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American Morning
20 Killed by Sniper Fire During Shiite Holiday; Spike Lee Discusses His Film on Hurricane Katrina
Aired August 21, 2006 - 08:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think steroids have ruined the game.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: To be a professional athlete, they should go out and play the sport with what they are given and not seek enhancements.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They're setting standards for young kids at an untouchable level.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's definitely not fair to either the sports or the fans that they enhance their abilities.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I wish it could be a level playing field. It should just be about your raw skills and your raw talent.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR, AMERICAN MORNING: Instead it seems many top athletes will do almost anything to tilt the playing field in their direction. The stories we hear about are bad enough, but there are new drugs being cooked up all of the time designed to slip through the testing process.
Dr. Don Kaplan (ph) is director of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory. He says creating new enhancement drugs is simple, but developing the tests to detect them is no easy task.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All drugs that are being revamped and turned into new drugs, they just take the molecule and tinker with it a little bit, and then we don't have it in our computer file. The test has to be foolproof. To remove an athlete for competition, you've got have it right.
M. O'BRIEN: Kaplan says in order to prevent the tests the sports world should be pouring some of its billions to make the testing labs more sophisticated. He believes this along with harsher penalties for offenders will bring fairness back to the games.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There will always be people who are in last place trying to move up to second to last, but you can expect to have the major winners in the sports be drug-free. That's a reasonable goal.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR, AMERICAN MORNING: Good morning. Welcome, everybody. I'm Soledad O'Brien.
RICK SANCHEZ: I'm Rick Sanchez in today for Miles.
O'BRIEN: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) the streets of Baghdad busy once again after a two-day lockdown. As many as people 20 people killed this weekend in an annual Shiite religious ceremony. Iraqi leads, though, are praising their security forces saying it could have been much worse. CNN's Barbara Starr is at the Pentagon this morning.
Barbara, good morning.
BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT, AMERICAN MORNING: Good morning to you, Soledad.
Well, it's a sign of the times, perhaps, in Iraq. Each the U.S. military put out a statement yesterday saying that this celebration had, quote, "relatively little violence," but indeed gunmen defied security and opened up fire on Shiite pilgrims in at least half a dozen neighborhoods in Baghdad. Some 20 people killed, at least several hundred injured.
The pictures you see here tell the whole story, in these neighborhoods where people began running in panic. A good deal of concern as snipers were apparently defying security, even though there had been a two-day ban on most vehicular traffic in Baghdad. But even the Iraqi minister of industry, when interviewed yesterday, on "Late Edition", said despite all this violence, he doesn't think there's a civil war in Iraq.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FAWZI HARIRI, IRAQI INDUSTRY MINISTER: There is no civil war in Iraq in the sense that we saw in other parts of the world. What we have is a struggle between two completely different ideologies. One that believes in the new dawn of Iraq, the new democracy, the new harmony amongst its people, and an ideology that is determined to stop the people of Iraq from achieving that goal.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STARR: Officials on both the Iraqi side and the U.S. side saying that celebration was a successful security operation yesterday, run mainly by Iraqi security forces and backed up by Iraqi helicopters. And compared to last year's celebration, perhaps it was. Last year during this same religious pilgrimage by the Shia of Iraq, several hundred people, up to a thousand were killed in a stampede, when there was a scare about suicide bombers last year.
This year, as officials say, relatively little violence. They say just 20 people or so were killed --Soledad.
S. O'BRIEN: It would be nice, one day, when they are not saying, "just 20 people killed" but nobody killed, and everybody survived it. But that may not be any time soon. Barbara Starr at the Pentagon for us. Thanks, Barbara.
STARR: Sure.
S. O'BRIEN: Other stories making news. Carol's got that.
Good morning.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN NEWS ANCHOR, AMERICAN MORNING: I do. Good morning. Good morning to all of you.
President Bush getting ready to hold a news conference later this morning. It's set to begin at 10:00 a.m. Eastern. It's not quite clear what the president will be focusing on during this conference, but the situation in the Middle East will likely be addressed. Apparently, he will open himself up to questions. CNN will, of course, bring you the presidential news conference live.
In Baghdad, the second Saddam Hussein trial starts before the first one ends. The former Iraqi leader refused to enter a plea today on charges of genocide and war crimes. So a judge entered a not guilty plea on his behalf. The charges are connected to his crackdown on Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s. A verdict in the first trial is expected in October.
In Egypt, two passenger trains crashed into each other north of Cairo this morning. The collision left at least 57 people dead. Dozens more are injured. Police say one of the trains did not stop at a signal.
