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CNN NEWSROOM

Setback Against ISIS in Iraq; Ferguson Police Chief Apologizes

Aired September 25, 2014 - 15:00   ET

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


ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Joined by Paul Cruickshank, CNN terrorism analyst.

Again, Iraq's prime minister surprised basically everyone today in a casual conversation outside the U.N., essentially saying that they uncovered a plot by ISIS militants to attack subways in the United States and in France.

It seems bizarre. It's not so bizarre, the general idea of it, but that he would sort of drop this casually. U.S. officials say they have no information about this. He gave a big interview to Christiane Amanpour, didn't happen to mention this yesterday. He had meetings with U.S. officials, apparently didn't mention it.

Do you buy this? Do you buy that Iraq actually has intelligence about the desires of ISIS?

PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: Well, this appears to be information, raw information that they received today from the interrogation of ISIS fighters that they captured in Iraq.

But, of course, interrogations are notorious for providing unreliable information. Were ISIS fighters just making this up? Were they under duress? It doesn't appear that the Iraqis have crossed-checked this and quite extraordinary that they would drop it in a media setting before actually alerting the Americans to this intelligence.

COOPER: Well, also, how many ISIS fighters are they actually capturing? They just had a base overrun in Fallujah and they just had 300 Iraqi troops killed. I just am very skeptical about these comments by this guy and certainly if he's making stuff up or just kind of casually dropping this, it certainly raises questions about his credibility.

CRUICKSHANK: Well, we don't know yet all of that. They may well have got this in good faith. But they may not have sort of vetted this information. It may not be credible information. They may well have received it in an interrogation. But that's very, very different to an actual plot being in the works.

COOPER: We're also hearing reports that roughly one dozen Americans, maybe as many as a dozen Americans with extremists -- who had fought with extremists in Syria may have actually returned to the United States. Officials have told us this today.

How likely is that? That shouldn't be too much of a surprise. Again, the difficulty is in tracking these people.

CRUICKSHANK: No, we have known this for some time, that there are a number of Americans who fought in Syria who are now back in the United States. They are watching these people very, very closely, obviously concerned that they could be trained killing machines and back in the United States.

Now, not all of these people will want to sort of launch attacks, but there they're obviously concerned that some of them may -- in Europe, they have a much greater problem. They have hundreds of people back in Europe who fought in Iraq and Syria, and in Europe there are so many of them, they can't monitor them all 24/7. In the United States, it's a more manageable threat right now.

COOPER: Also information from the FBI today that they believe they have identified the British person seen in the beheading video of James Foley, as well as Steve Sotloff.

Obviously, there are other people involved in that beheading as well. It seems likely that U.K. authorities have identified this person a while ago. Plenty of people would have recognized this guy's voice.

CRUICKSHANK: The U.K. authorities said several weeks ago they were 99 percent sure they knew who was in this video. You sort of do voice recognition and a lot of detective work back in the U.K. looking at the facial structure and things like that trying to narrow it down.

But they have not yet released the name. I don't think they're about to do that today necessarily, put the name out. They may worry that that could create a backlash against the hostages in Syria.

COOPER: Paul Cruickshank, appreciate you being on. Thanks very much.

Also, nine men in the U.K. have been arrested for their alleged involvement in a banned group linked to terrorism, among the nine a radical British Muslim cleric who was seen on CNN just last month.

Brian Stelter interviewed him on "RELIABLE SOURCES." The cleric told Brian one day the world will follow Sharia law.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANJEM CHOUDARY, MUSLIM PREACHER: I think that, you know, I don't pose a threat to anyone in this country. I pose an ideological and political threat definitely. I believe that I can counter the arguments of the government and those people who are banging the drums of war in Muslim countries. But at the end of the day, you know, I think that, ultimately, Theresa May and David Cameron have lost the argument, if they're going to run roughshod over the very principles and values which they are fighting for, you know, in places in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Why exactly are British and American soldiers dying if not for the same freedoms and values which they are stifling over here for the Muslim community?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: Brian Stelter joins me now, along with Paul Cruickshank.

It's interesting. He never condemned ISIS for murdering American journalist James Foley.

