Return to Transcripts main page
American Morning
Administration Warns of New Terrorism
Aired May 20, 2002 - 09:04 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: Over the weekend, Vice President Cheney said another terror attack on the United States is a near certainty. And there have been intelligence reports about communications similar to the kind that were intercepted in the months before September 11.
CNN National security correspondent David Ensor joins us now with more from Washington -- good morning, David.
DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Paula.
Well, the president -- the vice president's comments came after a week when for the first time since September 11 there started to be some debate in Washington over how to conduct policy in this terrorism war. The question being, of course, what did government officials know, when did they know it? What did the president know? The vice president sought to remind the nation that there could be another attack and soon. We are still at war.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: From our perspective, put the thing in the broader, context. Obviously, one of the things we want to talk about this morning, you need to do everything you can to defend against it, and we are. And we're doing more than we've ever done before. But it's almost impossible to erect 100 percent defense.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ENSOR: Cheney went on to talk about the question of how the U.S. should cooperate, how the Bush administration should cooperate with congressional investigations or others. There are suggestions by Senator Joe Lieberman and others in the Congress that there should be a separate panel, a separate commission that investigates what went wrong September 11 and looks for ways to fix it. A blue ribbon commission, but people outside Congress.
Now the Bush administration has been forcefully saying, and Mr. Cheney did again yesterday, that it wants to cooperate with the intelligence panel that has already been working for some time now. It says it's already given that panel hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from the CIA, and that that is the appropriate panel since those congressman and senators have top security clearance and are custom to dealing with intelligence matters. The administration hopes to avoid an independent commission which might go into a broader brief and which the administration fears might put out more of the information that should be kept secret to the public.
So there's this debate over how to handle the investigation into what went wrong September 11. And the panel itself is trying to debate whether it should find fault, find out who made the mistakes or fix what's wrong and move ahead -- Paula.
ZAHN: It's interesting to note that we had both the number one and number two senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee this morning. And Senator Shelby said to me that the vice president's office -- or actually someone from the administration has already read part of that controversial August memo that the administration acknowledged for the first time last week it received. And he said so far it dovetails with the same briefing they got; that they haven't seen a written copy of the briefing yet.
Is the expectation that the vice president will turn that over to certain people on the intelligence committee so the public won't have access to that?
ENSOR: Well, he might show it to a few people on the intelligence committee. But he said again yesterday, he doesn't want it to be given in a broad way to the rest of Congress. There's a fear that sources and methods might be revealed.
ZAHN: And in the meantime, how much fallout do you think there will continue to be over this?
ENSOR: It's going to go on, Paula. The Congress -- many in the congress feel strongly it's part of their job to look into what is broke and try to fix it. The administration feels it's got a war going on and it's got other things to worry about right now.
ZAHN: All right. David Ensor, thanks for the briefing this morning. We are asking you to vote on our big question today: Are Americans safer from terrorism now than before September 11? And so far, now more than 25,000 of you have voted. Still pretty much the same numbers. As they were earlier this morning. Fifty-three percent say we are safer, 47 percent say we are less safe. If you want to vote, log on to cnn.com and click on the quick vote button on the bottom right of the page. We will be checking in throughout the morning to update you on our poll results.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
