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THE LEAD WITH JAKE TAPPER

Battling ISIS; Taking On Ebola; NFL And Women; Obama: Need "Global Response" to Ebola; Al Qaeda Branches Urge Terrorists in Syria to Unite

Aired September 16, 2014 - 16:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: It kills indiscriminately. Americans are terrified it could come here to our shores. And the president is about to announce ground troops to combat it. But, no, I'm not talking about ISIS.

I'm Jake Tapper. This is THE LEAD.

The national lead. Minutes from now, the president will speak live from the Centers for Disease Control unveiling his plan to send thousands of U.S. troops overseas to join the battle against the worst Ebola outbreak in history.

Also:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The president has ruled out sending American boots on the ground to be engaged in a combat role.

GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF CHAIRMAN: I of course would go back to the president and make a recommendation that may include the use of U.S. military ground forces.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Well, which is it? Boots on the ground, no boots on the ground? The problem of defining the mission as al Qaeda jumps back in the fray and urges warring terrorist factions in Syria to unite as a terrorist super group against the West.

And the money lead, they're coveted by advertisers and they make up an estimated 45 percent of the NFL's fan base, but have the league's abuse scandals alienated women fans?

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to THE LEAD.

We are going to begin with the national lead. President Obama set to speak in moments from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, where he will reveal U.S. steps to stop the spread of Ebola, the deadly disease that has already killed at least 2,400 people.

So how will this plan help stem the outbreak?

Joining me now, our senior medical correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen, and CNN White House correspondent, Michelle Kosinski.

Michelle, let's start with you. Break down what the president's strategy will be this afternoon,

MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: This is an unprecedented outbreak of Ebola.

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: Michelle, I have to interrupt you. I'm sorry.

But President Obama is coming out right now. And we're going to start.

(JOINED IN PROGRESS)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: -- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for welcoming me here today.

Tom and his team just gave me an update on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, our efforts to help mobilize the international community to fight it and the steps that we're taking to keep people here at home safe.

Tom and his team are doing outstanding work. Between the specialists they have on the ground in West Africa and here at headquarters, they have got hundreds of professionals who are working tirelessly on this issue. This is the largest international response in the history of the CDC.

After this, I will be meeting with some of these men and women, including some who recently returned from the front lines of the outbreak. And they represent public service at its very best. And so I just want them to know how much the American people appreciate them. Many of them are serving far away from home, away from their families.

They are doing heroic work and serving in some unbelievably challenging conditions, working through exhaustion day and night. And many have volunteered to go back. So we are very, very proud of them. Now, their work and our efforts across the government is an example of what happens when America leads in confronting some major global challenges.

Faced with this outbreak, the world is looking to us, the United States. And it's a responsibility that we embrace. We're prepared to take leadership on this to provide the kinds of capabilities that only America has and to mobilize the world in ways that only America can do. That's what we're doing as we speak.

First and foremost, I want the American people to know that our experts here at the CDC and across our government agree that the chances of an Ebola outbreak here in the United States are extremely low. We have been taking the necessary precautions, including working with countries in West Africa to increase screening at airports, so that someone with the virus doesn't get on a plane for the United States. In the unlikely event that someone with Ebola does reach our shores,

we have taken new measures so that we're prepared here at home. We're working to help flight crews identify people who are sick and more labs across our country now have the capacity to quickly test for the virus.

We're working with hospitals to make sure that they are prepared and to ensure that our doctors, our nurses and our medical staff are trained, are ready and are able to deal with a possible case safely.

And, here, I have got to commend everybody at Emory University Hospital. I just had the opportunity to meet Dr. Gartland (ph) and Ridner (ph) and members of their team here and the nurses who -- sorry, Doctors, but, having been in hospitals, I know they're the ones really doing the work.

(LAUGHTER)

OBAMA: And I had a chance to really thank them for their extraordinary efforts in helping to provide care for the first Americans who recently contracted the disease in Africa.

The first two of those patients were released last month and continue to improve. And it's a reminder for the American people that, should any cases appear in the United States, we have world-class facilities and professionals ready to respond and we have effective surveillance mechanisms in place.

I should mention, by the way, that I had a chance to see Dr. Brantly in the Oval Office this morning. And although he is still having to gain back some weight, he looks great. He looks strong. And we are incredibly grateful to him and his family for the service that he has rendered to people who are a lot less lucky than all of us.

As we all know, however, West Africa is facing a very different situation, especially in the hardest-hit countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone and in Guinea. Tom and others recently returned from the region, and the scenes that they describe are just horrific. More than 2,400 men, women and children are known to have died. And we strongly suspect that the actual death toll is higher than that.

