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CENTCOM's Twitter Account Hacked; Terror Hunt

Aired January 12, 2015 - 15:00   ET

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

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, here we go. Top of the hour. You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

In the U.S. fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, it's the group calling the plays. And U.S. Central Command, CENTCOM, has taken a hit by the enemy, not on the ground, but online. Take a look. You will see for yourself.

This is what you get if you visit CENTCOM's Twitter page, big block letters here, account suspended, the page suspended after reported ISIS sympathizers hacked it, along with CENTCOM's YouTube channel.

But before the Twitter account was suspended, this is what you would have seen. Hackers changed the top frame, the top profile to masked militant. You see the word "cyber-caliphate" and also the words "I love you, ISIS."

When you looked at the tweets, one listed what appears to be some private information about members of the U.S. military. Well, reading, they tweeted: "We won't stop. We know everything about you, your wives and children."

With me, David Ibsen, executive director of the Counter Extremism Project.

But, first, let's just go to Washington to our correspondent there Joe Johns.

And, Joe, when you look at the information, yes, sensitive, but, according to Pentagon, nothing classified was posted. Yes?

JOE JOHNS, CNN SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Right. I think that's an important distinction. Nothing classified has been released.

Clearly, it's a major embarrassment for the U.S. government. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest sort of addressing that question. Asked about it today at the briefing, was downplaying it, pointing out there's a big difference between a larger data breach, for example, a hack into the Pentagon mainframe computers, which is almost impossible, and the hacking of a Twitter or YouTube account, which is what happened in this case.

So, shortly noon, you have accounts on YouTube, Twitter belonging to Central Command publishing Islamist videos, pictures, messages. You read them, things like, American soldiers, we're coming. Watch your back. You will see no mercy, infidels. ISIS is already here. We're in your P.C.s in each military base with Allah's permission. We're in CENTCOM now. We won't stop. We know everything about you, your wives and children.

It was a little bit after noon that CENTCOM confirmed that the Twitter account was compromised, the account now suspended. The hackers' actual identities and their affiliation have not been confirmed. Important to say that. But they did flood CENTCOM's accounts with all that jihadist propaganda and they also published what they claimed to be internal U.S. military documents which turn out to be addresses and names and addresses of military personnel and their families, which is the most troubling thing, but nothing classified, Brooke.

BALDWIN: We also now apparently have heard from Twitter not saying much, saying, yes, it was a hack. No more comment beyond that. Joe Johns, you mentioned Josh Earnest talked about this in the White House daily briefing.

David, I'm going to come to you in just a second.

This is exactly what he had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I can tell you this is something that we're obviously looking into and something that we take seriously. However, just a note of caution to folks as they're covering this story. There is a pretty significant difference what is a large data breach and the hacking of a Twitter account.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: All right, David. How significant is this?

DAVID IBSEN, COUNTER EXTREMISM PROJECT: I think it is significant.

And while we may want to be cautious and we can note this is a Twitter account and not classified mainframe, we can't be dismissive. Already, we have seen these extremists have gained incredible traction on social media platforms and have gone from utilizing them very effectively to mobilize and recruit and propagandize to now really engage in cyber-attacks, not just against groups such as our or against private individuals, but against the U.S. government.

BALDWIN: That was the point I was asking you earlier. We were talking in commercial. I said what are you most worried about? You said that their effectiveness on platforms such as social media.

What about -- your group had -- you studies these sort of things. You had been warning Twitter for months this kind of thing could happen.

IBSEN: We have. We noted from the outset of our work that while extremism has been around for a long time, the extremists seem to be using certain kind of 21st century communication tools more effectively than we are to spread their message and to radicalize.

We have raised this issue with social media platforms such as Twitter, and the response has not been as urgent and as comprehensive as we would like.

BALDWIN: Who could be capable? How did they go about -- I know they're working now to try to track back to the genesis of the hack and to try to figure out who this was.

You see again, if we want to throw it up there -- I don't know if we do -- at the top of the here -- here we go -- cyber-caliphate with words, "I love you, ISIS." It could be a bunch of different people.

IBSEN: Yes, it could be.

And that's part of the problem. I think that's why you need actors from all aspects of society, the government and private sector, but even the companies, the private second actors themselves. One thing we have seen when we track this information and the identities of these cyber-jihadists is that very quickly they can change their profiles and they can change handles. If they get removed, they pop up again right away.

BALDWIN: Wow. To your point about sophistication and effectiveness, right?

