AARON ON "AC360" (7:02pm ET) - MARCH 18, 2004
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ANDERSON COOPER 360 DEGREES
Assault on al Qaeda; Terror in Iraq; Hate Crime Whodunit?
Aired March 18, 2004 - 19:00 � ET
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ANDERSON COOPER, HOST (voice-over): Dawn in Pakistan. A high value al Qaeda target is said to be cornered. More than 200 al Qaeda fighters surrounded. Is al Qaeda's number two among them?
Pakistan promises a massive assault. We're following the action and bring you live reports.
She jumped from a plane, but her chute didn't open. One woman's remarkable story of survival against all odds.
And, have you OD'd on the Donald? He's on the tube, in books. When will somebody say, "You're fired?"
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ANNOUNCER: Live, from the CNN Broadcast Center in New York, this is ANDERSON COOPER 360.
COOPER: Welcome to 360.
We begin with an assault on al Qaeda. It is 5:00 a.m. in Pakistan right now. You are looking at a live picture of the capital, Islamabad, where the sun has not risen, where to the northwest Pakistani forces are getting ready to launch a major air assault in the mountains near the Afghan border.
That is where Pakistani sources tell CNN Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's number two man, a doctor sometimes called the brains of al Qaeda, may be cornered. With him, some 200 al Qaeda fighters who've already engaged with Pakistani forces.
We have extensive coverage ahead in this next hour. In Islamabad, CNN's Aaron Brown; at the Pentagon, CNN's Barbara Starr; and at the White House, CNN's Suzanne Malveaux.
We begin in Pakistan with Aaron Brown, who first broke this story just hours ago.
Aaron, what's the latest?
AARON BROWN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, the latest is that you'll perhaps hear the morning call to prayer soon, perhaps even as we speak now. The Pakistani army, with perhaps some assistance, will go in through the air and try to clear out these 200 fighters. And whether Zawahiri is one of them, we'll find out once they clean it up. This is a very difficult part of the country. The terrain itself is incredibly inhospitable. There are ways out.
In a perfect world -- in a perfect world -- the Pakistani forces would try and push the al Qaeda fighter who are very well-trained and very well armed, though not nearly as well armed as the Pakistanis, push them towards Afghanistan. Unless the al Qaeda fighters are pretty stupid -- and there's no reason to believe that -- they'll try to make an exit the other way, back into more hospitable regions of Pakistan.
All of that is playing out now. There are lots of questions here. We all need to be careful about conclusions we jump to.
Is al-Zawahiri there? Maybe he's there. As recently as 24 hours ago, the Pakistanis had intelligence saying he was there.
It was intelligence they gathered when they captured some al Qaeda fighters in the first days of this operation, days that didn't go particularly well for the Pakistani side. But they did take a dozen or more prisoners, and two of those interrogation -- and we can only imagine how unpleasant those must have been -- they came to believe that al-Zawahiri was there.
That was further reinforced in our conversation last night with President Musharraf, who argued that the intensity of the fighting, the degree to which the al Qaeda fighters were putting up resistance, supported the idea they were protecting a major player, and al- Zawahiri is a very major player.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PRESIDENT PERVEZ MUSHARRAF, PAKISTANI: The resistance that is being offered by the people there, we feel that there may be a high value target. I can't say who. But they are giving fierce battle at the moment. They are not coming out in spite of the fact that we've pounded them with artillery.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BROWN: That was President Musharraf, oh, I guess about 10 hours ago. We've lost a little bit of track of time.
That sentence, that part of the interview set in motion an awful lot of reporting that has gone on since. And since, we've been able to confirm through Pakistani intelligence sources and military sources that this operation is in motion, that an air assault is planned. And over the next hours or perhaps days we will find out if this is a major moment in the war on terror or just one more disappointment along the road.
COOPER: All right. Aaron Brown, thank you very much, live from Islamabad. We're going to continue to cover this throughout the hour.
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