Is the Hunt for Osama bin Laden Almost Over?
ANNOUNCER: THE POINT WITH GRETA VAN SUSTEREN. Target Osama bin Laden, at the center of the bullseye. But is he really cornered? Is he really bottled up?</s>GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I don't know whether we're going to get him tomorrow or a month from now or a year from now. I really don't know, but we're going to get him.</s>ANNOUNCER: "Flashpoint": Is the hunt nearly over?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We don't know what we don't know.</s>ANNOUNCER: What the special forces on the ground need to do. Jerry Falwell did it. So did Bill Maher. And so did he.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Anybody who blows up the Pentagon gets my vote, a pathetic attempt at a joke. Clearly, a sarcastic remark.</s>ANNOUNCER: Tonight, the backlash against bad taste, bad timing and bad judgment. Just who is going too far? "Flashpoint": politically unpatriotic? THE POINT, now from Washington, Greta Van Susteren.</s>GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, HOST: Take a look around. You see flags in front yards and on cars, signs proclaim the country stands united. There is no doubt it, patriotism is in. But is tolerance in as well? "Flashpoint": politically unpatriotic? THE POINT'S David Mattingly explains what I mean.</s>DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): On September 11, shortly after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, history professor Richard Berthold said something he continues to regret.</s>RICHARD BERTHOLD, PROFESSOR: Anybody who blows up the Pentagon gets my vote, a pathetic attempt at a joke. Clearly, a sarcastic remark.</s>MATTINGLY: It was a remark he uttered in front of not one, but two freshmen lecture classes at the University of New Mexico. A double case of what he admits was bad taste, bad timing, and bad judgment.</s>BERTHOLD: I just said something that was incredibly callous. And people have this anger, you know, what can I do with this anger? Well, that little son of a bitch. And bingo, you focus it on me.</s>MATTINGLY: What followed was a furious backlash of national criticism, more than 1,000 hate e-mails, letters demanding his firing, death threats.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This right here?</s>MATTINGLY: And the threat of violence from a biker in his own driveway.</s>BERTHOLD: He came charging at me screaming obscenities. And I ran into the house, which seemed like the sensible thing to do at the time and never heard from him again. But it was kind of a wake-up call.</s>MATTINGLY: A wakeup call, a reality check, a harsh demonstration of the limits of free speech in a time of war.</s>GREGG EASTERBROOK, SENIOR EDITOR, "NEW REPUBLIC": The whole point is that free speech must be free, but it cannot be without cost. You can say what you want and then you accept the consequences.</s>MATTINGLY: Among those paying a price, ABC's Bill Maher.</s>BILL MAHER, COMEDIAN: We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly.</s>MATTINGLY: Maher apologized, but may not be back next season. The comment infuriated advertisers and local affiliates. Louisiana Congressman Republican John Cooksey also had to apologize for his remarks in a radio interview. He said "if he's got a diaper on his head and a fan belt around that diaper on his head, that guys needs to be pulled over and checked." Both comments were brought to the attention of the White House.</s>ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN: It's a terrible thing to say. And it's unfortunate. And that's why there was a earlier question about has the President said anything to people in his own party. There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. And this is not a time for remarks like that. It never is.</s>MATTINGLY: Untimely remarks also from Jerry Falwell, who blames secular activities of "pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, gays and lesbians" for making America a target.</s>JERRY FALWELL, CHANCELLOR, LIBERTY UNIV.: Right living promotes a nation to greatness. Violating God's principles brings a nation to shame. I didn't say like I should. That's why I apologized.</s>MATTINGLY: And the list goes on. Cartoonist Aaron McGruder, his comic strip "Boondocks" dropped by two New York newspapers after satirizing the U.S. government. Columnist Dan Guthrie of the Grants Pass Oregon "Daily Courier" fired, after accusing President Bush of hiding in a Nebraska hole during the attacks.</s>CLARENCE PAGE, "CHICAGO TRIBUNE" COLUMNIST: When terror does it work, it inspires many people to overreact in all kinds of ways. And that includes overreaction to statements that they don't agree with.</s>MATTINGLY: And objectionable statements abound. ACTA, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni published a list of 115 comments it considers unpatriotic made on 30 college campuses in 17 different states. Near the top of the list, the comment from Richard Berthold.</s>BERTHOLD: It shows how this has gotten out of hand. I mean, that remark has no importance whatsoever. It's only important to demonstrate that there's a university professor in New Mexico, who at least for a day, was a jackass.</s>MATTINGLY: Berthold has sent -- apologized for his remarks. He's agreed to no longer teach freshman level classes. And he's accepted a reprimand from the university, but it's still not nearly enough to satisfy some of his critics.</s>BILL FULLER, NEW MEXICO STATE HOUSE: I want him to be either I want him to retire, or I want the university to fire him. One or the other.