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Who Is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?; Former FOX Network Anchor to Replace Scott McClellan; Chernobyl: Now & Then

Aired April 26, 2006 - 14:00   ET

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

FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: A terrorist speaks and plenty of people listen. Whether he's just spouting vibrato or something more sinister, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's new videotaped message is under many microscopes today. It's a fresh reminder of why he is one of the most wanted men in the world.
Our senior international correspondent, Nic Robertson, has a clear picture as anyone of the al Qaeda leader in Iraq. Nic joins me now from London.

Good to see you, Nic.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good to see you, Fredricka.

A very interesting message. Part of it aimed at the U.S. audience, telling them in the same way that Osama bin Laden tells the people of the United States that President Bush is lying about winning in Iraq. But the main part of this message aimed at the Iraqi people, trying to build support for himself in the Sunni community in Iraq and trying divide them and to reach his aim which has been stated for some time, which is bringing sectarian violence and civil war to Iraq -- Fredricka.

WHITFIELD: Is there anything to this one-two punch, so to speak? Zarqawi we're hearing from now. This after an audiotape coming from Osama bin Laden, purportedly.

ROBERTSON: You know, I think when you listen to the tape, there's so much in there about the politics in Iraq right now. Zarqawi says that he recorded this on Friday. That was just a day before Iraq's new parliament agreed on a prime minister for the new government. And that is expected to be a fundamental step in bringing more stability.

It seems to me this is more of a local message, that Zarqawi is really doing this to time into local politics in Iraq. This is his thrust for power for the Sunnis.

This is -- this is where al-Zarqawi is telling Iraqis, don't believe in this government. It's playing to Sunni fears. He's telling him that it will be a Shia-dominated government and any government like that will be a stooge of the United States.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) ROBERTSON (voice over): American Nick Berg is about to be beheaded. His execution recorded and released on a Web site titled "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Slaughters An American."

It's barbarity rocking Zarqawi from relative obscurity to front page familiarity. But already he is the deadliest insurgent in Iraq.

Born Ahmad Fadeel al-Khalayleh, he later took his nom de guerre, "Zarqawi," from the name of his hometown, Zarqa. It looks pretty from a distance, but up close it's different, crammed by successive waves of Palestinian refugees, one of the poorest towns in the country.

(on camera): With its densely-packed housing and intense tribal loyalties, Zarqa has been compared to the Bronx, but others liken it to down-at-heel, working-class neighborhoods to Detroit. For Zarqawi, though, it was a place of limited opportunity.

(voice-over): Outside the house where he was born in October 1966, neighbors say they remember the family well.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): They were simple people. They lived a simple life. They barely made it.

ROBERTSON: His father fought against the Israelis in 1948 and was well respected before he died.

In this picture at the time, the young Zarqawi looks unremarkable. But seems determined to earn respect like his father.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): If someone would harm his neighbors or Zarqawi would always come to defend a victim. He always did good deeds. Nothing wrong.

ROBERTSON: His days were spent here Swaqa's school, but by all accounts he didn't excel academically.

(on camera): Zarqawi left school before his final exams, disappointing his parents. He didn't seem to have a career in mind. And his father tried to fix him up with a job at the local municipality.

(voice-over): That was 1982. Zarqawi was about 16, developing a reputation as a tough guy who, against Muslim custom, drank and got a tattoo.

Outside his old mosque, I tracked down his brother-in-law hoping he can tell me more.

(on camera): Excuse me sir, can we talk to you about Abu Musab, your brother-in-law, is that possible?

You don't -- nothing -- you don't want to say?

(voice-over): He's not unfriendly, just unwilling to talk.

In 1989, the U.S.-backed Mujahedin were on the verge of driving the Soviet Army out of Afghanistan. Thousands of Arabs, including Osama bin Laden were in the fight. Zarqawi decided to join them.

In these rare pictures taken soon after he arrived, Zarqawi is seen relaxing, mixing happily with other jihadis or Muslim holy warriors. He arrived as the jihad was ending.

