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CNN Live Saturday

Celebrities & U.S. Lawmakers Taking on Darfur's Plight; Government Turns to Audio & Video Technology to Analyze Terrorist Tapes; A Rental Car Sharing Service That Includes Everything; 12 Year College Student has taken the term "Professional Student" to Another Level;

Aired April 29, 2006 - 17:30   ET

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

SUSAN ROESGEN, CNN ANCHOR: The desperate situation in Sudan's Darfur shows no sign of improvement. President Bush has described conditions there as genocide. But now celebrities like actor George Clooney are joining the effort to publicize the dire conditions. CNN's Zain Verjee has more in a report you saw first on "THE SITUATION ROOM" with Wolf Blitzer.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAIN VERJEE, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: At the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, lawmakers breaking the law.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We will not watch the slaughter in Darfur.

VERJEE: One by one, arrested, handcuffed, and hauled off in front of cameras and a cheering audience. Representatives Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, James Moran of Virginia, James McGovern and John Oliver of Massachusetts, and Tom Lantos of California, a holocaust survivor.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Stop raping women in Sudan!

VERJEE: They're demanding the Sudanese government stop the bloodshed in Darfur and allow food aid to get to refugees. And they're demanding the international community intervene to provide security to civilians. At the White House, President Bush repeated his administration's criticism of Sudan.

BUSH: The message to the Sudanese government is we're very serious about getting this problem solved. We don't like it when we see women raped and brutalized.

VERJEE: The president also called on NATO to play a peacekeeping role in Darfur, and he issued an executive order that freezes the assets of four men alleged to be involved in atrocities. Like Tibet, Darfur has become a cause celebrer. Celebrities, Don Cheadle, Angelina Jolie and George Clooney among them.

GEORGE CLOONEY, ACTOR: So now what you need is some plastic and some water.

VERJEE: Clooney has just spent several days on the border with Darfur, spending time with just a few of the tens of thousands of refugees there.

CLOONEY: Anyone killed or hurt? Many?

VERJEE: Jolie took out this newspaper ad to inform Americans about what's going on in Darfur, and Cheadle, star of "Hotel Rwanda" has written many op-eds, saying in "USA Today," there is one major difference between Rwanda and Sudan. In Sudan, it's not too late to act.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROESGEN: And that report by Zain Verjee first appeared on "The Situation Room" with Wolf Blitzer. You can watch it every weekday at 4:00 eastern, 1:00 pacific, right here on CNN.

And joining us to talk more about the crisis in Darfur now is Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas. He's been to Darfur to see the situation for himself. And he joins us from Topeka, Kansas. Senator, we tend to have a short attention span in this country, turning from one crisis to the next, whether it's the war in Iraq, or fighting in Africa. You have been on the ground in Darfur. What have you seen, and why should this country be more responsive to what's happening there?

SEN. SAM BROWNBACK, (R) KANSAS: Because what I saw is genocide. And we said after Rwanda, never again. That's why we should be responsive and that's why we should be active in this situation. We've called it genocide. It is genocide. If the west, and this I really want to include Europe involved in this as well, were to get very active and decide to be involved, this crisis would go away.

It would probably involve one or two firefights. The people that are the activists involved in this would stand down and people could go back to their home communities and the genocide could be over. Without active western involvement, you're going to see tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people continue to be persecuted, and it will expand out of Darfur into Chad and possibly other places in the region.

ROESGEN: Well, we know that right now there is a meeting in Nigeria to try to hammer out a peace agreement between the rebel groups and the Sudanese government. Have you had any word on how successful that agreement might be?

BROWNBACK: Well we need to try in talks. We pushed for a long time. And the Bush administration did an outstanding job getting a peace agreement between the north and the -- [ no audio ]

ROESGEN: Looks like we just -- Senator Brownback?

BROWNBACK: Yes. Yes, are you still receiving me?

ROESGEN: Obviously we're having some trouble with Senator Sam Brownback in Topeka, Kansas, talking about the situation in Darfur. We apologize for that. Once again there is a meeting right now in Nigeria, they are trying to hammer out a peace agreement, but the rebel groups may not be united enough to sign this agreement. Let's try again to turn to Senator Brownback in Topeka. Hey Senator, we lost you for a moment.

BROWNBACK: Sorry about that.

ROESGEN: That's all right, it's not your fault.

You believed that the peace agreement was a good step. But you also said something earlier, I want to get back to. You said with a limited amount of fighting. I assume by U.N. forces, American forces, we could clean this thing up. What do you really mean?