</s>MATTINGLY: Representative Bill Fuller of the New Mexico State Legislature leads the push to kick Berthold off the state payroll. Fuller, a retired army colonel, has two sons in the Army. The oldest works at the Pentagon.</s>FULLER: If you read the Constitution, you'll see that the freedom of speech, what it says is that you cannot be imprisoned for what you say. And it doesn't say a thing about you can't be fired. We encourage you continue to fight for this professor's termination.</s>MATTINGLY: Three months after September 11, Fuller still gets anti-Berthold letters and phone calls.</s>FULLER: These are the positive letters.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.</s>MATTINGLY: Berthold himself continues to get calls and letters. Thought most now, he says, are of a more supportive tone like this one. "Bad taste and being a jerk are rights we must protect."</s>BERTHOLD: Yes, well you know, that's essentially the message I was trying to put out. And bad taste, I don't know about being a jerk, but bad taste is certainly an American value.</s>EASTERBROOK: The nature of free speech, the whole reason we have it, is that there isn't a right or wrong, but there is a free debate about what ought to be right or wrong.</s>MATTINGLY: And since September 11, it seems no one is exempt from criticism anywhere on the patriotic spectrum. Young Aaron Pettit was suspended from his Cleveland high school for posting pro-war material on his locker. He had go to court before he could go back to class. The president of Harvard University was also criticized when he called on academia to support military service.</s>LAWRENCE SUMMERS, HARVARD UNIV. PRESIDENT: When we honor public service, it's particularly important to honor all forms public service, including the service of those who wear uniforms.</s>MATTINGLY: And remember, the ACTA list of unpatriotic statements? That too has been soundly criticized and labeled a black list.</s>PAGE: We Americans, like anybody else, will turn our anger on each other. So, you know, anybody who disagrees very sharply or offers contrasting view may find themselves chilled.</s>MATTINGLY: As for Richard Berthold, the backlash has chilled his lectures, as he is careful now to avoid making more provocative statements.</s>BERTHOLD: I can't eat much more crow on this one than I already have. I admit over and over, these were the words of a unthinking jerk.</s>MATTINGLY: Yet after 29 years of teaching, he's thinking about retirement. The career he loves put in jeopardy by an act of ill- timed and inappropriate sarcasm. David Mattingly, CNN.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: Remember freedom of speech. My guests have gotten some rude reminders about how valuable that particular right can be. And they will join me in a minute.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: It's one thing to have your foot in your mouth all the way up to your kneecap, but it's another for someone to demand you be fired because they are offended by your comments. We met Dan Guthrie in David Mattingly's piece. He used to be a columnist for "The Daily Courier" newspaper of Grants Pass, Oregon, until he wrote a certain column. And Ken Hearlson is a political science professor at California's Orange Coast College. His suspension for controversial statements will be over in January. They join us now. Welcome, gentlemen. And let me go first to you, Ken. Ken, what happened to you?</s>KEN HEARLSON, POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR: Well, what happened basically was in the classroom on September the 18th. I was making comments about terrorism against America, terrorism against the Israelis and the Jewish people, and citing instances from the Holocaust and what the Nazis did to the Jews, and instances what's happening in Sudan again where the Christian Dink (ph) and Nubian tribes are being wiped off the face of the earth by the Islamic Republic of Sudan. And Muslim students took offense to that. We've had some heated debate, but I've heated debate in my classroom before. Matter of fact, many, many times on controversial issues. I'm considered controversial on campus because I'm a born-again Christian conservative, but I believe in the First Amendment that everybody has the right to speak in the marketplace of ideas, especially in a classroom.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: You know what's interesting, Ken, is that one of the things that I heard that you were accused of, is of blaming the Muslim students personally for the hijackings. But then I read on doing more research, that there was a recording of your class. What was -- what did recording reveal?</s>HEARLSON: Well, recording was done by actually an international student, who didn't quite understand the class and myself and the speech. So I allowed her to tape it. She gave it to me. I gave it to my attorney and the investigating attorney for the Coast Community College district. And basically, the tape and the transcripts, if you've looked at them, all the allegations that I called the Muslim students terrorists, Nazis, rapists, oh you name it there was everything but the kitchen sink, were all falsified. There was no statements made.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: And that's what I've read. So I don't quite get why the university suspended you, if what I have read is that a tape recording said that the accusations made against you were false and an exaggeration?</s>HEARLSON: Well, I believe that, my own personal belief and my belief in my wife and my attorney is that -- and the belief of Thor Halbertson and Fire, who's really representing me as well, as a great organization is, they wanted to take away my First Amendment speech rights. And...