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CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports

How Will Osama bin Laden's Words Play in Muslim World?; Is bin Laden Still Alive?

Aired December 27, 2001 - 19:00   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.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Tonight on WOLF BLITZER REPORTS, THE WAR ROOM: Osama bin Laden's message to the West.

OSAMA BIN LADEN, AL QAEDA LEADER: If I live or die, the war will continue.

BLITZER: The al Qaeda leader defends the September 11 attacks, but how will his words play in the Muslim world? And is bin Laden still alive? We'll get the Bush administration's reaction, and a live update from Afghanistan on the hunt for bin Laden.

And I'll speak live with former U.S. ambassador for counter- terrorism, Paul Bremer, Dr. Jerrold Post, a former CIA psychiatrist who's profiled bin Laden, and CNN Terrorism Analyst Peter Bergen, as we go into THE WAR ROOM.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Good evening. I'm Wolf Blitzer reporting tonight from Washington. We're standing by for a news conference about a toddler who was apparently abducted from a Chicago bus station Christmas Eve.

The FBI says 16-month-old Jasmine Anderson has been found unharmed in Williamson, West Virginia. Let's go to that news conference which is about to begin right now.

PHIL CLINE, CHICAGO POLICE: Good afternoon. My name is Phil Cline. I'm the chief of detectives. With me is Tom Kneir, who is the special agent in charge of the FBI in Chicago, Deputy Chief Joe Gandersky (ph), Special Agent and Supervisor Gary Kissinger (ph) and Rich Kobol (ph), the commander of Area Four.

We are here today to bring you some very good news on the kidnapping case. First, I want to just say thanks to the media. The media is the one that helped crack this case by putting the picture of Jasmine on there. That's what led to this case being cleared. So the Chicago Police Department would like to thank the media.

The other thing is I want to bring up the cooperation between the Chicago police and the FBI on this case was tremendous. This involved several states. When I get into where Jasmine was recovered, you'll see why it was necessary for us to work as close as we did. And like I said, the cooperation between the FBI and the Chicago police was tremendous on this case.

Earlier today, detectives from area four received information from the Broadview Police Department that a citizen out there in Broadview had information regarding the kidnapping. Detectives went out and interviewed this citizen and were able to recover Jasmine's coat. It was identified by Marcella, her mother.

Based on this information, we learned that on Christmas Eve a woman by the name of Sheila Matthews had gone to the Greyhound Bus station and abducted Jasmine, brought her back to Broadview for Christmas Day. Actually tried to pretend that the baby was her own, and showed it to the people whose house she was staying at.

Last night, her and her boyfriend and Jasmine traveled to Williamson, West Virginia. Based on this information, the FBI in Chicago that has been working this case all along with us contacted the state police in West Virginia and the FBI in West Virginia.

And at about 4:00 Chicago time today, they rescued Jasmine from a house in Williamson, West Virginia. I will let Special Agent Kneir talk about that. Thank you.

TOM KNEIR, FBI: Thank you. I'd just like to echo, you know, in all of these cases it's -- where a child of tender age is taken, we get into these cases immediately because it's not always apparent where -- where the case will lead.

And the cooperation in this case not only with the Chicago Police Department but our agents over in West Virginia, the Virginia State Police, the Williamson, West Virginia, Police Department, you know, have been great.

And this is a good news story for a change, you know, to stand up and tell that, you know, that -- that the baby is -- is well and is being checked over at a hospital now. This evening around 4:00 Chicago time, 5:00 in West Virginia, Sheila Matthews was taken into custody at 937 Benton Street in Williamson, West Virginia.

You know, the case is ongoing. There are a lot of leads yet outstanding to do. But, you know, I think the good news story here is that, you know, the 16-month-old child is perfectly OK and well, and that's a good news story for the holiday season for you. Thank you.

GREG KNOWLES, FATHER: I just wanted to say thank all the media, thank all the FBI, thank the police, whoever had anything to do with my child coming home to me. I appreciate everything. Thanks.

MARCELLA ANDERSON, MOTHER: We're really grateful for everyone who helped. Grateful for everyone, the news, the -- the "Milwaukee Journal," all the newspapers, everyone who had anything to do with the safe return -- especially the family members who were brave enough to come forward and had a really good heart and God bless everyone who helped and thank you very much. And thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We can have questions for law enforcement first and then questions for the family.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Question for Phil. Phil, can you tell us...

BLITZER: There you have it. Marcella Anderson, the mother of little Jasmine Anderson, expressing her gratitude that their little daughter was found earlier today, 16-month-old Jasmine Anderson. Our Chicago Bureau Chief Jeff Flock has been covering the story. He spent a lot of time with Mrs. Anderson earlier today. Jeff, give us sense how this came about?

