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In the Arena

Navy SEALs at Risk of Retaliation for Osama Raid; Fighting in Afghanistan; View from Abroad in Strauss-Kahn Case

Aired May 18, 2011 - 20:00   ET

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

ELIOT SPITZER, CNN HOST: Good evening and welcome to the program. I'm Eliot Spitzer.

Our top story tonight, the men who killed Osama bin Laden and their families may be in danger because of what we know about his death. That, according to the nation's top two military men who say that the details of the Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan, the details that the world so hungered for, they say that information should never have been released.

In a Pentagon briefing told, Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen and Defense Secretary Bob Gates expressed strong concern for the safety of the SEALs. Each of them gave a stark warning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ADMIRAL MICHAEL MULLEN, JOINT CHIEFS CHAIRMAN: From my perspective, it is time to stop talking. And we have talked far too much about this. We need to move on. It's a story that if we don't stop talking, it will never end. And it needs to.

ROBERT GATES, DEFENSE SECRETARY: I'm very concerned about this. Because we -- we won't to retain the capability to carry out these kinds of operations in the future. And when so much detail is available, it makes that both more difficult and riskier.

Now, with respect to the SEALs, in my meeting with them the Thursday after the operation, they did express concern not so much for themselves but for their families. And all I will say is that we have been taking a close look at that and we will do whatever is necessary.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

SPITZER: Chris Lawrence is in Washington. He joins me now.

Chris, so explain this to me. Here you've got the two top guy s in the Pentagon objecting to information coming out of the government. So whose decision has it been to release all this information?

CHRIS LAWRENCE, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, that's just the thing, Eliot. Everybody has been making the decision for themselves. I mean he's talking about you, me, government officials, retired military folks, people speaking on background inside the Pentagon. Look, we've heard details about this raid from the White House counterterrorism adviser, from CIA director Leon Panetta. Like I said, Pentagon officials have spoken on background about it. Even retired SEALs have come forward to talk about some of the tactics they used and equipment they used in the past.

What he's saying is, look, it's one step short of saying shut up, because he's saying that now too much has gotten out and it's gotten to the point where you just cannot release any more information about this raid.

SPITZER: Chris, I rarely will disagree with you, but I think he did say shut up. I mean he was doing it more politely, I suppose. But you know in the speech he gave the other day, he said, we had an agreement in the situation room Sunday not to talk about this and now everybody has gone out blabbing away.

You know, different note, do we have any information about specific threats that have been made against the SEALs or their families? Anything more tangible that we can say, man, this really is a crisis right now?

LAWRENCE: Nothing specific. And of course they are not going to talk about any additional security that they put on these SEALs or their families to protect them, otherwise, you know, what's the point? But he did say when they met with the SEAL team, it was the SEAL team members themselves who spoke up and said, look, we're a little worried about our families. Not so much ourselves, we're a little worried about our families because so much has gotten out about this raid.

And also it's not just this raid. What the Pentagon and some of the officials I've spoken to have talked about and are concerned about is, you know, we know exactly how many SEALs assaulted that compound. How many SEALs were on backup ready to come in. How they moved up the stairs. The fact that they used a stealth helicopter. All of these details.

And now these officials are saying, look, what if we've got to do this again? What if we've to go in the frontier region of Pakistan and go after maybe the leader of the Haqqani network or another high- level figure? How are we going to do that if now all our tactics and all our technology is out there?

And hey, just to be fair, not to come off, you know, we shouldn't come off too hypocritical. Look, it's me and you that are beating down our sources, trying to get all these detail, us, FOX, "New York Post," "New York Times," "Washington Post." We've all been reporting on these details ourselves.

So, yes, the government is leaking like crazy. We're asking for the details.

SPITZER: Look, that's exactly right. I think -- but what confuses me is that you have a White House that is participating in the dissemination of information and you have the senior military folks pushing back against the White House. So is the White House -- been asked, look, do you agree with Secretary Gates, is there, in fact, too much information flowing, or are the folks in the White House defending the information they're giving out saying, look, it's important for the world to know that we have this capability so that they feel as though we can get them wherever they are?

LAWRENCE: Yes, I don't think there's any sense that they necessarily wanted the world to know about some of these capabilities. Look, who knows, this helicopter, this stealth helicopter, for example, may have flown a dozen times before. It's highly unlikely this was the first time they ever put it in the air.

Until it actually clipped that wall and crashed, and we had video of it, we probably still would not know it existed. So I don't think anybody is out there saying we want the world to know about this technology and they're not necessarily pointing the finger just at the White House, but I think there's a feeling from the Pentagon that people were so proud of what had happened that this mission came off and it had been such a long wait to get Osama bin Laden that people were enthusiastic.

They were excited. They wanted to talk about this in a way that really you never hear this kind of detail about special ops missions. But now it has gotten to the point where they feel like so many details have been squeezed out of this mission that they literally, you know, have been given a playbook in a way of the kinds of missions that the SEALs do.

SPITZER: All right. Thank you, Chris Lawrence.

LAWRENCE: Yes.