BRIAN STELTER, CNN SENIOR MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: I thought it would have been so easy for him to say I condemn the beheadings and then turn to whatever things that he wanted to say.

The fact that he wouldn't I thought was revealing. In the sound check as well, when usually you count to 10, you say, one, two three, four, five, six, seven, eight nine, he said, one, two three, four, five, nine, 11, three, 11, seven, seven. He was naming these dates of terrorists of these incidents as if they were a joke.

And that's what was most revealing of all about him, that he's a provocateur and he does that on Twitter and on YouTube and on cable news as well.

COOPER: Paul, in the U.K., there used to be a lot of guys like this making very provocative public statements. They have cracked down to a great degree over the last couple of years.

CRUICKSHANK: They have cracked down, but there is also freedom of speech.

And Anjem Choudary, I have met this guy dozens of times. He's always known exactly where legal red lines are. He's also been very careful not to cross them. Not clear if they will be able to get any sort of charge in here or conviction. He may have just gone too far. He's basically backed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliphate. That just may be a stretch too far for British authorities.

COOPER: Brian, you asked the cleric about that sound check. Did he have any explanation?

STELTER: He actually said to me that I shouldn't have taken it so seriously, that I should have taken it as a joke. I thought that was very revealing to hear him say that.

We should mention, we don't know what specifically they're charging him for. We don't know the details of it. That's been the case throughout all of this, hasn't it? There are so many situations right now where we are hearing charges from authorities, claims from authorities, claims about imminent threats, but we're not being shown the evidence.

And as journalists, this is the hardest time, but the most important time for us to stand up and ask for proof, ask for evidence and ask for cross-checking.

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: Frankly, it's like this statement by the Iraqi prime minister today saying that ISIS is threatening attacks. I was talking to Elise Labott, State Department correspondent, and you

could very easily say maybe he's feeling some pressure because right now the focus is all on Syria and he wants to remind people ISIS is a danger in Iraq and he needs to come up with this story.

STELTER: It's hard, isn't it, Anderson?

These are the hardest time for reporters, to press for details and to be skeptical, to go against the conventional wisdom and be skeptical. But we have to do it. Someone like Anjem Choudary, you hear what he's saying and it's appalling a lot of what he's saying. And yet we have to be skeptical when we hear that he's been arrested because we don't know exactly what for and we haven't heard his side. Difficult.

CRUICKSHANK: But what we do know about Anjem Choudary is that several followers of his group are now fighting in Iraq and Syria with ISIS. The first British suicide bomber in Syria Jabhat al-Nusra, he was part of this group, a follower of Anjem Choudary.

COOPER: It interesting that a lot of these guys, they preach this. They are not actually doing it themselves. A lot of guys who actually preach, they are encouraging others to go and fight. They're not actually the ones that go out and do...

(CROSSTALK)

STELTER: I was thinking about that. When I watching him get wired up in the studio in London, I was thinking about that last month, what a kind of cushy life he had, to get wired up in the air conditioning to sit there and spout off. We ended up having someone on the program a week later to refute a lot of what he was saying, because it's so important to point out when you hear what he's saying that he does not represent Islam, does not represent the Muslim world.

He represents one part of the battle of ideas that's going on.

COOPER: Appreciate you being on, Brian. Thanks very much. Paul Cruickshank, as well.

STELTER: Thanks.

COOPER: Don't miss Brian on "RELIABLE SOURCES" Sundays at 11:00 a.m. Eastern only on CNN.

Coming up next, we have more breaking news this afternoon. We're getting word ISIS terrorists have overrun an Iraqi army base, killing up to 300 Iraqi soldiers. You're about to hear from a survivor and what he says about how his own troops abandoned him is fascinating.

Plus, just in, the police chief in Ferguson, Missouri, just sat down for an interview with CNN hours after apologizing for the shooting that killed Michael Brown. Hear what he has to say to Brown's family.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COOPER: Three days of strikes in Syria, and the Pentagon suggesting the attacks are slowing ISIS.

A short time ago, the chief Pentagon spokesperson says ISIS movements, they appear to have stalled since the strikes began late month. Again, he's talking about in Syria, but we are now getting details from what appears to big another victory by ISIS in Iraq in yet another show of ineptitude by Iraq's armed forces or at least their leadership core.

