Israel Rocked by Terror Bombing
WOLF BLITZER, HOST: Now on WOLF BLITZER REPORTS, the nation once again at war remembers its war dead at the scene of an epic battle against tyranny, a price to defend freedom against terrorism.</s>GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This defense will require the sacrifice of our forefathers but it's a sacrifice I can promise you we will make.</s>BLITZER: Israel is once again rocked by a terror bombing. An eerie silence from al Qaeda, with the FBI wrapped in controversy, what's the next threat? A search for bodies and a search for answers after a barge knocks out a highway bridge in Oklahoma. And on this Memorial Day, I'll look back at a special conversation on the beach at Normandy. It's Monday, Memorial Day, May 27th, 2002. Hello, I'm Wolf Blitzer in Washington. We'll get to President Bush at Normandy Beach in France on this Memorial Day right after this news alert. A Palestinian group is claiming responsibility for today's suicide bombing in Israel, which killed a woman and a two-year-old girl. The attack took place at a cafe in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Israeli police say about 26 people were injured. We'll have a live report from the scene coming up. Divers working at the site of that Oklahoma bridge collapse recovered a fourth body today. As many as a dozen people were killed yesterday when a barge hit the bridge, which carries Interstate 40 over the Arkansas River. Officials say the pilot of the barge apparently passed out shortly before the accident, but preliminary tests show no evidence of alcohol or drugs. Much more later on this story in this hour. America is observing Memorial Day. Ceremonies included a gathering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial here in Washington. Former Senator Bob Dole, a World War II veteran, spoke about America's latest conflict and voiced confidence that the United States and its allies will win the war on terrorism. President Bush is now in Rome, his final stop on a European trip that took him today to hallowed ground, the D-Day battlefield in France. CNN's Senior White House Correspondent John King reports on the president's Memorial Day observance.</s>JOHN KING, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Retracing the costly steps of a battle long ago but remembering those who paid the price for freedom then and those fighting a very different war now.</s>BUSH: Our wars have won for us every hour we live in freedom. Our wars have taken from us the men and women we honor today, and every hour the lifetimes they had hoped to live.</s>KING: The American Cemetery at Normandy was the backdrop for a president overseas on the Memorial Day holiday. The graves are marked with crosses and the Star of David, 9,386 in all, each with a story and a place in history.</s>BUSH: Private Jimmy Hall was seen carrying the body of his brother Johnny saying "he can't, he can't be dead. I promised mother I'd look after him."</s>KING: As he arrived, the president looked down on the rough water and rocky cliffs, then peered from the overlook at what the D- Day battle maps call Omaha Beach. Earlier, services at the Church of San Mere Eglise, a simple memorial outside to the U.S. paratroopers who arrived June 6, 1944 to help end the Nazi siege, some old enough to remember, some far too young but told by a visiting president history is calling again today.</s>BUSH: This defense will require the sacrifice of our forefathers, but it's a sacrifice I can promise you we'll make.</s>KING: There was an unspoken message. The country that twice helped liberate Europe is counting on its allies now. The French president said not to worry.</s>JACQUES CHIRAC, FRENCH PRESIDENT (through translator): Whenever essential values are in jeopardy, you can count on us, just as we know that we can count on you.</s>KING: This memorial is to the more than 1,500 Americans listed as missing because their remains never were recovered or identified after one of history's most deadly and defining battles.</s>BUSH: Units of Army Rangers on shore in one of history's bravest displays, scaled cliffs directly into gunfire, never relenting even as comrades died all around them. When they had reached the top, the Rangers radioed back the code for success. Praise the Lord.</s>KING: John King, CNN, Paris.</s>BLITZER: Later this hour, a segment you won't want to miss. Legendary CBS News Anchor Walter Cronkite was among the first journalists to join the U.S. invasion force after the first wave at D- Day. I'll show you a special excerpt from my interview with Walter Cronkite. That was recorded at Normandy Beach on the 50th anniversary of the invasion. With the FBI under fire for its handling of pre-September 11th warnings, CNN has learned more about what happened to an agent's information on the suspected 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui. Let's go live to our Justice Correspondent Kelli Arena for more -- Kelli.