SPITZER: The debate over how much is too much when it comes to sharing secrets with the public has been going on within the intelligence community for years. It's a debate that former CIA officer Jack Rice has found himself in the middle of time and time again. He joins me live now from Minneapolis.

Jack, thanks for being here.

JACK RICE, FORMER CIA OFFICER: Great to be with you.

SPITZER: So let me get your perspective on this. Have you ever seen this much information tumble out about a top secret mission this quickly, right after it happened, and such a media frenzy?

RICE: No, not quite like this. But let's face it, we're talking about $3 trillion, two wars, 10 years. The U.S. government turning itself upside down, turning the world upside down. And when you finally get the guy that you're claiming this is all about, it's not exactly shocking that there's a bunch of people at the Pentagon and the agency and the White House and everywhere else, pounding their chest, talking about how great this was, so I don't think anybody should be really shocked about that.

SPITZER: Look, the sense of emotion, the bravado, the sense of rah, we -- rah-rah, we finally got this done, absolutely understandable. On the other hand, the thing that has always defined the CIA in particular, the intelligence community, has been the discipline to keep secrets like this absolutely under wraps and that sort of need-to-know psychology and emotion is what has been pervasive there.

With all this stuff out there, if you were still in special ops, if you were still at the CIA, would you be troubled by this?

RICE: Well, not quite yet, but they're right on the edge. And you were right, by the way, when you say it's not just shut up, it's probably shut the hell up, because the fear here is you're starting to talk about sources and methods. And that's the terms that we use inside the intelligence community.

You start getting close to talking about assets that were used, the methods that were actually going into this process, and the concern that this may actually stop future operations.

We're not talking about Osama bin Laden now. We're talking about Zawahiri, we're talking about others throughout the Middle East we may have our eyes on. And that's what people are talking about inside the intelligence community. And frankly, special ops at the Pentagon, too.

SPITZER: You know, Jack, one of the facts that came out that seemed it was inevitable it would, and Chris made this point, when the helicopter crashed, pictures of it came out and that's when people said, aha, this is a slightly different chopper.

On the other hand, the information that came out a couple of days later about the safe house in Abbottabad, that seemed to me to be a uniquely -- you know, a distinct piece of information. Nobody should have mentioned that because who gained by that? Now they start going back saying, where was it, who was there?

A lot of questions are going to be asked, that one is the one that ticked me off and said, this is a problem.

RICE: Well, you know, if you look back over last few years, I mean we can think about the situation with Valerie Plame. As a simple example, when that comes out, too, when you start hearing about sort of places she may have been, contacts she may have had, assets that may have been disclosed there, this is a perfect example of this concept of -- and the term we use is OPSEC, operational security, what comes out and what doesn't.

But you know, when we started this conversation, you and I, we were talking about this idea of just how transparent this should be. If we're talking about freedom, how much should we actually make available? That has been an ongoing debate inside the CIA across -- frankly, the U.S. government, and that fight goes on right now, even sort of amongst the various organizations and within those organizations.

SPITZER: Well, let me ask you -- and we can pursue that in a minute, but I want to get -- add a conspiracy theory. You know I'm not a conspiracy theorist, sure, but let me ask you this.

(LAUGHTER)

SPITZER: How much of the so-called information that we think we have gotten may, in fact, not be accurate? In other word, how much of it may be misinformation? Maybe there was no safe house in Abbottabad and this is something that's being told to send people down -- you know a dark well? Is that a possibility as well?

RICE: Well, let's be clear here. And I'm always careful in terms of what I can say. Just because the government tells you something doesn't necessarily make it true. Boy, does that sound dark or what?

(LAUGHTER)

SPITZER: Man, a guy -- a guy from the CIA sounding cynical like that, I'm shocked. But let me ask you, when you're at the CIA, and you're having this discussion about transparency, that is a very sort of theoretical conversation.

Where are those decisions made? How far up the ladder at the CIA do you go? Is it the deputy director, the general counsel, before somebody is saying, wait a minute, this simply can't get out there? How do you have that conversation?

RICE: Well, actually, it cuts a couple of different ways. You certainly see them at the directorate level. The guys at the top of the heap sort of politically. And certainly at the director level.

But sometimes it's the opposite. General council gets involves. And this comes frequently down from the White House itself, in terms of what comes out versus what should come out. But, again this is my opinion.

One of the problems the intelligence community has had again and again and again is that they've tried to keep nothing out. They're trying to keep everything inside the building. The problem with that is when we talk about representative democracy, the idea that the American people need to know, I think there are certain things the American people should know.

And in fact, I think the intelligence community actually hurts themselves sometimes because they're so concerned about security, so concerned about secrecy, sometimes over-classifying ridiculous things and in the end, the only thing the American people get is when the intelligence community screws up because it becomes public.

The good stuff never gets out there. I think there's a real problem with that, too.

