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New Day

126 Killed In Taliban School Attack; Conflicting Testimony From Ferguson Witnesses; Former CIA Officials Defend Torture Tactics

Aired December 16, 2014 - 07:30   ET

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

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Haras, thank you for joining us this morning. It looks from the outside like the Pakistani military/intelligence community was just caught off-guard by this Taliban attack. Is that a fair assessment?

HARAS RAFIQ, QUILLIAM FOUNDATION, MANAGING DIRECTOR: I don't think they were caught off-guard. I don't think they expected something to be this big in Peshawar, in the region where it was. But you have to realize something. That's groups such as ISIL in Syria and Iraq have embold -- empowered other groups like the Taliban, other groups that espouse al Qaeda, to actually want to be part of the action. They feel a little bit left out, and they feel that this is their time.

CUOMO: Well, Harris, let me get some...

RAFIQ: They really need to...

CUOMO: We've been hearing that, so I just want to get some perspective on what that means contextually. Do you think that the Taliban in Pakistan or Afghanistan are trying to have concerted action with ISIS or do you think it is a competitive instinct that ISIS isn't the baddest people in the world? We're the baddest people in the world. As horrible as that sounds, could that what's going on?

RAFIQ: It's definitely competitive. They don't in Baghdadi as their leader. They see ISIL as a direct competitor for the global jihadi forum if you like. These guys want their piece of the cake.

They want the piece of the pie. They want to have their own language. They can call the Islamic State and these guys want to carry out these actions in Pakistan.

CUOMO: So one more step sideways before we get to the urgency of what's going on at the school right now. Why don't the Pakistani Taliban attack ISIS, then, if they want to be the main group and they don't accept the leader and it's all about you know, perverse religious ideology?

RAFIQ: It's not about attacking ISIS. For them, ISIL don't have a presence in Pakistan. They want the country. They want to take over the military and the governance of the country. ISIL don't exist in the numbers in Pakistan as it does in the Middle East.

Therefore, they're not the -- they're not the direct threat for them. They're not the direct enemy. The direct enemy for them is the Pakistani governments and the Pakistani military so that they can take over or try to take over the country.

CUOMO: Haras, when you have a dozen guys, which is what we believe this contingent of enemies are right now attacking the school. If that is what's going on, it's a dozen guys, one of two things has to be true -- one, you weren't ready or two, you're not focused enough on the threat.

And the distinction would be the dedication to the threat. Is that a legitimate criticism? That Pakistan is not set up to combat the Taliban like it should be?

RAFIQ: I would agree with that. I think Pakistan recently the military did have an offensive against the Taliban. But the problem is that you, you can't win this battle just by military use alone. You have to tackle the ideology. You have to counter the narratives and beliefs. Pakistan as a country has not done that and they won't win the battle until they start doing that.

CUOMO: How do you think this ends? Right now it's active gunfire going on inside. There's suicide bombers involved. We know there are military and paramilitary there. There's been the suggestion of hostages. It is rare for the Taliban to want to negotiate, right? They see the ends often as just as much death as possible, isn't that the sad reality?

RAFIQ: You're right. The sad reality is that these guys don't really have something that they want to negotiate with directly or in terms of their objectives. What they want to do is to cause as much terror to kill as many people, to cause as much pain to Pakistan, the state and the region itself.

In order to, to make them a feared entity and you know, the sad reality is there's nowhere to go, for the military and the authorities in Pakistan other than try to take these guys out. If there are any remaining suicide bombers, take them out before they cause any more damage and hurt and kill more people.

CUOMO: It is just a horrible reminder that you're dealing with an enemy that believes a path to God involves killing children. Haras Rafiq, thank you very much for being with us today. Appreciate it -- Alisyn.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Chris, switching gears, why was there no indictment in Ferguson following the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer? Well, the credibility of several witnesses that the grand jury heard from is now in question this morning. Did this all play a part in the grand jury's decision not to indict Darren Wilson? We will look at those inconsistencies.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: The Ferguson grand jury in the shooting death of Michael Brown spent countless hours listening to witnesses, many of whom had conflicting memories and contradictory accounts, a review of thousands of pages of grand jury documents shows dubious testimony came from witnesses on both sides. Now some asking if it was those inconsistencies that convinced the grand jury not to indict Officer Darren Wilson.

