Higher Order in Alabama; Unemployment Is Down For The Month Of July
LOU DOBBS, CNN ANCHOR: Tonight: The Pentagon says fighters from the Mideast are infiltrating Iraq. General David Grange on the emerging guerrilla war. The Bush administration is calling on the United Nations to provide more help in Iraq. Tonight: Amtrak is an icon of this country's infrastructure problems. The head of Amtrak, David Gunn, joins us. And America's hot wheels, the cars thieves love to steal.</s>ANNOUNCER: This is LOU DOBBS TONIGHT for Thursday, August 21. Here now, Lou Dobbs.</s>DOBBS: Good evening. In God we trust, on the courts, we rely, colliding tonight in Montgomery, Alabama. At the heart of the conflict, a 5,300-pound granite monument of the Ten Commandments sitting in the lobby of a state building. The state's chief justice, who put it there, is now defying a federal court order that it be removed. David Mattingly joins us from Montgomery with the very latest -- David.</s>DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Lou, he's been denied once by the U.S. Supreme Court. Today, his fellow justices on the Alabama Supreme Court turned against him. But Judge Roy Moore says that he will continue to fight to keep his monument to the Ten Commandments on public display.</s>CHIEF JUSTICE RAY MOORE, ALABAMA SUPREME COURT: I say enough is enough. And we must dare defend our rights, which is the motto of this great state. No judge or man can dictate in whom we can believe and in whom we trust. The Ninth and 10th Amendment are not a part of the Constitution merely to make the Bill of Rights a round number. The Ninth Amendment secured our rights as a people. And the 10th Amendment guaranteed our rights as a sovereign state.</s>MATTINGLY: His fellow justices today, all eight of them, ordered the building manager to take all necessary steps to comply with the federal court order and remove the monument. The deadline for that came and went at midnight last night. State officials are hopeful the move by the justices will be enough to keep the federal court from levying a $5,000 daily fine. And it was about this time yesterday that 22 people were arrested inside when they refused to leave this building at the end of business hours, choosing instead to stay by the monument there and having to be arrested and charged with trespassing by the officials here. There's no chance of that happening today. The doors have been locked all day long. The only people that have been able to get in there are the ones with businesses with the court. Now, outside here, dozens of people continue to remain. They are supportive of Justice Moore, some saying, Lou, they will again stay the night to keep watch on the monument. And what you see going on right now is something we've seen a lot today, a prayer vigil going on, people hoping for whatever might come along that would keep the monument here and support their point of view -- Lou.</s>DOBBS: David, a number of questions. First, is there any indication as to when, with the order of the other justices, that the effort would be made to remove the monument?</s>MATTINGLY: There is some special language in that order that they handed out today that gave them some leeway in terms of practicality. This is a 2.5-ton monument. They have to decide where it's going to go and then how they're going to move it there. The federal court ruling was concerning just the public display of this. So it's possible they could move it to someone's private chambers or out of the building entirely. I don't know if those decisions -- no one here knows if those decisions yet have been made.</s>DOBBS: And do we know Justice Moore's whereabouts this evening and his plans?</s>MATTINGLY: His plans are to keep fighting this. He says he's going to go back to the Supreme Court and, hopefully, they will accept his petition now to listen to the arguments in this case and perhaps have some sort of ruling in the future that would allow him to keep that monument on display, on public display, here in this public building.</s>DOBBS: Obviously, this issue that Justice Moore has provoked by putting that monument in a state building and now moving it all the way to the Supreme Court, it has become far more than a local or state issue. It is now a national issue. Is there any sense, a reading of the public support or opposition to the justice's position?</s>MATTINGLY: Well, probably the best way to answer that would be to look back at some recent history. Judge Moore, when he was a circuit judge, did something similar by putting a wooden copy of the Ten Commandments up in his courtroom. There was a similar public outcry about that and considerable public debate. That sort of notoriety helped him actually become elected to the Supreme Court -- Lou.</s>DOBBS: David Mattingly, from Montgomery, Alabama, thank you very much. Later in the broadcast, we'll have more on this subject of church and state. We'll be joined by David Novak, who is not an attorney, but rather a professor of Jewish studies and philosophy at the University of Toronto. There are new developments tonight in the sniper attacks case in Charleston, West Virginia. Moments ago, police said, ballistics tests now confirm that the same gun was used in all three fatal shootings. Jeanne Meserve is in Charleston and has the story for us -- Jeanne.