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POINT
Will Jayson Williams' Celebrity Help or Hurt?; Could September 11 Have Been Prevented?
Aired February 25, 2002 - 20:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANNOUNCER: THE POINT with Anderson Cooper.
He was a star on the court and off. Now that he faces charges connected to a shooting death at his home, will his being a celebrity help or hurt?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The evidence clearly demonstrated that Mr. Williams is the individual who fired the shotgun.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. Williams is innocent or reckless and innocent of any criminal conduct.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: The September 11th attacks might have been prevented if the right people had paid attention to what was in his computer. "Flashpoint": missed signals.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
AIDA FARISCAL, FORMER POLICE INSPECTOR (through translator): They should have prevented it because the plan then and what was going to happen in the future is there in the discs.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: Tonight, a POINT panel weighs in, how to fight the war on terror more effectively. THE POINT, now from New York, Anderson Cooper.
ANDERSON COOPER, HOST: Good evening, welcome to THE POINT. He's used to being the center of attention, but not in this way. Today, NBC commentator and former NBA star Jayson Williams surrendered to authorities. The charge: reckless manslaughter. With the details now, CNN's Deborah Feyerick.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Surrendering to New Jersey police, basketball star Jayson Williams was arrested, forced to turn in his passport, and whatever guns he owned. Posting a quarter of a million dollars bail, paid in full, he left the police station and left the talking to his lawyer.
JOSEPH HAYDEN, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: The death of Mr. Christofi was a tragic accident, but it was an accident.
FEYERICK: Costas Christofi, a limo driver chauffeuring Williams and his friend to dinner, then to Williams 40-room estate, died in the master bedroom just before 3:00 a.m. Valentine's Day, cause of death a gunshot to the chest and abdomen fired at intermediate range.
Witnesses told investigators Williams was handling the gun in a reckless manner, and that Williams was the only one near the driver when the gun went off, prosecutors charging Williams with Second Degree Manslaughter.
STEVEN LEMBER, HUNTERDON COUNTY PROSECUTOR: At this point, I have no reason to believe that the defendant, Mr. Williams, intended to cause the death of Mr. Christofi.
FEYERICK: Williams, his brother, several players from the Harlem Globetrotters, and two children were among the 14 guests touring the mansion. Investigators still don't know if Williams and his party had been drinking, a lab processing blood alcohol tests taken that night. The gun was found next to Christofi. Witness accounts of suicide gradually changing. Prosecutors still unclear what everyone saw.
LEMBER: We'd like everybody to come forward and clear up some discrepancies in their statements..
FEYERICK: So far Williams not telling prosecutors his side of the story. Friends call the ex-New Jersey Nets rebounder and popular NBC sports commentator a fun-loving generous guy.
PAUL "DOC" NICELLI, FORMER COACH: He would see a homeless person and walk up and give him $100. You know he'd just say "hey" and the guy would look at him in shock.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
FEYERICK (on camera): The prosecutor says it still could take months before he's got all of the evidence to present to a Grand Jury. He says if Williams has any information that would clear him, he's willing to present that to the Grand Jury as well. Anderson.
COOPER: So, Deborah, 14 people were in the house when the shooting occurred, including the victim. Have all those people come forward? Are witnesses being cooperative?
FEYERICK: The witnesses have all been questioned. That's the indication we're getting from the prosecutor. The big question is, is who's telling the truth and who isn't? Initially, this was made to appear as if it was a suicide. The gun was even found right next to the victim. However, after investigators began questioning a number of the folks who were there, then all of a sudden they began putting it together, and realized that it was Jayson Williams who allegedly pulled the trigger.
COOPER: So, Second Degree Manslaughter, if convicted, what kind of time is Jayson Williams looking at?
FEYERICK: Jayson Williams is looking at five to ten years if he's convicted.
COOPER: All right, Deborah Feyerick, thanks very much for your report.
Moving on, Jayson Williams is hardly the first athlete, current or former, to get in serious with the law. But the question tonight, is his big name a big deal? Does celebrity status help or hurt one's chances in the legal system.
Our two guests tonight should know. In Atlanta, Attorney Ed Garland, he defended Baltimore Ravens Linebacker Ray Lewis in a Murder case just last year. Lewis ended up plea bargaining to a much lesser charge. And in LA, Attorney Robert Shapiro, everybody knows what happened to a former athlete named O.J. who became one of his clients.