</s>VAN SUSTEREN: All right, go ahead.</s>HEARLSON: And that by trying to use this as a means to fire me, they could eliminate me as a controversial conservative from this secular taxpayer-paid school.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: All right, let me go to Dan now. Dan, you wrote a column in which you accused essentially President Bush of hiding in a Nebraska hole on the day of September 11. Is that essentially what you wrote? Why did you write it, if so? And what happened?</s>DAN GUTHRIE, NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST: It wasn't only Bush that I was talking about. It was Bush and our congressional leaders all took a powder on 9/11. His was especially embarrassing. You could see photos of him TV footage, first fleeing to Louisiana and then to Nebraska. I waited for Wally Ivans and some other columnists with guts to comment on what he'd done. And nobody did. So I stepped forth and wrote a piece headlined, "When the Going Gets Tough, the Tender Turn Tail," in which I said he skadaddled. Skadaddled is an old Civil War term describing those who turn tail under pressure. That's what he did. I won't apologize for that.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: You will not apologize?</s>GUTHRIE: No.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: OK, I'm not asking you to apologize. I mean, that's not what the discussion is about. But Dan, here's what I don't understand, is that when you submitted your column, I assumed that there's an editorial staff that goes over them before it actually makes the paper, right?</s>GUTHRIE: Yes, I didn't sneak this in at the last moment. It went to our city editor and our editor and was approved without change.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: OK, good. Is your city editor and your editor, were they bumped from the newspaper like you were?</s>GUTHRIE: No. The editor wrote quite a fine editorial apology in which he said it was not appropriate for someone to write such irresponsible criticism of our President.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: But after letting it hit the newspaper, right? After letting, I mean...</s>GUTHRIE: Oh, yeah.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: ...I don't know whether anyone thinks it should be in or shouldn't be in. Your editor didn't get bumped like you did, but essentially OK'd to it go in the first place?</s>GUTHRIE: No, he did OK it there were hundreds -- I don't know how many people, objecting to the column in e-mails and walking in the door, and canceling subscriptions. That's the usual recourse of certain folks. And the publisher was the one really affected by this. So he put heavy pressure on the editor, who wrote an editorial, and said this was not appropriate criticism. You know, the funny thing is if it had been Clinton, and I had called him, after his escapades, a fat pervert, that would have been entirely appropriate and responsible criticism.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: Dan...</s>GUTHRIE: But, this was a different person.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: What are you doing for...</s>GUTHRIE: We're in a conservative area.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: Dan, what are you doing for a living now? I mean, have you been blackballed from the business?</s>GUTHRIE: I've am living on unemployment and thinking and reevaluating life myself, my position in it.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: One last...</s>VAN SUSTEREN: One last question, Dan...</s>HEARLSON: Greta?</s>VAN SUSTEREN: Go ahead, Ken.</s>HEARLSON: Greta, I just want to tell you, I support this man. I love President Bush. I voted for him. I support him. I think he's a great president, but I believe with all my heart he has the right to do this. This is his opinion. And we all have right opinions. We do not have to agree with each other. And to fire him and get rid of him was an injustice to the Constitution, an injustice to Dan.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: Gentlemen, thank you both for...</s>GUTHRIE: I appreciate that.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: Right, well, you got some help there, Dan. You got Ken supporting you and you probably also got the First Amendment right there with you. My thanks tonight to Dan Guthrie and Ken Hearlson.</s>GUTHRIE: Thank you, Greta.</s>HEARLSON: Thank you.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: There's no question about Harvard University president Lawrence Summers patriotism or commitment to public service. He used to be the U.S. Treasury secretary. But as David Mattingly reported, when Summers paid tribute to those in the military who "risked their lives in support of our values," he caught some flack from students. Two of them join me. Yi-ping Ong is a graduate student in philosophy. And Eric Beach is a senior with a concentration in social studies. Yi-ping, first to you. Why can't the president of Harvard University give his opinion that we should support our soldiers and sailors?</s>YI-PING ONG, HARVARD STUDENT: I absolutely agree with him that we should support everyone of our servicemen and women. They're very valuable to us and we honor them for the job that they're doing. I do think, though, that right now, we're requiring them to carry out a bombing campaign that has killed, in the latest estimates, up to 3,700 Afghani civilians. And there are questions about this. And there are inquiries to be made. And he has no right to...