Some reports say Zarqawi never fought the Soviets, others that he was very brave in battle. All accounts agree, though, he befriended this man, Abu Mohammed al Makdisi, a Kuwaiti-born cleric intent on the violent overthrow of secular Arab governments.

Much of what he did in Afghanistan is unknown. There are conflicting accounts of whether or not he met Osama bin Laden. General Ali Shukri was a military and intelligence adviser to Jordan's King Hussein and knows Zarqawi's case file.

GENERAL ALI SHUKRI, FMR JORDANIAN MILITARY ADVISER: He decided to join the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He was trained there. He became a bomb expert.

ROBERTSON: Zarqawi left Afghanistan in 1992. He came back to Jordan with new friends, ideas, and an agenda.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROBERTSON: When he got back to Jordan, that's when he began getting in trouble with the Jordanian authorities, ended up in prison, recruited more people to him, became a much more powerful figure, took off for Afghanistan right at the end of the 1990s.

There, he formed his own camp in Afghanistan, trained people in bombing techniques, in urban warfare. Then, then the Taliban fell, fled Afghanistan, turned up in Iraq. Three years now has been fighting, and now for the first time on this new videotape we now see Zarqawi's face.

He wants to show himself to the world. That's what he's now done -- Fredricka.

WHITFIELD: And seemingly dug in deep in the trenches there in Iraq. All right.

Nic Robertson, thank you so much from London.

Switching sides. Television anchor Tony Snow goes from asking questions to now taking them as he signs on to become the White House press secretary. In making it official, President Bush addressed the fact that Snow has been openly critical of some of the president's policies, policies Snow may be called on to defend when staring down the gaggle in the press room.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: For those of you who have read his columns and listened to his radio show, he sometimes has disagreed with me. I asked him about those comments, and he said, "You should have heard what I said about the other guy." I like his perspective and the perspective, I like the perspective he brings to this job. And I think you're going to like it, too.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TONY SNOW, INCOMING WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: One of the reasons I took the job is not only because I believe in the president, because, believe it or not, I want to work with you. These are times that are going to be very challenging. We've got a lot of big issues ahead, and we've got a lot of important things that all of us are going to be covering together. And I am very excited and I can't wait.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WHITFIELD: Well, no surprise from Democrats. Despite the fact that Snow has publicly criticized President Bush, there's a fair amount of cynicism about his job switch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), MINORITY LEADER: What can I say? As Jay Leno said last night, now his job is to defend the president at the White House when he's been defending the president on FOX. What's changed?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WHITFIELD: Well, knowledge is power just about everywhere, but that's especially true in Washington, where administrations can rise and fall on their abilities to manage the daily news cycle. Given Tony Snow's credentials, he'll know what reporters want. Or will he? But will his boss let him deliver?

CNN's John Roberts knows the White House beat from inside-out. He joins me now from our Washington bureau with some perspective.

Good to see you again, John.

JOHN ROBERTS, CNN SR. NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hey, good afternoon to you, Fred.

I guess that's really the $60,000 question, is, is Tony Snow going to be able to change the policies and the standpoint of this White House? You know, for the last five years, they've been operating on a point of, the less the press knows, the better off they are, even though it really hasn't worked out for them to that degree.

Tony Snow knows what the press needs, knows what the White House press corps has to do, knows the importance of the White House press corps. Is anybody going to listen to him, though, when he says, look, we've got to come up with some information? That's what everybody is waiting to see. WHITFIELD: Well, perhaps, was that the strategy? Scott McClellan, upon departure, said he really wasn't in on all the meetings, so there was a lot of times that he just didn't know. So, if he doesn't know, he can't necessarily deliver.

In the case of Tony Snow, he apparently has negotiated something where he is in on some of the, you know, top-secret meetings that perhaps Scott McClellan wasn't to give him a greater advantage to communicating to the press. Is that the objective?

ROBERTS: I know that McClellan was in on a lot of meetings, because many times I would try to get in touch with him and he'd be in a meeting with a foreign leader. So it's not that he was completely out of the loop. But I assume that Tony has asked the White House for more access.

Again, whether or not the White House gives it to him remains to be seen. And there are cases where some press secretaries in the past have deliberately wanted to stay out of the loop.