Joining us for more is Joey Jackson, HLN legal analyst and criminal defense attorney along with Liz Brown, defense attorney and columnist for the "St. Louis American."

Let's look at some of the examples of the inconsistencies in the testimonies of witnesses. Witness number 40 proved problematic. She did a whole bunch of things that should have raised the eyebrows of the grand jury. She said she went out the exit of a parking lot, where no exit exists. She had a timeline that was all wrong.

She basically admitted that she was trying to exonerate Officer Wilson. Here is what she said in the testimony. They asked her, the investigator, basically, you are doing what you can to kind of help Darren Wilson with all of these efforts, is that fair?

She says, she admits, I think a lot of it was redacted, is kind of selfish. It was more for myself. Being I do support law enforcement and I felt bad. I don't know if that helps him or not. Now Joey --

JOEY JACKSON, HLN LEGAL ANALYST: Yikes.

CAMEROTA: When a grand jury hears that, do they dismiss her out of hand or do they listen to her testimony?

JACKSON: Here's how it works, good morning, Alisyn and Liz, the bottom line if you continue to recite the discrepancies in this witness's testimony, we'd be here all morning. This is what happens, even prior to your question, this is where a prosecutor, and I get and I understand I disagree with, the fact that this prosecutor wanted to present everything before this grand jury.

But there's some obligation on the part of a prosecutor, and as a former prosecutor myself I could say that, to vet your witnesses, when you talk about a witness who is going to appear before a body, you want to examine what they say.

CAMEROTA: Beforehand.

JACKSON: Absolutely. Now the incident itself happens on august 9th, right? She goes to the police thereafter on September 11th. Which in and of itself raises red flags, but sometimes people don't come forward right away. To the extent that you don't certainly now, you want to have your dander up as to whether the witness saw what they saw.

She comes before them at that time telling them some story on September 11th. And prior to that, had posted rants on her Facebook page which were very disparaging to the African-American community.

CAMEROTA: They were bad. They are such racist garbage that we're not even going to read that here.

JACKSON: Do you not then as prosecutor, Alisyn, have an obligation to evaluate who you're dealing with? Let's go a step further. After that she meets with the FBI on October 22nd. Mentions nothing about a journal that she kept to contemporaneously record what she was talking b. But she relates she has a journal she'll bring it with her next time.

We find out she wasn't even there. She's 30 miles from the particular occurrence. We know she has a history of some type of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and a criminal felony record.

These are things as a prosecutor you want to examine because you have an obligation, even though you want to share with the grand jury, you want to insure the information you share is at least credible. To the extent that wasn't done is very troubling.

CAMEROTA: Lizz, why was she allowed to even testify in front of the grand jury?

LIZZ BROWN, COLUMNIST, ST. LOUIS AMERICAN: That's the question, isn't it? Why was she allowed to testify? I would go a step further than what joey said. As a prosecutor attorney you're also an attorney, you have ethical obligations to bring witnesses in front of a jury that you know are going to, that you know are truthful.

And you vet them and you determine whether or not they're truthful. And in particular, with a grand jury, where there's no cross- examination, you have a double duty to make certain that a witness is credible.

And when a witness has expressed the racist comments that this person, that this witness did, what racism is, not a noun, it's a verb. People act on racism. So if you are a racist person, that means you are willing to lie about a person based on the color of their skin.

Knowing that as a prosecutor, why would you bring them in? And the only conclusion we can draw in this particular case is, it's because of the narrative that she was giving. She bolstered the conversation. Whe bolstered the testimony of Darren Wilson.

She not only said what he said, but she went even further. She said that Michael Brown engaged in a football type of action to keep Darren Wilson in the vehicle. So why did they bring her on?

Because she bolstered and I think that we can fairly ask a question of whether or not this attorney, this attorney's office has violated their ethical responsibility. And maybe that, that is something that should be explored as well.

She knew that this person was not a credible witness and she put them in front of the grand jury and more importantly, she did not question this witness in front of the grand jury. She did not cross-examine this witness in front of the grand jury.

So she, she didn't even allow the grand jury to get to whether or not this particular witness was telling the truth. There's a difference between questioning a witness. And cross-examining a witness and she did not, Kathy Alesaday did not cross-examine this witness and she did not allow the grand jury to get to the truth about this particular witness.

