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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown
Bush Speaks Out on 9-11 Warnings; Is George Tenet a Political Winner This Week?; Carter Calls Trip to Cuba Successful
Aired May 17, 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.
CANDY CROWLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good evening. I'm Candy Crowley, in for Aaron Brown.
It's Friday night, the end of the week spent very much in the past. The beginning of the week was spent in the more distant past, and the news seemed undeniably good. Russia, once the center of the evil empire in the eyes of the West, came together with the old archenemy, agreeing to cut its nuclear stockpile along with the U.S. And then just a day later, the organization set up to defend itself from Russia embraces Russia itself, NATO approving a partnership, the British foreign secretary declaring it the funeral of the war.
But it was the recent history that would come to haunt the headlines for the rest of the week, the history that was made in an instant less than nine months ago, would have, could have, should have was a phrase we heard from one of the families of 9/11, along with a lot of other people. Hopefully, it won't take half a century like it did with Russia to make peace with all of our demons from September 11.
So we begin the whip with the president's response to the criticism today. Kelly Wallace is covering that tonight. Kelly, can I have a headline, please?
KELLY WALLACE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Candy, the White House went on the offensive today. President Bush speaking out publicly for the first time about the controversy, while his aides made it very, very clear they believe some of the president's critics are motivated by politics.
CROWLEY: Following the intelligence trail tonight, national security correspondent David Ensor. David, a headline from you.
DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: I'll look tonight at whether or not George Tenet, the CIA director, is a winner out of the week and also at the debate over whether or not the U.S. intelligence community needs to be reorganized in order to better connect the dots.
CROWLEY: On to Havana now, quite a week it's been there. Kate Snow today had an interview with former President Carter. Kate, the headline. KATE SNOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Candy, President Carter wrapping up his trip here to Cuba speaking to CNN for the first time since he arrived on Sunday. He says his trip was a very big success. He says he's particularly happy he was able to speak with so many people, including political dissidents, and he said something interesting. He said American's rights are being violated by the U.S. embargo on Cuba -- Candy.
CROWLEY: Thanks, Kate. We'll be back with all of you in a moment. Also coming up on NEWSNIGHT, Laura Bush on her first solo trip as First Lady, comes out swinging in support of her husband. We'll talk about the evolution of a reluctant political wife with essayist Anne Taylor Fleming. And we'll meet the survivors of a war zone, an urban war zone, back to Fort Apache the Bronx. That's in Segment 7 tonight.
All that to come, but we begin with another day of the blame game, a second day of second guessing, more partisan finger pointing. Whatever you want to call it, there was no end of it today in Washington.
Just the opposite, questions about who knew what and when grew more pointed and warnings about playing politics with the issue got sharper. More facts became known, some of them embarrassing to this administration, some to the last administration, and today President Bush entered the fray. Here again with that side of the story, CNN's Kelly Wallace.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
WALLACE (voice-over): President Bush denounces Washington's second-guessing, vigorously defending himself and his administration.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people.
WALLACE: The president's advisers say no one could have predicted that a possible al Qaeda hijacking could turn into a suicide mission. But just that prediction was this September, 1999 report commissioned by the CIA during the Clinton Administration and prepared by the Library of Congress.
The report suggested al Qaeda operatives could crash land an aircraft packed with explosives into the Pentagon, the CIA or the White House. The White House said it knew nothing of that report until now.
ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I think what it shows is this information that was out there did not raise enough alarms with anybody that it suggested because it was not intelligence information, it was their thinking, of sociology, psychology.
WALLACE: Republican Senator Charles Grassley is calling for an investigation into what the CIA did or didn't do with that report. Meantime, the president's advisers are accusing Democrats of playing politics, taking issue with this New York Post headline, and how one Democratic Senator referred to it on the Senate floor.
SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D), NEW YORK: Questions being asked by my constituents, questions raised by one of our newspapers in New York with the headline, "Bush Knew." The president knew what?
WALLACE: The White House press secretary said Senator Clinton crossed the line.
FLEISCHER: She immediately went to the floor of the Senate, and I'm sorry to say that she followed that headline and divided.
WALLACE: But Senator Clinton says she's not being divisive, simply asking questions.
CLINTON: I am only seeking answers and information. I am not looking to point fingers or place blame on anybody.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WALLACE: And the White House continues to be in damage control mode. That is why the administration revealed publicly for the first time today that the President ordered up a report early last year about ways to dismantle the al Qaeda network. We are told that report was complete and was sitting on Condoleezza Rice's desk, the president's national security adviser on September 11th, waiting to go to the president for his final approval -- Candy.