Don't forget Mike McCurry said he didn't want to know anything about Monica Lewinsky scandal, purposefully removed himself from that loop so that he didn't have to get up in front of the press corps and either be evasive or go out and tell untruths.

WHITFIELD: So, we know how Nancy Pelosi, you know, thinks, but how about others inside the beltway? You know, what do they think about someone who is a lot more press savvy because he was, and I guess we should still say is, until he takes -- you know, starts the job -- is one of us?

ROBERTS: Well, I think that a press corps, a White House press corps that has been absolutely starved for information for the past five years, is looking at this with some hope, to think that, here's a guy who knows us, knows what we need, knows the beat of journalism, and hopefully will help us out with a little bit more information, at the very least to try to understand what the White House is doing. You know, Tony himself has said it can't be all about spin, there's got to be some substance.

He'll have a short honeymoon as the White House press corps tries to get close to him, hoping that they'll be the one that he passes off the little nugget too. But you watch, and mark my words on this, leading up to the election, you're going to hear Tony Snow's words put back out there in a public forum, only with his new title "press secretary" attached to it. Things like the fact that the president was something of an embarrassment, that he was impotent on certain issues, that the energy bill was "another presidential clunker."

You can bet that some of what Tony has to say publicly to defend the president is going to be cast in the context of his past private thoughts.

WHITFIELD: A critic, but at the same time, some folks are going to see him as a real advocate or have some real allegiance to the Bush family because he was once a speechwriter for the first President Bush.

ROBERTS: Absolutely. And he knows the father. The father trusts him. The father probably recommended him to the son.

I know he's also pretty close with Josh Bolten, and Josh Bolten does seem to be a chief of staff who is indicating that there may be a different way of doing things. I know Bolten a little bit. We both ride motorcycles, and so there's a little bit of simpatico there. And he seems to me to be the type of guy who's pretty pragmatic.

He likes to get out there among the people. And I think he wants to put this White House a little bit more on a level playing field with the people of America. And to do that, he's going to have to talk to the media.

WHITFIELD: When Scott McClellan announced that he was stepping down, I remember you saying that, you know, in order to be a good press secretary you need to come with certain credentials, one being you can't melt under the hot lights and under the pressure. Tony Snow, someone who is used to the hot lights, who's used to the kind of questions -- asking questions, some of the very questions he's going to now have to respond to, certainly the White House was trying to be very strategic by getting someone who was as TV savvy as he is, someone who can withstand the heat.

ROBERTS: But can I tell you, though, it's different when you're on the flip side of that coin.

WHITFIELD: Yes.

ROBERTS: You can exude all the confidence you want when you're on the air when you're talking about your opinions, when you're the one who is in control. But I know from being on the flip side of that in some interviews that it's very uncomfortable to be in the position of answering the questions. It's much easier to ask than it is to answer.

So, I think that Tony is going to have a little bit of getting used to that. I mean, he does carry himself quite well. He does exude a lot of confidence.

And there's also a sense of confidence that the White House braces behind you. And it's very easy to have that sense of calm, cool reflectiveness when you figure you have the power of the most powerful man in the world behind you.

WHITFIELD: All right. John Roberts, from Washington, thanks so much.

ROBERTS: You bet.

WHITFIELD: And not far from the Capitol Hill backdrop of John Roberts there, I want to take you straight to the White House, the Rose Garden. This is something that if a press secretary would be excited about making an announcement before the press corps, this would be one of them. You're now looking at the 2006 teacher of the year being honored there at the White House, there along with the president and the first lady. And this is a woman who would be able to be a real role model for any schoolteacher.

She is from the Silver Spring, Maryland, area, teaches at Broad Acres Elementary. And she can really tell you what it's like, what immigration has done to the public school system. In her class size of just 14, only one student is a native English speaker. Eighty percent of her kids as a whole don't speak English at home, 90 percent live in poverty.

And we'll be talking to her in the next hour personally, Kimberly Oliver, the 2006 teacher of the year.