</s>KELLI ARENA, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, the information about Zacarias Moussaoui was sent to the FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit. Now that terrorist unit also received information from the Phoenix agent with suspicions that Osama bin Laden may have been sending Middle Eastern men to U.S. flight schools. Now it's unclear at this time whether the same people within the unit got both pieces of information to be able to connect the dots, but as one government official says, it underscores the problem with information flow within the FBI and the intelligence community as a whole. Now the letter from the FBI Special Agent Coleen Rawley has been described as scathing. It accuses FBI headquarters of thwarting the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, who investigators now believe was supposed to be the 20th hijacker. Now specifically, Rawley complains about attempts made to obtain a FISA. In plain English, that's a special warrant to search Moussaoui's computer files, and she accuses headquarters of ignoring French intelligence on Moussaoui. Now Rawley says that an agent at FBI headquarters, "deliberately further undercut that FISA effort by not adding the further intelligence information, which he had promised to add that supported Moussaoui's foreign power connection and making several changes in the wording of the information that had been provided by the Minneapolis agent." Now a congressional investigation into what the FBI knew pre-9/11 continues, and FBI Director Robert Mueller is expected to announce more changes this week. Now those changes are aimed at turning the FBI into an intelligence gathering agency, rather than a crime fighting agency. Wolf.</s>BLITZER: Kelli Arena here in Washington, thank you very much. And there area also new reports today about what the airlines knew before September 11th. CNN's Patty Davis joins us now live from just outside Washington at Reagan National Airport. Patty.</s>PATTY DAVIS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, the airlines knew as far back as 1998 that Osama bin Laden posed a threat. In fact, the Federal Aviation Administration in that year issued three information circulars basically alert bulletins to the airlines, telling them to be on alert. They said things like, Osama bin Laden operatives had trained to hijack or bring a plane down, that unidentified individuals might be planning to hijack or bomb an airliner in the metropolitan airports in the U.S. and also urged vigilance due to statements by bin Laden about killing Americans. That was first reported in the Boston Globe and confirmed by a U.S. government source. Now this information on top of about 15 directives, 15 alerts sent to airlines in 2001, telling them that Middle Eastern men could possibly be interested in hijacking or blowing up a U.S. commercial plane. The problem is here, Wolf, that none of these circulars ever mentioned suicide hijackings, so the airlines never changed their policy of cooperating with hijackers. That's what happened on September 11th and those planes crashed. The policy has now changed. They are to bring the plane down immediately and never open the cockpit door. Wolf.</s>BLITZER: Patty Davis at Reagan National Airport, thank you very much. And al Qaeda's silence is leaving investigators uneasy as they try to guess where the terror network will strike next. What's al Qaeda up to? That's the focus of Michael Elliott's piece in the latest edition of "TIME" magazine. Michael joins us now live from New York. I want to read one excerpt, Michael, from your excellent article that you have in "TIME" this week. "There could be another al Qaeda cell out there just as good, just as quiet as the one that mounted the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon." Specifically, Michael, what are you talking about?</s>MICHAEL ELLIOTT, TIME MAGAZINE: Well, one of the extraordinary things that we've discovered, Wolf, is that in all the hundreds of interviews of al Qaeda detainees that have been done, in all the mountains of documents that we took away from Afghanistan and went through, in all the computer diskettes that were examined, we have found essentially no record of the September 11 hijackers. What that, of course, makes investigators concerned about is the possibility that there's another cell that's just as good. One of the questions that investigators have to concern themselves with is what's more frightening, noise, chatter as they call it in the intelligence field, the things that they hear, the things that they pick up in telephone intercepts, or silence. And the extraordinary fact that we can find virtually no signals or human intelligence of the September the 11th hijackers, the 19, has really got people worried that there may be others out there who are just as good.