CROWLEY: Kelly, this is a White House that has been getting some fairly good press over the last six, seven months. How must they be feeling there tonight?
WALLACE: It is somewhat defensive, U.S. officials here somewhat defensive but also a bit feisty. As you said, they really haven't had to deal with anything like this since the September 11 attacks, the criticism really taking many of them by surprise.
Clearly though, the president coming out swinging a bit, his aides talking publicly and privately about how they feel that Democrats are playing politics, and also Candy as you mentioned, the first lady herself, Laura Bush, on a trip to Europe, issuing a statement talking about this, saying any suggestion that the president or his aides had any specific warning and could have prevented the September 11 attacks is really a horrifying thing to do to people who lost loved ones on that day.
So you have the first lady stepping into the fray, a very unusual move, and we are told that the vice president and Condoleezza Rice will be on the Sunday shows, once again fielding more questions -- Candy.
CROWLEY: Kelly Wallace, thanks so much from the White House tonight.
WALLACE: Sure.
CROWLEY: On the intelligence side, the question today shifted from who knew what to who should have put all the pieces together. That's the CIA's job, and tonight we're learning the agency may have come close to solving the puzzle; back to CNN national security correspondent David Ensor with that.
ENSOR: Well, Candy, even though he was President Clinton's choice for the CIA, George Tenet is still a key member of the Bush national security team. That may be in part because he was right all last summer.
Starting in about May, CIA officials including Tenet were warning the White House that an attack by al Qaeda was extremely likely, that it could be on a large scale. Someone suggested that may, in part, be why the president went to the CIA after September 11 and publicly thanked them and gave Tenet a very public show of support.
There are those who say that early on it was George Bush Sr., who suggested his son keep on the CIA director. Though Tenet warned all summer that bin Laden's group might attack, the CIA never had specifics, and the suggestion about hijacking in early August was very, very general. White House officials say that it was nothing they could act on.
As information emerges now about CIA briefings and FBI memos, there are questions about whether the intelligence community perhaps failed to connect the dots.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ENSOR (voice-over): Did U.S. intelligence have clues, which together could have helped divert 9/11? Should the intelligence community be reorganized and better equipped to put the pieces together.
SEN. BOB GRAHAM (D-FL), INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: There wasn't a single point of contact for analysis and reporting of what was going on. We failed to put the puzzle together before the horrific event.
REP. PORTER GOSS (R-FL) INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: The fact is we do need to make some changes. I think we've discussed before that the basic architecture of our intelligence structure is flawed.
ENSOR: Right now, the CIA director is also the nominal head of the whole intelligence community, the director of Central Intelligence. But George Tenet has no real power over the biggest three agencies, which report instead to the Pentagon.
The National Security Agency which cracks codes and eavesdrops; the National Reconnaissance Office, which deploys spy satellites; and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which analyzes spy photos, all get their money and marching orders from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He does not want that to change. DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: I doubt if it will happen. I don't know. We'll see.
ENSOR: After 9/11, President Bush and CIA Director George Tenet asked a former senior official, Brent Scowcroft, to recommend reform if needed. Scowroft's panel recommending sweeping changes, sources say, designed to make intelligence agencies report directly to Tenet and to use more resources against terrorism, rather than for military intelligence goals.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If the Defense Department is spending all the money to get product for their troops, there's not enough money to get the right kind of equipment and the right kind of intelligence flowing to our national leaders. That has been a tension that has been going on for some years.
ENSOR: For now, the Scowcroft recommendations are languishing in the bureaucracy. At the Pentagon, sources say, officials are preparing a counter proposal, which would increase their control over all the intelligence agencies except the CIA. But opponents of change appear to have a powerful ally.
DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It's important for us to avoid a situation in which we spend so much time moving the boxes around on the chart and redrawing wiring diagrams, that we lose sight of our basic requirements and mission here.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ENSOR: The Bush administration then is wary of taking on the huge task of reorganizing U.S. intelligence in a city where power brokers can be fiercely resistant to change. It may be a good idea, one senior official told me, but we have our hands full already -- Candy.
CROWLEY: So, David, if I read you correctly, what you're saying is reform of these agencies, getting them to talk to one another somehow reorganizing them in to something where there would be some crosstalk is not going to happen?
ENSOR: There is some of that that has already started. You know the FBI director and the CIA director are often in Bush's office in the morning, the president's office in the morning, early on, talking to each other, comparing notes. But as far as the kind of overall reorganization that General Scowcroft has been talking about, it doesn't seem all that likely.
CROWLEY: Let me also get back to something you said earlier in the piece, which was that George Tenet, the head of the CIA, sort of had some warnings and he kept going back to the White House and making warnings about how something big was going to happen and to that effect.