Iraqi officials say ISIS killed at least 113 Iraqi soldiers during fighting for a base in Fallujah before the base fell Monday to ISIS. They also say the number of dead could rise up to 300. In an interview obtained by CNN, a soldier who survived says his unit's command structure broke down in the midst of fighting.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): From 2:30 a.m. until 10:00 a.m., no one came to help us. I had been calling the commander since 2:00 a.m. at night for support, but no one responded and they sent us nothing. I stayed injured for nine hours waiting for them until they airlifted me here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: The soldiers said promised airstrikes never materialized. Again, we have to ask whether Iraq's army either can or will fight, even with the help of airstrikes.

With us now from Orlando, Florida, Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, U.S. Army retired. He's a CNN military analyst.

General, you and I have talked a lot over the last several weeks, and what this soldier says really backs up a lot of the reporting which has been that many of the generals seem to have failed when actually confronted on the battlefield. They didn't return calls. They abandoned their troops, essentially.

How deep does that go? Are there lower-level generals who could take the place of these higher-ranking generals, some of whom basically just paid their way into the Iraqi military under Nouri al-Maliki?

LT. GEN. MARK HERTLING (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Yes, Anderson, this is really distressing, because I think it's a similar type of event that we have seen at so many Iraqi army locations that happened in the early stages of the fight at Camp Speicher, my old headquarters in Northern Iraq.

This is Camp Fallujah where it has happened and it has been reported over the last several days. I have had some contacts have told me it's the recurring theme of the Iraqi leadership breaking down. It's not soldiers who are unwilling or incapable of fighting. It's just a lack of leadership. That's what is criminal about this.

Do they have lower-ranking people that can step up? They do. It's because we have seen them. The Marines were in Fallujah. They trained the next generation of fighters. We were in the north training the next generation of fighters, the captains and the majors. Those are ones we will have to rely on to fleet up or go after and go back and get the ones that were the generals at the time that were relieved by Mr. Maliki and replaced by some of his proxies.

It's going to take a long time, though. To build trust in a military unit just takes time and leadership characteristics.

COOPER: It's distressing though that given the commitment now by the United States and countries in the region, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain and others, that this is still going on, that they still are not -- that they are not able to hold onto territory and make advances, retake territory that they have already lost.

How long a process -- how does it even begin, the kind of confidence building, morale building, replacing generals? What are those first steps? How do you go about doing that?

HERTLING: Yes. Well, you have to train them and school them and that takes a while. But I would suggest the reports at both Camp Speicher, where I was, and now Camp Fallujah, where this most recent event took place, it's not only a matter of the fighting force, Anderson, but I think as you read reports or understand what happened out there, ISIS surrounded this base, cut off all logistics trains to the base, ammunition, fuel, water, food, and then basically sieged the base.

So these young Iraqi soldiers who were fighting out there were fighting for their lives, and then when their leadership left, they not only were fighting for lives, but they were starving and they were thirsty and they had no resupply. They had no medical equipment. So it's not only a matter of building up leadership again. There has got to be the logistics trail, the communications trail and the leadership in Baghdad, the overarching command authority of the Iraqi army in Baghdad.

That was suspect even when I was there. There were some incompetent leaders in that base that were continuously supported when they should have been relieved.

COOPER: The new prime minister is over in New York when all of this stuff is happening over in Baghdad. They don't have a defense minister as far as -- I haven't checked today, but as of earlier this week, they hadn't picked a defense minister, they hadn't picked a interior minister, crucial positions if you are waging a war.

HERTLING: Yes. That's incredibly tough and I think when Mr. Maliki took on the role of both the defense minister and interior ministry to basically put all of the power of security under him so he could do the things he wanted to do, that's what started the downward spiral and that was several years ago.

Now you have to get the defense minister in place. It's got to be a Sunni to generate the trust among the Sunni tribes in both the west and the north. And that's a critical factor. That should be step one, both the defense minister and the interior minister. But even the selection of that, that individual is going to just be the start of revamping a military which was in relatively good shape a few years ago and is now in tatters.

COOPER: It's just -- it's incredibly distressing. Mark Hertling, General, appreciate it. Thank you very much.