David Ibsen, thank you very much, executive director of the Counter Extremism Project. Thank you, sir, very much.

Now with perfect 20/20 hindsight, the White House today admitted it goofed essentially by not sending a senior U.S. official, a higher- profile someone from the administration to that historic unity march in Paris. While the U.S. ambassador to France was there in attendance, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest admitted her stature did not quite measure up, especially -- look at the pictures here.

This is something that will be written in future history books and it will not include the president of the United States here. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

EARNEST: Some have asked whether or not the United States should have sent someone with a higher profile than the ambassador to France. And I think it's fair to say that we should have sent someone with a higher profile to be there.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: CNN senior political correspondent Brianna Keilar joins me now from Washington.

Brianna, you have covered the White House for quite a while before your current post. When you heard Josh Earnest say essentially, our bad, we should we should have sent higher-profile, you don't often hear that.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: You don't hear often that, this White House just admitting that they messed up. You don't hear that from this White House. Quite frankly, you don't hear that from many White Houses.

This was a very big deal to see this. I think it reflected in retrospect they realized this was not really the right decision. We had heard from Secretary of State John Kerry that a lot of this criticism of President Obama or higher-level official not going was quibbling.

The fact that Josh Earnest came out today and said what he said tells you they realize now it's not just quibbling. I think part of the reason, while they're not being very clear at the White House what the issue was, they cite security.

But at the same time, you look at who was there, Brooke, and you had Mahmoud Abbas. You had...

BALDWIN: Benjamin Netanyahu.

KEILAR: Yes. And the security concerns for these leaders of the Palestinian Authority and of Israel are huge. That kind of I think pushes this argument to the side.

I think there are another -- there are a couple of things going on here. One, President Obama, while he obviously does things to deal with terrorism, this isn't the issue that he wants to be fully front and center out there with, I think it's fair to say. And then I think the really big thing here is a style issue, that this is an example of this president maybe not being comfortable at times making overtures that would be automatic to other world leaders or other politicians.

I think there the idea of just showing up to something like this -- and it's true -- you heard the White House say this -- it kind of came together sort of last-minute. But it also shows you the first instinct wasn't to go.

BALDWIN: But these are the moments, right? These are the moments that presidents and the president of the United States would want to be a part of. Again, like I said, when you see that picture of these world leaders, dozens of world leaders linking arms -- I was listening to our coverage earlier.

Jake Tapper was right to point out in the wake of 9/11, I think it was a week, two weeks after that happened, who was the first leader to come to the United States? It was the president of France at the time. It was Jacques Chirac.

KEILAR: That's right, and just the importance of the relationship between France and the U.S. going all the way back to the Revolutionary War. This is a very big deal.

You look at this image, it's amazing, it's moving. The fact that the president isn't there or that another top U.S. official isn't there is very much a conspicuous absence. At the same time, I think this probably was the best move of the White House to just come out and say, we messed up.

They is obviously some -- they were facing criticism. I think they realized it wasn't going to go away and that really a mistake was made. So, again this very rare instance of just, you know what? We're getting criticized and the criticism is warranted.

BALDWIN: Brianna Keilar, thank you.

Coming up next, how the three men blamed in the terror attacks are all linked in Paris. They're connected to this jihadist group that may have started in a Paris park. We're digging into their backgrounds and how this whole network fits together. It comes as investigators search for possible members of this sleeper cell.

Also ahead, a story we have to talk about, another terror group, Boko Haram, back here in the headlines. You know the story, those 200 girls kidnapped by these militants months ago. Now you have 2,000 villagers reported dead -- those details coming up here on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

Right now, this worldwide hunt for this female terror suspect. Authorities initially thought the grocery store gunman's girlfriend, Hayat Boumeddiene, may have fled that Paris terror scene by slipping out with hostages. That is what was first reported.

Now it seems she may not even have been in France. But given what they know about this 26-year-old, authorities are on this frantic search to find her. Turkish media say this video shows her -- this is far right of your screen there in the white. She has her head covered here and she's on her way to Syria, arriving in Turkey from Spain on January 2.

And while it may not be her, the French prime minister says officials are sure the grocery store gunman had an accomplice. So, where, how does a plot like this even begin? Investigators now believe the trail may have started in a park in Paris, continued through prisons, and ended in the horrific bloodshed witnessed last week.

Here's CNN's senior international correspondent, Arwa Damon.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ARWA DAMON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The network was nickname after where its members worked out, this park in Paris, Buttes-Chaumont, with an aim far from its tranquil setting, to send French nationals to fight American troops in Iraq.