So, isn't he in charge of doing something about that? I mean, why would he -- I mean, and then he complained that no one would listen to him. Why didn't he do something? ENSOR: He wasn't complaining. He was just repeating day after day that there was credible evidence there could be an attack. The problem was, he had no specifics. There was nothing that was what politicians call actionable materials, something they could react to, do something about. It was all too general. That was the problem.
CROWLEY: David Ensor, thanks very much. Serious business this is, even talking about reorganizing the U.S. intelligence apparatus or exploring possible lapses in it while the nation is at war with terrorism, is a tricky thing to do.
Senator Evan Bayh is on the Intelligence Committee and joins us now here in Washington. Senator, thanks for being here. I just hardly know where to start to you. It seems to me that Washington got, we were just in overdrive today. How do you read this?
SEN. EVAN BAYH (D), INDIANA: Well, there's definitely a feeding frenzy going on here, Candy, and a lot of it has to do with the dramatic events of September 11th. My own belief is that the real story isn't one of presidential malfeasance. I don't think too many people really believe that President Bush had information that he would have acted on did not protect the country.
The real issue is the one that David was just reporting on, which is what do we do to keep this from happening again and why did the intelligence community not have all the dots on the same page so they could be connected?
The dots were there but they were on separate pages, so you couldn't get the whole picture. That's the real story.
CROWLEY: But you know, the Senate Intelligence Committee has had oversight of the intelligence community for a long time, much longer than you've been up on Capitol Hill and this has been going on forever. So why hasn't it been fixed before now? Is it sort of what David was saying? Is it just these agencies?
BAYH: It was exactly what David was saying. There's so much bureaucratic (UNINTELLIGIBLE) here in Washington. Even after the largest terrorist attack in the history of our nation, these agencies are jealously guarding their budgets and their turf, and we as you know have an investigation going on in the Intelligence Committee, not for the purposes of pointing fingers or creating scapegoats, but to try and figure out what happened and to make sure it doesn't happen again and they're fighting us every step of the way and that would be the real scandal here and that's why I hope the administration gets active.
The real scandal is not what the president knew and when he knew it. The real potential scandal is, if there's another attack and it becomes apparent that there was no better coordination leading up to that than there was this last time, then the American people, I think, will be quite angry about why nothing was done.
CROWLEY: Well, look, you first of all have these bureaucracies that are very entrenched and don't want to share information of be, you know, folded into one another, and then you have frankly you all in what appears to be a really toxic atmosphere. You all ask questions. The White House hears it as, well, the president knew and didn't do anything about it. The White House says, wait a second. Stop criticizing me like that and you all take it as, oh you're accusing us of being unpatriotic. It just doesn't seem to me that this atmosphere is at all ready to do anything that what you say is very important and what everybody else says is very important.
BAYH: Candy, we need to step back, take a deep breath, and clear the air because if we could cooperate here, I think we could really make some progress and it's going to take cooperation to make the changes necessary to protect the American people from another event like this.
You know if I were advising the president, I'd say make available the information that you have, deal with the Intelligence Committee. We'll behave responsibly in a bipartisan way. To the Democrats, I'd say, look, let's give him the benefit of the doubt until proven to the contrary. In that spirit, I think we actually could accomplish some good.
CROWLEY: Well, would you agree -- I mean, I know you think that the White House has not been forthcoming with some information, but would you agree that Democrats have sort of gone over the top with this?
BAYH: A couple have. Some of the rhetoric, I think, suggests that they knew things that could have prevented the attack. The president knew things that could have prevented the attack is over the top.
At the same time, the White House says that the information they had was so general, I think Ari Fleischer's quote, so general as to be useless. Well, if that's the case, make it public. You won't reveal any intelligence sources if it's that general and that useless, and this will put any doubt about this to rest.
CROWLEY: Can you do anything without changing the leadership of the CIA?
BAYH: I happen to be in the camp that thinks that George Tenet is doing a credible job. In this particular case, the FBI wasn't communicating with the CIA. Candy, they had information in Phoenix about suspicious characters in flight schools and a memorandum outlining specific steps to deal with that. Another office in Minneapolis was following Mr. Moussaoui and had some information about him. Those two offices were talking to each other and none of that was shared with the CIA.
So if I could just kind of combine this. You knew that the World Trade Center had been previously attacked. You knew in spite of some of the things that had been said that airliners had been intended to be hijacked for the purpose of using these weapons.
It happened in France. There was a case of Yousef in New York who said they were trying to crash a plane into the CIA headquarters. In Phoenix, you knew about the training schools. In Minneapolis, you had a particular individual. All these dots, no central location for somebody to say, wait a minute, there's a picture starting to emerge here. That's what we have to improve.