For now, we're going to take a short break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WHITFIELD: Suicide bombers in Egypt, today they did what suicide bombers do. But this time, no one else died. One explosion went off near a military vehicle, another near a police station. Together, they're the second attack this week on the Sinai Peninsula. Police are checking for connections to Monday's triple bombing in a resort town that killed 18 people.

Striking back in Sri Lanka. A suicide bombing there has led to a pound of Tamil rebels by the Sri Lankan military. The blast was carried out by a woman who pretended to be pregnant. Her target, the government's top military commander.

He was critically wounded, along with 30 others. Nine people were killed. Sri Lanka and the Tabil Tiger rebel group have coexisted under a fragile cease-fire for four years. Many now fear a return to full-scale war.

Twenty years ago today, the worst nuclear accident in history was unfolding in the Ukraine. It was well before dawn when a reactor exploded at a power station in Chernobyl. The disaster spewed radiation across Europe and it turned a whole city into a ghost town that may not be livable for centuries.

CNN Senior International Correspondent Matthew Chance is there.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Welcome to the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a contaminated landscape in the shadow of its reactor. Twenty years have passed, but this monster of 20th century science gone wrong still casts a radioactive shadow.

The acute danger may have passed, but background radiation is still many times higher than normal. It could be centuries before being here is completely safe.

We limited our trip to a few hours. Time to explore a notorious disaster zone and it's city of Pripyat, population zero. Built in the 1970s to house Chernobyl workers, its 50,000 residents were evacuated in the days after the disaster struck.

(on camera): It really is quite unsettling being here at the center of the world's worst nuclear accident. This is the main square of Pripyat. And you can see this whole town completely abandoned.

This is the palace of culture from the old Soviet Union. Every good Soviet town had one.

Over there, a restaurant, which obviously dominated this main square. And beyond that you can see an old Soviet apartment building.

The people here were given just a few hours to gather what belongings they could to get out shortly after the accident back in 1986. They were told they'd be gone for just three days, but, of course, they've -- they've never been able to come back.

(voice over): Sudden tragedy is written in every building. We found this abandoned classroom, books still on desks, lessons of two decades ago still scribbled on the blackboard. And the children of Pripyat never got to ride on their ferris wheel. The city's amusement park was never opened. Now it's a devil's playground of radiation hotspots.

But Chernobyl is more than a dead monument. It's hard to imagine, but 20 years of isolation has turned the area into Europe's biggest wilderness, a radioactive lost world where wild animals appear to be thriving.

MARY MYCIO, AUTHOR, "WORMWOOD FOREST": These might be lynx tracks, and if they are, that's actually very exciting because lynx are very, very rare. They have a huge range.

CHANCE: While animals may live with Chernobyl's legacy, surely people should not. Yet, scattered across tiny villages in the exclusion zone, a few hundred like Marina Urpan have come back. Born and bred in Chernobyl, she's now nearly 80 years old. But her husband refuses to leave.

MARINA URPAN, CHERNOBYL ZONE RESIDENT (through translator): It's my motherland. I was born here and I should die her. This climate is better for our health.

Most people here have bad backs, leg pains. Maybe that's something that would happen in our old age anyway, but we don't know for sure. How can we know?

CHANCE: It is the question many are still asking of Chernobyl. Twenty years on, its victims, its consequences remain far from understood.

Matthew Chance, CNN, Chernobyl.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WHITFIELD: And Matthew Chance will have much more from Chernobyl tonight on "ANDERSON COOPER 360." Tune in for that at 10:00 Eastern, 7:00 Pacific, only on CNN.

Chernobyl's long-term health effects are still being hotly debated. My next guests say a whole new generation has been exposed to radiation every single day with devastating effects. They're part of a group trying to help children with physical and mental disabilities near the disaster site.

Joining me now, Kathy Ryan, who runs the U.S. branch of Chernobyl Children's Project International, and Jennifer O'Dea, an occupational therapist and a volunteer for the program.

Good to see both of you ladies.

JENNIFER O'DEA, VOLUNTEER: Thank you for having us.

WHITFIELD: Well, Kathy, let me begin with you. How did this project -- your project get started?