CAMEROTA: Lizz Brown, Joey Jackson, so many questions, thank you for explaining it to us this morning. Nice to see you. Let's go over to Chris.

CUOMO: All right, Alisyn, Dick Cheney says he would do it all over again. What the C.I.A. did was OK, and it was okay because it worked. Do you agree? New poll numbers are coming up and the truth about your feelings about torture are revealed.

And we have live pictures for you outside the school in Pakistan where right now there's active gunfire going on, at least 125 have already been killed. Many of them are children. We will give you the latest coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CUOMO: Welcome back to NEW DAY. A majority of people just like feel comfortable with the brutal interrogation methods used by the CIA against detainees after 9/11. That is the fact of a poll coming out from the Pew Research Center. The numbers are right in front of face right now.

Fifty one percent of Americans find methods to be justified. Only 29 percent don't agree with that. Let's bring in Phil Mudd, you've been hearing from a lost people who say I knew somebody who was in the program. I kind of knew things.

This is different, he's a CNN counterterrorism analyst, but he's a former deputy director of the counterterrorism center at the C.I.A. you know what was going on there, good, bad, ugly and you fknow who knew. So the first question for you is a softball.

What do you think of the poll numbers saying the American people agree with what the C.I.A. did? And even basically an even split. Let's put up provided intelligence that prevented attacks. Yes, 42. No, 43. The decision to release the committee report split, right decision 42, wrong decision 43. What do the numbers mean to you, Mr. Mudd?

PHILIP MUDD, CNN COUNTERTERRORISM ANALYST: Well, I think the most interesting thing to me is not what these numbers say. We're in 2014, when military diplomatic intelligence efforts have decimated the adversary that murdered 3,000 people 13 years ago.

Can you imagine this poll if we had done it on September 12th? That was the environment in which the C.I.A. established a program authorize by the Department of Justice and the Congress.

These people were worried about things like Christmas shopping and the decline in the stock market. Tell me more about what we would have said 13 years ago, than even about what we say today. CUOMO: Is it fair to say that that emotional response to that situation put the CIA in a position where it was not completely prepared to do what it was being asked to do. And that that led to mistakes?

MUDD: Sure, I think the C.I.A. response to this indicates that. And I would agree with that the intelligence system as anybody as a traditional intelligence officer will tell you, includes three basic components. You collect intelligence, spies in the field.

You disseminate it you send it to places like the Department of State, the White House and the Pentagon and then people like me take all this stuff out there, intercepted communications. Information from spice and put it together into a narrative, into a story.

Take a hard left in 2002 when we captured our first detainee. Now in addition to those responsibilities, you create secret prisons overseas and you start interrogating people. It was an area that we weren't familiar with back then.

CUOMO: The idea of Dick Cheney coming out and saying I would do it all again, it was all fine. That's part of the political fight that's going on now because of how this initial report came out.

Let me ask you, at no time regardless of whether or not the DOJ said it was okay or not, people in and around the program didn't feel like this is too much what we're doing. This is torture what we're doing, no matter what we're being told. None of that common sense hit anybody?

MUDD: Excuse me, common sense? The majority of the American people still saying this is OK. We went to the people to the people who determine what U.S. statute say. I personally spoke to members on both sides of the aisle in the Congress. They told me either OK or is this it?

In other words, aren't you doing more? The mod of the population is reflected by the American security service. The mood of the population this is OK, this is morning OK, and by the way, if it we ever see another jumper from the 100th floor at a building in New York, it's on you.

You want to know what that's like, Chris, we were dealt a hand of deuces and we ran the table in the casino. I thought it was great work.

CUOMO: I saw the jumpers that day. I understand the emotionalism of the situation. There's no question about that, but that's also not perhaps the best mind to be making decisions, right? We don't want to act at our most emotional.

MUDD: It's the only mind we have, dude.

CUOMO: The DOJ said it was OK, but you didn't feel anything that was going on was actual torture by any other definition? MUDD: No. I felt that the measures were tough. I knew we'd pay by this water cooler at the CIA we talked about it all the time, end game. That is, we began conversations early on with the White House saying, when the prisoners that we hold no longer have intelligence value, what do we do with them?