Hospitals, clinics and the few treatment centers that do exist have been completely overwhelmed. An already very weak public health system is near collapse in these countries. Patients are being turned away, and people are literally dying in the streets.

But here's the hard truth. In West Africa, Ebola is now an epidemic of the likes that we have not seen before. It's spiraling out of control. It is getting worse. It's spreading faster and exponentially. Today, thousands of people in West Africa are infected. That number could rapidly grow to tens of thousands.

And if the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people infected, with profound political and economic and security implications for all of us. So this is an epidemic that is not just a threat to regional security; it's a potential threat to global security if these countries break down, if their economies break down, if people panic.

That has profound effects on all of us, even if we are not directly contracting the disease. And that's why, two months ago, I directed my team to make this a national security priority. We're working this across our entire government, which is why, today, I'm joined by leaders throughout my administration, including from my national security team.

And we have devoted significant resources in support of our strategy, with four goals in mind, number one, to control the outbreak, number two, to address the ripple effects of local economies and communities to prevent a truly massive humanitarian disaster, number three, to coordinate a broader global response, and, number four, to urgently build up a public health system in these countries for the future, not just in West Africa, but in countries that don't have a lot of resources generally.

Now, this is a daunting task, but here's what gives us hope. The world knows how to fight this disease. It's not a mystery. We know the science. We know how to prevent it from spreading. We know how to care for those who contract it. We know that if we take the proper steps, we can save lives.

But we have to act fast. We can't dawdle on this one. We have to move with force and make sure that we are catching this as best we can, given that it has already broken out in ways that we have not seen before. So, today, I'm announcing a major increase in our response.

At the request of the Liberian government, we're going to establish a military command center in Liberia to support civilian efforts across the region, similar to our response after the Haiti earthquake. It's going to be commanded by Major General Darryl Williams, a commander of our armed -- Army forces in Africa.

He just arrived today and is now on the ground in Liberia. And our forces are going to bring their expertise in command-and-control, in logistics, in engineering. And our Department of Defense is better at that, our armed services are better at that than any organization on earth.

We're going to create an air bridge to get health workers and medical supplies into West Africa faster. We're going to establish a staging area in Senegal to help distribute personnel and aid on the ground more quickly. We are going to create a new training site to train thousands of health workers, so they can effectively and safely care for more patients.

Personnel from the U.S. Public Health Service will deploy to the new field hospitals that we're setting up in Liberia. And USAID will join with international partners and local communities in a community care campaign to distribute supplies and information kits to hundreds of thousands of families, so they can better protect themselves.

We're also going to build additional treatment units, including new isolation spaces and more than 1,000 beds. And in all our efforts, the safety of our personnel will remain a top priority.

Meanwhile, our scientists continue their urgent research, in the hope of finding new treatments and perhaps vaccines. And, today, I'm calling on Congress to approve the funding that we have requested so that we can carry on with all these critical efforts.

Today, the United States is doing even more. But this is a global threat and it demands a truly global response. International organizations just have to move faster than they have up until this point. More nations need to contribute experienced personnel, supplies and funding that's needed. And they need to deliver on what they pledge quickly.

Charities and individual philanthropists have given generously. And they can make a big difference. And so we're not restricting these efforts to governmental organizations. We also need NGOs and private philanthropies to work with us in a coordinated fashion in order to maximize the impact of our response.

This week, the United States will chair an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council. Next week, I will join U.S. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to continue mobilizing the international community around this effort.

And then, at the White House, we're going to bring more nations together to strengthen our global health security, so that we can better prevent, detect and respond to future outbreaks before they become epidemics. This is actually something that we had announced several months ago at the G7 meeting. We determined that this has to be a top priority. This was before the Ebola outbreak.

We anticipated the fact that in many of these countries with a weak public health system, if we don't have more effective surveillance, more effective facilities on the ground, and are not helping poor countries in developing their ability to catch these things quickly, that there was at least the potential of seeing these kinds of outbreaks.

And, sadly, we now see that our predictions were correct. It gives more urgency to this effort, a global health initiative that we have been pushing internationally.

Let me just close by saying this. The scenes that we're witnessing in West Africa today are absolutely gut-wrenching. In one account over the weekend, we read about a family in Liberia. The disease had already killed the father. The mother was cradling a sick and listless 5-year-old son. Her other son, 10 years old, was dying, too. They finally reached a treatment center, but they couldn't get in.