KATHY RYAN, CHERNOBYL CHILDREN'S PROJECT INTERNATIONAL: The disaster at Chernobyl happened 20 years ago, but many people are shocked to realize that so many people continue to suffer serious medical and economic consequences. Chernobyl Children's Project International focuses on helping the children who are the ones who were most vulnerable to the aftermath of Chernobyl.

WHITFIELD: And Jennifer, you've been volunteering with this group. What have been your observations? What's seems to be the real common problem that a lot of these children are enduring?

O'DEA: I would say the three most common would be cerebral palsy, children with global developmental delay, and autism. But severe physical deformities are -- are rampant over there.

WHITFIELD: And so, Kathy, what's the explanation? Because clearly these children were not born at the time of, you know, Chernobyl 20 years ago, but instead, they're suffering sort of residual effects. Is that because of these hot spots that Matthew Chance talked about in his piece, or does it have something to do with their parents and what their parents were exposed to?

RYAN: Well, most people realize that in the years following Chernobyl, thyroid cancer increased dramatically in young adults. But what medical researchers are telling us now is that they're seeing dramatic increases in birth defects, non-thyroid cancers, cardiac and immune disorders, chronic childhood diabetes and digestive and respiratory disorders. So, we're very concerned about what we're seeing in the children that we're working with in Chernobyl regions.

WHITFIELD: The kind of aid that you've been able to provide for these children, in what form?

RYAN: We provide humanitarian aid in which we deliver important medical supplies and medicine to hospitals in Belarus, but we also perform services. We have a very successful cardiac surgery program in which we operate on children who had been previously deemed inoperable. We also provide foster homes, hospice services for the most seriously ill children, community care programs for disabled children and their families to offer an alternative to institutionalization, and a number of other programs to help these children.

WHITFIELD: So, Jennifer, how many children are we talking about? It would seem that you just don't have enough volunteers like yourself to go around to help these children.

O'DEA: No, you're exactly right. What we really need is occupational, physical, speech therapists. Right now, I'm the only occupational therapist there, and these children need intensive physical, occupational, speech, and psychosocial rehabilitation.

WHITFIELD: And just -- and just looking at the children here, talk about to me how you're able to communicate, how you're able to really reach a lot of these children who have a variation of distractions physically and mentally.

O'DEA: Some of the children are nonverbal, and we communicate either through picture symbols, through gestures, and really just through human connection, body language. We don't need words to connect with each other. We can provide the therapy even though we don't have -- they don't have the language.

WHITFIELD: And so, Kathy, tell me about this Vesnova Children's Asylum. You know, what are some of the obstacles in trying to get the kind of care you think would be best for a lot of these children?

RYAN: Well, we discovered the Chernobyl asylum in 2001, and it was some of the worst conditions that we'd ever seen. The smell was terrible. There were children bedridden, lying in their own waste, many of them with bed sores, other children without stimulation. And our main challenges are funding and finding qualified volunteer professionals such as Jennifer to come in and help us do what needs to be done to improve the quality of life for these children.

WHITFIELD: Kathy, do you ever run against -- run up against really trying to communicate to the rest of the world that these are residual effects that are ongoing right now and that people say, well, this happened 20 years ago, how could it still be an issue now?

RYAN: Again, this was a disaster that was like no other, because for 20 years, five million people have been living on contaminated ground, and they've been ingesting radioactive toxins for their food supplies for 20 years. A number of them burned contaminated peat and wood to heat their homes. And so, there's this ongoing exposure to low levels of radiation. Today we still don't know what the consequences will be.

WHITFIELD: And Kathy, I know you mentioned you could always use more volunteers just like Jennifer. Kathy Ryan and Jennifer O'Dea, we want to be able to share with everyone out there the Web site information if they want to volunteer, perhaps even give donations. And that would be chernobyl- international.org.

Thank you so much to both of you ladies for joining us.

RYAN: Thank you.

O'DEA: Thank you.

WHITFIELD: Still to come, kill more people, score more points?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

You're killing a pregnant woman, and if you can feel good about that, well, have at it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WHITFIELD: That definitely needs some explaining. When LIVE FROM continues, a crude and very grisly video game about Mexicans crossing the border. Many think the game simply crosses the line.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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