SPITZER: You know, Jack, I think that's exactly right. I think part of what's going on here is there have been so much negative publicity about the CIA, our intelligence, every time there's a failure, fingers are pointed. Now you finally have a success. People do want to claim credit, and rightly so. And then you have the guys in charge of the operations, Mike Mullen and Bob Gates, who are saying, wait a minute, guys, this is going to encourage all sorts of problems or create problems down the road so things have got to stop right here.

All right, Jack Rice, thanks so much for being with us.

RICE: Thanks, Eliot.

SPITZER: Coming up, we're winning the war in Afghanistan. A prominent journalist says it's so and he's got some astonishing information to back up the claim. That story is next.

But first, E.D. Hill joins me.

E.D., what do you got?

E.D. HILL, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Well, we're talking about Dominique Strauss-Kahn. And if there's any clearer example -- I can't figure one out -- between what the United States holds valuable and what the French hold valuable. It is how we're treating the alleged victim in the sex scandal.

The French press posts her name and many of them have posted her face. And in America, we're trying to shield her. And one of the French editors for "Slate France" said, well, we put her name out there because it's a common name. If it hadn't been so common, we wouldn't have put it out there.

But this is trying to help her save her reputation which we don't understand here. There's a lot about this story that's confusing.

SPITZER: Not only confusing but as you say goes right to the vortex of the very different emotional and ideological approach to the whole issue of privacy.

HILL: Exactly. We're going to talk about that.

SPITZER: Fascinating conversation. All right, thanks, E.D.

Up next, could we actually beat the Taliban? Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SPITZER: Osama bin Laden is dead and U.S. military commanders estimate that fewer than 100 al Qaeda members remain inside Afghanistan. So why is Afghanistan beginning to feel like Obama's Vietnam? And now we're hearing we might actually be winning?

We're joined by two men who have deep personal knowledge of the situation and some very strong personal opinions about it.

Peter Bergen is an expert on al Qaeda and CNN's national security analyst. And Sebastian Junger is author of "War," an account of his experiences with American troops in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. And I can only tell you guys you are two of the leading experts on not only counterinsurgency but Afghanistan and warfare generally.

Peter, I want to start with you. You have just written a blockbuster article from my perspective in "The New Republic." And I want to read perhaps the ultimate sentence, your conclusion in which you say, "When I look at the hopeful signs that are starting to emerge from the country and when I consider these indicators in tandem with the likely consequences of a hasty exit, I do think the wise choice now is for the United States to stay."

Now you're talking about Afghanistan. I was completely shocked by this conclusion. So first, what is winning? What does that mean in Afghanistan?

PETER BERGEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, winning in Afghanistan would mean leaving the country in a situation which it was in the 1970s, which was, you know, a very poor country, at peace with itself and its neighbors. This is not dream of vision, this has existed within historical memory.

And I think, you know, when we overthrow somebody's government, we have a responsibility to kind of pick up the pieces. And we've already run the experiment, Eliot, twice already of kind of washing our hands of the country. We did it in 1989 because of our embassy there. We did it again in 2002 because of ideological opposition of nation building by the Bush administration. And I think we owe it to ourselves and the Afghan people to get it right.

SPITZER: Sebastian, you wrote perhaps one of the most gripping books, "War," about -- you were literally embedded with the U.S. soldiers in the Korengal Valley and the day-by-day combat.

We just withdrew from the valley. Have we given up? Do you agree with Peter that we are in any way, shape or form winning this confrontation?

SEBASTIAN JUNGER, AUTHOR, "WAR": Well, here's the thing, I mean the Korengal Valley, it's a six-mile long valley in Afghanistan. It's really not emblematic of the whole country. There are other valleys where there's no fighting at all. And those aren't emblematic either.

They pulled out of Korengal because it sort of served its purpose. There were a lot of attacks coming out of the Korengal to the Pesh River Valley and they put an American base there to stop those attacks while they paved the road up the Pesh and once that was done, I think the commanders decided the benefit isn't worth the cost.

SPITZER: Let's take a look at the clip of the movie "Restrepo" that was based upon your writings that you and Tim Hetherington did that is absolutely gripping in the way you get the sense of the real interplay between U.S. soldiers and those -- the real Afghan people.

Let's take a look at this because I think it shows folks what goes on.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Going to get the information about the cow. He's the owner of the cow.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right, the cow? The reason why we killed it --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Because it ran into concertina wire. And it was mangled inside the concertina wire so we had to kill it to put it out of its misery because if we got it out, it would have been useless.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They're asking because it was illegal.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's illegal?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, illegal.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: To kill it?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're not going to be able to give them the money. If money is all he came for he's --

(CROSSTALK)

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

SPITZER: Now this captures, in a way, the real interplay between the soldiers and the Afghan people. Are we winning hearts and minds in this context?

JUNGER: Well, there's many different scenes we could have shown. You know, there were scenes where there was a lot of hilarity, a really good feeling, then there was that, and there were worst scenes than that.

Ultimately, it really isn't hearts minds in a sense. We -- you know, it doesn't -- we don't have to have the Afghans love us being there for it to work. They're very practical people. And the thing that made them resistant to cooperating with the Americans in the Korengal really was that we didn't go in there with enough soldiers.

