Today's 9/11 Commission Hearing in New York Will Focus on Emergency Management Response to Attacks on WTC; Discussing Possibility Sarin Gas May Have Been in Weapon Fired at U.S. Troops
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Searching for answers -- what happened in the hours after the 9/11 attacks? The investigating committee comes to New York City. In Iraq, the discovery of what may be sarin gas in a bombshell and the bombshell implications. And how bad will hurricane season be this year? The Weather Service makes a dire prediction. Those stories all ahead on this "American Morning."</s>ANNOUNCER: From the CNN broadcast center in New York, this is AMERICAN MORNING with Soledad O'Brien and Bill Hemmer.</s>BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to eight o'clock, everything. Welcome back to AMERICAN MORNING. The Bush and Kerry campaigns nearly bumped into each other yesterday in Kansas. Suzanne Malveaux is standing by and joins us in a moment with a look at what the candidates there were talking about. We'll get to that in a moment.</s>O'BRIEN: Also ahead this morning, low carb doesn't necessarily mean low cost. Sanjay Gupta has been adding up all those expenses that go along with diets like Atkins and South Beach and he's got some pretty surprising conclusions this morning.</s>HEMMER: All right, also, back to Jack Cafferty -- good morning.</s>JACK CAFFERTY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Notice that said chocolaty chip? It didn't say chocolate chip. So that means there's a weasel deal going on there. There's not real chocolate in there.</s>O'BRIEN: Clearly, yes.</s>HEMMER: A weasel deal. Coming up in the Cafferty File, speaking of weasel deals, we'll tell you what one in four Europeans is doing on the job, and it's not work. And how would you like to be able to go to the doctor, be treated and then send him a bill? It's happening. We'll tell you where.</s>O'BRIEN: Ooh, really?</s>CAFFERTY: Yes. How cool is that?</s>O'BRIEN: I'd like that. That would be great.</s>CAFFERTY: Thank you for setting my broken leg. You owe me $500.</s>O'BRIEN: I'd like that.</s>CAFFERTY: It's perfect.</s>O'BRIEN: Yes.</s>CAFFERTY: Yes.</s>O'BRIEN: I look forward to that. Let's get to our top stories first, though. We begin in Iraq this morning, where forces loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have engaged in more clashes with U.S. forces. American troops have reportedly killed nine militiaman during ongoing battles in Karbala. Explosions and heavy gunfire have also been heard in Najaf. There could be some tense moments this morning on Capitol Hill. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz goes before a Senate panel this morning to answer questions about the transfer of power in Iraq. Wolfowitz has taken heat from some law makers, who contend the Pentagon did not have a good plan for a post-Saddam Iraq. A mountain climber who was rescued by helicopter after being stranded on Mount Rainier has died. Peter Cooley was 39 years old. He'd been climbing with his friend Scott Richards, seen on the right there in that picture. Richards called for help after Cooley fell 30 feet down a cliff and injured his head. They'd been stranded since Saturday in deep terrain and snow. In U.S. politics, former Democratic rival Howard Dean joins John Kerry on the campaign trail in Oregon. Dean has voiced opposition to the war in Iraq. He told supporters at a rally that he is confident Senator Kerry would only send U.S. troops into battle after telling the truth to the American people. Oregon is considered a swing state in the upcoming November election. And forecasters are predicting a very busy hurricane season. Officials say a whopping 12 to 15 tropical storms could hit this year. Some of them are expected to be major, category three hurricanes. That means winds up to 130 miles an hour, which, of course, means a big old mess on the ground.</s>HEMMER: Yes, I wonder in the past how often their predictions have played out and how often they've been right. So we shall see soon enough, huh?</s>HEMMER: In about an hour, the Commission investigating the 9/11 attacks is scheduled to open two days of hearings here in New York City. Part of its mission is to take testimony about the city's emergency response that day and to pursue recommendations for improving readiness. Deborah Feyerick is in downtown Manhattan and has more now -- good morning, Deb.</s>DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Bill. Well, 25,000 people got out of the buildings that day because of the efforts of firefighters, the NYPD and Port Authority police. Still, some 3,000 people did perish. The question, was the rescue effort, while unprecedented, sufficient? There are lots of questions that will be answered.</s>DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The images remain clear. What remains unclear and what many still wonder is whether more people could have been saved if there was better communication, better coordination between police and firefighters. It's one thing the 9/11 Commission hopes to find out.</s>RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER NEW YORK CITY MAYOR: My impression was that they're going to conduct a very fact oriented and very objective study, the goal of which is to make recommendations about how things can be handled in the future.</s>FEYERICK: Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and others in charge that day will be questioned publicly under oath for the first time by an independent commission.</s>GIULIANI: Whatever the adequacies or inadequacies in New York, they're much -- the adequacies are much greater.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Watch your step!</s>FEYERICK: Since the attacks, response drills are commonplace. There's more counter-terrorism training.</s>RAY KELLY, NYPD COMMISSIONER: There is no exact blueprint to a terrorist attack, so our aim is to train for the greatest variety of circumstances possible.</s>FEYERICK: Fire Department radios, blamed for possibly failing to alert firefighters to evacuate, have been upgraded. But critics say the radios still don't work properly.</s>SALLY REGENHARD, SKYSCRAPER SAFETY CAMPAIGN: It's about time that we received the proper funding from the Department of Homeland Security that will support firefighters' radios that work not 95 percent of the time, 100 percent of the time.