CROWLEY: Well, let me ask you, we've got about 30 seconds. Who failed here? Who is responsible for this, or is the question not germane anymore?
BAYH: The question -- the answer, Candy, is not who but what. The system failed. I think you had good people operating in a dysfunctional system. We have to have a system in which the FBI talks to the CIA. The other intelligence agencies communicate to a central place where all of these different bits of information can be looked at, put in context, a real risk assessment done, and then steps taken to protect the American people. The question is why wasn't the president getting more information, the kind of information he needed to really take the steps that were necessary?
CROWLEY: Senator Evan Bayh, thank you so much for joining us tonight. We appreciate it.
BAYH: My pleasure.
CROWLEY: A bit later on NEWSNIGHT, the political emergence of another member of the Bush family, as Kelly Wallace mentioned, first lady Laura Bush. And next, the political fallout from the 9/11 investigation; we'll talk to Craig Crawford of the Hot Line. This is NEWSNIGHT from Washington for a Friday.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CROWLEY: Last night, Vice President Cheney warned against politicizing 9/11. He did it at a political fund-raiser, but Mr. Cheney's old House colleague Tip O'Neill said all politics is local. He had it only half right. All politics, it turns out, is inevitable, even when it comes to national tragedies, perhaps especially so.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CROWLEY (voice-over): Could it have been prevented?
REP. RICHARD GEPHARDT (D-MO), MINORITY LEADER: What we have to do now is to find out what the president, what the White House knew about the events leading up to 9/11.
CROWLEY: The questions are torturous at a personal level. The questions are important at a policy level.
SEN. TOM DASCHLE (D-SD), MAJORITY LEADER: I'm gravely concerned about the information provided us just yesterday that the president received a warning in August about the threat of hijackers by Osama bin Laden and his organization.
CROWLEY: And the questions are provocative on the political level. RICHARD CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: What I want to say to my Democratic friends in the Congress is they need to be very cautious not to seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions, as were made by some today, that the White House had advance information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9/11.
CROWLEY: The problem with politics is that everybody thinks the other party is playing.
JOE LOCKHART, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: I think Vice President Cheney's speech last night was outrageous, sort of creating a threatening attitude where if you ask any questions, if you ask any questions you'll undermine the war, we'll brand you as un-American.
ED GILLESPIE, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: I think the Democrats in Congress have been flailing about for some time trying to figure out a way to bring the president's high approval ratings down. I don't think this approach is going to work for them. In fact, I think it may indeed backfire.
CROWLEY: In fact, the latest CNN-USA Today Gallup Poll shows 66 percent of Americans say their opinion of the president is not changed by recent revelations. Of the 32 percent who feel less favorably toward the president, 48 percent are Democrats, 34 percent independents, 10 percent Republicans.
And neither do normally liberal editorial pages seem much impressed with the last 24 hours. In an editorial entitled "The Blame Game," the "New York Times" warned congressional Democrats: "They should remember that the House and Senate Intelligence Committees received some of the same intelligence reports. We don't recall a rising clamor from Congress last summer." "The tempest," said the "Washington Post," "seems overblown."
Still, there are warning signs within the polls that Democrats may have exposed a soft spot in the Bush administration. Sixty-eight percent of those questioned said the Bush administration should have much earlier disclosed the news that the president had been told of a general threat of hijacking by al Qaeda members.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CROWLEY: After a rough 24 hours, the White House has seemed to regain its political sea legs. In his first remarks since the briefing story was leaked, the president sought to turn the corner and the country's attention back to his strong point. "This is an enemy that's not going to quit," he said. "In order to protect innocent lives, this country must have the will and determination to chase these killers down one by one and bring them to justice."
And one late development to mention, this evening the State Department issued a warning to U.S. citizens traveling in Turkey; it stems from what the department calls and we're quoting here, "unconfirmed and fragmentary information of a possible terrorist attack involving civil aviation." No specifics about who or when or how credible the threat is. The warning runs through the 22nd of this month.
Here with me now to explore the intersection of policy and politics, Craig Crawford. He's executive editor of the Hot Line. This is his business. Welcome back to the program, Craig.
CRAIG CRAWFORD, THE HOT LINE: You bet.
CROWLEY: I have to ask you about this Turkey terror warning. I mean as serious as it is, I guess, isn't this sort of the problem?
CRAWFORD: Yes, I think we're going to get lots of warnings nowadays.
CROWLEY: You know, we have a fragmentary. We're not sure if it's true. What kind of good is this and is this the first fallout of this whole brouhaha?