BROWNBACK: Well, we've got African Union troops that are in there that the United States is primarily paying for, and where they are, they have done a reasonably good job. But they're not enough troops, they don't have enough transportation, they don't have enough intelligence, and they don't have a broad enough mandate to engage the enemy. I think if you really had a NATO force, in here, of somewhere between or around 10,000 NATO troops, in Chad and Western Sudan, the Darfur region, that you would -- eastern Sudan, you would be able to resolve this conflict with a minimal amount of fighting. And the activists that are involved in the fight would stand down and people could go back to their villages. That's what's so troubling about this genocide. It wouldn't take that much, and it would be done and it would be gone.

ROESGEN: All right, Senator Sam Brownback, joining us in Kansas. We hope that they do reach some kind of agreement to stop the trouble there in Darfur. Thank you very much.

BROWNBACK: Thank you.

ROESGEN: Videotapes from Al Qaeda operatives. Audio tapes from Bin Laden himself. It is the terrorists preferred method of hiding spots, speech making. They're usually current and experts almost always agree that they are genuine, but you may be surprised just how much is learned about where and when those tapes are made. As we first saw on CNN's "Paula Zahn Now" it's a little bit Hollywood and a lot high tech. Here's David Ensor.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID ENSOR, CNN CORRESPONDNET: Voice on this audio tape, definitely Osama bin Laden. In his New Jersey home, acoustic expert Tom Owen identifies voices. To learn more, he focuses on the moments when Bin Laden is not speaking.

TOM OWEN, AUDIO ANALYST: Let's just take a very small section, where he hesitates for a second, and let's see what we can hear in there.

ENSOR: Okay.

OWEN: There is something in the background. I can hardly tell what it is. ENSOR: Tom Owen is one of the nation's top sound analysts. Using spectrographic equipment like that used by the CIA, the FBI and others to identify voices. Listening for clues on the recent Bin Laden tape, right away Owen runs into something.

OWEN: You hear that noise in the background?

ENSOR: Yeah, sure.

OWEN: It sounds like metal scraping metal.

ENSOR: Yeah.

OWEN: It's to eliminate noises other than the voice. But it's a little over used.

ENSOR: Visually this is such a flat band of sound here.

OWEN: It's been compressed.

ENSOR: So you think they may have compressed this, taken off the highs and lows to make it harder to draw any clues out of the tape as to where he's hiding?

OWEN: Right.

ENSOR: Do you think it's conceivable that a clue off of an audio tape might lead U.S. intelligence to Osama bin Laden one day?

OWEN: Possible. It's possible. It wouldn't be the first time when they were doing the mob cases in New York, one of the ways that they were finding out where certain people were and making -- where certain gangsters were conducting operations is because they heard the airplanes overhead.

ENSOR: And, in fact, he does find a tantalizing clue on this tape.

OWEN: Yeah, starting right in there.

ENSOR: Right through there.

OWEN: There's something.

ENSOR: It almost sounds like there's a kind of thing going on.

OWNEN: Yeah.

ENSOR: Could be engine noise. That would say something about bin Laden's hiding place. When there are pictures to look at there is much more to analyze, though it's not as easy as it looks on TV.

FROM CBS' CSI: NY: I got three reference points, how far the building is away.

We'll know in a second. Right down to her front door. Certainly isolating.

Queens.

ENSOR: Do you ever watch "CSI"?

RICHARD BORDEBRUGI, FBI AGENT: Never. Makes me sick to my stomach.

ENSOR: FBI agent Richard Bordebrugi doesn't like the way "CSI" makes it all look so easy. But at an unmarked FBI lab in northern Virginia, he uses the same technique, triangulation, on bank surveillance images, to figure out the height of masked robbers and help convict them.

BORDEBRUGI: If you have one measurement in that scene, then you can measure anything in the scene.

ENSOR: Bordebrugi looks for patterns like the masked robber of ten banks who always wore the same shirt.

BORDEBRUGI: Patterned shirts are very easy to individualize, that is to say, to identify them to the exclusion of all other shirts.

ENSOR: Once the man was arrested, the goal was to prove he had committed all of the robberies. In his house, they found the shirt.

BORDEBRUGI: I'm 100 percent sure that it's the same shirt.