</s>BLITZER: That they might be that compartmented, they might be that efficient that nobody knows, in fact, if anything is going on right now?</s>ELLIOTT: Precisely.</s>BLITZER: You do raise some specific questions about Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber. Was he or was he not part of this loosely-based al Qaeda operation?</s>ELLIOTT: I don't have any doubt that he was part of it and I never have had any doubt of it since we starting reporting this immediately after that incident. Our sources in Europe and, you know, I've talked about this before, Wolf, a time -- you spend a lot of time talking to European sources on al Qaeda because they have tremendous experience at dealing with Islamic terrorist groups. Our European sources have never really been in any doubt that Richard Reid was an al Qaeda operation. So when people say rather kind of oddly, in my view, when is the second wave of attacks, of al Qaeda attacks on the United States, my answer is, we've already had it. The attempt to blow an American Airlines plane out of the sky just before Christmas, I'm quite sure, was an al Qaeda attack. We've also had a few other -</s>BLITZER: What about -</s>ELLIOTT: Yes, go ahead, sorry.</s>BLITZER: Yes, I was going to say what about that synagogue bombing in Tunisia, Jerba, and that attack on those French personnel in Pakistan?</s>ELLIOTT: Exactly.</s>BLITZER: You suggest those may be al Qaeda operations as well.</s>ELLIOTT: I think the one in Tunisia is pretty much plainly accepted now in Germany but no one's quite come out and said it was an al Qaeda operation. The name of the group in Whose name that atrocity was claimed was precisely the same name that was used in 1998 for the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. There are also some leads in the German investigation of the synagogue bombing that takes one back towards the Hamburg al Qaeda cell that we think originated the September 11th attacks. The attack on the French contract workers in Karachi in Pakistan, that's a bit more difficult to take a conclusive view on. What the Pakistanis say is that they have lots of militant groups there. Some of them are closely associated with al Qaeda, some aren't. Some just kind of share the same broad aims, share information, share objectives. So it's a little bit more difficult in the Karachi case to say that that's an al Qaeda operation. But, you know, one of the things that we've learned, Wolf, is that this is a very fuzzy, very loose network. Some parts of it are tightly organized and work under tight instructions. Others are just, if you like, fellow travelers and sympathizers, and it's rather difficult to kind of put your finger on any one ring and say with hand on heart Osama bin Laden ordered that.</s>BLITZER: Michael Elliott of "TIME" magazine, thanks once again for your good reporting and helping us better understand this story. Our web question of the day is this: Do you think that al Qaeda does have sleeper cells in the United States? Go to my web page cnn.com/wolf. That's where you can vote. While you're there, let me know what you're thinking. There's a "click here" icon right on the left side of the page. Send me your comments. I'll try to read some of them on the air each day at the end of this program. That's also, by the way, where you can read my daily online column, cnn.com/wolf. In Israel, the terror attacks continue without let up. A suicide bomber today killed at least two people, including a two-year-old girl, the target, a cafe in the city of Petach Tikvah near Tel Aviv. CNN's Martin Savidge is on the scene. He joins us now live. Marty.</s>MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, in the background here, you can hear the noise of the high pressure hoses that are being brought to bear. It's part of the clean-up in the aftermath of this latest suicide bombing attack in Israel in specifically Petach Tikvah. It happened at 6:45 p.m. just outside of this shopping mall here. It is a very modern shopping mall and that would have been a very popular time of day. In the background, you may see the skeletal remains of the awning. It is that exact spot where precisely the suicide bomber detonated his device. It was also an area where there were men, women, and as you already point out children. One of the victims a two-year-old child and also a 30-year-old woman, not clear if there was a relation between the two. Twenty-eight other people were injured. We can show you the aftermath immediately from that detonation and it was a chaotic scene because this is such a popular place. Now there is some speculation on the part of authorities that perhaps the suicide bomber might have intended originally to try to get inside the