Was it al Qaeda?

Monday, August 21, 2006

by Soledad O'Brien, CNN's American Morning

August 11, 2006 Friday

Transcript

TONY HARRIS: And coming up, was this alleged plot coordinated with the five-year anniversary of 9/11 that is quickly approaching? And in the five years since that terrible (AUDIO GAP).

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TIM ROEMER, FMR. 9/11 COMMISSIONER: ... grades that you just rattled off are not the kind of grades we would want our children receiving, and certainly not the kind of grades that make our government safer and our citizens safer from a 9/11-type of attack.

Safer from who? Al Qaeda, translated into the base, is regrouping, re-energizing and releasing. They are regrouping on the Internet, experimenting with technologies. They are re-energizing in homegrown types of terrorist movements in Great Britain and getting some training in Pakistan. And they are releasing tapes where Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri have released 12 tapes. They are releasing tapes quicker than the rock group U2 just this year.

So that's a real threat. And then you talked about, what are we doing about it?

We made some incremental progress right initially after 9/11. We have not made enough progress since.

Twelve Ds, five Fs, two incompletes to our government on some of the most important issues, like protecting us from weapons of mass destruction, like reorganizing Congress so that they are better equipped to fight the hot war against jihadists, rather than the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: Some people would say it's not really a surprise that al Qaeda has turned to chemical explosives to try to bring down a plane. They've tried it before. It's kind of a little bit of an MO, if you will, by al Qaeda, try, try again.

So, what should be in place to stop that? I mean, is there anything that actually can sense parts of a bomb, a chemical explosive that are broken up and could be combined together? I mean, is that possible to even do?

ROEMER: Well, Bojinka comes to mind. And what we found in Bojinka was that al Qaeda is both tenacious and they are inventive. They are innovative.

They are tenacious. They keep going back after the same targets, like planes. They try to get into a cockpit with a suicide bomber. Then they try a shoe. Then they look back at Bojinka and see what a kind of a liquid explosive might work with new technology, new iterations on that technology with timers.

So we have to have people, Soledad, thinking about red-teaming. What are they going to do next? Not just putting our money into what did they do last time. And that's another issue for Congress and the Department of Homeland Security.

Instead of spending money in pork barrel pet project fashion, how do we get a Kevlar vest for a dog or an air-conditioned garbage truck? How do we have the strategy set forward so we're investing in, you know, the likely targets by al Qaeda, whether they be airlines, whether they be soft targets like trains like they hit in Europe, or whether they be the next kind of target that al Qaeda goes after, a shopping mall or some other kind of target?

O'BRIEN: You gave Pakistan a C plus back in December of 2005. Pakistan intelligence apparently was very helpful in helping crack this alleged terror plot.

Would that make you raise their grade, B minus, A plus, A minus?

ROEMER: Well, you have two issues with Pakistan. You have both their cooperation with the British and with the Americans on intelligence sharing. That's one of the good success stories of yesterday. However, you have some cultural, political, economic, military issues with Pakistan, where Pakistan is where the Taliban and al Qaeda started.

There are schools and madrassas that are teaching the hatred of Jews and Americans and to kill Jews and Americans. We have problems there, Soledad. So I think it's something that we need to continue to work on in a balanced way.

We need to finish the job in Afghanistan. We need to capture Osama bin Laden. These are unfinished parts of the agenda.

Afghanistan is backsliding. We are sending more NATO troops there. We are running into more problems in the south. More sorties are going on there than maybe even in Iraq.

And we're having problems with the Tora Bora hills and trying to find Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri, who seem very confident these days releasing their tapes. And these are CNN studio quality tapes that they are putting out there these days, communicating with hundreds of millions of potential jihadists and trying to get them to sign up.

O'BRIEN: You mention more problems potentially than Iraq. That's a little bit of a quote than what you just said. So are you suggesting that maybe we should be withdrawing resources and money out of Iraq and putting it into capturing Osama bin Laden, and Afghanistan, and other things? I mean, at the end of the day, right, it comes down to X number of dollars can be spent in certain things.

Where do you put the money?

ROEMER: I don't think you can cut and run from Afghanistan. I think you really have to finish the job there. We started out well. We did some things innovatively there with Special Operations Forces and our CIA recruiting Muslim-Americans to help.

We did a great job there initially, and now we're seeing some backsliding and some lack of progress there. And I think it's very important to finish the job in Afghanistan.

It's very important that we don't put all our intelligence and military resources in Iraq and take our eye off the ball in other places in the world. And it's very important that we capture Osama bin Laden and we are not letting him release a tape every few months trying to motivate, inspire and recruit new jihadists.

O'BRIEN: Tim Roemer is a former 9/11 commissioner.

Always nice to see you. Thank you for talking with us.

ROEMER: Thanks, Soledad.

HARRIS: And still to come this morning, President Bush addresses that alleged plot to blow up planes. We'll tell you why two words of his have angered some Muslims.

That's ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.