we gather it's going to be at the top of the bestseller list this weekend.
CARO: Yes.
WOODRUFF: So congratulations.
CARO: Thank you.
WOODRUFF: Good to see you, good to talk to you. The book is "Master of the Senate: the Years of Lyndon Johnson."
Well, any politician who travels overseas knows how important it is to have a good interpreter. In fact, we have every reason to believe that former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl is looking for a new one tonight. Kohl was meeting the Israeli president in Jerusalem today, when some farmers presented him with a basket of fresh vegetables. Israeli President Moshe Katsav grabbed a hot pepper and suggested that if Kohl had any enemies, he could offer them one. Somehow that got lost in the translation and Kohl took a bite himself. And well, he got a bit choked up.
I guess we didn't capture it in the picture. You'll have to take our word for it, but you should believe us.
As NEWSNIGHT continues, we will tie together a number of interesting developments on the web. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
WOODRUFF: The rest of the program is devoted to technology, its use and abuse. Someone once said this about technology, and I'm quoting. "We can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation." Well, as we said earlier, we will hit quite a few topics. And we don't want to suggest that the Internet leads to damnation. But some of the roads do lead us to places we didn't necessarily want to go.
No better example of that than the videotaped execution of journalist Danny Pearl. It is something that almost all of us never thought we would see, and frankly, never would never want to see. But as Dan Rather reported last night on CBS, the video is making the rounds online, as propaganda for Muslim extremists. The White House today criticized CBS for showing part of the tape, where Pearl is speaking to the camera. Dan Rather defended the move, saying CBS was trying to "illustrate how far an enemy will go to spread its message of hate."
Al Qaeda has also proven itself very adept at using the Internet to spread a message of hate. That's why one mysterious Web site has grabbed the interest of intelligence officials, and CNN investigative reporter Mike Boettcher.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MIKE BOETTCHER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The web site, called alneda.com, is only in Arabic. It first drew attention in February with reports about al Qaeda prisoners in Pakistan, and what was supposed to have been a condolence message from Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar to the family of a Muslim cleric. Then, in March and April, a series of messages posted, some signed "al Qaeda jihad," full of interesting claims.
MAGNUS RANSTORP, PROF., ST. ANDREWS UNIV.: One of the messages also talks about the fact -- or claims that bin Laden is well. He's healthy. And he's preparing himself for the next round of jihad against the United States.
BOETTCHER: Professor Magnus Ranstorp, a counterterrorism expert at St. Andrews University, has been monitoring the alneda web site.
RANSTORP: It's not so much geared toward the West, but rather to own potential new supporters among the Muslim community.
BOETTCHER (on camera): The relationship between the Web site and al Qaeda is not clear. We sent e-mails to the web site and have not received a reply. But CNN has learned that intelligence agencies around the world have been monitoring the alneda Web site, looking for any clues that might be of help them.
RANSTORP: To really gauge who's visiting the site, giving clues to possible future perpetrators, future supporters.
BOETTCHER (voice-over): Aside from the news about bin Laden, says Ranstorp, the site has a claim of responsibility by al Qaeda for the bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia that killed at least 18 people. And there was this taunt about a captured al Qaeda leader, said to be cooperating with the U.S. "We challenge them to obtain any useful information from Abu Zubaydah."
Mike Boettcher, CNN, Bagram air base, Afghanistan.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WOODRUFF: Next on NEWSNIGHT, more on this story and also, how technology promises to turn the media world upside down, but will it make money?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
WOODRUFF: It seemed as if ever since Napster emerged from a college dorm room three years ago, that it was so powerful and so alarming to the record business, that it was fated not to last. And now it seems like we're getting closer and closer to the day the music dies on that file-sharing service. Several top executives, including founder Shawn Fanning, have resigned after negotiations to be bought out by the media giant Bertelsman fell through.
But while Napster was struggling, other services quietly cropped up, allowing people to swap not just movies and increasingly movies even before they premiere. All those "Star Wars" fans who stood in line tonight could have sat right down at their computers, typed "Star Wars Attack Clones" and gotten 1,000 hits. Well, to a movie executive, this is a threat that makes Darth Vader looks harmless.