And said a relative, "We're just sitting."

Now, these men and women and children are just sitting, waiting to die right now. And it doesn't have to be this way. The reality is that this epidemic is going to get worse before it gets better. But, right now, the world still has an opportunity to save countless lives. Right now, the world has a responsibility to act, to step up and to do more.

And the United States of America intends to do more. We are going to keep leading in this effort. We're going to do our part. And we're going to continue to make sure that the world understands the need for them to step alongside us as well, in order for us to, not just save the lives of families like the one I just discussed, but, ultimately, to make sure that this doesn't have the kinds of spillover effects that become even more difficult to control.

So, thank you very much to the entire team that's already doing this work. And please know that you have got your president and commander in chief behind you. Thank you.

TAPPER: President Obama speaking at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, talking about the Ebola crisis, trying to tell the American people that he did not think that the chances of an outbreak in the United States were strong, but that what is going on in Africa, especially Western Africa, could be dire, talking about potentially hundreds of thousands of Africans being infected.

Right now, we know 2,400 Africans have died from the disease -- saying that, if that were to happen, it could create political, economic and security implications that the United States and other Western countries will find difficult to solve.

Let's go now to senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen and CNN White House correspondent Michelle Kosinski to digest all of this.

Let me start with you, Elizabeth.

The president said the world knows how to fight this disease. Is that true?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: You know, Jake, what public health experts tell me is we knew how to fight the earlier Ebola outbreaks that were in remote and rural areas. You go in, you isolate the sick people, you find out who they had close contact with, you follow them, if they get sick, you isolate them and you do that cycle over and over again.

This is in many ways a different disease. Yes, it's the same virus. But it has gotten so out of control, there are so many people who are sick. This contact tracing process has broken down in many areas that fighting this disease is very different than the Ebola that we knew how to fight in the past.

Certainly, you know, Americans are -- as he said are up to this challenge. But it is a different disease in many ways than the ones that we've been successful against in the past.

TAPPER: All right. Michelle Kosinski at the White House, let's talk about exactly what President Obama announced he was going to be doing. First of all, there is this command center in Liberia that will be headed by the commander of CentCom, Major General Darrell Williams.

What else is the president proposing?

MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: You heard him lay it out there. I mean, there are many, many components to this new expanded plan. But to sort of put in it broad and practical strokes, let's just supply these countries with what they're severity lacking right now -- money, personnel, training and facilities. So, these 3,000 military personnel will be based in Africa and they'll coordinate not only the U.S. effort to supply those needed things but the international aid effort as well. They're going to build a hospital. They're going to be building treatment centers that will supply more than 1,000 beds which are badly needed.

Just to add to what Elizabeth was saying, I mean, we just heard a Senate subcommittee hearing on this subject. And it was fascinating. They had some updated numbers and they were talking about how U.S. officials and world health officials have been able to contain Ebola pretty well in various outbreaks over the last several decades. They were talking about in East Africa, there was one outbreak that was contained to one single person.

So, there has been success. It's just that this has been so unprecedented and so big. I mean, they were talking about the latest numbers now are just under 5,000 diagnosed cases and about half of those were just reported in the last three weeks, Jake.

TAPPER: That's stunning. Michelle Kosinski at the White House, Elizabeth Cohen at the CDC in Atlanta, thank you so much.

We want to continue with this conversation with Dr. Alexander Van Tulleken. He is a senior fellow at Fordham University's Institute for Humanitarian Affairs, formerly with Doctors of the World and the World Health Organization.

Doctor, thank you so much for joining us.

Let's talk about why this is such a problem in western Africa in particular. I heard from -- I was reading something in "Vanity Fair," an author who was talking about how the communication breakdowns in the region slowed the international response that there would all of a sudden be these health workers coming into a town and the people didn't trust them, didn't know who they were.

Do you think U.S. troops are a solution to this problem?

DR. ALEX VAN TULLEKEN, FORDHAM UNIVERSITY: I think actually the president's plan is really impressive. And I think the U.S. -- ordinarily the kind of American essentialism he laid out is difficult for other countries and other organizations to stomach. But he's right. The American military is really the only organization in the world that can deploy these resources in this speed, and the American troops is the right way of doing that.

But you're raising a really important question. This is a region ravaged by war. And people do not -- they have a very well-founded distrust of men in uniform with guns. And it's really important that this is not perceived as a security crisis in Liberia. It should be perceived as a public health crisis.

So, on the one hand, yes, the president's plan for a big logistics operation to deliver equipment and supplies is absolutely essential. But on the other hand, this is also about education and behavior change.