HERTLING: Thank you, Anderson.

COOPER: The chief of police in Ferguson is apologizing to the family of Michael Brown. Just moments ago, he sat down with CNN for an interview. After weeks of silence, why now is he apologizing? That's coming up.

Plus, happening right now, police in Charlottesville holding a news conference on the disappearance of University of Virginia student Hannah Graham. The suspect made a pretty bizarre appearance in court today. Hear the new developments ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COOPER: Well, this just into CNN. Moments ago, the man wanted in the case of missing student Hannah Graham waived his extradition rights and agreed to go back to Charlottesville to face charges.

Jesse Matthew has been on the run for days, until police found him reportedly camping on a beach yesterday near Galveston, Texas. That's nearly 1,300 miles from where Hannah was last seen 12 days ago in Charlottesville.

Police believe that Matthew was the last person with her before the night disappeared. Here he was in court today. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JESSE MATTHEW, SUSPECT: Sir, I have got a question for you.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK.

MATTHEW: Like, they took all of my clothes and they got me sleeping with a long thing. I almost feel like I'm a -- I should be able to have some kind of clothes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You appear to me to be dressed in a jumpsuit.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: Want to bring in HLN host Nancy Grace.

Nancy, explain the charge. Suspicion of abduction with intent to defile, I had never heard of a charge like that.

NANCY GRACE, HOST, "NANCY GRACE": Yes, Anderson, I was surprised as well when I saw that charge.

Suspicion of abduction, that means kidnap, with intent to defile. In Commonwealth of Virginia law, that was later changed to mean for immoral purpose. In 1986, it was translated and recently retranslated in 2012 in Collin Ellis vs. Commonwealth to mean sex molestation or rape.

Sex molestation, let's go with that. That's what Ellis says verbatim. So, boiling it down, kidnap with intent to commit a sex molestation, that's what the charge is. Now, remember, that is a police charge on the arrest warrant.

This is not a grand jury charge or a formal charge that we would hear in court. He's got some other charges such as driving erratically. Now he's got a new charge of giving false information to police. What is that? Don't know for sure. What is it probably, Anderson? When that police officer saw him there on the beach, it's a little peninsula called Bolivar Peninsula about 10 miles from Galveston -- he probably gave a false name, hence false information to a cop.

He can make bond on that. But he's also a fugitive. On that, he's not going to get a bond.

COOPER: He's going to go back now. He's facing this charge. The police -- the bottom line is we still don't know what happened to Hannah Graham. Police have asked people who own land, who have property to search their own properties and pass along information to police to help kind of limit the search areas.

But the focus of the police is still trying to figure out exactly what happened. How much -- having this guy in custody, how much does that help them?

GRACE: Well, it helps them a lot.

If they are correct that he's the last one to see her before she vanishes off the face of the earth, as cops say, he should give them a clue as to where he last saw her. Now, I would like to point out, we're on the outside looking in, Anderson, of course. But after they search his car and after they search his apartment, they suddenly issue an arrest warrant.

What, if anything, did they find? We know they went in specifically looking for clothing. Now, what did they find, Anderson, that leads them to believe that he kidnapped her with intent to commit a sex assault? What did they find in that car or apartment to lead to that charge, not just kidnapping, but sex assault attempt?

Also, I would like to point out that when he left, he had roommates. Anderson, they're gone. They moved out. Why do you just move out of an apartment that you live in? His dog, a pit bull, gone. Did he take the dog? Did he give it to somebody to keep for him? And if so, what did he say to that person?

He was found in his sister's blue Sentra that we have been putting out on the airways for several days now. We believed he was in that car. What, if any evidence, is in that car? Those are just a few of the forensic questions that I have.

COOPER: All right, Nancy Grace, I know you are covering it a lot tonight. Nancy, thanks so much.

GRACE: Thanks.

COOPER: All right.

And Iran's president said the U.S. could be creating a new terror group as an accidental consequence of its war. Iran's president said the U.S. could be creating a new terror group. You will hear our interview with him coming up.

Plus, the White House now weighing in on the suggested terror plot against subways in the U.S., a bizarre suggestion from the Iraqi prime minister. That's next.

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