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Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl Arrives in the U.S.; Crisis in Iraq: Militants Parade Through Captured Towns; Official: U.S. Has Not Finalized Iraq Strike Targets

Aired June 13, 2014 - 09:00   ET

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

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Thanks so much. You have a great weekend.

NEWSROOM starts now.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: Happening now in the NEWSROOM, breaking overnight. Bergdahl back in America.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR, EARLY START: Arriving just hours ago at Brook Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

COSTELLO: The army sergeant starting to heal after five years of Taliban captivity.

REAR ADM. JOHN KIRBY, PENTAGON SPOKESMAN: He's going to need some time to re-assimilate.

COSTELLO: Tinderbox. Terrorists marching to Baghdad taking control of key cities, what was once unthinkable about this anti-Iraq war president.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And I'll be a president who ends this war in Iraq and finally brings our troops home.

COSTELLO: As we come this --

OBAMA: I don't rule out anything.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They come here and they find a relief.

COSTELLO: A tiny shelter in Texas home to families from foreign countries trying to get into America.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You look into these people's eyes, especially the children. What do you see?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Fear. They're scared.

COSTELLO: We'll take you live to the border on the trail of children some as young as 4 crossing the Rio Grande.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So that's one for you changed your mind?

HILLARY CLINTON, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: I really -- I have to say, I think you are being very persistent --

COSTELLO: The Hillary NPR interview. Same-sex marriage and a quip at Clinton.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm just trying to clarify so I can understand.

CLINTON: No, I don't think you are trying to clarify.

COSTELLO: What happened?

Let's talk. Live in the CNN NEWSROOM.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: Good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me. We begin this morning with Bowe Bergdahl's return. Today for the first time in five years, the former POW is on American soil. This is the plane landing in San Antonio overnight. On board, Bowe Bergdahl and a host of people to help make him -- to help make the transition back to a normal life more easy.

A physician, psychiatrist and officer in what's called a personal recovery specialist are on board that plane with Bergdahl. Bergdahl is now in Brook Army Medical Center. His room is ready. He's getting an entire part of the building devoted just to him and his recovery. At his side, attorneys, a chaplain, security financial analysts. But most importantly of all, his family. And that meeting according to experts is going to be the most stressful.

CNN's Martin Savidge live outside the Army hospital in San Antonio to tell us more.

Good morning, Martin.

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you, Carol. Yes, as you pointed out, it was the middle of the night when Sergeant Bergdahl returned to the United States of America. But there's no fanfare, there was no special greeting, and there was none ever intended. This, the military says, and what comes next will all be strictly by the book.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SAVIDGE (voice-over): After five years in Taliban captivity, U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl is back on American soil. Touching down overnight, Bergdahl arrived at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, then was transported to a military medical facility with a room prepped for his arrival and a support team standing by along with his family.

KIRBY: He just came out of five years of captivity. We're going to get a chance to find out what was in his head there that -- you know, that day when he was taken captive. SAVIDGE: "The Daily Beast" obtained letters purportedly written by

Sgt. Bergdahl to his family while he was in captivity. They may give a glimpse into his disappearance from his base that night in 2009. Writing, "Leadership was lacking if not non-existent. The conditions were bad and looked to be getting worse for the men that were actually the ones risking their lives from attack."

The two letters are dated 2012 and 2013. Penned in two very different writing styles, one in cursive, the other in block print. The Bergdahl family purportedly confirmed the authenticity of the letters revealed by sources in contact with the Taliban.

ROY HALLUMS, AMERICAN HELD HOSTAGE IN IRAQ FOR 10 MONTHS: I'm please asking for help.

SAVIDGE: Held hostage for nearly a year, American Roy Hallums can relate.

HALLUMS: When I did mine, they just set a piece of paper in front of me and gave me a pen. And one person sat on each side of me and told me exactly what words to write and they wanted me to print it and not write in script because they couldn't read English in script.

SAVIDGE: At times Bergdahl's thoughts seemed to wander, touching on mathematics, God and the universe. Several portions of the letter blocked out. It's unclear by whom. Words in letters oddly misspelled. In 2013 he wrote, if this letter makes it to the USA, tell those involved in the investigation that there are more sides to the situation.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SAVIDGE: Carol, I've just gotten word from the military. There's a press conference that is scheduled for 4:00 Eastern Time. Participating in that will be a brigadier general from the Army, also will be a psychiatrist and a doctor, both of whom are part of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl's medical team who are treating him right now.