</s>FEYERICK: Firefighters and police remain on different frequencies. Sharing information is still a challenge. The city working to fix that.</s>STEVE KUHR, CRITERION STRATEGIES: We're talking about a system that allows all these agencies to fit into a single, comprehensive, unified organization to effectively manage the incident under a single command operation.</s>FEYERICK (on camera): The Commission hopes to provide what it calls the definitive account of 9/11 and ways to save even more lives if a terror attack should happen again. Deborah Feyerick, CNN, New York.</s>FEYERICK: A source close to the 9/11 Commission was asked by CNN whether the city and the country is ready if there is another attack. The answer, I'm relatively sure we are not -- Bill.</s>HEMMER: Deb Feyerick here in New York City -- Soledad.</s>O'BRIEN: In Iraq, U.S. officials say more tests are needed to determine if a roadside bomb contained the nerve gas sarin. The device partially exploded on Saturday as members of a U.S. convoy tried to defuse it. Initial field tests showed traces of the deadly nerve agent in an artillery shell. And joining us this morning from Washington, D.C. to talk about the potential chemical discovery and what it could mean is former U.N. weapons inspector Jonathan Tucker. Nice to see you, Mr. Tucker. As always, thanks for being with us.</s>JONATHAN TUCKER, FORMER U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: Good morning, Soledad.</s>O'BRIEN: It's been interesting to me to hear people's reaction. For example, we heard from General Kimmitt. He seemed to sort of brush off how important this find might be. Secretary Rumsfeld seemed to reiterate that more testing needed to be done outside of the field testing that's already been done. Isn't this likely, though, evidence that Saddam Hussein did not destroy his stockpiles of sarin, as he claimed?</s>TUCKER: Well, this could be a stray round that was simply mixed in with other conventional munitions. It doesn't necessarily indicate a large cache of chemical weapons, because the round itself had no distinguishing markings.</s>O'BRIEN: But isn't that sort of, to some degree, the point? With no distinguishing markings to delineate it from any other shell, couldn't that actually suggest that there could be much more that aren't labeled and so when the weapons inspectors did their searches, they didn't really see what they'd been looking for?</s>TUCKER: Yes, that's a possibility, and I'm sure the Iraq Survey Group, the intelligence group in Iraq, will examine that possibility. There are ways of determining if a shell contains a chemical agent without actually drilling into it. It's called non-destructive testing and it can be done with x-rays and other types of radiation.</s>O'BRIEN: Oh, I see. So how concerned do you think the coalition, the U.S.-led coalition, should be at this point by this discovery?</s>TUCKER: Well, I think an IED with this type of munition, a so- called binary munition in which the two components that make sarin would be mixed together, is relatively -- a relatively low threat. As we saw, this was basically a fizzle, a dud, that did not seriously injure the troops. In fact, they would have been more seriously injured had it been a conventional artillery shell. But there is, I think, a possibility that if there are enough of these shells, the insurgents could extract the two components, the two chemicals that, when mixed together, make sarin, and perhaps improvise a larger chemical weapon.</s>O'BRIEN: A while back David Kay, the weapons inspector, said that he was confident that some weapons of mass destruction sites would turn out in their searches. Now he says that this, this shell that's been found is actually a probably overlooked, part of an old relic, not part of a stockpile. So how would he know, I mean going from one level of confidence completely on the other side?</s>TUCKER: Well, these are weapons that were produced in the late 1980s, before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. If they were unitary shells, that if they contained actual sarin, it would have degraded by this time to be ineffective. These binary shells are really only effective if they're fired from a Howitzer, which would cause the two chemicals to mix. So as improvised explosive devices, they are ineffective. So the -- I think the question that remains is are these a few stray rounds or is there a cache of these munitions that is still present in Iraq? And we just don't know at this point.</s>O'BRIEN: If it is an old relic, is there any indication in your mind from this latest find that, in fact, insurgents have their hands on more than just one of these duds, but a decent amount of this stuff?</s>TUCKER: Well, according to General Kimmitt, he believes that the insurgents did not know they had a chemical munition. They thought it was a conventional artillery shell. And because the rounds are not marked, I think it would just be a matter of chance if insurgents whop raided a depot would come across this type of munition. They would not necessarily know that they had these weapons just from their appearance.</s>O'BRIEN: Jonathan Tucker is a former U.N. weapons inspectors, joining us this morning. Mr. Tucker, thanks. Appreciate it.</s>TUCKER: Thank you.</s>O'BRIEN: Bill.</s>HEMMER: Eleven minutes past the hour. The cost of gas nationally averaging more than $2 a gallon for the first time ever. Now, many Democrats, including Senator John Kerry and even some oil companies, are pressing the Bush administration to stop filling the strategic oil reserve. White House policy since 9/11 has been to fill the reserve to capacity and not to use it to effect the price of oil. A smaller group of Democrats today is set to call for the administration to sell oil from that reserve.</s>O'BRIEN: Still to come this morning, an historic anniversary puts education at center stage yesterday and both presidential candidates put their spin on it. That story is up next.</s>HEMMER: Also, the woman who survived a mountain lion attack talks about life today, after reconstructive surgery.</s>O'BRIEN: And if you are looking to buy some Martha Stewart lore, well, now you can. And guess what? It's her brother who's selling. That's ahead as AMERICAN MORNING continues right after this.