They are not jailers. They are interrogators, intelligence professionals, and we knew part of that end game personally would be judgments about us and judgments that history would make without living in the time.

The biggest problem here is not documentary evidence that's reviewed by a congressional committee that never spoke with people like me. It is trying to relive the time and saying how.

When you're told by the president, the vice president, the National Security Council, the Department of Justice and both sides of the aisle in the Congress, how can you relive that moment and say what you did was wrong? We tried to reflect the will of the people.

CUOMO: So you're saying that your friends ran away from you in the aftermath. Two questions, one, why did you do it? You answered that. The next one is did you tell people what you were doing? Did they know? Right now politicians are saying you either didn't tell us or you went farther than you said you were going. Is that true?

MUDD: I think let's take those two questions. We went down to the Congress and I was among them, again. It's not a very complicated briefing. I've done a million briefings in my life. Here are ten techniques. We use flexible walls, we us chokeholds, open-fingered slaps, we use sleep deprivation.

It's brutal but pretty simple, I run down a list, this is what we do. There are a couple things happening here. First, why didn't you ask the people who ran the committees, Porter Gross, the former chairman, later the CIA director said, nobody in this investigation asked me, a former congressman, I was chairman of the committee.

Yes, they told me. We could have resolved this question by asking the people who were there.

CUOMO: You're saying that the people who need to know knew, and there were no blind spots about the CIA.

MUDD: Yes.

CUOMO: The last question is this then. You're in the report. And you are used as part of the CIA machine that was spinning what this program was about to the media to make it something that it wasn't. Is that a fair charge?

MUDD: Yes.

CUOMO: Were you a spinmeister for the CIA selling us on a program we didn't really understand?

MUDD: Let me put you on the hot seat, Chris. How long has NEW DAY been on the air?

CUOMO: About a year and change.

MUDD: Are you guys doing OK?

CUOMO: We're doing better than that, Mudd.

MUDD: Why are you spinning me? I believed in the program. I believed they were crushing al Qaeda, we were crushing them with human source operations with signals intercepts, with working with security services, the paramilitary military operation in Afghanistan against the Taliban was stunningly successful.

And I told the media, I didn't cherry-pick of ABC, CBS, NBC, "New York Times," "The Washington Post," "L.A. Times," told them all, we are crushing it. Nobody in the report ever asked me. I stand by what that report says. Hell yes I saw what we did, I believed it. Here's a dirty secret, I was right, we did crush them.

CUOMO: Philip Mudd, thank you for coming forward with the candid responses to the questions. I appreciate you taking the opportunity.

MUDD: Sure, thank you.

CUOMO: Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: All right, Chris. Terror strikes again this time at a school in Pakistan. We'll show you live pictures of the scene where at least 126 people have been killed, most of them children who will. We'll bring you the latest developments.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A deadly attack on a school in Pakistan.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Six men with suicide vests.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Taliban gunmen entered the school, after scaling its walls.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have heard explosions coming from the school.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: At least 100 people killed, mostly children.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The death toll is continuing to rise.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The siege is over. Sydney remains on high alert.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is just the kind of guy ISIS wants?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Things like this don't happen in Sydney.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are ready to deal with these people. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just because we don't believe in the bad guys, doesn't mean the bad guys aren't trying to kill us.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CUOMO: Welcome to NEW DAY. It is Tuesday, December 16th, just before 8:00 in the east. Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota here and right now a school in Pakistan is still an active battle zone. Gunfire, explosions, just rocking this army-run school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.

Gunmen have been targeting students from grade one to grade ten. These are live pictures from the scene now somewhat under control. The death toll is high and will get higher. At least 125 people dead, many of them between 12 and 16 years of age.

CAMEROTA: The numbers are so staggering. We'll bring you all of the breaking news as soon as we get it.

Meanwhile, there are more questions about another terror attack yesterday in Sydney, Australia. Could more lives somehow have been saved? Could the gunman known to Australian police somehow have been stopped sooner?

Our coverage begins with the breaking news from Pakistan. Let's go to CNN's Atika Shubert tracking all the developments live from London. What is happening at this hour, Atika?

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right. It looks like they have cleared most of the buildings in that school compound.