I mean, we were there with 150 men. With a battalion, I think we could have done anything we wanted. We could have paved the road, built a school, everything we said we'd try to do. And had we done that with the 600 men, I think the Afghans on the ground would have bought into it. They all would want those things. They took a look at a company of men. And I think they just shook their heads and thought this is not going to work.

SPITZER: Now here's the toughest question, though. We can go in with a massive force and we can begin to do the nation building, Peter, that you talk about as well. Once we leave, what happens?

Does the Taliban then re-emerge from the woods? That you get the sense reading your book, your articles, watching the movie, that they're sort of an omnipresent force that just disappears into the ether for the moment, but then reappears. So are we defeating them or are they simply withdrawing tactically?

JUNGER: Well, I had a conversation with a U.S. senator about this. And I said, look, you have to answer the question, why is one Taliban fighter worth about 10 Afghan national army soldiers? The same people, the same guys? And his answer was, well, the Taliban believe in what they're fighting for. And the ANA do not.

I think the problem is not a tactical military problem. I think while we're there, we can -- we can keep order in that country. But we have a finger in a dike. And I think ultimately it's a problem of corruption in the government. And until there's a government that serves the Afghan people, that the Afghan people can be proud of, they won't be willing to risk their lives fighting for it. We will always have to do that job for them.

SPITZER: You may not had direct contact with the Taliban but what is your sense -- having been in Afghanistan so much, are the Taliban necessarily and rightly part of any successor government?

JUNGER: I mean there's sort of two kinds of Taliban. I mean on the one hand, there were sort of homegrown Afghan-Taliban. They're part of Afghan society. As such I think they deserve some kind of consultation as long as it's in good faith by them.

But then there are the proxy forces of Pakistan. There are people like the Haqqani network, Mullah Omar, who are essentially paid in forms -- an arm of the ISI, an arm with the Pakistani government. They do not have the Afghan's people best wishes at heart.

And so when you negotiate with the Taliban, you're not going to the Haqqani network and saying, what do you want to do in Kabul? You can't do that. You have to kill those people or marginalize them. And then if you have a conversation with the real Afghan Taliban, I think that's a legitimate process.

SPITZER: I want to ask you a different type of question. Time runs short but you got close to the soldiers. And you sort of absorbed their emotional content. If you asked them if they thought we were winning what do you think they would say?

JUNGER: They were so focused on their job that, you know, they were in the Korengal Valley, and they were winning for a year and then they left. That was how they saw it. I think the ones who sort of stepped back and looked at the broader war, they would probably look at the death of bin Laden and say, wow, it was confusing for a while but it kind of worked.

That's what we went in there for. I think some of them do also realize the reason bin Laden was in Afghanistan was because it was a failed state. So you can kill bin Laden, let it relapse into a failed state, and you have the same old problem all over again with the next bin Laden.

So I think some of them would realize there is a kind of logic to overseeing this a bit longer.

SPITZER: And so last word to you, Peter. Your view would be that if we used the death of bin Laden as an excuse to leave without rebuilding the state, we sow the seeds of our own destruction down the road.

BERGEN: Yes, I mean we've run this experiment before and it didn't work out very well.

SPITZER: All right. Thank you so much.

There's excerpt from Sebastian's book "War" on our blog, CNN.com/arena. I'd encourage everyone to read it.

Sebastian Junger, Peter Bergen, thank you so much. Fascinating stuff. Thank you.

BERGEN: Eliot, thank you.

SPITZER: Up next, the latest on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case. He's looking to make bail and he's willing to pay a lot for it. The details are next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HILL: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, may make bail tomorrow. His lawyers are going to court, and they're reportedly going to ask that he be released on $1 million bond. He's also said to be willing to wear an electronic bracelet and submit to house arrest.

Meanwhile, the French were having a reaction to Strauss-Kahn's arrest that actually might shock you.

Joining us to talk about the view from abroad is Thierry Arnaud, a political correspondent for the French network BFMTV.

Thanks for being with us.

Pleasure.

HILL: I was shocked when I looked at this new Council of Polling Analysis, CSA as you call it in France, showed that 57 percent of the people who were polled said that they thought Dominique Strauss-Kahn, DSK, was the victim in this. Does that surprise you? THIERRY ARNAUD, SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, BFMTV: Well, the victim is suddenly a very strange way to put it. And I'm not sure exactly what the question was. But victimized to some extent I can understand why and the reason is the way he was put on display so to speak and -- before undergoing any trial, before being proven guilty.

There is no such thing as a perp walk in France. This is actually illegal. It has been for over 10 years now. And comparable circumstances, the most you would get to see would be barely distinguishable head and shoulders inside a police car that would drive by very quickly.

Certainly not, you know, what we have seen, the walk, the pictures from the court and all of that.

HILL: And then from the American perspective, then what makes it even stranger to me, to understand that perspective, but then to have the French media willingly publish the accuser's name and some of them her photograph as well, and there was one editor who said, well, we published it because we wanted to protect her from rumors. It's a common name. If it weren't so common, we wouldn't publish it.