Here's Bruce Francis.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Memento? FRANCIS (voice-over): This 23-year-old has a memento from one of his sessions on the net. Not just any memento. A complete copy of the Oscar nominated film downloaded for free. Josh, as we'll call him, has many Mementos.
JOSH: I found screeners of movies before they were out. If I can get on a good streak, then I can pull down about five movies a day.
FRANCIS (on camera): Welcome to Hollywood's worst nightmare. Studio executives say that the downloading of films will ruin the movie industry. Meanwhile, fans of downloading say that Hollywood's missing out on an opportunity to capture a new audience in a new way. And that audience is growing.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And there's "Lord of the Rings."
FRANCIS: Andrew Frank is analyst for Viant, a technology consulting firm. He says that as many as half a million movies are downloaded every day, including those in current release like "Spider- man."
ANDREW FRANK, VIANT: The potential threat is fairly large, as high speed connections become more prevalent and as the services become easier and more difficult to stop.
FRANCIS: And movie studios, including those owned by CNN parent AOL Time Warner, are doing everything they can to stop them, including a lawsuit to shut down file trading networks like Morpheus. Many of the same companies all but crush Napster's movie trading. So far, their own fee based alternatives for music haven't caught on the same way. Hollywood isn't just blaming the downloaders. They're lashing out at technology companies like Intel, who's chips run the PCs that make it all happen.
MICHAEL EISNER, CHMN., CEO, WALT DISNEY, CO.: It's very hard to negotiate with an industry who's growth, they think, their short term growth is dependent on pirated content.
LES VEDESZ, EXECUTIVE VP, INTEL: The media industry will try to make that personal computer nothing more than a DVC player, an expensive DVD player, or a CD player, and maybe not at that.
FRANCIS: Both have a point. After dismal year, the PC industry has targeted on-line entertainment as a killer app.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I see where this family's going. Hollywood.
FRANCIS: But Hollywood has a history of fighting new technologies. Most notably, the video cassette. The studio tried to sue that technology out of existence, only to lean on it as a huge source of profits years later. As for Josh, he's gotten a free taste of a world that he wants to know more about.
JOSH: It just kind of piques my interest. I've kind of gotten more into movies because of this. I don't think my grandma's going to start downloading movies on her, you know, on her own machine. If you have some tech know-how, then yes. I mean, once you start doing it, it gets easier and easier. It was just kind of funny. At the bottom it would say, "property of Columbia Tristar" every 10 minutes. And I'm like no, it's not. Now I have it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's strange thing, we should suffer so much fear and doubt under so small a thing.
FRANCIS: A little thing that experts say is growing every day.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
FRANCIS: Now fans of downloading say it can't be stopped. As soon as one service is shut down, another crops up. But Hollywood studios may eventually try to go after the Internet access companies, through which the movies are traded. Now that's a strategy full of conflict for the one company that is both studio and Internet provider. AOL Time Warner, also the parent of CNN.
Judy?
WOODRUFF: All right, Bruce, thanks very much. A lot to think about.
Coming up next on NEWSNIGHT, Alex Wellan of the tech cable network. TechTV, will help sort this all out for us.
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WOODRUFF: Two themes dominated the second half this program tonight: the Napsterization of the movies and for want of better word, the Napsterization of hate. In a way, they are two sides of the same coin, except the Internet seems to be a coin with more than just two sides much.
Joining me now to pick up on that them, Alex Wellen. He is the senior producer and co-host of "Cybercrime," which can be seen on the technology cable network, TechTV.
Alex Wellen, first of all, talk about the challenges facing you and others, who work with the Internet in terms of all of these kinds of issues out there?
ALEX WELLEN, SENIOR PRODUCER, CO-HOST, TECHTV'S CYBERCRIMES: Absolutely. There are three classically challenges that we find in reporting on the subject matter, all of which apply to issues we're talking about today. Talking about the film industry and talking about the Danny Pearl video and some of the hate web sites. Anonymity being the first one.