CRAWFORD: Well, of course, earlier we were getting lots of threats and lots of warnings from Ashcroft and there was some criticism of the administration for putting us on alert with no details. Now it's all whipped around and the argument is they didn't give us enough warnings before September 11.
CROWLEY: Right, it seems like we're going to get a couple now. Look what do you make of all this?
CRAWFORD: Well, you aid it best earlier. Politics is inevitable. We are within six months to an election over the control of Congress. I don't know how we put into words how meaningful this is to the lobbyists and the politicians in Washington. You and I know that. The stakes are so high.
Democrats have been in a three-point stance waiting for an opening on politics for a long time. They thought they had it earlier in the week with the photo and Air Force One. They thought they had it with the Mid East, the handling of the Mid East, that turned out not to have an impact on President Bush's popularity. This is a popular president, so I don't know if this is the story to change that or not. The Gallup Poll you had earlier on, two-thirds saying the warning should have been given, maybe that's an indication there will be an impact on the overall popularity.
CROWLEY: Actually, the poll was about should he have put this out earlier. I'm not sure they saw it as a warning, but should we have known this at least post 9/11 that he was told that. But the main point I think was that 66 percent or something said look, you know it doesn't change our opinion. So, is there a danger here for Democrats overplaying their hand?
CRAWFORD: Well, this has been interesting. If you really look at what Democrats said, apart from a few who are not in leadership, it was pretty mild. I mean their comments were not that strong. What happened was, Cheney came out and made an issue out of the Democrat response in saying that it was inappropriate. I think that was very clever. I mean, he is one of the best in town and he showed it again. He got up there and made an issue out of the Democrat response, and that became a secondary story and I think maybe the Democrats walked into a trap there.
CROWLEY: And you know, it's interesting because Cheney is always seen as the one that's, you know, not all that political. Everyone was so surprised when they first picked him, because they didn't really think that he'd be that vice president that was sort of the attack dog and he's proven pretty good at what he does.
CRAWFORD: It was a strong response and it put the Democrats on the defensive. I thought Senator Bayh earlier, I mean he was saying, give them the benefit of the doubt. I mean, we're not seeing the strong statements from Democrats toward the end of the day that we were beginning to see earlier.
CROWLEY: And what do you make of this latest report we have now that there was a Library of Congress report that said, oh maybe they'll fly things into the White House or the Pentagon or you know? I mean, does this story keep going? Is it going to die a natural death and move into blaming the CIA? I mean, how is this going to work?
CRAWFORD: My guess is this story becomes a bureaucratic turf war, not very sexy, not really about the President getting specific knowledge. I mean it's like where is this story going? Is it going to end up that, you know, the president withheld specific knowledge of an attack on the World Trade Center? Probably not. Is it going to end up, you know, showing that the president was somehow negligent? I don't think it's going to affect the president himself.
It's becoming more of a bureaucratic turf thing between the FBI and the CIA and my guess is, it's overblown. If you look at the original story that, you know, CBS David Martin, he said in the story, there's nothing here that shows the president got information that would have allowed him to prevent September 11.
CROWLEY: And yet we have, you know, the headlines and ...
CRAWFORD: Right.
CROWLEY: The suggestions were out there. We've got about 30 seconds left and I wanted to ask you if you had this on a scale of one to ten, how much of this story was politics on both sides, you can combine them, and how much of it is a real problem pointing out a real problem?
CRAWFORD: I think it's about 60 percent politics and about 40 percent a serious issue between the FBI and the CIA and connecting dots that all these spy stories always bring up and will probably continue.
CROWLEY: So 60/40 politics to policy, that's about right for most Washington stories, isn't it?
CRAWFORD: Sixty-forty is a good bet, yes, in most cases.
CROWLEY: Craig Crawford from the Hot Line, thank you so much, really appreciate it.
CRAWFORD: Sure.
CROWLEY: And later on NEWSNIGHT, back to Fort Apache. But next, a day of firsts, the first lady, her first solo trip, and her first real foray into a political firestorm, we'll talk about it with essayist Anne Taylor Fleming coming up.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CROWLEY: It's been said often that Laura Welch married George W. Bush only after they made an agreement that she would never have to make a political speech. Well, that went out the window a year later, when he waged an unsuccessful campaign for Congress. Laura Bush has been emerging in big ways and small ways ever since. Today was one of the big ways.
She spoke while traveling solo in Europe, and came out with a powerful defense of her husband, and a lecture for those doing the criticizing.
"I think it's sad to play upon the emotions of people as if there were something we could have done to stop the attack," she said. Adding, "We're still in a war on terror. It's still very important that both Democrats and Republicans work together."
Tough talk from a woman who chooses her words very carefully, if she chooses to speak at all.