To us here in America, publishing the accuser's -- the, you know, alleged sexual assault victim's name and face is unthinkable. The perp walk to us is common.

ARNAUD: Right. Right.

HILL: So why is there this disconnect?

ARNAUD: Well, I don't know. And I would not -- you know, condone that sort of thing as I think it's very important as well to protect the identity of the victim so --

HILL: So that's not common in the media in France?

ARNAUD: No, I mean, some would and some would not. It's entirely on this side as your own, that media's discretion. In my case, I know what her name is. I'm not going to say it on air. If I have a picture, I'm not going to show it on my network. So it's for each media to decide how it's going to go about it and I'm not sure that -- this justification hold water very much. But that would be my position.

HILL: You know, there was an April 28th interview that DSK gave that may come back to haunt him. And he was asked about, you know, what would keep you from becoming president? Because he is the front -- he was, I should say, the frontrunner to beat Sarkozy.

And he said well, there are three things that are, you know, working against me winning, and that is money, women and my Jewishness. Well, he then went on to verbally describe a scenario in which someone could be paid off to accuse him of rape. And there it is.

"A woman who would be raped in a parking lot and who would then be promised 500,000 or a million euros to invent such a story."

That's really, to me, a kind of huge leap, to go from what keeps you from being president, well, you know, women (INAUDIBLE), and then here's a scenario of rape. It was -- it's just eerie.

ARNAUD: I agree that this is strange, E.D. It is completely strange. But I think the point he was trying to convey, albeit maybe in a strange fashion, was that he knew he was vulnerable. He had had this reputation for a very long time. You knew he was a womanizer.

You knew he was sometimes, you know, bold, even almost aggressive in the way he would -- he would chase women, you know, to put it frankly. But that doesn't mean he -- you know, he was suspected of anything close to rape.

HILL: Right.

ARNAUD: But he knew it was something he had to take care of in the frame of a presidential campaign because he knew he was vulnerable to accusations that he was sleeping around basically.

HILL: Does Sarkozy apparently, and this is a report that's out, warned him when he came to the United States? He said, listen, they don't treat things the same way we do here so watch yourself was the general warning to him.

ARNAUD: Yes.

HILL: Watch yourself, they don't view it the same. Is that part of the issue there? Because I understand that people take it very, you know, casually, he's having an affair, he's sleeping around, you know, he's got an active sex life, but the idea of forcing himself on someone seems to just take it to that level that it's not acceptable. Is that a fair --

ARNAUD: Well, I think -- you have to be very careful how you put this. I think it is true that in France there is a much larger degree of tolerance to whatever consenting adults are going to do behind closed doors. You know, if my mayor has affairs but does his job very well, I don't care. If my president does that sort of thing and still is a good president, that's his problem. You know?

I don't think that forcing yourself upon women would be considered acceptable behavior in France by any stretch of the imagination. I think what maybe Sarkozy was trying to warn him is be careful the way you address your secretary. Be careful about the way you approach people you work with because some practices that may be upsetting and would be criticized in France would be downright illegal in the U.S. and cost you your job.

HILL: Interesting. Well, we will watch as this unfolds. Thierry Arnaud, thank you very much.

ARNAUD: My pleasure.

HILL: Coming up, so this guy is about to get out of jail possibly. Well, after we've heard that he's a flight risk, still that's a possibility. Eliot and Jeff Toobin discuss it in a moment. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ELIOT SPITZER, HOST: As we've been discussing, lawyers for Dominique Strauss-Kahn will argue for bail tomorrow. CNN's Jeff Toobin has new information on the story. He joins us now.

Jeff, so have they reached an agreement or are they just begging and pleading in front of the judge?

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Begging and pleading. There is no deal. And the proposal they just filed moments ago, a 16- page application for bail, and it's really a fairly straight-forward proposal. $1 million bond, 24-hour monitoring in an apartment in New York, and an ankle bracelet, electronic monitoring, so that if he leaves a prescribed area, bells will go off and --

SPITZER: He could be wearing his own GPS?

TOOBIN: Exactly, which is actually fairly common for bail in a federal court proceedings where there are a lot more white collar cases. I think one of the things Strauss-Kahn has going against him is this is state court where that's a more unusual set of circumstances.

SPITZER: State court cases are more ordinarily just street crime, violent crime where bail is more fought over more vigorously. The interesting thing here is, of course, if he gets to his apartment, he could then begin to try to fulfill his job obligations and maybe that is one of the imperative he feels.

TOOBIN: That may be. He just wants to get the hell out of there though. I mean, I don't think he's worried about -- I don't think he's worried about, you know, being head of the IMF. I think that train has left the station.

SPITZER: Has the D.A.'s office responded yet to this?

TOOBIN: They have not filed a response, but my information is they will respond and they will object. This is very similar. It's not identical but it's very similar to the bail application that was rejected earlier in the week. This will be before a different judge.

SPITZER: How was that judge chosen?

TOOBIN: I think it was random, but I'm not entirely sure.