In Phoenix, Arizona, two accused serial killers face a court hearing. Police say the two men, Dale Housner (ph) in and Samuel John Dieterman (ph), are friends, and that they have terrorized Phoenix for the past year. Together they're charged in connection with a series of latte-night shootings around in the city since May of 2005.
In Medina, Illinois, making it a even dozen for Tiger Woods. The world's number one golfer has won the 88th PGA championship. That brings it to 12, the number of major titles Woods holds, that is. He shot a 4 under par 68 in low-scoring conditions. Woods trails Jack Nicklaus, who has 18 career majors.
And I know one man who was glued to the set this weekend, and that would be Chad.
(WEATHER REPORT)
S. O'BRIEN: The man behind one of the most famous photographs in U.S. history has died. His name was Joe Rosenthal. He died of natural causes in an assisted living facility in San Francisco. He was 94 years old.
Rosenthal won a Pulitzer Prize for this picture, snapping the unforgettable image of servicemen raising an American flag over Iwo Jima, during World War II. You know, this was the second shot. In fact, he was told you missed it. They raised the flag. And he almost didn't climb the hill to get the shot, this famous shot. But he did. This is the second flag that was being raised. The first one was smaller and they decided they wanted a bigger one. SANCHEZ: Why would the Marines ask them to put a bigger flag up, though? Isn't that interesting?
S. O'BRIEN: There is a little controversy behind that. But this is the shot. For many years some people said that that was a posed shot. And he would say, well, if I was going to pose it, what I would have done was shown people's faces and I would have more people in it. You know, that sort of stuff.
SANCHEZ: No, this is the real thing. And you know what's it's interesting. His eyesight was so bad they originally rejected him as a photographer, and he then he went on to finally the job with the Associated Press.
S. O'BRIEN: Right, right. It's a beautiful photo.
SANCHEZ: Great.
Well, still to come powerful stories from New Orleans nearly a year after Katrina.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is my daughter, Serena, who drowned (SOBBING) in Hurricane Katrina. She was five years old. I never got a chance to say good-bye.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SANCHEZ: Wow!
S. O'BRIEN: Oh, that's brutal.
SANCHEZ: That was part of director Spike Lee's new documentary "When The Levees Broke." He will join us live to talk about this emotional project. It's next on AMERICAN MORNING
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
S. O'BRIEN: With just days to the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, filmmaker Spike Lee's much-anticipated documentary is about to make its debut, it happens tonight on HBO, and it's called "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in 4 Acts". Look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When we first crossed the bridge and we saw a lot of damage and we were taking pictures and going, wow, oh, my god. And as we came over closer to where the -- you know, on the north side where the breach happened, we stopped taking pictures.
It is like when I saw my neighborhood, it was like looking at a friend who had been like disfigured. You know who you're talking to, you just don't recognize them.
(END VIDEO CLIP) S. O'BRIEN: Spike Lee joins thus morning.
Nice to see you. Thanks for being with us.
SPIKE LEE, DIRECTOR, "WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE": Good morning.
S. O'BRIEN: Oh, this is so hard to watch, it's brutal. But it's so fascinating, too. And it's funny, in parts.
LEE: That was a surprise to me.
S. O'BRIEN: It was?
LEE: I didn't think there would be much humor.
S. O'BRIEN: Like, laugh out loud funny.
LEE: I think we just successfully captured the spirit of the people, but going in, I didn't think that. I mean, it's not a comedy. It's the worst natural -- natural man-made disaster here in the United States of America, but when people are dying, I mean, and I mean that as a cheap pun, but when we had the premiere and New Orleans people --
S. O'BRIEN: Fifteen thousand people in the Superdome.
LEE: It wasn't 15, but it was 10.
S. O'BRIEN: Somewhere around -- 10, a lot of people at the Superdome.
LEE: People were rolling down the aisles, so -- again, it's still not a comedy, but the people -- I guess, that's just the spirit that had to laugh to keep from crying.
S. O'BRIEN: Oh, some parts of it are just incredibly heartbreaking. At what point did you know you had to do a documentary on this?
LEE: Well, I was in the Venice, for the Venice Film Festival, August 29th, and I watching CNN, flipping back and forth between CNN and the BBC and watching these images coming from the Gulf Coast, but specifically -- the Gulf Region, but specifically New Orleans.
S. O'BRIEN: Oh, just some of the stories. There's -- there's a sound bite from -- we ran and I think it's worth running again; a mother that talks about her five-year-old daughter. I know she --
LEE: Kim Polk.
