CNN American Morning - Transcript

CNN

SHOW: AMERICAN MORNING 07:00

HEADLINE: Porter Goss Picked for CIA Director; Interview With Senator Charles Schumer; Scott Peterson

GUESTS: Charles Schumer, Eddie Bernice Johnson

BYLINE: Bill Hemmer, Heidi Collins, Jill Dougherty, Ed Henry, Carol Costello, Chad Myers, Scott Filippi, Christiane Amanpour, Sanjay Gupta, Christine Romans

HIGHLIGHT:
Porter Goss is President Bush's pick to head the CIA.; Interview with Senator Charles Schumer.; Scott Peterson's double murder trial resumes today, and the state's star witness, his former mistress, Amber Frey, expected to take the stand.; Darfur, Sudan, in crisis.; Interview with Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson.; A new study suggests that mentally demanding jobs are linked to lower risk of Alzheimer's.; 'Minding Your Business.'

BODY:
HEMMER: Heidi, as the White House trumpeted the arrest of al Qaeda suspect Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, critics complain that outing the computer engineer was a tip-off to terrorists. New York Senator Chuck Schumer wrote a letter to the White House asking who leaked Khan's name. The senator from New York my guest here in the studio on AMERICAN MORNING.

Good morning to you.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER (D), NEW YORK: Good morning.

HEMMER: Before we get to this issue and the letter you wrote to the White House, Porter Goss, reaction, CIA director is what?

SCHUMER: Well, you know, I served with him in the House. He's a fine guy. He cares about intelligence services. I like him. But I think there are going to be some real questions here.

Many of us were very troubled when the president sort of gave a lukewarm endorsement to the 9/11 Commission's recommendation that the director of national intelligence have full budgetary and hiring authority. If you don't have that, you're a toothless tiger.

Now, Goss has taken this job. Has he taken the job with the assurance that he will retain the budgetary and hiring authority, that the director of national intelligence will get it? So I think this is going to-you know, this question is not only going to involve Porter Goss himself-I don't have an objection to the fact that he's a Republican. If Democrats chose Jay Rockefeller, a man of great intelligence and integrity, we would all be for it.

But I think it comes at a time when we know our intelligence agencies have to be restructured. And the question is, is Porter Goss going to go along with that program?

HEMMER: You served with him in the House as a colleague. You supported him at the time. You had a good working relationship from my understanding, right?

SCHUMER: Yes, we did.

HEMMER: When Jay Rockefeller says what Ed Henry just reported, saying this is not a slam dunk in any way, and Rockefeller, the senator from West Virginia, will oppose his nomination, where does this leave Porter Goss early on?

SCHUMER: Well, I think it leaves him in some state of limbo. I think what Goss has to do, and more importantly the president has to do, is assure the American people that they really want to adopt the 9/11 Commission recommendations

HEMMER: But your issue is whether or not you have budget control over this new position...

SCHUMER: When the president talked earlier this-this week, or last week about it, he was not willing to say that the director would have either budgetary or hiring authority. If he has neither, it's a toothless tiger, and you may as well put the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission on this issue on the shelf.

HEMMER: Now let's talk about this letter you wrote to the White House. On our screen for the viewers, "I respectfully request an explanation of who leaked this Mr. Khan's name, for what reason it was leaked, and whether the British and Pakistani reports that this leak compromised future intelligence activity are accurate."

You wrote that letter why?

SCHUMER: Oh, I was just-when I read in the newspaper that they-the name of this fellow, I said to myself, "Isn't that a little soon?" If this man is at the center of al Qaeda's computer nexus, he knows everything. And why are we alerting people all around the world that we got him?

Then it comes out-two things come out. One, that-and this is in news reports. I don't know how accurate they are, but I think they are-that they were trying to set up a sting where he would continue to communicate with other agents, and they would find them.

And then when you read that both the Pakistani interior minister and the British home secretary were furious at this leak, you say, "What the heck is going on here?" In fact, the Pakistani interior minister said, had we kept his name quiet, maybe we would have been able to find bin Laden.

HEMMER: Condoleezza Rice addressed this over the weekend on "LATE EDITION." Here's how she talked about it on Sunday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: The problem is that when you're trying to strike a balance between giving enough information to the public so that they know that you're dealing with a specific, credible, different kind of threat than you've dealt with in the past, you're always weighing that against kind of operational considerations. We've tried to strike a balance. We think for the most part we think we've struck a balance. But it's indeed...

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HEMMER: And as we go through this whole matter, are you going to talk about Las Vegas and the mayor, and how he responded or did not respond two years ago.

SCHUMER: Right.

HEMMER: Did the White House strike the right balance?

SCHUMER: Well, you know, the bottom line is, I tend to believe in openness. That's the way our society is, and it's always better to be open. But there's one very important exception, and that is national security.

If leaking this name impaired national security, that is a very bad thing to do. Whether it was done for any purpose, to help bolster the raising of the alert orange, maybe by accident, maybe by somebody within the CIA or elsewhere who shouldn't have done it and had their own ax to grind, I don't know what the reasons were. But we ought to find out why. Because it seems, at least on the face of it-and I'm still waiting for the White House's briefing and explanation to me-but it seems that on the face of it, this was a very bad thing to do.

And you can even see Ms. Rice on Wolf Blitzer show, where I was on a few minutes after that. She seems a little bit concerned about it, reading between the lines.

HEMMER: Charles Schumer is the senator from New York. Thank you for your time.

SCHUMER: Thank you.