</s>VAN SUSTEREN: But Yi-ping, it's the question, not whether you agree with him, just with Dan and Ken just before you, but the question is why can't the president of Harvard make this statement that he supports it? Why don't you let him make that? What's your objection?</s>ONG: Well, I think the main point is that as the university president, he has the role of leading a community whose commitment is to the truth, not to any particular political agenda. And he needs to be fostering a dialogue and a critical inquiry into matters of the truth, and not into any single act of the government.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: But that is his opinion, And he does have a First Amendment right, You don't challenge either one of those, do you?</s>ONG: It's not about the right, Greta. It's about the fact that he's the president, representing a community of international students, many of whom do not or may not take an American view on this. And he doesn't represent the diversity of views at our institution, nor the commitment that we have to truth, whether or not it happens to support a government policy.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: Eric, your reaction to President Summers?</s>ERIC BEACH, HARVARD STUDENT: Well, Greta, I'm surprised that President Summers has taken this approach also. It's something I'd expect to hear from a politician, not from a university president. I think it's similar in its effect to the types of responses we've been hearing from the U.S. government, from people like Attorney General John Ashcroft, who have been saying that if you're not completely 100 percent for us, then you're against us, which to me is a ridiculous attitude, that there needs to be room on both sides here for an understanding and a different view. I think that Larry Summers promoting this view, as a majority view, is just not the place of a university president to be doing that.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: You know, Eric, I'd be highly critical of President Summers if he were clamping down on your right and your fellow student's rights to have your views. And what I'm having a little bit of trouble -- let me ask you, has President Summers said in any way or intimated in any way that you students don't have a right to your opinion on this?</s>BEACH: He hasn't -- it's not a question of whether he's censored us to say, per se, which he hasn't. What he has done is said this is the role which Harvard University should be taking. He said Harvard University should be supporting the troops. Harvard University should be supporting this conflict, which he said has no moral ambiguity, which I think that's completely false. Any type of a conflict where you have 3,700 civilians that have been killed. Mind you, these are civilians. They're not troops. They're not people that were in combat. They're innocent civilians in Afghanistan. It's also a conflict, excuse me just -- one more thing, it's also a conflict which the U.S. is facing possible war crime charges, for the prison -- so-called prison revolt, which they bombed. And with those sorts of things happening, it's just not true to that say that this conflict has no moral ambiguities.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: Yi-ping, one last question to you. When President Summers speaks, is he saying that this is his opinion or is he saying this should be your opinion?</s>ONG: Well, absolutely it's a very good question, Greta, because he represents the university to the public. And when he says that Harvard University has the obligation to get behind a certain political agenda, he is representing me. And I think he's representing me unfairly.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: All right, my thanks to both of you, Yi-ping Ong and Eric Beach, both Harvard students, for joining me this evening.</s>ONG: Thank you.</s>BEACH: Thank you, Greta.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: THE POINT will be right back. Don't go away.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: General David Grange joins us from Madison, Wisconsin. Of course, the general is a former ranger and as well as a Green Beret. General, thank you very much for joining us this evening. And I've got to ask the first question, with regards to going after Osama bin Laden, snatch and grab, what is that?</s>RETIRED GENERAL DAVID GRANGE, CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Snatching a person is going in after a prisoner, going in after a specific person that you want very badly. An example would be Noriega, an example would be Carlos, the old terrorist from the '70s. It may be someone like Escobar down in Colombia. That is where you go in and do a lot of planning to go in and snatch an individual, hopefully alive. You kill usually everybody around him. If you wound that particular person, you wound him, to bring him out. Many times they die.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: And I assume that these are special teams that actually make up these sort of snatch and grab teams. What do you look for when you're trying to find someone to be part of one of these groups?</s>GRANGE: Well, first of all, the people that are trained to do this, it sounds snatch and grab almost like a quick stop, but it's nothing like that. It takes intensive planning. The people that do these operations are trained very well in the special operations community. Very dedicated to this type of a mission. They're deadly with their weapons.</s>VAN SUSTEREN: And you know what? I'm sorry, I got to cut you off. We've got to go because Larry King is up next, general. Short show tonight. Good night. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com