Joining us now to talk about Laura Bush, essayist Anne Taylor Fleming from Los Angeles. Anne, thanks so much for joining us.
ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING, AUTHOR, ESSAYIST: Sure.
CROWLEY: I am fascinated with Laura Bush for this reason. Covering the campaign for two years, she was almost in some ways, sort of a retro-wife or seemed that way, certainly acted that way. Didn't speak a lot in public. Generally did girl things. And this whole trip to Europe strikes me as another ratcheting up of Laura Bush public person.
FLEMING: Well, yes. You know, on the one hand, Candy, think it's great. I mean, I like to see any woman emerge and a first lady -- I mean, it's fun to have an outspoken or more outspoken first lady. It always makes me nervous when they are hiding in the shadows. That said, the role that she took today was really still the retro-role if you look at it. It's very supportive of the husband. It's very much the wife of. So on the one hand she's emerging. On the other hand, she's emerging in a pretty old traditional role.
CROWLEY: What is Laura Bush, as she's sort of feeling her way through, really, the first years of her husband's administration? Who's she shaping up to be like is your best guess? If you had to pick another First Lady.
FLEMING: Yes, that's a really, that's a very good question. Certainly, I think she's more in the tradition mold of a lot of first ladies. I think we've got Hillary Clinton standing between her and everybody previously. And you know, I think -- so therefore she's maybe even a little like her mother-in-law. Even though at first, you know, everybody said that she was meek and soft.
You know, you don't marry into a Bush family, and you don't marry a Bush, I would think, unless you're pretty strong somewhere inside. So I think that the Laura Bush we heard from today, you know, is probably who she is.
That said, the one thing that I do want to say, that I did feel strongly about, while I'm happy to see her emerge, I think the implication that anybody that questions the war, question also the policies of this administration is in some ways unpatriotic is a really dangerous line. And I'm sorry she parroted that. And it's certainly the line we heard from Cheney. And it's a line we've heard from a lot of people since the war on terrorism began. So I just want to register a sharp dissent to that. I think to impugn people's patriotism is really dangerous ground.
CROWLEY: I guess part of being a member of the team is to be on message. She certainly was as far as the Bush team was going.
FLEMING: Yes.
CROWLEY: One of the things that also fascinated me in reading the research on this is that Laura Bush mentioned that she's been in contact with Hillary Clinton. Do you suppose there's a sisterhood that sort of springs from being the first lady, and all the contradictory things that that means?
FLEMING: You know, that's a really good question. I bet there is. And I bet that to find yourself in that position, I mean, it's an untenable position. You know, Hillary Clinton played it as boldly and to some people's taste, as unappetizingly. You know, and to other people, she was a role model. You know, I think it's a very, very tough role.
Barbara Bush, I guess, did fairly well getting out unscathed, but you know, she was tough and cynical, but mother at the same time. And you know, Laura Bush is finding her way. I think Americans like to cheer for a first lady because we all realize it's a very difficult position. And that said, you know, to see Laura Bush sort of peek her head out of her shell like a turtle, I think people are going to be receptive to that.
I do think, though again, that as she starts to emerge, we're going to have take her at what she says. And therefore, she will begin to be an object that we can therefore dissent with, as I've done here tonight and would again. And it's going to be very interesting to see how she deals with that if she keeps her head out of that shell.
CROWLEY: Anne Taylor Fleming out of Los Angeles tonight, thank you so much for joining us.
FLEMING: Thank you.
CROWLEY: Just ahead, politics breaking out all over. Would you believe in the movie business? Say it isn't so. And next, what did former President Carter accomplish in Cuba? We'll hear what he had to say. This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CROWLEY: Former President Jimmy Carter is back home tonight. His six day visit to Cuba over. It was the first trip by any president, former or otherwise, to the Communist nation. The trip clearly rankled the White House, as did Mr. Carter's call for closer relations with Cuba. But in the end, former presidents go where they want and say what they want. And this one did both.
And Communist or not, Cuba is a magical place. So it's easy to see the attraction and not hard to envy CNN's Kate Snow, who comes to us tonight from Havana -- Kate.
SNOW: Hi, good evening, Candy.
Yes, it's not too bad an assignment. They're practicing right now for a show tomorrow night right behind me. I don't know how much you can hear them. Sort of hard to complain here. And President Carter didn't complain about his trip either. He said it was a big success. He told me in an interview this morning that he enjoyed his time, not least because he was able so freely to meet were dissidents and regular Cubans, everywhere I went.
