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Jeb Bush Talks George W.'s Decision for Iraq War; Explosive Allegations Surrounding Killing of Osama bin Laden; New Fears North Korea Pushing Ahead with Sub-Based Missile System. Controversial Idea to Address Flood of Migrants Overwhelming Parts of Asia, Europe. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired May 11, 2015 - 13:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:30:24] WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back. I'm Wolf Blitzer, reporting from Washington. It's 1:30 p.m. here, 6:30 in London, 12:20 a.m. in Vietnam. Wherever you're watching from around the world, thanks very much for joining us.

Jeb Bush speaking out about his older brother's controversial decision to go to war against Iraq in 2003. In a new interview with FOX News, the likely presidential candidate was asked point-blank if he would have gone to war if he had been president. Listen to what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEB BUSH, (R), FORMER FLORIDA GOVERNOR: I would have. So would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody. So would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.

UNIDENTIFIED ANCHOR: You don't think it was a mistake?

BUSH: In retrospect, the intelligence was faulty.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: If the former Florida governor runs for president, he still hasn't officially announced but it is expected, that comment could draw fire from his rivals. They could point to the human cost of the war, which included nearly 5,000 American lives lost, tens of thousands of injured, and billions -- hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars that U.S. taxpayers spent over a decade fighting that war. And now there's the ongoing bloody battle with ISIS in Iraq that's still going on very much.

So let's talk about all of this with our chief political analyst, Gloria Borger; and chief congressional correspondent, Dana Bash.

This comment that he sort of is doubling down supporting the decision that his brother made in March of 2003 to go to war, how is it going to play?

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: It depends on what audience you're talking about. The general election running against Hillary Clinton who says that the Iraq war, her vote on the Iraq war was a mistake it could hurt him with some independent voters. The Iraq war very unpopular. When you look at the Republican Party right now, it's grown much more muscular on foreign policy. The American public is looking at the ISIS beheadings they're seeing what's going on in Syria and so it may not hurt him as much in the Republican Party as you might think. By the way, he hasn't been shy about telling people in a closed fundraiser that W. is one of his chief advisors on foreign policy. And a lot of his advisors come from the Bush team.

BLITZER: They're saying he was referring to be one of his chief foreign policy advisors when it comes to Israel, trying to reassure a pro-Israel group in New York, but not necessarily saying he's one of the chief foreign policy advisers on everything.

DANA BUSH, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right. Some of the bigger picture issue is like Gloria was saying that when it comes to how he's going to separate himself or not from his brother, it's not as it would seem at first blush. Iowa, the first caucus state. Jeb Bush's favorability rating is under water, 39 percent, and it's unfavorable is 45 percent. George W. Bush right now, 81 percent. So to some out there in might seem like really, you want to link yourself to your brother, especially since the Iraq war was seen as the most controversial decision he made during his presidency. But to those who are running, and voting in the Republican primary, maybe not so much.

BLITZER: What's he waiting for? Why doesn't he announce like six other Republicans have announced.

(LAUGHTER)

(CROSSTALK)

BORGER: I think they're looking for a way to separate themselves in a way from the field. Let everybody else out there first and then Jeb will get in. He's out raising an awful lot of money and that's an important thing for him to be doing right now. You know, I would assume that some time later this spring we're going to see an official Jeb Bush announcement, but for all intents and purposes, Wolf, everybody knows Jeb Bush is running.

BASH: Yeah.

BLITZER: Is he running away from his record on comprehensive immigration reform in the face of criticism from some Republicans that he supports amnesty for 10 or 12 million illegal immigrants here in the United States?

BASH: He claims no, that he's not running a away from it, that he's still very much believes in that, he is not the kind of Republican that you saw like Mitt Romney back in 2012 who talked about self-deportation, really leaned into the part of the Republican base that was highly against any form never mind citizenship, but legal status, that he's not like that. But the one thing that I want to say about what you mentioned,

and you asked, why is he not running you hit the nail on the head. It's about money. They can raise so much more money now before he's a declared cap date hand over fist you can raise literally by the millions because it is not capped until you're a federal candidate and once -- when raising money for a super PAC or PAC as he is now before a declared federal candidate he can raise -- they want him to raise about $100 million and want to push the envelope as long as they can to raise those big dollar amounts until they can't.