You can be anyone and you can hide your identify. There are also no borders. So you can make an attack or do something criminal or do something civil or do something in any event from country to country, city to city, state to state. And there really are no borders.
And finally, I would say that the third item is boundaries. You can reach into a bank from your home. There's nothing stopping you. And all three of those elements come into play, in particular with this video. I mean, we don't know exactly what the background is, and how it got up there. But we can talk about what could have been.
WOODRUFF: Yes, let's talk about -- I mean, how does this all relate to the video that these terrorists in Pakistan put together of -- around the execution of Danny Pearl?
WELLEN: So there's the more obvious way. There's the way that it could have been done through an ISP. Someone could have signed up with their Internet service provider in that area, and posted the information. And in fact, they didn't do anything illegal or weren't violating the policies of that Internet provider.
And then there's the more nefarious side, right. There's the scenario, for example -- and I'm making this up, but the worst case scenario is where let's say someone with computer skills, if you want to call them a hacker, got hold of a credit card, and was able to set up a web site with an Internet service provider. Put information in there that's not accurate. Hide who they are. And then start setting things up. Putting information up there.
Maybe this video. And doing it through servers all over the country, all over the world. And they would be able to hide their identity. Even on the web site, you can mask where it's going. So there are lot of things that are in place, scenarios that could happen, that would make it more difficult to track down who's responsible. But again, it may very well be blatant. Right? Someone could've just posted the stuff.
WOODRUFF: Yes, I would not want to equate the horror of what was put in that web site having to do with Danny Pearl's killing. I would never want to equate that with the other issue we've been talking about tonight, and that is pirating movies on the Internet, except that the fact that they are both distortions. Obviously one of a much greater magnitude.
But in terms of the movies, you know, we're really talking about commercial damage here. Is this something that people like you and others, do you believe there's solution to this?
WELLEN: Well on TechTV and on Cybercrime, we deal with those issues. I think there are solutions out there. There's not going to be a cure all necessarily. Part of the problem with the movie industry is that it's peer to peer now truly. With Napster, it was going through a central server, so you could keep track of it, but now, it's more difficult because it's decentralized to track down, you know, you and I are communicating back and forth with music and nobody is the wiser.
So it is difficult to track that down. There are different solutions out there. I mean, the two areas that we deal with on TechTV, and that you'll see over and over that you report on all the time, technology and the laws. And we've seen some changes for both of them, in particular today. On a technology point of view, we've learned a lot from Napster. Right? They're -- for better or worse, Napster and music, there are all kinds of copyright protections that they're experimenting now. People are very frustrated with it. But there are copyright protections, things you can do to CD's to make it more difficult to listen to the music. And that may very well apply to the movie industry. I mean, if you go into a movie cinema, right...
WOODRUFF: So -- let me just interrupt. You're not just talking about technological steps you can take, but you're talking about legal, and you're talking about regulation as well?
WELLEN: Right. Well, of course. On the technology side, we talked about different ways that you might protect the technology or the copyright. On a legal side in the House today, they approved through the House Judiciary Committee, laws that would make crimes more harsh against hackers. And also, a law that would make it easier for Internet service providers to give up information, might very well deal with the film industry. Those are some of the areas that deal with it.
WOODRUFF: All right.
WELLEN: So those are some of the areas that deal with it.
WOODRUFF: All right, well, Alex Wellen with TechTV, we want to thank you very much for joining us to try to pull some of these very different, and yet connected stories together. Thank you very much. Good to see you.
WELLEN: Thank you, Judy.
WOODRUFF: And we will leave all of you tonight with a look at some folks who are not looking for "Attack of the Clones" online, but a rather in line to see it in a Seattle movie theater. The movie, which is the fifth of director George Lucas series of "Star Wars" movies, has been premiering at midnight across the country. The movie will be showing in more than 6,000 screens nationwide.
That's NEWSNIGHT for tonight. I'm Judy Woodruff. Thank you for watching. Have a good evening.
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