And one last thing, the reunion, that's what everyone here is focused upon. When will they see his family? We've not been told a specific timeline. We do know from the past in previous reunions, this is a difficult and emotional, albeit very joyful time. The first meeting likely to only last a few minutes, Carol.

COSTELLO: Martin Savidge reporting live from San Antonio. I want to focus in on those letters that were allegedly written by Bowe Bergdahl and then sent to his parents. Joining me now is Kimberly Dozier who obtained those letters. She's a contributing writer for "The Daily Beast".

Welcome, Kimberly.

KIMBERLY DOZIER, CONTRIBUTING WRITER, THE DAILY BEAST: Good to be here.

COSTELLO: Senator John McCain said earlier on "NEW DAY" that we shouldn't put much stock in these letters because they probably weren't really written by Bergdahl. In your mind were they?

DOZIER: That's one of the first things I asked myself when I looked at these. The letter writing doesn't match and while they say the kinds of things you think that someone in captivity would want to tell their parents, that I'm OK, I'm being fed, they also go off on tangents. So I had to show them to a number of U.S. and Western officials before I had confidence that these really were at least delivered from the Taliban to the Red Cross and purported to be written by Bergdahl.

Bergdahl's family also saw things in them like the way Bergdahl signed the first one in 2012 with a little paw print. They say that's something that he did with his other letters from the field, so they believe that they were real.

They go on to say things like, in the second letter, he's aware of the investigation into his disappearance, and he wants to tell his parents why he walked off the base. He says that there was a high disconcern for troopers in the field, a lack of clear, logical and commonsense thinking at the top, and that the situation was going from bad to a nightmare in the field. So was he writing this in case he never came back and he wanted to defend himself? Or another possibility is, the Taliban had to be watching his every move, monitoring everything he wrote and approving it before it got sent off.

Perhaps this was the kind of message that they wanted to send to tear down the morale of U.S. troops in the field. Look, one of your own walked off because he had no confidence in his commanders and things were really bad there.

COSTELLO: Interesting. You know, as you mentioned, there are a lot of spelling errors in the letters so this is one example. "To all my friends and family in regards to the circumstance," and if you see how he spelled the word circumstance, that's way off.

In "The Washington Post", you know, they released excerpts from his journal. He misspelled a lot of things in his journal, too. And some of the things he put into code. So what do you make of those misspellings in the letters?

DOZIER: Well, I actually also read through the Bergdahl family letters back to Bowe. We haven't released those. They're private. They're about things that are happening at home, births, marriages, et cetera. But there are a lot of misspellings in those letters as well. So it seems that while this is a family that's very creative, they talk a lot about God, philosophy, but grammar and how letters are spelled, not really their high point.

COSTELLO: Strong suit.

(LAUGHTER)

DOZIER: Strong suit, yes.

COSTELLO: You said you chose not to release letters from the Bergdahls to Bowe in captivity including a photo of Jani Bergdahl with her face veiled, according to a Muslim custom, land Bob with his beard. Did you deliberately not want to release that particular photo just because of privacy issues, or was there more to it?

DOZIER: Privacy issues but also yes, Jani is veiled, but she wears the same kind of veil that I wear when I'm in the field in Kabul or especially out in the countryside where you might come across someone who holds very fundamentalist beliefs. I always did that partly to show respect for their culture, but also so that I didn't endanger the troops or the officials I was with by being a Westerner who was offending local custom.

I understand from the people who delivered the letters to me that they were advising the Bergdahl family how to communicate with the Taliban to make sure those letters, or to better ensure that those letters would actually reach their son. So they did things that were respectful of the local culture, and that might be seen in a very different context back here in the states.

COSTELLO: Understood. Kimberly Dozier, thanks for sharing the information. We do appreciate it.

DOZIER: Thank you.

COSTELLO: Still to come in the NEWSROOM, militants march toward Baghdad, but what happens if they succeed in capturing Iraq? Would it be anarchy or would an actual government be put into place? We'll talk to a man who helped rebuild Iraq's leadership from the inside.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: This morning President Obama has already met with his National Security team to discuss the crumbling situation in Iraq. And a senior administration official tells us that a decision on what action, if any, could come as early as this weekend.

Terrorist fighters continue to parade through their captured towns. ITN reporter Jonathan Rugman was at a checkpoint in Kirkuk as fighting broke out and Iraqi military abandoned their posts.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JONATHAN RUGMAN, ITN REPORTER (voice-over): Outside Kirkuk, Iraqi troops from the 12th Division were filmed trying to halt the Islamist advance. But it seems they didn't try for long. Somebody filmed the Iraqi soldiers fleeing, many of them in civilian clothing. And apparently leaving behind this military base as a playground for jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and El Sham. Some playground, from this footage we could count 14 abandoned tanks.