[13:35:] BORGER: That's why you hear all these candidates speak gobbledygook and say, if I were to run. Legally, they can't say, OK, I'm running because then they're subject to fund-raising caps. Instead, they have to speak this phony language that makes everybody sort of scratch their head and say, why don't you come out and say you're running.

BLITZER: He will at some point.

BORGER: He will. We'll be there.

BLITZER: Thanks very much, Gloria.

BORGER: Dana will be there.

(LAUGHTER)

BLITZER: Thanks very much.

Still ahead, explosive allegations surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden. One investigative journalist in the U.S. says we don't know the whole story. The White House has just reacted.

New fears North Korea is pushing ahead with a sub-based missile system that could vastly extend its nuclear reach. A former Pentagon official will stand by to join us live with his analysis.

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BLITZER: Four years after the death of Osama bin Laden, there's a new claim about the circumstances surrounding the raid that killed him. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Seymour Hersh, now says what we've been told about it is false. He's written an article for the "London Review" that says top Pakistani officials knew the Navy SEALs were coming, which contradicts the White House version saying the Pakistanis were kept in the dark.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

[13:40:02] SEYMOUR HERSH, JOURNALIST & AUTHOR: The story was this -- it would have been a good, clean mission, if we hadn't gone public that night and said we did it. Instead of waiting the week, as we were supposed to. That was the game. If you think about it that way, you realize it makes more sense. The Pakistanis were confronted with the fact we knew something they didn't want us to know, no choice but to cooperate because we have economic leverage on them, the generals, we put money in the Pakistani.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: The White House is totally dismissing the controversial article.

Let's go to our White House correspondent, Michele Kosinski.

Tell us about the White House reaction, Michele.

MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: It may have taken a little time for the White House to respond to this formally. That's one of the things he mentioned on our air today, saying the White House isn't denying this almost using it as a defense.

Now, the White House is not just denying his accounting of what happened that night, but they're pouring water all over it.

Here's the press secretary just now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I can tell you that the Obama White House is not the only one to observe that the story is riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods. The former deputy director of the CIA, Mike Morell, has said that every sentence was wrong.

And, Jim, I thought one of your colleagues at CNN put it best. Peter Bergen, a security analyst for CNN, described the story as being about 10,000 words in length. And he said, based on reading it, that what's true in the story isn't new, and what's new in the story isn't true. So I thought that was a good way of describing why no one here is politically concerned about it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KOSINSKI: And he didn't go into any of the specific items detailed in Hersh's reporting.

But one of the assertions at the heart of it all the Pakistani government knew and cooperated with or had to cooperate with the U.S. government on the raid. But what analysts have in the short time since the story has been out there poked holes through this, the premise this would have had to entail a cover story that would have lasted year and years, that would have made the Pakistanis look terrible and bad for them ultimately. Earlier, the National Security Council did respond to the premise and what they said and equally strong language what you heard from the press secretary staying, "There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each one. Nevertheless the notion that operation that killed Osama bin Laden was anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false. As we said at the time, knowledge of the operation was confined to a small circle of senior U.S. officials. The president decided early on not to inform any other government including the Pakistani government which was not notified until after the raid occurred."

So, you know, they're blowing a big hole in one of the primary assertions that Hersh is making there -- Wolf?

BLITZER: Michelle, thank you very much.

Michelle Kosinski reporting from the White House.

Coming up, a flood of migrants overwhelming parts of Asia and Europe. The crisis and a controversial idea to address it.

Plus, what's on the Secretary of State John Kerry's agenda as he heads to Russia to meet with Russia's president?