He firmly believed, he said, that the U.S. should lift its travel and trade embargo on Cuba. He calls it a violation of American rights, saying Americans should have the right to trade with anyone they want, and to travel anywhere they want. Carter also said that the Cuban government has to make some changes and move towards democracy. He said he doesn't see Fidel Castro moving in that direction.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JIMMY CARTER, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE U.S.: I don't see any change in the future in his willingness to permit dissident expressions from Cubans. Although he has been amazingly gracious, I think, in letting my views, highly critical on occasion, be expressed.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SNOW: Now Carter's speech was broadcast live on radio here and on television. And then it was reprinted yesterday in the Communist party newspaper. That is a real first. But while they don't get access to a lot of American views here, the Cuban people do have access to American pop culture. Despite a U.S. embargo on this nation for four decades now, they still have access to pop culture.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) SNOW (voice-over): It's not just 1950s American cars, though it's hard to miss them. These days, it's Nike's famous logo, pirated CDs, and fast food joints that tell you American culture is reaching the Cuban shore. Take one guess who their favorite basketball player is, Michael Jordan. Their favorite team?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Lakers.
SNOW: Lakers? The Wizards.
Baggy jeans and hip-hop clothes are in. So are T-shirts bearing American flags, not to make some kind of political statement. Just because, well, it's cool.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (through translator): It's the style we like, the style that draws our attention.
SNOW: Go down to La Playa, and you might think you're in Malibu.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Check out the short shirts and all. Walking around in flip flops. That's our style.
SNOW: During the Cold War, it was the Russians who left their mark. There's still evidence of that. But the U.S. is creeping back in, often illegally on pirated CDs or bootleg tapes. A stereo with a good antenna picks up stations from the Florida Keys and Miami. Junior high girls tell me they see American music on TV.
Who are your favorites?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: 'N Sync.
SNOW: 'N Sync?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Backstreet boys?
SNOW: Backstreet Boys?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Lincoln Park.
SNOW: Lincoln Park.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Britney.
SNOW: Britney Spears?
(on camera): American culture is by no means all pervasive here. You won't see any Coca-Cola signs or McDonald's, but if you go looking for it, and you know who to ask, you can rent pirated copies of recent American movies. We rented "Moulin Rouge," "Pearl Harbor," and "A Beautiful Mind."
You deliver movies for a company?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
SNOW: How many movies do you have?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 70.
SNOW: Almost all American from "Monsters Ball" to "The Godfather." Mario doesn't want us to show his face because the movies are illegal.
So a movie shows up in an American theater. And then, how fast do you get it here in Cuba?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Two months, three months, maybe one week.
SNOW: One week?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Maybe.
SNOW (voice-over): But Mario says he's not worried the American influence will stamp out Cuban culture.
Because Cuban culture's very strong, is that why?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Strong, completely strong.
SNOW: Street musicians wouldn't dream of playing American songs. There are too many wonderful Cuban tunes. Even the teenagers told us they love Cuban music, too. Little kids prefer Cuban cartoons, but they do know Tweety bird and that famous mouse.
Mickey Mouse?
In a tiny stalls that line the streets, there's no sign of anything but Cuban products, but there's no question young people seek out American goods, adapted to fit their Cuban lives.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SNOW: Candy, no danger of finding a Burger King here any time soon. But you know, it's funny, Cubans might not mind having Burger King here. That's because they want those American dollars. They feel like if the U.S. embargo is open, if it's cut off, that is stopped, perhaps they will get more dollars here. And that would help their economy -- Candy.
CROWLEY: Kate, I watched you wall to wall early this morning to late tonight. Either go join the party or go get some sleep with our thanks.
Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, we'll talk about the hot drama that's the talk of the Cannes film festival and the filmmaker behind it, Michael Moore. Film critic Harlan Jacobsen is next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CROWLEY: NEWSNIGHT has been trying to have Harlan Jacobson on for quite a while. A film critic with an eye of the unsung, underappreciated, and sometimes the unseen. A good person to cut through the thicket of movie hype, better known as the Cannes Film Festival. He joins us from Cannes, where today, the industry buzz was overshadowed by political buzz from one of the most political filmmakers in attendance, Michael Moore. He launched an attack on the war on terror. Before we talk to Harlan, let's take a listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MICHAEL MOORE, FILM MAKER: To use the dead of that day as the cover to push their right wing agenda, to shred our Constitution, to take away our civil liberties, to try and get tax cuts for the rich, oh, we need them because of 9-11, to drill holes in Alaska for oil, well, we need because of 9-11, you know, to try and distract people from Enron because we need to focus on the war on terrorism, I think it's immoral. I think it's abhorrent. And I have done my best in traveling around the country and this book tour, that I've just finished, telling people to not be afraid.