TAPPER: And let's talk about the behavior change. One of the things that I just became aware of that is a problem in this region is that apparently, it's not uncommon for once somebody has died, for not just an open casket funeral but for people to lay arms on this person who has died. And in that process, many individuals are thought to have contracted this disease because it can be -- it can come from bodily fluids such as sweat.

Is that one of the problems? What are some of the other behaviors that need to change?

VAN TULLEKEN: I'd say that West Africa is such a different region to almost the entire U.S. that it's hard to conceive the differences. There is really no functioning health care system that can deliver anything the care these people need.

Certainly, there are certain rituals that would expose you to bodily fluids. But probably, the main differences, things like literacy rates will just be -- in some regions will be close to zero. So, you have a population that are hard to educate about things like hand- washing, the germ theory of disease would not be widely understood in large regions of the country.

And so, this is why the president's got a very difficult job of selling Americans on the idea that on the one hand, it can't come here. And on the other hand, we should contain it there. To reassure Americans is to say how difficult the health system here is.

TAPPER: All right. Dr. Alexander Van Tulleken, thank you so much. Appreciate your time.

Coming up on THE LEAD, al Qaeda extending an olive branch to ISIS. Could the terrorist groups join forces? That's next.

Plus, a high-profile hire for the NFL as a former White House official is tapped for a leadership position within the football organization. Will she -- that's right, she -- be able to help turn things around?

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TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD.

From one horrible threat to another in the world lead, ISIS terrorists today say they've shot down a Syrian military fighter jet so you can pick your lesser evil there. ISIS madmen who kill innocents or the military who serves the Syria regime, which the U.S. came close to attacking last year, accusing it of also killing innocents with chemical weapons.

While the White House is putting together a so far hazily defined coalition of nations to help expand the fight against ISIS to Syria, U.S. military jets continue to strike ISIS targets in neighboring Iraq, one hitting southwest of Baghdad, the closest the strikes have come to the capital since they began. According to a senior military, U.S. Central Command says these are the first strikes in direct support of Iraqi forces on the ground.

ISIS, as you likely know at this point, was originally al Qaeda's branch in Iraq but main al Qaeda leadership cut ties in February after ISIS supposedly disobeyed orders. Among the groups ISIS is fighting in Syria now is an al Qaeda affiliate called the al Nusra Front. But other al Qaeda branches are calling on these two terrorist forces in Syria to take a hard look in the mirror, put aside their differences and focus on what's really important to them -- hating and killing Westerners.

Let's bring in our justice correspondent Pamela Brown on this.

Pamela, explain what is going on here. Is al Qaeda feeling irrelevant?

PAMELA BROWN, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, I think it appears if you look at this letter, Jake, that al Qaeda's trying to stay relevant and actually trying to build bridges with ISIS after cutting ties earlier this year. This joint letter from the two al Qaeda branches, AQAP and AQIM is truly unprecedented. Essentially, they're calling on ISIS and al Nusra, the al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, to kiss and make up, to bridge their differences after months of fierce infighting between those two groups.

The letter urges the two groups to come together and focus on the real enemy, America. The letter condemning the U.S. bombing campaign on ISIS, saying the U.S. is actually waging war on Muslims. And one part of the letter says, quote, "Then here is America, the head of infidelity and the symbol of aggression and tyranny. It is leading a crusader campaign to fight Islam and the Muslims under the excuse of striking the Islamic State."

And then the letter goes on to say, "Stop the infighting between you and stand as one rank against America's campaign."

So, asking them to be a united force against the U.S. -- Jake.

TAPPER: I know al Qaeda has written to other terrorist groups before when it was al Qaeda in Iraq headed by Zarqawi. They wrote to him. But how unusual is this particular move?

BROWN: I think this joint messaging strategy is unusual, a letter -- a joint letter by these two branches in particular, the one in Northern Africa, AQIM, and then, AQAP in Yemen. So, I think that that's unique because it took a certain level of coordination.

And also this is pretty, I think, important because they're extending the olive branch to is, a group that they cut ties from, as you pointed out, in early February. Now, it appears they're sort of softening their stance toward is as ISIS continues to sort of rise up the ranks in this global jihadi movement, which means they're getting more fund-raising, they're having an easier time recruiting as a direct result. So, it's really interesting to see this dynamic at play now.

TAPPER: Fascinating and terrifying both. Pamela Brown, thank you so much.

When we come back, what has the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee saying the president is, quote, "flat-out not telling the truth about part of his ISIS strategy"?

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