SPITZER: And on Friday, so whatever the outcome of this, Friday he's back in court, presumably with an indictment that will have been returned based upon the testimony of the victim. Will we then begin to get a better sense of the texture and the contours of the case?

TOOBIN: Probably not. I don't think we're going to learn a lot more. I mean, you know how -- you were an assistant district attorney in this very courthouse.

SPITZER: Right.

TOOBIN: But the indictments in state court, in Manhattan, tend to be pretty bare bones.

SPITZER: Bare bones, right.

TOOBIN: Because the questions we don't know, which the really important questions are, is there any sort of forensic evidence? Is there DNA? Are their hair and fiber evidence? Were there injuries to either party? Scratches? You know, any evidence taken from underneath fingernails? Those are the kinds of evidence that's going to be very important, that's going to change this potentially from a he said/she said to a case involving real life.

SPITZER: And when will that evidence come out? Because getting his hands on that evidence is critical for Ben Brafman, the defense attorney, who's got to make the most important choice for his client. What is his theory? And what are the two big options he's got.

TOOBIN: The two big options are "I wasn't there."

SPITZER: The alibi defense.

TOOBIN: This didn't happen. An alibi defense that this is just some crazy mix-up. The other theme of a defense is consent somehow.

SPITZER: Right.

TOOBIN: And both of those seem to have a lot of problems. But you can't do both.

SPITZER: Look, you can't say I wasn't there but if I was it was consensual. And the jury's not going to buy that.

TOOBIN: Right.

SPITZER: And here's the thing, forensic evidence, if there's evidence of DNA under fingernails indicating a fight. If there's evidence that somebody -- a video of somebody leaving the room disheveled, all of that goes to the lack of consent. This is still we're not going to see.

TOOBIN: Absolutely. And, you know, all of us who are covering this, you know, we want all these answers immediately. We want to know what the defense is. Ben Brafman, the prosecutors in this case, this isn't their first rodeo. They know what they're doing. They're going to wait and see what the evidence is, wait and see what are plausible defenses. And, you know, this is going to take weeks, if not months, before we know a lot more.

SPITZER: The other thing that just happened, all the criminal case, both federal and state, is there's been a push by judges for the prosecution to share this evidence with the defense just as a way of saying, look this isn't a game, let's figure out what really happened here. So in the next month, I bet we will know what the answers to this are. At least Ben Brafman will know. And so, when will he begin to make this choice?

TOOBIN: I think in a matter of weeks. But, you know, I think we also don't -- you know, they're not in as big a rush as we are. It's much more important for them to wait a couple weeks and be right than to start spouting off in the press for a theory they can't sustain on the evidence.

SPITZER: Which is why Brafman was dancing very lightly at the arraignment initially trying to preserve his options without going too far.

TOOBIN: Right.

SPITZER: But as long as his client is in Rikers, he's in a big rush.

TOOBIN: Well, and that's -- and what they're really talking about today is risk of flight and arguing that there is no risk of flight. And that doesn't really relate to the evidence in the case. The 16-page application, which just came in, it's all about, you know, what a responsible person he is, his daughter's a graduate student at Columbia, he has roots here, he has a house that he lives in in Washington, the IMF is in Washington. So, you know, trying to take away his French-ness, saying this is someone who has some roots in the United States, and he's not going to flee.

SPITZER: And why do I suspect that even if he's permitted to go back to his apartment, there are going to be cameras at every one of the --

TOOBIN: And there's one interesting fact I just want to disclose --

SPITZER: Very quickly.

TOOBIN: The flight he was on, he booked that flight a week in advance.

SPITZER: Right.

TOOBIN: Which I think is interesting.

SPITZER: OK. All right, Jeff Toobin, thank you.

Coming up, the good news about jobs -- sorry, there isn't any. The problem is there isn't any good news about jobs unless you have big ideas like CNN's Fareed Zakaria. He's up next. Stay with us.

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SPITZER: All this week, CNN has been focusing in-depth on the crisis of jobs in America. And that includes an amazingly insightful article in this week's "Time" magazine by our own Fareed Zakaria.

Fareed, as always, thank you so much for being here. Frame the issue for us.

FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST, "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS": The simplest way to think about it I think is we don't realize what the unemployment rate is. We think we have about seven million people unemployed. Actually, if you take into account the people who have stopped looking for work and you take into account the people who have part-time jobs and these part-time jobs pay on average $19,000, which is half the median wage, so if you put all that together, you have 24 million people unemployed. This is almost close to great depression levels of unemployment.

What unemployment does is outside of the fact that it means you have fewer taxes, all your budgets get screwed up at the state level. The personal tragedy of unemployment is that you lose these people. This becomes a lost generation because they lose skills, they lose work habits. They kind of get lost to society.

SPITZER: Let me summarize it this way. There is a corrosive effect to our society. The social fabric of our nation is ripped apart, and we have 20-plus million unemployed. And then as you point out, all the presumptions about the federal budget are completely thrown out the window because they presume revenue from jobs that simply don't exist.

