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CNN Saturday Morning News
Reporter's Notebook
Aired June 01, 2002 - 09:49 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.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: When things go wrong in Washington, you reorganize, you explain, usually to a congressional committee, and then you listen as whispers begin to circulate about your job security.
Well, that's pretty much the status at FBI headquarters after days of embarrassing disclosures and backpedaling on who knew what and when about September 11.
We're going to talk about the new FBI with Kelly McCann, our CNN security analyst, and Elaine Shannon from "Time" magazine.
Hello to you two.
ELAINE SHANNON, "TIME" MAGAZINE: Good morning.
KELLY MCCANN, CNN SECURITY ANALYST: Hi, Kyra.
PHILLIPS: Let's start with what is coming across now the wires, FBI director Robert Mueller and the Justice Department's inspector general, Glenn Feines (ph), expected to testify Thursday -- I'm reading here -- at the Senate Judiciary Committee's public hearing about the FBI's performance before the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Elaine, what can you tell us? What should we expect from this?
SHANNON: Well, we saw a lot of Bob Mueller this past week, where he was talking about the FBI's reorganization and the new guidelines for conducting terrorist investigations. So I think we're going to see the same man. Bob Mueller is a trial lawyer by choice, and he's very good on his feet.
Of course, there's been some complaining that he seemed to backpedal a little bit and say, Well, maybe there were things we could have known in advance of 9/11.
But what he's really talking about there is, Should we know more about the airplane hijacking problem? Yes, maybe. But the FBI is still insisting that they didn't have their cross-hairs on any of the 19 hijackers, the actual people who were going to do this, or where they were going to do it, except for the two dozen on the watch list, whom they couldn't find. Otherwise, they said, they had no way to anticipate that those people would get those planes.
PHILLIPS: Kelly, was there extraordinary negligence on the part of the FBI?
MCCANN: No. I mean, given the backdrop of total -- the totality of information that we know now, hindsight is 20/20. I mean, you know, think about it, Kyra, there are people, felons, in the United States that we can't find.
So when you look at a world situation and you have documentable people similar to the man being held in Norfolk right now, who is documentable, (UNINTELLIGIBLE) have U.S. citizenship, but was captured with the Taliban, that's a guy that -- a person like Zubaydah would single out and say, Hey, we can use that guy legally to enter the U.S., and again, cover for action, cover for status, we can get close to the, you know, the attacks.
So it's very unfair to bench-race this thing and say, Geez, they should have, they could have. We'd all be millionaires if we had that power.
PHILLIPS: Well, let's talk about the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) counterterrorism part of the FBI. I did do an interview about a week ago with a former FBI agent, and he said, Hey, there's high turnover in there, there's not a lot of pay, that is a popular place to come in and come out.
And this is a part of the department where you need to build sources and you need to be around for awhile.
Elaine, is this a problem?
SHANNON: Sure it is. A lot of people, probably most people, join the FBI because they want to catch bad guys, take them to court, and put them in jail. And when you have to gather intelligence, that really is sort of a glorified way of saying gossip, for years and years, and you may be gathering information about the wrong people.
The FBI had plenty of wiretaps out on people that they thought were al Qaeda sympathizers, and they were pretty confident that they could head off any plan in the United States, because they had, what they say, hung so many wires. It's just that the 19 hijackers weren't in communications with any of the people that the FBI knew about in this country. They stayed off the phones, and they were not detected.
PHILLIPS: Let's get to a e-mail quickly here. Kelly McCann, I'll have you address this. "Some day, after all the hype and paranoia is gone, what civil liberties will we have given up to ensure our safety, and how will we get them back?"
MCCANN: That's a great question. I mean, ask yourself, given the backdrop, again, of weapons of mass destruction, modern arms, the number of people in the United States, and, you know, an imminent threat, just sheer population size, would the framers, if they were sitting on this dais right now, say that they would not invoke some change?
I mean, this is a wholly different situation. And to apply a literal interpretation of the Constitution when the closest threat was by wooden boat from across the ocean is a little bit ludicrous.
So yes, I think that we're going to see some -- kind of intrusive measures, and people have to realize, if you have nothing to go about your business and be legal, and you have nothing to worry about. You probably won't even notice any kind of intrusion.
Now, the problem is, is returning to a normal state. I would suggest to you that it's similar to, you know, things that we lose, we can't get back. This is the way it is. Even if we just got rid of the illusion of invincibility, take al Qaeda out of the mix, people now look at the United States differently than they did pre-9/11, which is a wholly different set of problems.
PHILLIPS: Kelly McCann and Elaine Shannon, I apologize, we have to cut this short. But the president's commencement address at West Point took a little more time than expected. I know we will be continuing this discussion and hope you both will come back.
MCCANN: Thanks, Kyra.
SHANNON: Thank you.
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