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[13:47:00] BLITZER: The European Union is preparing to urge more member countries to share the burden of accepting migrants from North Africa. The flood of migrants is creating a crisis in Europe, particularly if Italy, which can't handle them all. The plan would distribute those looking for asylum based on the country's size, unemployment rate and ability to handle the cost but the U.K. already is saying it won't be forced to take any more. At the same time Indonesia is coping with refugees trying to escape the poverty of Bangladesh and Myanmar. The Indonesian government rescuing thousands at sea as hundreds more die.

Here's Ivan Watson.

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IVAN WATSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Indonesian and Malaysian authorities say more than 2,000 immigrants have been rescued at sea in a period of just 48 hours. More than a thousand of those migrants landing at the Malaysian tourist resort island of Mankowi (ph), and the rest apparently arriving on the other side of the Malacca Straits around the Indonesia district of North Korea. Indonesian officials tell CNN many of the migrants include women and children and they were exhausted after apparently being adrift at sea for days with very limited supplies of food and water. The United Nation's high commissioner for refugees is calling this part of a larger trend that UNHCR has been documenting with some 25,000 people embarking on this dangerous journey by sea, just in the first three months of this year alone. And that's an increase of more than two times the number that the UNHCR documented in the same period of 2014.

The UNHCR says 40 to 60 percent of the people making this dangerous journey come from the Rohenja (ph) Muslim community in Myanmar, an ethnic and religious minority that is largely denied citizenship and equal rights by the government in Myanmar.

We traveled in the fall of last year to Myanmar's Rakin (ph) state where we met some of the more than 100,000 Muslims who have been made homeless by simmering conflict in that region in the last couple of years, people who said they had been evicted from their homes and confined to displaced person camps. Every person we talked to said they knew somebody who you with planning to or who had previously embarked on this dangerous naval journey to escape the difficult conditions there in Myanmar.

The UNHCR says at least 300 people were killed, died, according -- due to difficult conditions on that perilous maritime voyage in the beginning of 2015 and increasingly it appears that smugglers are turning away from over land routes to the naval route. The UNHCR say the migrants suffer extortionary rates at the hands of smugglers and they're also subjected to human rights abuses by the smugglers, including rape.

Ivan Watson, CNN, Hong Kong.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

[13:50:17] BLITZER: Thank you, Ivan.

Secretary of State John Kerry is headed to Sochi, Russia, his first visit to the country since the start of the Ukraine crisis. He'll meet with the Russian President Vladimir Putin and the foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. Iran, Syria, Ukraine, will certainly be on the agenda.

Still to come, dire warnings that North Korea is getting closer to a sub-based missile system that could have a global reach.

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[13:54:26] BLITZER: A frightening new development in one of the most feared and dangerous regimes on earth. South Korea raising the possibility that North Korea is only a few years away from developing submarine-based missiles that could be difficult to track and strike anywhere. Images from North Korea seem to back up its claim of a successful underwater test launch with the leader Kim Jong-Un apparently looking on. The South Korean military believes the photos are authentic. Pentagon officials are not so sure. They say they're looking at whether these images were Photoshopped.

Let's bring in Peter Brookes, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He's a former assistant secretary of defense.

One U.S. official telling CNN, Peter, and I'm reading here a direct quote, "This was not a test but a simulated firing." What does that mean?

PETER BROOKES, SENIOR FELLOW, HERITAGE FOUNDATION & FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Well, they really didn't have much of an objective here in terms of test and operation. It was probably a simulation to push up the missile through the water column to get it out. I'm very skeptical about that one picture there. Would you really put the North Korean leader that close to a missile coming out of the water? And there's a possibility the missile didn't go that far, even if there was some sort of test firing of the engine. But it's certainly not good news. Only the latest in a series of pieces of bad news. Some Chinese told some Americans that North Korea may have double the number of nuclear weapons we have. (CROSSTALK)

BROOKES: We're saying about 20. We were thinking 10 to 15. They're saying 20. An American general -- sorry, an admiral, has said North Korea might have road mobile intercontinental missile with a warhead to put on top of that. And of course this.

BLITZER: So they have the capability already, you believe, to deliver a nuclear bomb?