ZAKARIA: If you look at President Obama's budget and this is true of all the budgets been put out there, but take President Obama's budget. It assumes that over the next 10 years we will create 20 million new jobs. Over the last 10 years, we created 1.7 million jobs.

SPITZER: Why is this happening? You highlight two fundamental causes.

ZAKARIA: There are two things going on. One is technology. If you look at the American economy right now, we are back to pre-crisis level of GDP which is about $13.5 trillion. But we've gotten there. We're producing the same number of goods and services as we did in 2007 with seven million fewer workers. So at some level, that's a productivity increase, right, which is admirable. But what it tells you is we are achieving productivity where you can get GDP growth without hiring more people, in fact, by firing people. You know, you look at every industry, technology is replacing people.

SPITZER: Now, traditional economics would say additional productivity is good because it produces greater wealth and the people who are displaced by that technology then get new jobs in new sectors. But what's happening it seems to me, and tell me if I'm right here, is those people who've been displaced are sitting on the sidelines, and the new jobs, such as they are, are overseas.

ZAKARIA: Exactly. And part of what's happening is, I think, this technological change is also happening at warp speed. So maybe that's part of it. But the other part of it is there's a pencil movement. So you have the technological change but you also have globalization and global markets and global labor so there are cheaper workers doing the same kinds of jobs overseas. And the two things together, technology plus globalization, mean the average American workers feeling the pressure like I don't think he's ever felt before.

SPITZER: Now, it used to be that our sense was manufacturing jobs were being displaced and being sent overseas. But now you point out it's happening in white collar areas as well. Lawyers. Now nobody maybe will cry for lawyers, but nonetheless, lawyering jobs are being displaced as well.

ZAKARIA: Right. Discovery, which used to be one of the classic things that young lawyers did, is now something that is increasingly being done by computer programs. Now if you were running a law firm and you could replace a lawyer you're paying $150,000 with a computer program, you'd do it in a heartbeat, because it's huge cost savings for you. But it tells you that even in professions like law, computers and technology are replacing people.

SPITZER: Here's a number to give people a sense of scale. Back in 1979, General Motors, we're all happy it's coming back a little bit, General Motors had 618,000 jobs in the United States. 2011, down to 77,000.

ZAKARIA: Right, and the new companies so people talk about technological change.

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: Facebook employs 2,000 people.

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: It's a $50 billion company.

SPITZER: Right.

ZAKARIA: But, you know, the Ford Motor company, when it started, when it was the new hot thing, it employed a million people --

SPITZER: Right. Now, look, there's something much more important about your article. You diagnosed the problem. You do it brilliantly. And to "The Post-American World" which is -- "The Post- American World" which is the book that catapulted you to global fame did that as well, people should read it. But you also say here are some answers. So give us -- you have five -- give us what you think is the single most important of the five.

ZAKARIA: Probably the single most important of the five is small business. Because if you look back over the last two decades, almost all job creation came not out of these big companies that we think about, but out of small businesses. And we've got to sit and focus about on the question of what does it take to grow small business in this country. And that means rationalizing the patent system, creating a regulatory environment that allows it to happen. I would argue, probably, powerfully immigration reform that allows skilled immigrants to, you know --

SPITZER: Because that's where so much of the small business comes from. ZAKARIA: The statistic is that half of all the Internet start- ups in Silicon Valley had a founder who was a foreigner, who was an immigrant. So if you think about that and ask yourself, what would it take to get these small companies going? Because these are companies that often employ less than 100 people or even 25 people. But there are lots of them.

SPITZER: You also talk about retraining. We need to retain the existing workforce where people had been on an assembly line but simply don't have the capacity to step into the shoes of the jobs that are needed. So how do we do that?

ZAKARIA: Well, honestly, we haven't had great luck with this, so I think this is one of those areas where you want to try a bunch of different things. But I think part of the problem is we have never thought about this as ambitiously as we need to.

You're talking about a whole generation of workers in their 40s and 50s who need to be retrained. I think this is a place where you need the government. You need academia, the educational institutions and industry, private sector to work together. The government probably pays the bills. The educational institutions train people. And industry tells you what training they need. You need something on the order of the G.I. bill, you know, that kind of magnitude where you really change people's lives.

SPITZER: Fareed, great article. Thanks for coming by.

ZAKARIA: Pleasure, Eliot.

SPITZER: You can read Fareed's article in its entirety and it's well worth it on our Web site CNN.com/arena.

Coming up, it's hard to run with one foot in your mouth. Ask Newt Gingrich. Has his campaign for the White House already run out of gas? Stay with us.

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SPITZER: We turn now to breaking news. A new bin Laden recording has just been released. It was presumably and purportedly taped sometime in April or May of this year before he was killed obviously. In it, he praises the Arab spring that erupted across the Middle East and North Africa. Let me read some of what he says here. And this is a direct quote from this tape.

"My Muslim nation, we are monitoring with you this great historic event and we join you with your joy and delight. So congratulations on your victories and may God have mercy on your martyrs. May he cure your injured and grant the release of your prisoners."