And so it was that Kurdish fighters moved in to occupy Kirkuk, they said to stop it from falling. Kirkuk, the city the Kurds have long claimed as their historical capital.

(on camera): The Kurdish fighters argue they are the only force for stability in this region because so many of the Iraqi army has collapsed but the temptation for the Kurds is to hold on to Kirkuk come what may, not just because of its oil wealth but because they've always wanted it as part of a future Kurdish state. The Kurdish state is what might eventually happen here if Iraq does indeed collapse.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: It's like deja vu all over again, isn't it? Iraq's embattled government says its troops have recaptured Tikrit. This video shows Iraqis boarding vehicles to fight the militants. President Obama says he does not rule out any option in helping Iraq stop the terrorist advance. Possibilities include airstrikes but not boots on the ground.

Last hour, we heard from a leading critic of the Obama administration and its handling of Iraq through the years.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: The Iraqis rejected our troop retention plan, they didn't want to sign it. The American people wanted us out of there. The president won the election in large part by promising to end the war.

Weren't those all circumstances that demanded we get out of there? It's not our fight.

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: Well, it's interesting, that narrative. But the fact is we could have negotiated a residual force just as we could have in Afghanistan. By the way, you'll see the same thing happen in Afghanistan that's happening in Iraq if the president goes through with total withdrawal.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Senator John McCain.

Joining me by phone, a man who saw Iraq's broken system from the inside and tried to fix it, David Tafuri worked with the U.S. State Department to help rebuild Iraq's legal system in 2006 and 2007. He's now in the Iraqi city of Erbil.

David, welcome.

DAVID TAFURI, WORKED TO REBUILD IRAQ'S LEGAL SYSTEM (voice-over): Hi, how are you?

COSTELLO: I'm good.

So, you're within country. Tell us what the situation is from your perspective.

TAFURI: The situation is very fluid right now. Iraq changed a lot in the last week. There are (INAUDIBLE) northern Iraq that are under control (INAUDIBLE) ISIS is soldiers who invaded this part of northern Iraq. You know, as I mentioned, a big surprise. There's no surprise that Tikrit were attacked by ISIS troops. I'm surprised it fell so quickly and the Iraqi army surrendered so quickly. So, there are a number of questions now, will the Iraqi army be

reinforced by Prime Minister Maliki? Will he send more troops and weapons to confront the fighters? What will the person ma do, protecting the border?

There are questions about if any other country also get involved. Will the U.S. help? The U.S. spent a lot of time here trying to rebuild Iraq, did a lot of training for the Iraqi army and will the U.S. come in to assist?

COSTELLO: Well, the United States did a lot to train the Iraqi army. We're seeing pictures of them simply giving up the fight. I mean, that's got to be disturbing to you.

TAFURI: It is. It's rather embarrassing for U.S. foreign policy. We spent a lot of time and a lot of money here, and it's an unfortunate result. So I don't think it's a complete surprise that the Iraqi army is not as strong as it was when the U.S. military pulled out.

It was clear that Prime Minister Maliki was not doing what he needed to do to make it as a strong fighting force that will be loyal. He made a number of mistakes including Sunni Arabs in the Iraqi and not including Sunni Arabs in the military.

The Iraqi army clearly isn't as loyal to him as it was a few years ago and he needs to be to be an effective fighting force.

COSTELLO: Well, in your mind since the United States was in Iraq a long time, and if you look at things now, you can probably say it didn't accomplish its goals to say the least. So should America get involved again?

TAFURI: Well, it's going to be a difficult decision for America. But we have important strategic interests here in Iraq. We certainly cannot let large parts of Iraq fall to Sunni militants who are extremists and will certainly do harm to the U.S. and U.S. interests in the region and around the world.

So there are important reasons why the U.S. needs to pay attention and really needs to do something. It doesn't necessarily mean that the U.S. needs to put troops on the ground. The U.S. along with its allies need to make sure Sunni extremists don't continue to control populated areas of Iraq.

COSTELLO: David Tafuri, thank you so much for providing your insight. We really appreciate it.

(MUSIC)

COSTELLO: All right. Let's talk about the possibility of U.S. airstrikes, because that's not an easy proposition. Officials tell CNN that President Obama has not yet decided to launch strikes as the military is pointing out, a number of concerns. That news just coming into CNN.

Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr has more now. Barbara, good morning.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol.

I think it's absolutely right what you just said to emphasize the president has made no decision about air strikes and there are always other options he could decide upon. Intelligence sharing works weapons shipments to Iraq. That sort of thing.