That you're being hoodwinked here. And all smart right wing leaders know this. The best way to get people to give up freedoms and liberties is to create this climate of fear. And what better way than to use September 11, and try and string out the so-called war on terrorism? As Bush says, "The war will never end. The war will never end. We'll always have terrorists now."
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CROWLEY: Well, gosh, Harlan all along I thought you were out there to cover movies and films. What was that all about?
HARLAN JACOBSEN, FILM CRITIC, "USA TODAY": Oh, it's about Michael, Candy. You know, in some sense "Bowling for Columbine," the name of his documentary, is in the best sense of documentarians, Marsell Ofal's (ph), because it's impassioned and maybe in the worst sense, in the sense of Michael Moore, being about himself.
You know, Michael tends to think of himself a bit as a government in exile, issuing an alarm to the sleep and (UNINTELLIGIBLE) American population, who can't understand politics for themselves. You know, which room our here in the closet of the Cotes D'Azurs is Michael preparing to come down from the hills in and wake us all up in?
I'm not sure. But I don't think that the American press corps particularly thinks that his film is, or rather his press conference is anything more than Michael turning the Cannes Film Festival in into something about himself.
CROWLEY: So did he have a movie? And what's the buzz on the movie?
JACOBSEN: Well, the buzz on the movie is a good bit of discussion about it among -- certainly among the press for citing its pros and cons. It deals with anti-gun violence. Perhaps you remember his first film back in 1989 was called "Roger and Me" in which he pursued unsuccessfully an interview with Roger Smith, the chairman of General Motors about closing a plant in Flint, Michigan that it operated for some 50 or 60 years. Well, this might as well be called "Charlton and me" since the climax of the film and the goal in the distance is to get an interview with Charlton Heston, which Heston grants him in his home to discuss Heston's policy as the lead advocate, the president of the National Rifle Association. And granted, Heston's insensitivity at shoring up in Littleton, Colorado, 10 or 12 days after the massacre in April 1999, and saying things like, "I have five words 'over my cold dead body will they take guns away' in essence.
So he has the interview with Charlton Heston, who becomes quite offended, and walks out on the interview, which I think is actually part of the point.
CROWLEY: Harlan, we've only got about 15 seconds left. I need you to tell me quickly what the buzz was about the new Woody Allen movie out there?
JACOBSEN: Well, the Woody Allen movie was received quite wonderfully by the French. Put him in the tradition of perhaps Jerry Lewis or a number of jazz and film artists discovered by the French and appreciated by the French, perhaps more so than Woody himself is outside a 20 block radius.
CROWLEY: Harlan, I got to interrupt you there. Thank you so much for joining us.
Next up here, we have "Segment 7." At the 41, Fort Apache, the Bronx visited.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CROWLEY: Finally tonight, the reunion we promised to take you to may still be going on. Our camera crew left before last call to bring back the pictures we're about to show. The reunion of some New Yorkers who survived devastation, but not the devastation of 9/11. They are survivors of another kind of devastation entirely. In another time entirely.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Looked like Berlin 1946.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When it was at it worst, it looked like a bomb was dropped.
CROWLEY (voice-over): Way back when in uniform and in plain clothes, they all served on Simpson Street at the 41, the precinct that came to be called as did the movie about it, Fort Apache.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This isn't a police station, captain. It's a fort and hostile territory. You understand?
CROWLEY: If the country had an image 30 years ago of the worst that could happen to a city in peacetime, this was it. Abandoned buildings, vacant lots knee deep in debris, whole blocks fit only for rats and ravagers, predators on four feet or two. Urban apocalypse had a name then, the South Bronx.
Everyday, the cops at Fort Apache went to work. 120, 130 murders a year in the worst years. 35 shoot-outs in one of the bad years. And through the mid '70's, 12,000 fire as year. Most of them set by landlords or tenants who saw no other way out.
Another generation's notion of progress accounts for a lot of what went wrong here. But if a single culprit can be nominated, this is it. A vast permanent river of concrete called the Cross Bronx Expressway. It washed away sturdy neighborhoods full of boys playing stick ball and mothers watching from windows, fathers coming home from work.
With all that gone, the only people who could be induced to live here were those with no choice. And they went from being choiceless, to being hopeless, to being desperate.
Look at the south Bronx now. Revival is not the word. Miracle is. Big government made bad decisions for decades. And then, wonderful to report, began making wise decisions with a lot of neighborhood help. So the south Bronx has many people to thank for its resurrection, but these people in particular. They held out the fort.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fate through me there. And it was the greatest training ground at the time anywhere in the world to become a cop in New York City.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CROWLEY: Thanks for watching NEWSNIGHT. Have a good weekend.
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