Magali Serre, an investigative journalist formerly with France 3, spent month on a documentary delving into Buttes-Chaumont back in 2005.

MAGALI SERRE, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: So three there in Iraq, you see.

DAMON: One of them, according to her reporting, in an attempted suicide attack against U.S. forces along Baghdad's notorious airport road. And that was Cherif Kouachi's aim, to be a martyr in Iraq. He, like the others, was not particularly religious, and yet drawn into, Serre explains, radical Islam and then to war by this man, Farid Benyettou.

SERRE: He told them, you have to discover your identity, your roots. You have a -- you have to know who you are, you know? And it's why they were listening him, you know, because he was like a prophet for them, you know? Somebody who knew more the Koran.

DAMON: Benyettou spoke about the abuses committed by U.S. troops in Abu Ghraib to recruit. Kouachi never made it to Iraq, detained along with six others, including Benyettou in 2005.

All as seen in court documents obtained by CNN, in conjunction with (INAUDIBLE) charged with conspiring to commit acts of terrorism. The common link among them, Benyettou. According to the documents, three of the men had already traveled to Fallujah in 2004 when it was under the control of al Qaeda in Iraq's leader, Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

Kouachi told the court he was relieved he was detained and, according to Serre's interview with Kouachi's social worker, finished with so- called jihad. But in prison is when the real radicalization began.

JEAN-CHARLES BRISARD, TERRORISM ANALYST: They were in prison with other hard-liner, including a central figure in the al Qaeda networks in Europe, Djamel Beghal.

DAMON: Algerian-born Beghal, jailed for plotting to attack the U.S. embassy in Paris in 2001.

BRISARD: And he in prison became the mentor, spiritual mentor, continued the work in some way initiated by Benyettou, and maintained these links between them in prison, radicalized them even more because his was in direct contact, we should not forget about it, he was in direct contact with the highest ranking members of al Qaeda at the time.

DAMON: This terrifying attack on French soil, carried out not by returnees from Syria, not by foreigners, but by two brothers born and radicalized here in France.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BALDWIN: And here she is with us now, Arwa Damon. Also joining us, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen.

But, Arwa, let me just begin with you and your reporting. And as I'm watching you in this piece connecting sort of all these different dots, I'm wondering if we're talking about this group from within the 19th District in Paris, where they all got together. I'm wondering how many others there are still out there, how many mobilized they are. Do you know?

DAMON: We don't.

That is exactly what French authorities are trying to determine, because, as we have seen with the violence that took place here over the last few days, whom they believe might be a potential threat is not necessarily who they are watching.

These individuals that were responsible for the bloodshed, they were not those that French intelligence was tracking, returnees from Syria who may have fought along extremists there. These are people that went well into hiding, opening an entirely new level of threat that the French authorities need to try and determine, because, effectively, as one person was saying, you don't know if the individual standing next to you in the street at this state has the capabilities to carry out this kind of violence.

BALDWIN: Then one of the other tentacles of the story is this other Kouachi brother, Peter Bergen, who apparently traveled in 2011, which just before, months before apparently Anwar al-Awlaki killed in that drone strike. And according to our reporting, this Kouachi brother actually roomed, prayed with the famed underwear bomber, Farouk Abdulmutallab.

And could you just help us paint the picture of what this Kouachi brother would have gone through, a typical day? I don't know if the correct phrasing is terror training camp or a school, but what would have happened over there?

PETER BERGEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, typically, these guys who go over to Yemen hook up with some kind of school, a legitimate school, sometimes to learn Arabic, and in case of Abdulmutallab, went over there to -- the underwear bomber -- to brush up on his Arabic.

He actually already spoke pretty good Arabic. And then he reached out to al-Awlaki. He went around mosques in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, basically saying, I want to meet al-Awlaki. And al-Awlaki through an intermediary, I'm interested in meeting you. You need to write an essay about why jihad is great, which he did. That allowed him into al-Awlaki's circle.

We don't now how Cherif Kouachi got into al-Awlaki's circle. But I think we can presume that it was a similar process, where he was in Sanaa, Yemen, supposedly to learn Arabic, but was seeking out al Qaeda. And over a period of weeks or even months, he was allowed into the inner circle. We don't know if he met al-Awlaki. But I'm sure, in my view, he -- I'm sure he did.

He certainly said that al-Awlaki financed his sort of terrorist career in one of the last statements he made while he was alive.