</s>JEANNE MESERVE, CNN HOMELAND SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Lou, that's right. We're expecting a press conference momentarily with the police chief from the city of Charleston. He will tell us, according to sources, that these three shootings are linked ballistically. There certainly were similarities. They all took place at convenience stores. They all took place at night. They all involved a single shot to the head or neck. But this is the official word. The ballistics do match. The question today was, was there a fourth shooting? Last night, a 16-year-old girl was at a convenience store in nearby Dunbar. She told police that a bullet went whizzing by her head and that she saw a maroon truck. Other witnesses on the scene seem to corroborate her story. And a short time later, there was a chase given by a sheriff's deputy to a dark truck. The deputy lost the truck, however. Today, investigators went back and forth over that area around the convenience store. And according to the sheriff's department, they found no relevant evidence.</s>PHIL MORRIS, KANAWHA COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT: What occurred at the Go-Mart, Dunbar is following up on. We did send our crime scene van down. We followed up on it. We could find out where nothing -- the building was hit, nor the vehicle was hit.</s>MESERVE: The mayor of Charleston, Danny Jones, said today that the sheriff and his deputy are speaking for their department and only their department. They are not talking for the task force that is investigating these crimes. It's another public indication of the growing disconnection, at least within this investigation, although no one has said to this point that this apparent discord is affecting the quality of the probe. Meanwhile, authorities are still on the lookout for that Ford F- 150 extended cab truck. Today, they distributed yet another animation showing a truck like that near one of the crime scenes, but, still, nothing has shown up -- Lou, back to you.</s>DOBBS: Jeanne, thank you -- Jeanne Meserve. Turning now to a nationwide attack of worms and viruses against computers, that virus has hit millions of computers over the past several days. The attacks have put everything from transportation systems to personal information at risk. And the newest of these viruses is spreading at a record rate. Bill Tucker reports.</s>BILL TUCKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's so big and so fast, it briefly brought freight and commuter traffic in Washington, D.C., to a halt, as CSX computer systems were affected. It forced Air Canada to cancel and delay flights. Computers at Lockheed Martin were slowed, as were the computers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Yet, you can't see it. You can only know it was there or wanted to come in. It is the virus appropriately named Sobig.</s>JOS WHITE, PRESIDENT, MESSAGELABS: This is the most severe e- mail virus that we've ever seen. And, at its peak, one in every 17 e- mails that we were processing was a copy of the Sobig virus. So, certainly, we haven't seen numbers like this before. So it is spreading at a very, very fast rate. And the volumes are very, very high.</s>TUCKER: Internet service provider AOL says it scanned 40.5 million pieces of e-mail and found the Sobig virus in 23.2. Sobig, in fact, accounted for 98 percent of all viruses found. But get this. Sobig is not alone. There is the blaster worm, AKA Lovsan, and two viruses which purport to fix the blaster, and they do, but they also clog up your computer. Then there's Sobig, now in its sixth variant form, having been around since January. And the newest is Dumaru, which appears as an e-mail from Microsoft. It's not.</s>JEFF SCHILLER, NETWORK MANAGER, MIT: I'm not exactly sure who to blame here, OK? It is certainly the case that it's gone past the prank stage. There's real harm being cost. Real dollars are being lost. Real people are losing sleep. I'm sitting here slightly bleary-eyed. I was up half the night. It's not fun anymore. The first one of these, OK, fine, that's cute. The next one, all right, sure, shame on me. But it's getting a little old.</s>TUCKER: These are costly in terms of dollars, human capital, and technology. The best advice, Lou, is the most obvious: Update your anti-virus software at least once a week, if not once a day.</s>DOBBS: OK. Bill, thanks -- Bill Tucker. Fast-moving wildfires in Oregon forced a change in the president's schedule today. The White House moved a speech on forest policy to a new location tonight, away from these fires. The president's focus is not only on forest policy in Oregon. President Bush is also trying to persuade voters there upset with the economy to vote for Republicans in the next presidential election. Oregon has an unemployment rate of 8.1 percent. That is the highest unemployment rate in the country. It also has a budget deficit of $2.5 billion. As a percentage of state spending, that deficit is the second biggest in the country. President Bush will deliver his speech on forest policy in just a few moments. We'll be going live when he takes the podium. He is also expected to talk about energy policy. We'll bring you the speech as soon as it begins. Also still ahead here: Baghdad is the center of the global war on terror, according to the commander of U.S. forces. Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr will report. Then: What cease-fire? A new wave of deadly violence leaves the Mideast road map in tatters. Michael Holmes reports from Gaza. And this country's roads and rails are in a state of disrepair. Lisa Sylvester reports. And David Gunn, the president and CEO of Amtrak, joins us. Stay with us.