ENSOR: Law enforcement and intelligence officers use those techniques and others to analyze tapes from terrorists like this one from Osama bin Laden. Not long after he escaped from American bombardment of the Torah Bora. Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri generally use plain backgrounds to reduce the clues. But analysts soon noticed that on this one he did not move one of his arms.

JIM FITZGERALD, FBI AGENT: Members of the medical profession were brought in to review that and there was an opinion that in fact he probably had been hurt at some point.

ENSOR: In the early days, things were different, bin Laden and Zawahiri even put out a walking tape, showing terrain. That sent analysts to examining rock formations and listening to bird calls. But the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit says since then Al Qaeda has learned to be careful.

MICHAEL SCHEUER, FORMER CIA AGENT: The enemy is stupid if they're going to give us a tape that tell us where they are geographically. If it's going to give us a fix on them. So a lot of this stuff is just -- we go through the motions so we can cover our behinds and say we've checked everything we could think of.

ENSOR: Nevertheless over the years there have been successes against Al Qaeda. Officials will not say whether tape analysis contributed to them. Each time a new terrorist tape emerges, though, American analysts go through every sound, every image, just in case. David Ensor, CNN, Northern Virginia.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROESGEN: CNN is committed to providing the most reliable coverage of news that affects your security. Stay tuned to CNN for the latest information day and night.

And be sure to tune in to "Paula Zahn Now" weeknights at 8:00 eastern.

You know, oil companies aren't the only ones benefiting from high gas prices. Here's an idea that somebody's making money off of, the zip car. If you rent one of these cars, then your gas, your parking and your insurance is included. And it could be coming to a city near you.

And we're going to meet a college student who loves the college life. Loves it! Maybe loves it too much. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ROESGEN: An answer to the high gas prices? Some people say they've found it. It's a service that puts you behind the wheel of a car without charging you a penny for gasoline, or for insurance. Here's CNN'S Ennis Ferrer.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

There you go, you hear it.

ENIS FERRER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's been a month since Kristin Le Sommier paid for her own gas, after years of car rentals, she and her family turned to a car-sharing service to save money.

KRISTIN LE SOMMEIR, ZIPCAR MEMBER: The idea of paying over two bucks a gallon and it getting higher and higher just was too much.

FERRER: The program is called Zipcar and it works like this. Clients can pay either a monthly or a yearly membership fee and then rent cars by the hour or day. Here's the hook. Insurance, parking and gas are included.

LE SOMMIER: I'm not worrying about the gas as much. I'm not worrying about, oh, do I have enough money to fill up the tank? Gas wise, I'm probably saving about $100 a month.

FERRER: She drives all over town and out. The car-sharing service was started in the Boston area after its owner saw it in Europe. Today it operates in ten states. Their big markets are cities. Half their new clients mentioned fuel price as a reason for joining. But with rising fuel costs some ask if one day they could be victims of their own victory.

Their CEO says city folks don't drive that much, keeping mileage low, and about 15 percent of their fleet are hybrids. But he admits, just a few months ago the company raised their basic hourly rate by 25 cents because of rising fuel costs.

SCOTT GRIFFITH, CEO ZIPCAR: It worries me that we're starting to hear $4 a gallon. If we started to see that, it would start to having more of a significant impact on our cost structure and that would be a time we'd have to start to rethink our pricing again.

FERRER: But that doesn't seem to bother Le Sommier much.

LE SOMMIER: Down the road if the prices keep on going up and up and up and up and up, someone's going to have to pay for it.

FERRER: For now, she's just enjoying the ride. Ennis Ferrer, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROESGEN: Well here's a way to avoid driving altogether. Did you think you would never make it out of college? That's where you don't have to drive. Wait until you see our next report.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HEIDI COLLINS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: This is Johnnie Lechner. He could be the most educated undergrad in the world. Johnnie is in his senior year for the eighth year in a row.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROESGEN: Heidi Collins hangs out with a college student who can't quite make it into the real world.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ROESGEN: Many people fondly remember their college years, but a Wisconsin man doesn't have to remember, because he's still there. After 12 years, he's finally about to graduate. CNN's Heidi Collins has his story in a report we first saw on "Paula Zahn Now."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COLLINS: As graduation season approaches and tens of thousands of college kids put on their caps and gowns, among them, will be a one of a kind student. Who's made a career out of being in college. This is Johnnie Lechner. He could be the most educated undergrad in the world. Johnnie is in his senior year for the eighth year in a row.

