Return to Transcripts main page
CNN Live At Daybreak
America Under Attack: America Seems Poised for Eventual Response to Terrorist Attacks
Aired September 14, 2001 - 08:31 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Recapping the latest developments for you at this hour: Searchers say they have recovered both the voice and the flight data recorder from that American Airlines 747 that crashed into the Pentagon. The U.S. Coast Guard boarded a Carnival Cruise ship and detained two people said to have a history of hijacking, all part of that sweeping international dragnet that is under way. And Congress joined with the White House in an agreement that would offer New York and Virginia a $40 billion emergency aid package.
There seems to be no question the U.S. will respond to these attacks. we heard the president vow it. We heard other in Congress insist upon it. And we are joined now by the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, General Wesley Clark, now working as a military analyst for CNN.
General Clark, thank you for being with us.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK, FMR. NATO COMMANDER: Good morning, Miles.
O'BRIEN: The general has a very interesting op-ed piece in "The Washington Post" this morning. We're going to talk about that in just a moment. But first of all, when we hear these talks about these dramatic strikes, the first question is where, and whom might be affected by this.
Maybe we can just go to a map of the region for just a moment and get sort of the lay of the land and see how problematic it might be as a military planner trying to come up with target locations.
CLARK: Well, a lot of attention has focused on Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a country that has been wracked by civil war for two decades. The Russians came in. The resistance movement, aided by the United States and the West, fought back. We used Pakistan as a base for this resistance movement. The Russians pulled out when the Soviet Union collapsed, and Afghanistan has been in a state of perpetual civil war ever since.
Somewhere in Afghanistan, we believe that Osama bin Laden has had one or more training facilities and camps. Maybe he is located there. It's hard to believe that the government of Afghanistan doesn't know what he is doing, doesn't know where he is, and can't keep up this. He is probably drawing support somewhere out of Pakistan. But there is a broader network at play here, Miles. These organizations are connected from Afghanistan and many other places in the Middle East, in Europe, and in South America, in Asia, and even into the United States. And so there's regular traffic that goes back, couriers that move, money that flows, instruction, messages, technology that moves. We saw last year a strike against the American destroyer, the USS Cole in the country of Yemen, the port of Aden. We know that that was connected somehow. There are persistent rumors that Saddam Hussein may have some communications with this. We know that people come from -- and Osama bin Laden are from Saudi Arabia. Others are identified as coming from other of the Gulf Coast states. There is concern if Iran has a role to play in this.
And so it's a broad network. It's composed of many thousands of individuals, possibly with government connections, in various countries, and we've got a lot more work to do I think on this.
O'BRIEN: All right. It seems to me what is crucial in a situation like this is not to rely so much on satellite imagery, but good, solid human intelligence to find out where these people are at any given moment. Do we have that?
CLARK: Well, we have very good intelligence. But some of these countries also have very good intelligence. And what we need is stronger intelligence sharing. We need to rapidly follow up the leads, and we need to crack open these terrorist cells that are located not only in the Middle East, but in Europe and in the United States, one by one, individual by individual. They need to tell us about what's going on. individual by individual. They need to tell us what's going on, and then we'll run these cells back to their starting point.
O'BRIEN: Well with when you do that, though, it requires a great degree of patience. The American public right now is not in a patience mood. You make the analogy in your op-ed piece, that if what we saw is a latter day Pearl Harbor, there might be a desire for a latter-day Doolittle Raid, the 30 seconds over Tokyo bombing raid. Is that an appropriate thing to be seeking right now?
CLARK: Well it might be the right thing if we get the right target and disrupt this organization. It might know help us prevent further attacks, but it's the question of whether we can find the right targets and then how to strike them.
O'BRIEN: All right, let's put the right map in the Code (ph) telestrater there, and take a look at the greater Mideast here, and give us a sense here, talking about this network and how difficult it is to track, how these other countries might come into play.
CLARK: Well, we know that this -- you are dealing with individuals here, and they are moving from country to country and place to place, and so at various times they may have been and moved through Iraq or Syria, or into various parts of the occupied territories, or through Egypt. They may have been in Cyprus or moved into Western Europe. They may have received training, or instructions or money. So it's a complex web of individuals. some of whom are known to authorities in various countries. They go by different identities. They have different passports, and it's a complicated matter for international police and law enforcement as well as for our intelligence communities.
O'BRIEN: General, these borders are very porous then?
CLARK: They are porous, because even though they are -- they require passports and are things, the passports appear, and the individuals don't have Social Security cards, and they don't have a Social Security account number.
O'BRIEN: If you were in a position right now to be making -- delivering advice to the national security team, what would you tell them to do?
CLARK: I would say that we have to work the information, work our allies, build the coalition, strengthen the resolve of all of the nations who have expressed sympathy with us to take the hard political decisions to go after these groups in their own countries. Parts of these groups are known in many countries, and there may be intimidation and fear and threats against the government in this country. They've got to make these hard decisions. The Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, yet, there are people there in the West Bank who probably know some of these people. Does Yasser Arafat know them? Can he fiend them? Can he get information to us? That's what we're going be to looking for.
O'BRIEN: Let's take a look at one more map here, and this will show us the area of North Africa. Libya is the country that comes to so many American's minds Moammar Gadhafi, is he still a player in all of this? . Does he aid and abet this activity in some sense, and would the U.S. be wise to look for cells there as well.
CLARK: We certainly are looking for cells there. Moammar Gadhafi says that he has renounced this. He sponsored a form of state terrorism, and but -- and we tried to bring it to the trial in the Lockerbie trial, and maybe after the strikes in 1986, Moammar Gadhafi saw that he couldn't be directly associated with terrorism. But there are connections that remain throughout this area to a militant fundamentalists in Algeria, to militant groups in Egypt, perhaps in Libya as well, in Syria and throughout the Middle East.
And so this is a network, and we're talking not about governments, yet; we're talking about individuals, and then we've got to go and find where they have drawn the support from those governments.
O'BRIEN: And one other point you are making this in article in "The Washington Post" this morning, which is particularly troubling, this is in your opinion a rather precarious time, because a plot has been discovered and clearly there are other suspects out there, and other attempts and further hijacks, and may be further attacks are maybe contemplated. Is this a more precarious time, and should we be on this heightened alert for some time now?
CLARK: Well, I think we have no to remain alert, because an organization that plans something like this, it clearly has other plans, and we don't know whether they will be released on us. I think that the more active that we are in terms of our police work, the greater the chance that we'll put this network off balance. This is not a network that has the flexibility and responsiveness of let's say our armed forces. It's a network that's directed to single purposes, and if you disrupt it, and force it to move, and force it to change its plans, it can't react, and so that's why I am so very pleased by what we see our police and our law enforcement agencies doing today.
O'BRIEN: General Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme commander, and now a military analysts for CNN, we really appreciate your insights, giving us quite literally the lay of the land in helping identify targets for the retribution and for justice.
CLARK: It will be difficult.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