JEFF FLOCK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, we did spend a good bit of time with Marcella Anderson and Greg Knowles, who is the child's father. Just after we left them today at the bus station they went -- we took them back to the bus station for the first time since they'd been there with the police when it all happened. She was very fragile, as you can see on the air there. Also very, very fragile now.

Here is what is being reported locally in Chicago are we're not -- we've not been able to confirm this but just want to make you aware of it. Sheila Matthews, who is the woman that you heard Detective Cline refer to there of the Chicago Police Department, the women that was taken into custody and apparently will be charged in connection with this abduction.

The story being told is that she apparently had told a boyfriend in prison that -- that she was pregnant with his son. That, in fact, apparently was not the case. And the man was about to be released from prison, and apparently needed a baby quickly.

That is the story that's being reported. The Chicago police not able to confirm that to us yet. But perhaps some light being shed on how this all went down.

As of course it's been reported, most of the abductions that take place have something to do with the family, some member. This apparently one of those where that was not the case and a happy ending. Wolf.

BLITZER: A very happy ending indeed. Chicago bureau chief Jeff Flock, who's been covering this story since Christmas Eve, thank you so much. And thanks for the good news. We'll continue to monitor all of the latest reaction.

But let's turn now to the latest videotaped statement from Osama bin Laden. Portions of the tape were first released yesterday by the Arabic-language news channel Al-Jazeera, which says it received the tape in the mail several days ago.

Al-Jazeera released the entire tape earlier today. In it, bin Laden tries to justify the terror attacks on New York and Washington.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIN LADEN: The events of the 11th of September is just a reaction to the continuance -- continuous injustice against our children, our sons in Palestine, in Iraq, in Somalia, in southern Sudan, in Kashmir.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Bin Laden also goes on to downplay his own importance to his cause, but almost fatalistically predicts his legacy will live on.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIN LADEN: I'm just a poor slave of God. If I die or live, if I live or die, the war will continue. We pray for God to accept these people who committed -- who carried out the attacks. They have done a great deed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: The White House is dismissing the latest bin Laden tape as simply more propaganda. Our White House correspondent Major Garrett is live with more from Crawford, Texas, where the president is spending new year's. Major, what is the additional reaction coming from the White House?

MAJOR GARRETT, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, it's not much different than it was yesterday, dismissing it as just more terrorist propaganda that the White House and much of the world has grown familiar with. And White House officials would say, at least from their perspective, they have grown tired of.

Now, one consideration that was being debated here, Wolf, among senior officials was if in fact bin Laden is dead --and there are some reports suggesting that he might already be dead -- does the White House really want to find itself in the position of responding in a full way, in real time, to a tape that is clearly several weeks old when in fact bin Laden might be dead? The ultimate decision the White House came to was to respond bluntly, swiftly, but dismissively.

(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)

GARRETT: A quiet day at the Western White House. And after considerable internal debate, the president decided to keep quiet, too, about the latest bin Laden tape. The defense secretary said bin Laden no longer merits the attention he once commanded.

DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: He has lied repeatedly, over and over again. He has hijacked a religion. He has hidden and cowered in caves and tunnels while sending people off to die.

GARRETT: But the tape -- no one knows where or when it was recorded -- is revealing. Bin Laden looks pale, gaunt, weary and he comes closer than ever before in a pre-taped message to claiming credit for the September 11 attacks, and he heaps praise on the hijackers.

BIN LADEN: They have shaken the throne of America and hit hard the American economy in its heart and its core. They hit the most powerful military power on earth in its core. GARRETT: Privately, White House officials scoff at bin Laden's attempt to co-opt conflicts involving Muslims in Africa and the Middle East. Bin Laden, they point out, never mentioned any of these countries or causes in the tape made of him dining with supporters.

(END VIDEO TAPE)

GARRETT (on camera): Wolf, the White House sees bin Laden and his rhetoric as much less menacing and persuasive than it once was. Coalition partners and most analysts agree, which the White House the White House considers yet another victory in the war on terror.

BLITZER: Major Garrett in Crawford, Texas. thank you very much.

And our guests tonight here in the CNN WAR ROOM: Paul Bremer, the former U.S. ambassador at large for counterterrorism; Peter Bergen, CNN terrorism analyst and the author of the new book "Holy War, Inc."; and Dr. Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist at George Washington University who pioneered the field of political psychology while he worked over at the CIA. He's profiled Osama bin Laden.

And remember you can participate. Send me your e-mail questions. Just go to my web page, cnn.com/wolf. That's also where you can read my daily on-line column.

Let me begin with you, Dr. Post. You looked at this videotape of Osama bin Laden. You've profiled him before. What do you make of what has -- what's going on in his mind right now?