JOHNNIE LECHNER, COLLEGE STUDENT FOR 12 YEARS: What class do you think that was for?

COLLINS: It may sound like the plot of a funny movie, but unlike Will Ferrell in "Old School," --

Do one. Do one.

COLLINS: -- Johnnie's not acting. You might say Johnnie's on the 12-year college plan. Staying year after year after year. And postponing the real world as long as financially possible. When Johnnie was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, it was 1994. Internet and e-mail hadn't yet arrived. Now, Johnnie's 29, and attached to his cell phone.

LECHER: So that's going on in our front yard.

COLLINS: His classmates, though have graduated, taken jobs, gotten married, had kids. Why do you think it's taken you so long to figure out what you want to do?

LECHNER: You know, I don't think it's so much that I'm taking any longer than a normal person is to figure things out.

COLLINS: Johnnie, it's 12 years of college.

LECHNER: My friends are like, you know, hey man you're living the dream, keep doing it.

COLLINS: Johnnie's happy to oblige. Embracing the college lifestyle with everything he's got.

We love Johnnie! Whoo.

COLLINS: His schedule is packed with cookouts. Frisbee.

Nice.

COLLINS: And, of course, women.

What are you doing later?

COLLINS: Let's talk about the girls. You're 29. Freshman girl comes in, she's, 18. Are you going and getting phone numbers?

LECHNER: I'll be out with my friends and, you know, they'll be beautiful, 18, 19, 20-year-old girls that will kind of be you know throwing themselves at, you know, at me, but, you know, I don't date girls that aren't at least 21. As far as older women, I mean, I don't have the most selection. Unless I was going to date somebody who was in the real world and I mean, that's frightening.

COLLINS: You might think a professional student would take inspiration from scenes like these in the classic comedy, "Animal House."

Girls welcome to the delta toga party.

COLLINS: He does. But that's not to say that Johnnie doesn't study. He has a respectable 3.0 GPA.

LECHNER: We have a lot of fun, but at the same time, I'm telling you, I'm very serious about my studies.

COLLINS: Johnnie's earliest class starts at 2:15.

LECHNER: I'm that kind of guy who likes to just kind of wake up when the sun finally wakes you up, and if that's 12 o'clock noon, that's fine. If it's 7 o'clock, that's fine, too.

COLLINS: His illustrious college career has made him a bit of a celebrity. Making headlines and guest appearances on several TV shows. He even has a website, on it, a countdown clock to graduation. $10 t-shirts and a link to Paypal so friends and fans can donate to his college fund.

What's the most money you've ever gotten from somebody?

LECHNER: A $20 donation.

COLLINS: But not everyone on campus supports his 12-year plan.

COLLEGE STUDENT: I think the whole thing that he's doing is ridiculous. Wasting so much money.

COLLEGE STUDENT: Most people just make fun of him.

COLLEGE STUDENT: He's a nice guy, but I think he needs a little reality check.

COLLINS: Some people say you're a loser. You've been there for 12 years. It's pathetic.

LECHNER: It's a liberal college, I'm a liberal person. If other people have a problem with it, you know it's like, well who cares? You know, don't you have something better to be worried about.

COLLINS: When he graduates in two weeks, he'll have a triple major, a triple minor, and a total of nearly 300 class credits. More than double the number needed. But even so, Johnnie says he'd stay one more year, if he could only raise the money. What are you afraid of?

LECHNER: I don't want to graduate and then a couple years after the fact look back and be like, why didn't I just go another year? I'm seriously having such a great time, and I'm so happy with where I'm at and my lifestyle and the friends I'm hanging out with. If I could figure out a way to not have to graduate, I would do it. I just need a miracle.

COLLINS: You're freaking out.

LECHNER: I know I am.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROESGEN: And that was Heidi Collins reporting.

To discourage other students from following in Johnnie's footsteps, the Wisconsin Board of Regents recently passed a law, tacking on hefty surcharges for instate students who exceed the required number of credits and they call it "Johnnie's Law." As for Johnnie, he turns 30 later this year, but he plans to write a book about his very long college experience. That will get him in the real world. For more stories like that, you can watch "Paula Zahn Now" weeknights at 8:00 p.m. eastern here on CNN.

And much more ahead on CNN. You're looking at live pictures now of the annual International Robotics Championship. 9,600 high school students facing off to see who can build the very best robot. And maybe make our lives easier one day. We'll have the latest on the competition in the next hour of CNN LIVE SATUDAY.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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