But let's say it was air strikes. What we're now being told is there are a number of challenges to develop a target set against these fighters, these so-called ISIS fighters. U.S. officials are telling us it starts with the basic concept that the targeting problem is a lack of intelligence, the lack of credible, specific U.S. intelligence on the ground. Who are these people? Where are they located? How do you target them?

If you don't have the intelligence on the ground, you can't go against them. They have no fixed position.

You see it from the video. A lot of them are just riding around in trucks. There's no command in control, no air defense sites, no radars, no military bases to strike. So who and what do you really go after? If you start dropping bombs, the risk of civilian casualties may be significant. Again, when you look at all the video coming out of Iraq, these people are largely moving not far from civilian populations.

So, people then say why not drones? Just use drones and fire missiles at them. These are people, fighters on the move. You don't know who is in the vehicle. You don't know exactly where they're going to be. It's very hard to determine from the air who exactly is on the ground and what you want to target?

That may be the challenge the White House is looking at right now in trying to develop a target set -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Barbara, on the intelligence angle of this story, you said we lack good intelligence. We've been in Iraq such a long time. You would think we have those resources on the ground.

STARR: Well, let's remember, the U.S. left at the end of 2011.

This ISIS organization, this militant group, has really surprised everybody with their speed, rapidity and strength and the numbers of fighters and what they've been able to accomplish in a very short period of time.

So they are on the move. Is there a broad understanding of who they are, who their commanders are, what their goals are? Sure, absolutely. I think the U.S. intelligence community is looking at that around the clock.

But if you want to fly U.S. military aircraft, U.S. drones and strike targets, you have to have that very fine granular intelligence, who exactly is on the ground, where are they? Are there any civilians near them? Are you going to cause civilian casualties, are you going to hit houses?

This is the kind of real-time minute-by-minute intelligence. And the U.S. right now has nobody on the ground to give that kind of information, Carol.

COSTELLO: All right. Barbara Starr reporting from the Pentagon. Many thanks.

Still to come on the NEWSROOM: thousands of unaccompanied children are illegally crossing the border into United States. We'll talk to a teenager who tried to turn himself in to immigration authorities, but instead found shelter in a church.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is outraged over the massive influx of unaccompanied children crossing the border every day and is in part blaming the White House for not helping deal with the problem, opting to move the children to temporary medical or military facilities.

In a letter to the House and Senate she writes, "It has become clear ha the administration has encouraged this massive influx intends to continue ignoring the state's impulse to end the policy."

Veteran border patrol agents say they've never seen anything like it and warn children are coming over the border every day, some so young it's heartbreaking.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS CABRERA, NATIONAL BORDER PATROL COUNCIL: I've seen them personally as young as 4. I've heard of them out there as young as 2.

REPORTER: Four years old, unaccompanied.

CABRERA: Yes, unaccompanied.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: CNN's Martin Savidge joined an agent tracking small footprints in south Texas. Here is what they found.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: So, what it looks like maybe a family unit, juveniles amongst them, maybe some adults. They'll come back here and be loaded inside.

From what we understand, they're from Honduras, many of the children really young.

(voice-over): The adults may be related to the children or may be only traveling with them. It's past of the puzzle agents have to solve.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Federal officials say 60,000 unaccompanied children will illegally cross the border this year alone.

CNN's Polo Sandoval is on the border near McAllen, Texas, with the story of one teenager.

Good morning.

POLO SANDOVAL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Carol, good morning. You're right. The debate over immigration reform rages on thousands of miles away. But in order to see the face of the issue, you have to travel to this corner of the country in south Texas. We found the story of a young boy who crossed this river after a treacherous journey.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SANDOVAL (voice-over): Sister Norma Pimentel's makeshift shelter offers more than just food, clothing and a few creature comforts for the hundreds of undocumented immigrants who have passed through the doors. It's also a spiritual sanctuary from the pain so many suffered on their journey north.

SISTER NORMA PIMENTEL, CATHOLIC CHARITIES: They come here and find a relief, a sense of peace, a sense of goodness that we have for one another.

SANDOVAL: The shelter in downtown McAllen, Texas, is staffed by a army of local volunteers. It's frequently a first stop for families after being released by U.S. Customs.

(on camera): Sister, you look into these people's eyes, especially the children, what do you see?

PIMENTEL: Fear. They're scared. They're lost. They're wondering whether this was the right choice for them.

SANDOVAL (voice-over): They're usually families, mostly women and children, but 16-year-old Juan has only himself. We're protecting his identity because he's a minor.