JERROLD POST, PSYCHIATRIST, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY: Well, he seemed to me quite stressed. And in fact I was really struck as a physician. I wanted to prescribe a nutritional supplement or something. He looks like he lost a good 15 pounds and looked frankly ill.

And I found that interesting to think about the fact his number two, Zawahiri, in fact, was his personal physician as well, and reported -- although not confirmed -- to have been killed several week ago.

He is also alone in the tapes, which he's been with others before. And I see a man really quite stressed, still trying to rouse us. But that -- that citation and the quote was quite interesting.

I have never heard that before. He's talked about the uprising against the United States and the West, but not whether I live or die. And I wonder if he isn't seeing his death imminent.

BLITZER: Peter, now we have some contrast. I want to show our viewers what Osama bin Laden was doing in an earlier videotape as compared to this one.

Take a look at both sides of the screen over here on the monitor. You see him in one using his right hand, obviously, but not moving at all in his left, which is the current video to the right of the screen. But if you take a look at the earlier one, he's using both hands. What do you take -- 34 minutes today, we didn't see him moving with his left hand at all.

PETER BERGEN, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: Well, it's quite striking. And I think that in view -- obviously, perhaps, he's had some kind of accident. Perhaps he's been hit by shrapnel.

Something has happened to his left hand, because he never raises it throughout the whole course of that 34-minute interview. And also, as you can see, he's considerably aged, even between October 7 and the mid-November date when this may have been shot.

BLITZER: Dr. Post, you want to...

POST: Yeah. Also, his weapon is off to his right. And talking to my friends who have been in the military, as a left-handed individual he would not only be gesticulating with the left but he would also have his weapon towards his left hand.

BLITZER: So there's obviously something going on. I have a question one of our e-mailers, Ambassador Bremer, asked us this question, and it's reflective of a lot of e-mail questions we're getting. Nancy from Toronto, Ontario: "Am I the only person that finds the tapes strange, perhaps doctored?"

BLITZER: I can tell you, Nancy, you're not the only person who's asked us that question. But what do you think?

PAUL BREMER, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR FOR COUNTERTERRORISM: I don't -- I don't think it's doctored. I think it's not very flattering to bin Laden, for all the reasons we've just heard.

It's the same shopworn, delusional things we've heard from him before but with much less force and much less conviction. And as Dr. Post points out, a little hint that he suddenly has seen his mortality and seen it in the face.

BLITZER: Let's ask Peter. Peter, you've actually met the guy. It seems like -- at least to me -- a different Osama bin Laden than the man you spent time with in, when was it, 1997?

BERGEN: Well, then he was -- he was -- he's always been quite low key. But it sounded very different from -- there was videotape circulating this summer in which he was very engaged and passionate.

And this man is -- is older, it seems to me kind of done in by events, and is a quite a different picture even from October 7, when we saw that first videotape which was quite a confident performance.

BLITZER: Another e-mail question we got from Peter in Seattle, Washington. "To what extent can the U.S. track down the chain of possession of the bin Laden videotapes to Al-Jazeera from Pakistan?"

Because presumably that might give the U.S. some hints where he might be right now. BREMER: Well, the first thing is you'd have to have cooperation from Al-Jazeera to start with, because that's the end of the trail. And I'm not sure we would get that. They claim it came to them from an unknown person via a courier service from Pakistan.

I'm sure that the relevant American agencies are going to do everything they can to track it back, as they have tried with the October 7 and then the subsequent one. But there is a limit to what you can do if you don't get cooperation.

BLITZER: And they also say they lost the envelope in which it came. They just threw it away, not realizing there was an important tape inside. Does that sound credible to you?

BERGEN: Well, the editor of Al-Jazeera said, I mean, it -- it sounds like luck that we even have this tape, because it was one of a series of tape that just sort of arrived and there's a lot concerns about security, anthrax at Al-Jazeera. So it was left alone for four or five days.

Then it was on a very unusual format. They spent two days looking for the right videotape recorder to actually look at it. So the fact that we're even talking about it all seems, you know, really happenstance, because there are a lot of things that could have gone wrong.

BLITZER: This is an Osama bin Laden seen in these 34 minutes, Dr. Post, that seems to have made some major changes, at least from my brief analysis of what he has done over these past several years.

POST: Well, for one thing, he is now accepting more responsibility. He specifically accepts responsibility for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, but there's also a kind of peculiar time out of joint here because the release of the home video on the 13th, he was chortling over his responsibility in the -- in the events of September 11.

Here he sort of disclaimed. Said we would not take innocent victims, but then goes into his characteristic upside-down psychologic where his violence is justified by the depredations of the West.

