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American Morning
Audiotape Says Osama Bin Laden in Good Health
Aired June 24, 2002 - 09:09 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.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: There's an audiotape from this past weekend allegedly made by an Al Qaeda spokesperson, saying Osama bin Laden is in good health, and that Al Qaeda is operating at -- quote -- "full power." If bin Laden and his Al Qaeda are still alive and well, where are they? The war on terror has resulted in a string of arrests lately. There have been no recent encounters with Al Qaeda troops in Afghanistan. So then why, why are nearly 7,000 American troops still there?
Barbara Starr at the Pentagon this morning for more answers on this. Good morning, Barbara.
BARBARA STARR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Bill
We should tell you that General Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, is at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan today, getting a series of updates on the war.
Now regarding the tape that you mentioned, administration officials say they at this point have no way to know if that tape is authentic. They simply do not know. But they also say that, at the moment, that changes nothing about their calculation about Osama bin Laden, that the working assumption in this administration is as long as there is no specific evidence that bin Laden is dead, the working assumption is that he is alive, probably moving somewhere between the Afghanistan and Pakistan boarder. But, of course, again, nobody knows absolutely for sure.
But all of this is raising a lot of questions about the Al Qaeda. The recent arrest in Morocco, Pakistan and other places, all underscores that the Al Qaeda seems to be turning up these days everywhere but Afghanistan. Again, it's been since March that the U.S. troops have had any major encounter in combat with the Al Qaeda inside Afghanistan.
Senator Richard Shelby, speaking earlier this morning on "AMERICAN MORNING" underscores some of these points.
Here's what he had to say:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. RICHARD SHELBY (R-AL), INTELLIGENCE CMTE.: It's obvious to everyone that a lot of the Al Qaeda leadership dispersed., got away, and they're all around the world. They are trying to reassemble. And although they do not have the command structure that they did from the top, a lot of people, we believe, will act on their own.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STARR: So the question on the table now, is how long those 7,000 U.S. troops will stay in Afghanistan? Of course, British and Canadian troops are already heading home. They say their mission is over. Now a major element of the U.S. Effort now is not necessarily combat. It continues to be, of course, searching eastern Afghanistan, caves and other complexes, looking for weapons and intelligence, but it is also training the Afghan National Army, hoping that someday soon they will be ready to takeover security inside Afghanistan and the U.S. troops can go home.
HEMMER: Barbara Starr at the Pentagon. Let's talk more about it. Put these same questions to our CNN military analyst and former NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark, live this morning in Little Rock.
General Clark, good morning. Good to see you again.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK, CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Good morning. Good to see you.
HEMMER: Two questions here, why still there is there no significant encounter going back to possibly January, or beyond that?
CLARK: And also more importantly, what are U.S. troops doing today on a day-to-day basis?
HEMMER: Well, I think that we've got adequate information that Al Qaeda elements are in and around Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai's regime has just been installed. He's just been selected as the president. There's still disputations about the makeup of his cabinet. He doesn't have authority over the entire country yet. The warlords are still strong. There's no effective judicial system. There's no economic support for the country, other than smuggling and opium growing. They're trying to crackdown on the drug trade there. The Pakistani intelligence services still rumored to be involved heavily into what's going on in eastern Afghanistan. And so there are many, many issues there to be dealt with.
One of the things that the president said early on we will take away the ability of Al Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a base. Our forces are there preventing Al Qaeda from reestablishing itself in Afghanistan. Now, if you were the Al Qaeda leader, you'd be very worried about encountering American troops. We have a lot of firepower. We can move very quickly. We don't make the same mistakes the Russian did in the 1980s in against Mujahedeen.
So the best tactic for the Al Qaeda is to blend into the population and avoid the Americans, and so we have every reason to believe that's precisely what's going on right now. We're in a phase of what's known in military doctrine at latent and incipient insurgency. They're there. They are building networks. That are conversing with people. The Taliban supporters are still there. They're not raising their heads above the parapet (ph) because the American troops are there.
So it's a struggle, it's an organization phase, and we don't want Al Qaeda to have an opportunity to win the struggle.
HEMMER: Monster, a monster task ahead of you. John Kerry was on the talkshows yesterdays. In fact, he was talking on NBC. There's a significant amount of second guessing going on in the military strategy early on. If you go back to December and January and before that in Tora Bora. Senator Kerrey all but said, and we can listen to his words right now, that Tora Bora was somewhat of a military failure. His words from yesterday.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. JOHN KERRY (D), MASSACHUSETTS: I don't know whether Osama bin Laden is still alive. I just don't know the answer to that. The presumptions are that he is. But I think the Tora Bora operation was not our best military moment. I think when you have 1,000 people in a mountain range, you need to move whatever assets are necessary to guarantee you're going to capture the world's greatest terrorist, and it seems to me that to rely on Afghans, who a week before on the other side, to go up and do the job is not a very good strategy.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HEMMER: Certainly hindsight can be perfect, General, but does he have a point?
CLARK: I think it's clear there's a lot of people who got away at Tora Bora, and this may have been the best we could do at the time. We don't really know. We haven't unpacked the lessons learned in this, at least publicly, for the benefit of the American people. But it's clear that there were fighters there, and we took away their base area, through the use of high explosives, precision bombing, but we didn't capture all of the fighters. In fact, we didn't capture most of them. They got away.
HEMMER: General Wesley Clark in Little Rock, thank you, sir. We will talk again. The topic is going nowhere. Thank you very much in Little Rock, Arkansas today.
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