shopping mall. As you know, shopping malls and many other places here in Israel have their own private security to prevent just that. It's possible that security may have dissuaded the suicide bomber from going in, and instead he chose a softer target, that being an outdoor cafe under the awning and that being where women and children were. We also want to show you something else that's developed here. Shortly after the attack, volunteers showed up on scene and then there were young people that showed up to hold a quiet candlelight vigil. It is their hope, their desire, to clean up and have this ice cream shop open within 24 hours. That's important to them because to all Israelis, they do not want these terrorist attacks to dissuade what they say is their normal life, to have an impact. They want to get back to normal. It's their way of demonstrating defiance. Already one group has come forward, Wolf, to say that they are responsible and that is the Al Aqsa Brigade. It was announced on Hezbollah television. Wolf.</s>BLITZER: Martin Savidge on the scene at Petach Tikvah, just outside Tel Aviv, thanks for that report. So is there an answer to the plague of suicide bombings? Should Yasser Arafat be held accountable? Joining me now live from Little Rock, Arkansas, the retired NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark, General Clark, is it possible for Yasser Arafat to completely stop these kinds of terrorist strikes?</s>GENERAL WESLEY CLARK, CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Probably not possible to stop them all, but it's up to him to set the agenda for the Palestinian people so that they will stop the terrorist attacks. The real battle here, Wolf, is the battle for intelligence. It's intelligence that has to come to Yasser Arafat about what's being planned. It's intelligence that has to come to the Israelis to be able to stop it. We can't really see the outcome of that battle, so it's still in doubt.</s>BLITZER: Yesterday, Secretary of State Colin Powell told me he hopes by the end of this week, the CIA Director George Tenet will be back in the region working with the Palestinians to reform their security apparatus. Is that doable?</s>CLARK: I think a certain amount of the security apparatus can be restructured, but you can be sure that George Tenet is going to have a deeper agenda than that because the administration is pressing Arafat very strongly for reforms inside the Palestinian Authority to make it more accountable and more transparent and push toward democratization. And I'm sure all of these factors have to go in, along with the strengthening of the intelligence and security apparatus there.</s>BLITZER: You probably saw the piece in the New York Times on the front page yesterday, suggesting a major debate inside the Bush Administration, whether to continue counting on Yasser Arafat. Some officials apparently saying he can't get the job done, find an alternative to Yasser Arafat. Is there an alternative?</s>CLARK: I think there could be an alternative, but I think that the pragmatic way to go about this is for George Tenet to go back in to push, not only to reform the intelligence apparatus, but also for democratization and a lot of other quiet, behind the scenes efforts that George Tenet will know how to work for, and then let's see if Yasser Arafat can produce. Let's see if the leopard does change its spots.</s>BLITZER: General, before I let you go, on this Memorial Day, the first since September 11th, you're the retired Supreme Allied Commander, the NATO Commander, is this Memorial Day different than previous ones we've all observed?</s>CLARK: Oh absolutely it's different, Wolf, because we've always been cognizant of the sacrifices of those who went before, but this is a nation in conflict right now. As President Bush says, it's a war, but it's a different kind of war. Sacrifices have been made, the president saying that more will be made. The American people are ready, but we're also expectant. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know exactly how we're going to be called. It's been ten months of this and so we're anxious, and so it makes us even more cognizant of those who have gone before and given their lives for this country.</s>BLITZER: General Clark, thanks for spending at least part of your Memorial Day with us here at CNN, appreciate it very much. Danger on the water. Who's watching over the rivers? The search effort still underway in Oklahoma. The latest on the bridge collapse when we return. Plus, a tearful Memorial Day reunion, fighter pilots from the USS Stennis home at last. And a special look back, remembrances of a D-Day with the legendary anchor, Walter Cronkite. Memorial Day was originally intended to honor the fallen of which war? The Revolutionary War; the Civil War; World War I; World War II? The answer coming up.