BROOKES: That's what the commander of NORTHCOM said, Admiral Gortney. He said this publicly. Some people dispute it, but it is big news if it's true. The fact is we believed for a while that North Korea could potentially hit the West coast of the United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile.

BLITZER: And you think they have maybe as many as 20 already?

BROOKES: This is what the Chinese are telling us. The other news is perhaps they've perhaps started the nuclear facility, restarted that facility which would give them more material for more nuclear bombs. So it's an interesting possibility. And the fact the Chinese decided to tell this to some American interlocutors is particularly interesting.

BLITZER: There's been a strain in that North Korea-China relationship lately.

BROOKES: Absolutely. In fact, it was a possibility that Kim Jong-Un was going to go to Russia. He's balancing the --

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: For the anniversary.

BROOKES: Right. For V.E. day.

(CROSSTALK)

BROOKES: And he decided not to go. But he's playing Russia off China a little bit. He's got this very large neighbor. They have a history of a relationship with the Soviet Union. I think they're balancing that big neighbor to the north with Moscow.

BLITZER: So you think he wants to improve the North Korean relationship with Russia at the expense of what had been the most important relationship North Korea had. with China.

BROOKES: It still is, but the fact is that North Korea likes to look independent.

BLITZER: Is he in charge, Kim Jong-Un, of what's going on in North Korea right now? He's still obviously in his early 30s, relatively young.

BROOKES: No doubt in my mind, especially if these reports about the purges are true. We're hearing about a lot of purges of senior political officials and military officials. I think he's firmly in charge.

BLITZER: And the reason he didn't go to Moscow, if he wants to improve relationships with Russia, was?

BROOKES: Possibility of a coup in North Korea, right?

BLITZER: So he's afraid to leave the country?

BROOKES: Absolutely, that's the case. They're afraid to leave the country. He's not traveled outside the country since he's taken charge. There's always a possibility he might travel to some places in China, but traveling all the way to Russia, I think, is probably something he's not comfortable with.

BLITZER: What do you anticipate, let's say, over the next several months in terms of North Korea, its relationship with South Korea, with China, potentially with the U.S.? Any improvement, or is it simply going to continue to deteriorate?

BROOKES: The Obama administration calls it strategic patience. I'm not sure to what end that strategic patience is, but there have been no talks. I think the American with the highest visibility is Dennis Rodman, to have met with Kim Jong-Un. So --

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: I think he's the only American.

BROOKES: Well, yeah, and there's talk about Jane Fonda, right. So I mean --

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: She hasn't been there.

BROOKES: Right, but she may actually -- there's talk about her crossing the DMZ at some point.

BLITZER: There is a delegation of women. I don't know if she's on that trip, but there are others going there I think next week or the week after.

BROOKES: That's exactly right.

BLITZER: They'll go to North Korea and then go across that border. Apparently, North Korea and South Korea have agreed to let them do.

BROOKES: That's right. It will be interesting to see if they meet with senior leadership for propaganda purposes, the same way we saw with Dennis Rodman.

So this is a very interesting regime. It's a wild card and something we need to be concerned about, especially this newest development, although, I don't think it's in the near future that they're going to have an intercontinental ballistic missile being able to be shot from a submarine.

BLITZER: Peter Brookes, thanks very much for joining us.

BROOKES: Thanks very much.

BLITZER: There's also breaking news coming in from the Pentagon, which is now casting serious doubt on earlier reports that the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, was wounded in an air strike back in March. A U.S. official telling CNN there's not intelligence that al Baghdadi was at that strike location. The Pentagon spokesman saying it has, quote, no reason to believe al Baghdadi has been injured in a coalition air strike. The new information contradicts published reports that al Baghdadi was seriously wounded and no longer running ISIS. So that just coming in from our sources at the Pentagon.

That's it for me. Thanks very much for watching. I'll be back 5:00 p.m. eastern in "The Situation Room."

For our international viewers, "Amanpour" is next.

For our viewers in North America, "Newsroom" with Brooke Baldwin starts right now.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.