BLITZER: And he -- and he demonstrates an extensive knowledge of all 19 of those hijackers. We're going to get to that in a second. We've got a lot more to talk about. Stand by. When -- when we come back, will the Osama bin Laden tape spark yet more terrorism? Our guests will weigh in when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Welcome back. We're he in the CNN WAR ROOM with Dr. Jerrold Post, Peter Bergen and Paul Bremer. Dr. Post, you were -- you were suggesting that the Osama bin Laden is not necessarily the same person that we had known earlier. But right now his head where?

POST: Right now, his head is with A, his legend in history, portraying himself as the man who brought down the giant United States to its knees, but trying to keep rousing the morale of his -- his troops. But again, this was made three weeks ago and lot has happened since then.

BLITZER: Could what he says, which has played in it entirety on -- on Al-Jazeera, presumably some other Arabic-language stations out there, others around the world -- could it presumably spark yet more terrorism against the United States?

BREMER: It's possible in two respects. First, there may be coded messages in there, for all we know. And he's hard a time -- one of the great benefits of our campaign has been to make it much harder for him to communicate. I mean, we've really knocked out his communication. So he could be using this to communicate.

But it's also possible you get an emotional response to seeing him there and people agreeing with his message. I believe personally it's a very small minority of people in the Islamic world who agree with him.

BLITZER: But you -- but you don't need a whole lot of people...

BREMER: No.

BLITZER: ...to cause an enormous amount of damage.

BREMER: No. But that's -- that's a risk we face. That's what we're up against. We're up against a much bigger problem than bin Laden here.

BLITZER: Peter, there's a question -- we got an e-mail from Frank in Redding, California. "Where is bin Laden's family? Could he be hiding with them?"

BERGEN: Good question. I mean, some of them are in Saudi Arabia. He has an oldest -- oldest son is in Saudi Arabia and also quite a young daughter. But I think the rest of his wives and -- and children are in Afghanistan. But whether they're with bin Laden, who knows.

BLITZER: Is the U.S. government, the Bush administration, handling Osama bin Laden right now in the right way in sort of dismissing it as propaganda, but at the same time saying there's a $25 million reward out for his capture?

POST: In the -- in the beginning we lapsed into something we've regularly done. We did this with Saddam Hussein, too: make this highly personal conflict. The newest madman of the Middle East, which promotes the stature of that individual in the world of Islam for having the courage to stand up to a giant superpower.

Rapidly, they went into a far preferable posture, where they're depersonalizing it and this is not against Islam. This is against terrorism. And you scarcely hear the name of bin Laden uttered, and that's terrific, as I have mentioned to you before. I would like to see that whole reward dropped to $1. BLITZER: As you know, he's been personified with the war. A lot of Americans think that if you capture or kill Osama bin Laden, it's -- it's over.

BREMER: Well, there are two problems with personalizing. This goes way back. It goes back to Gadhafi in the late '70s, then Abu Nidal in the '80s. Then we had Carlos. I mean, we've had a series of these most evil men.

This guy is certainly very evil, but it does lead the American people to think that if you just deal with this guy, the problem will go away. The problem is not going to go away with bin Laden alive or dead. That's the one thing I agree with in his -- in his videotape. It is going to go on after he -- and we're going to continue this battle.

BLITZER: And just one final question. Do you believe that he's still in Afghanistan?

BERGEN: I do. It's a place he knows very well. It's an excellent place to hide, if he's still alive.

BLITZER: If he's still alive, and we don't know. There's a lot of stuff we don't know. Peter Bergen, Dr. Post, Ambassador Bremer, thanks for joining us.

Just ahead, tragedy outside the New York's Midtown Macy's Department Store. We'll have details.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Welcome back. Here are some of the latest developments we're following. A commuter van hit a group of people outside Macy's flagship department store in New York late this afternoon. Six people were killed, at least five injured. Police say the van had been double parked and the driver was asked to move.

A missing 16-month old girl has been found unharmed in West Virginia. Jasmine Anderson allegedly was abducted from her mother Christmas Eve at a Chicago bus station. Marcella Anderson says while she was waiting to refund her bus tickets, a woman who offered the family a ride walked away with the toddler. The FBI says the woman is now in custody.

Detainees held in Afghanistan may be headed to Cuba. The Pentagon confirms the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay has been told to prepare for them. Yesterday, U.S. forces took custody of 20 more detainees in Afghanistan, bringing the total being held now in Kandahar and offshore to 45.

And that's all the time we have tonight. Please join me again tomorrow twice, at both 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Until then, thanks very much for watching. I'm Wolf Blitzer in Washington. "CROSSFIRE" begins right now.

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