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American Morning
Talk With Senior Presidential Adviser Karen Hughes
Aired March 11, 2002 - 09:22 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.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: This morning, at the White House, President Bush is scheduled to give a speech commemorating six months since the terrorist attacks. Members of Congress and more than 150 ambassadors from around the world will be attending the ceremony on the South Lawn.
White House correspondent Major Garrett spoke with senior presidential adviser Karen Hughes this morning, and asked her why the president is planning to devote such big part of his remarks today to coalition building.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KAREN HUGHES, SR. PRESIDENTIAL ADVISER: Major, this an opportunity for the president to publicly thank the partners from around the world who are working with us in this war against terror. More than 170 flags will fly on the South Lawn of the White House today as a way to visually and symbolically explain that the world is coming together to fight this threat to civilization and to freedom.
MAJOR GARRETT, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Is part of this thank you a way of sort of getting back in good graces with some coalition partners who are unnerved about the president's "axis of evil" speech?
HUGHES: Well, I think it's an opportunity to thank them for the many things that they are doing, and working with us on, for example, law enforcement and intelligence gathering, and it's a way to publicly say that the civilized world coming together against this threat.
GARRETT: You are a big part of the Coalition Information Center, yet polling data from Muslim and Arab-speaking worlds suggests a great division between them and us on this whole question of the war on terrorism. Are you disappointed about that?
HUGHES: No, absolutely not. That's exactly why we must do what we are doing, and it will take probably 10, or 15 or even 20 years for the kind of campaign that we're talking about to have an effect. We have done a very good job in America over the last 20 or 30 years of explaining our values to the rest of the world and talking about the values we have in common, our love for family, our desire for religious freedom, our free speech, to talk about the universal demands, what the president calls the non-negotiable demands of human dignity, and we have got to talk about that throughout the world, and that will take years. We're obviously behind.
The Gallup poll confirmed what we thought, which was the whole reason we set up the coalition information center. That's that we've got a big job ahead in communicating our values to the world.
GARRETT: The president is also supposed to talk about troop deployments to Georgia, Yemen and the Philippines. Is that, in part, a reaction to some of the questions raised by the Senate majority leader Tom Daschle?
HUGHES: No, actually what that is, is a specific explanation of what he talked about in his State of the Union Speech, which was that the next phase of the war against terror is to deny terrorist sanctuary anywhere they operate in the word, and we know they're operating in more than 60 different countries, and the president in his State of the Union talked about that. Today, he will talk about specifically a couple of places where our military is working with the military in the Philippines, in Yemen, preparing to work in Georgia, to go after terrorist cells in those countries.
And you know, I was a little perplexed about Senator Daschle's statement, because my question would be, in -- where in the world where terrorist are capable of striking our country would he not want us to go after them?
GARRETT: The president will also invite families of surviving family members of victims of 9-11. How is he baring up with not only their grief but also the grief now of soldiers' families of those lost in Afghanistan?
HUGHES: Well, the president is a very loving and thoughtful person, and obviously, it's emotional for all of us to think about the tremendous sacrifice and loss that our -- the families of military personnel and the families of the victims of the attacks are baring. These have been six difficult months for all of America, but I think especially sad and painful for the families and friends of those who were victims of the attacks in New York and Washington.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ZAHN: Thank you presidential counselor Karen Hughes, and White House correspondent Major Garrett.
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