S. O'BRIEN: Kim Polk, and her daughter Serena who drowned.
LEE: Right, right.
S. O'BRIEN: Just, I mean, let's play it. I think we have the sound bite.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KIM POLK, HURRICANE KATRINA SURVIVOR: This is my daughter, Serena, who drowned (SOBBING) in Hurricane Katrina. She was five years old. And I never got a chance to say good-bye. And I miss her so much.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
S. O'BRIEN: She was there at the screening? Did she go?
LEE: I'd invite her -- I did not invite her, and she called and said I want to come. Same thing with Herman Freeman, who mother, Ethel, was the symbol of that when her body was left.
S. O'BRIEN: She was the little old lady wheeled into the corner, covered with a blanket, with the note pinned.
LEE: Yes, I didn't invite him either. I thought it would be too much. But he called, too, and said I want to come. And the day after the premiere, he filed suit against the City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana for wrongful death of his mother.
S. O'BRIEN: You ran our interview with Michael Brown.
LEE: Right.
S. O'BRIEN: But you didn't interview him. Why not?
LEE: Well, Michael Brown was the only person that agreed half way to an interview. Chertoff said no, Condoleezza said no, and I wasn't even going bother with the President. But I decided to not interview Michael Brown because he was just real -- like, for me he was a peon. I mean, he was carrying out orders. The person who is responsible for all of this is Bush, and Chertoff. And Chertoff did not want to sit down with me.
S. O'BRIEN: You said you weren't going to bother with the president, but he appears a lot in this.
LEE: Yeah.
S. O'BRIEN: I mean, all over it.
LEE: I mean, it's funny. I don't have -- that's why we didn't have to put any narration in because we just let people hang themselves.
S. O'BRIEN: There's a really, I thought, heartbreaking, scene, Terrance Blancher (ph), who is a friend of your, he wrote the score, too, right?
LEE: Yes, Terence did all the scores for my films since "Jungle Fever."
S. O'BRIEN: You bring his mother back to their home. LEE: Terrence is a native of New Orleans. And I said -- and he had to evacuate his mother. So, I said, Terrence, please let us shoot when you bring your mother is back to the house.
S. O'BRIEN: And he agreed.
LEE: And he agreed. He had mixed feelings about it, but he --
S. O'BRIEN: You didn't go in?
LEE: No, I couldn't. It was too much for me to go. I just stopped outside.
S. O'BRIEN: Let's show a clip of this from the documentary.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When we first crossed the bridge and we saw a lot of damage and we were taking pictures and going, wow. Oh, my god. And as we came over closer to the north side where the breach happened --
(END VIDEO CLIP)
S. O'BRIEN: That's obviously not Terrence talking to his mother. I think we have that clip, this is Terence's mother as she described going back to her house. Take a look.
No. I am told we don't have it.
LEE: Oops!
S. O'BRIEN: But she breaks down, it's a -- big oops. But it is so sad. And so -- I think she sums it up right. Because he sort of cajoles her and says, listen, these are things that are replaceable. She says, no, really in a way, it's not.
LEE: The sad thing, Soledad, that not much has changed. We're coming upon one year, August 29th, 75 percent of the population is still not there. It's been spread out in 46 other states. The 25 percent that are there are just barely making it day to day.
S. O'BRIEN: Crime is up.
LEE: Crime is up.
S. O'BRIEN: Stress is way up.
LEE: The post -- forget about that. There's just no services. There are people waiting for a plan.
S. O'BRIEN: There's no plan.
LEE: The plan has not come forward yet.
S. O'BRIEN: Do you do a follow up? Do you see yourself doing a documentary or a movie on Hurricane Katrina?
LEE: No, this is, I think that I would like to continue this. Even though it's four hours, it's still incomplete.
S. O'BRIEN: It's a riveting four hours.
LEE: It's still incomplete. And I want to stay with this. Either way, New Orleans goes, I want to stay with this.
S. O'BRIEN: Spike Lee, it's an amazing documentary.
LEE: Thank you.
S. O'BRIEN: It was great to watch. Nice to talk to you, too.
LEE: And thank you for being part of the documentary.
S. O'BRIEN: I'm glad you were able to use some of our interviews. And a lot of our videotape, too.
LEE: And thank you for sticking your Malano Blahniks (ph) up.
S. O'BRIEN: I don't wear Malanos (ph), but I know what you're saying
(LAUGHTER)
LEE: Malano, Manolos.