BALDWIN: And, al-Awlaki, just remembering all that I have read about him, he was described as a fairly charismatic man, as someone that I think even Bin Laden said he was jealous of. Do we know how many people he would have potentially helped finance to travel to Yemen to potentially carry out these kind of acts?

BERGEN: I don't think we know that.

But we know that, like, even in this country, the Boston Marathon bombers were influenced by him two years after he died. Here we have the Paris cell influenced by him four years after he died.

The point is, is that this guy, even in death, is being quite influential. And in multiple cases around the world, particularly the English-speaking world, he spoke in colloquial American English. He shows up in lots of cases.

There have been at least two dozen in the United States, Brooke, where we have determined that his writings or propaganda were possessed by the people who had been indicted in jihadist terrorism cases. He remains influential, despite the fact that he was killed in a drone strike four years ago.

BALDWIN: And to reiterate your point when we talked Friday, when we say the name Anwar al-Awlaki, he's American. Let's just remind everyone he was American-born.

Peter Bergen, thank you very much. And, Arwa Damon, your reporting excellent, as always. Appreciate both of you.

Coming up, another attack and scene so terribly brutal. Thousands are feared dead at the hands of Boko Haram. What are we learning about a child reportedly forced to carry out an attack there?

Plus, the Twitter account for U.S. Central Command was hacked, the startling details, names, numbers that ended up being posted all purportedly in support of ISIS. That is coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Since the "Charlie Hebdo" gunmen were killed in Friday's manhunt, investigators have pulled travel records for Said and Cherif Kouachi.

Officials believe both brothers traveled to Yemen, as we were just discussing, in 2011. And now mounting evidence points to links between both men and American terrorist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. And if that name sounds familiar, it's because Peter Bergen and I were just talking about that. But he is also no stranger to terror attacks in the West.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BALDWIN (voice-over): Anwar al-Awlaki, when investigators and journalists reportedly heard this name from one the "Charlie Hebdo" gunmen, there were flashbacks.

Al-Awlaki was a radical American-born Yemen-based preacher who was the key influence behind many major terrorist plots in the past five years. Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told investigators and his brother were influenced by al-Awlaki's Internet sermons.

In 2009, Major Nidal Hasan killed 13 people at Fort Hood military base after sending 18 e-mails to al-Awlaki. And that same year, it was al- Awlaki who ordered the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to take down Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit. After the London tube bombings in 2005, investigators discovered four that suicide bombers were dedicated listeners to al-Awlaki's audio sermons.

If the Kouachi brothers were telling the truth about his trip to Yemen, it would have had to have happened more than three years ago. Al-Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in September of 2011. But his footprint and his legacy, as we're finding out, seems to endure.

Unlike a number of leaders of al Qaeda, such as Osama bin Laden, al- Awlaki was a cleric. So, experts say he could present himself as a leading religious leader. And he was found by so many to be so charismatic that even bin Laden himself was jealous.

Al-Awlaki's father was a minister of the Yemeni government and he came to the United States to study at New Mexico State when al-Awlaki was born. At age 6, his family returned to Yemen. Al-Awlaki moved back to the United States for college, Colorado State, to study engineering and San Diego State for a master's in education.

He even preached at a mosque in Virginia. Later, he would use colloquial American English to speak to his Western followers.

Morten Storm, a former jihadist who says he became a CIA operative, got close to al-Awlaki. He says he was extremely determined and motivated.

MORTEN STORM, FORMER CIA SPY: His passion to take revenge on the West and spread this global jihad was -- was -- I mean, it was his whole life.

BALDWIN: When President Obama made the decision to take him out, al- Awlaki was rising in leadership of AQAP. That's al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a hub for terrorist training. Once more regional, experts say, they're now pursuing a global strategy.

STORM: So, once they are trained, he will request or the leadership of al Qaeda will request that they will return back to the West and then wait for orders.

BALDWIN: With that in mind, the FBI is become more concerned about isolated attacks by people in the West who may subscribe to al- Awlaki's teachings beyond the grave.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BALDWIN: Coming up next here on CNN, we will take a closer look at the stunning hack today. It was the Twitter account of U.S. Central Command. How likely is that it was ISIS behind this?

And after a lot of criticism from all around the world, the White House saying today, yes, a higher-profile official should have been in Paris for that massive rally yesterday. You will hear what President Obama's press secretary said to reporters. And we will get with Wolf Blitzer to weigh in live with me here in New York next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)