Then what we gather is an outtake of some poetry. The days of glory came to the people of Islam and some rulers of the Arab lands have vanished. Drones have folded and we receive the news carrying gospels to the people and new banners. He continues, "The Muslim nation was always getting really for the victory that is rising from the eastern horizon but the surprise of the sun of the revolution rose from the Maghreb at the west. The light of the revolution sparked in Tunisia and the nation felt the relief. The faces of the people got brightened, and the throats of the rulers got coarser and the Jews got terrified because of the coming of the promised day."

Finally, last paragraph we're going to read of this mayhem from bin Laden. "With the overthrown of the tyrant, the definitions of fear, humiliation and surrender have fallen as well. The new meanings of freedom, cried audacity and courage were risen. The winds of change came in a will of liberation."

All right. That is bin Laden's own twisted view of the history clearly that does not relate to what has actually happened in North Africa or the Middle East. And we're joined now by former CIA agent Jack Rice. Once again, he joins me on the phone.

Jack, what was interesting about this is that it was recorded obviously before he was killed. It does not strike me as though it was a statement he wanted to be released in the event of his death. In other words, it was not in contemplation of his death. It was more just commentary on the state of the revolutions that were sweeping North Africa.

JACK RICE, FORMER CIA OFFICER (via telephone): Oh, I think you're absolutely right, Eliot. I mean, if what we have seen about Osama bin Laden even over the last few years, he has become less and less relevant. I mean, part of that problem is he was on the run. He was isolated. He didn't have a command and control structure. He didn't have the ability to essentially do face-to-face, on the ground operations. That was all clear. So part of what he was trying to do was to sort of stay in front of it. Almost one of those lines like just tell me where you want me to go and I'll lead you there. Well, guess what? That's kind of what was going on when it came to the spring awakening.

SPITZER: You know, and in fact, I think you're exactly right, because he was watching and presumably he does get some form of accurate information, even there in his compound in Abbottabad. And he was seeing revolutions that really had little or nothing to do with the jihadist Islamist campaign that he had been trying to wage. And so he is trying to recast the history, to claim, that in fact, his ideology was what was motivating those in Tunisia. And then from Tunisia it spread across Egypt and onwards. And, of course, that is simply a historical -- so he's trying to plant himself, implant his flag in revolutions from which he'd been entirely absent is how I see it.

RICE: Oh, think you're absolutely right. I mean, that's what we have seen. I mean, if we want to be really honest about this, we have to take a look at what the social media world has done that really drove this in ways that nothing else did. This provided the voice to the small, to the insignificant, the inconsequential, of who, in fact, are not, but, I mean, in many ways in the Middle East they have been. This gave them the voice to rise up, sort of together, and in many ways unilaterally from the Americans and from Osama bin Laden, and said against Mubarak, against Tunisia, parts of Yemen, parts of Somalia and said finally, OK, we're done with this, this is enough. We're still seeing the ramifications of it right now in Syria and elsewhere and that has nothing to do with anybody except for these people being tired of where they are and the lives that they're leading.

SPITZER: That's right. It was freedom not only from the tyrants whether it's Mubarak or Gadhafi, but freedom from the jihadist rhetoric which had been the only voice they had had of rebellion. And it's interesting, bin Laden, of course, needs to watch and he sees in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood now participating in a democracy, speaking about the virtues of secular democracy, speaking about how, yes, kind of, OK, we know we're going to have to abide by peace with Israel, even though they can't quite say it, and he's feeling more marginalized so he spouts off invoking anti-Semitism and the angry rhetoric against the Jews here, something that isn't always in his tapes. And so this was almost literally a last hurrah for a guy who feels his own irrelevance.

RICE: Oh, how about this. We think about what comes next. Osama bin Laden is now gone. Now we have Zawahiri, really, the guy who is driving Al Qaeda in many ways. This guy came out of Egypt. This guy came out of the Muslim Brotherhood. What do you do now if you're essentially the leader of an organization that's been cornered from all directions, the organization that you left is now, as you said, standing up for this concept of a secular democracy, the very organization you say is the one that you stand behind is now the one who's essentially opposing what you say you believe in now. Where does a guy like Zawahiri go now?

SPITZER: Now, put on your CIA hat for this question. Time is running short. Why is this the tape they would release now? Is it fair to presume now that this is the only tape they had? Was there -- do we presume there was no post death, if I get killed, here's what I want the world to hear tape?

RICE: No, there may be more out there because they're actually trying to use that to wrap up other operations that may exist, other people who may have been involved.

SPITZER: All right. Jack Rice, thank you so much for joining us. And as we said, this tape is just being spread over the Internet. We just got our hands on it a few moments ago. What we read to you was the excerpts that we had, this most recent. And we don't know as Jack just said, if there will be more tapes from bin Laden, his last effort to make himself relevant. He's not only dead now but ideologically irrelevant as the revolution sweeping North Africa has made eminently clear.

Thanks so much for joining us IN THE ARENA. Good night from New York.

"PIERS MORGAN TONIGHT" starts right now.