S. O'BRIEN: You know, you know.
Thanks, thanks for coming in. The movie is called, the documentary is called "When the Levees Broke", and it will be on HBO tonight and tomorrow.
LEE: Tonight and tomorrow night.
S. O'BRIEN: And tomorrow night, part two.
LEE: At 9:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
S. O'BRIEN: "A Requiem in four parts". And HBO, as we mentioned, at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Part Three and Four, then, tomorrow night, 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time. The documentary will replay, in it's entirety on August 29th at 8:00 p.m. Eastern. Of course that day is the one year anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina.
I might take this moment we'll be live on that day, Tuesday, August 29th for a special edition of AMERICAN MORNING coming to you from New Orleans, taking a look at Hurricane Katrina one year later. We're back in just a moment. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SANCHEZ: Welcome back. This Wednesday CNN brings you the closest look yet inside the life of the world's most wanted man, Osama Bin laden. An astonishing picture of his world from childhood to Afghanistan, into today. This report from Senior International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour is just part of the upcoming special "In the Footsteps of bin Laden."
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, SR. INT'L. CORRESPONDENT (voice over): December, 2001. A relentless bombing campaign, air strikes thundered through the treacherous mountains of eastern Afghanistan. The battle of Tora Bora had begun. Osama bin Laden, the Jackal of 9/11, and hundreds of al Qaeda fighters had finally been cornered, or so it seemed.
GARY BERNTSEN, FMR. CIA OFFICER: We brought in Specter gunships, which can put a bullet on every inch of a football field.
AMANPOUR: Gary Berntsen was the leader of a secret CIA paramilitary unit that had pursued bin Laden since he had fled Kabul. And now, the CIA was sure it knew where he was, thanks in large part to a radio taken off a dead al Qaeda fighter.
BERNTSEN: We listened to bin Laden for several days using that radio. Listening to his communications among him and his men. We listened to him apologizing them for having lead them into this trap and for having lead them into a location where they would be having air strikes called on them just relentlessly.
AMANPOUR (on camera): The plan was for Afghan and Pakistani soldiers to block any escape routes, but Osama bin Laden managed to slip away through the mountains. And the mission to capture or kill the al Qaeda leader failed.
By most accounts, the main problem was not enough American soldiers on the ground.
BERNTSEN: In the first two or three days of December, I would write a message back to Washington recommending the insertion of U.S. forces on the ground. I was looking for 600 to 800 Rangers, roughly, battalion. They never came.
AMANPOUR: Osama bin Laden, looking frail and much older than his 44 years, after the massive onslaught of Tora Bora, had escaped again.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SANCHEZ: That's Wednesday. The stories only CNN can tell you about the man who became the world's most wanted terrorist. Don't miss "In the Footsteps of bin Laden." A CNN Presents special two-hour investigation with Christiane Amanpour. That's Wednesday night, at 9:00 Eastern, only on CNN.
S. O'BRIEN: Mixed message from home improvement retailer Lowe's. Here with the news, a little bad news, Carrie Lee is "Minding Your Business".
Good morning. CARRIE LEE, CNN FINANCIAL CORRESPONDENT, AMERICAN MORNING: Good morning.
Let's start with the bad, because the stock price really tells it all, right? The stock is down 4.6 percent this morning on a not-so- great second-quarter profit report. Now, profits were up 11 percent over the year-ago period, but a little weaker than Wall Street was expecting. They're also trimming their sales outlook -- our profit outlook, excuse me -- for later on this year. That's what's most important, looking forward. Because in part of the slowing housing market.
So, we're seeing this, also high gas prices affect other retailers as well. Names like Williams & Sonoma, Starbucks, they have all seen disappointing sales. So, that's what's happening on Wall Street.
I want to turn to Will Smith, of course, the movie star. We all know who he is, right?
Well, "The New York Times" reporting that he'd been trying to get his movies into the Chinese market. Government censors, though, only allow 20 foreign movie imports in 2005, so he since turned to India. He has a production company and worked some with some people there and made some connections. And now he is going to make two films. They're not starring him, but he's putting them together. So interesting that you can't get into China, so he's getting into India instead. Film companies have to do what they can, because sales, we know, have been on the decline here.
SANCHEZ: They love U.S. movies.
LEE: Yeah. They'll get even more of them.
SANCHEZ: Thanks, Carrie Lee.
S. O'BRIEN: We have to take a short break. When we come back we'll take a look at the top stories making news right here on AMERICAN MORNING.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
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