Thanks very much for being with us both tonight. Mr. Shapiro, I want to start off with you. Money in American may not buy love, but it certainly does buy a good defense team. What about fame? Does it hurt or does it help a client?
ROBERT SHAPIRO, ATTORNEY: You know, it depends what stage of the proceedings. Right now, it certainly hurts Jayson, and the reason it hurts is because people are jumping to conclusions very early. If he was somebody who was not in the media or in the headlines, this story would not appear even in a small town newspaper.
But because he was a former NBA star and a very popular announcer, this is a headline story. If he gets charged, then things will be different. If he gets charged, then the favor switches to him, because he is a very affable, very likable person, and that will be an advantage to him.
COOPER: Ed Garland, let me bring you in at this point. How is defending a famous client different that someone without fame? What sort of a strategy do you have to keep in mind?
ED GARLAND, ATTORNEY: Well, I think you have to move very quickly to try to at least get your story out in a small form. When you're defending someone that's in the news like this, people come out of the woodwork. They are often people that want a minute of fame to be attached to the star, and getting your story clear and getting a message early is very important.
But it's both a harm and a benefit. It gives a forum for the defendant, and particularly a defendant who is articulate and who may personally state his position. That can be very effective.
COOPER: Well, Robert, how important is the media strategy in your opinion? I mean and if it is important, how do you go about using the media to your advantage?
SHAPIRO: I think it's quite important because now the only thing we have heard is really from the prosecutor. We certainly haven't heard, and I don't think we will hear from Jayson, and I think that's appropriate. But it's going to be very, very important for his team to state his position, whether or not he was involved, and whether or not this was purely an accident. They've stated that, but I think they have to come up with a few more facts to sway public opinion, which will be favorable for him.
COOPER: Well, Ed, let me ask you, Jayson Williams you know wrote an autobiography a couple years ago in which he talked about being reckless with a firearm, at least in one case drinking and getting into brawls. How will the defense team overcome what Jayson Williams has put out there about himself?
GARLAND: Well, I mean they will say you must focus on the events that occurred here. The difficulty for the defense is finding out what all these witnesses say very quickly. But I think they then have to deal with it. That's not what he's being tried for, and they will point that out. One of the other things that has to be done is the message has to be kept extremely simple and extremely focused.
COOPER: Robert, in what way does the court of public opinion seep into the court of law?
SHAPIRO: I think that if there is ever a trial that juries, even though they say they're not influenced by what they've heard or read in the media, I think subconsciously, clearly and maybe consciously they are, and therefore it's important to balance the field.
All the stories now are really coming from the prosecutor, from the police and are statements that are against Jayson, and once his story gets out, his lawyer has already said it was accidental and perhaps if there's a few more witnesses to back this up, that there was no drinking involved and that it is a tragic horrible human event.
COOPER: Robert, your final thoughts tonight, beside buying up all the copies of Jayson Williams autobiography that might still be in print, what do you recommend he do tonight?
SHAPIRO: You know, I think the best thing for him to do really is to confer with his lawyer, to be as honest as possible with his lawyer, and put faith in the legal system because I think the legal system will in the end find the right answer.
COOPER: Ed Garland, your final thoughts tonight, advice?
GARLAND: I agree with Bob. I think he needs to confer with his lawyers. He needs to refrain from making any comments, and he needs to control the people around him, the followers, the hanger-ons that often attach to a celebrity. Speak to no one. Keep good counsel with his lawyers.
COOPER: All right, I'll add in, don't write any more books. Ed Garland, Robert Shapiro, thanks very much for joining us this evening.
SHAPIRO: Thank you.
GARLAND: Thank you.
COOPER: Appreciate getting your advice. In a minute, we're going to switch topics and see what might have made September 11th just an ordinary day, if only someone had paid attention. We'll be right back.
ANNOUNCER: Next, clues that might have prevented September 11th tragedies. Flash Point: Missed Signals. THE POINT will be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COOPER: And welcome back to THE POINT. Perhaps it could have been stopped. In going after the people who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, authorities in the Philippines ran across clues to what some terrorists were planning for the future. Those concepts became a terrible reality September 11th. "Flashpoint": missed signals. Here's CNN's Maria Ressa.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MARIA RESSA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Asian intelligence sources say this man may have helped plan September 11th. He is Reiswan Isamuddin (ph), an Indonesian cleric, also known as Hambali. Authorities in Malaysia and Singapore say they suspect he is al Qaeda's main operator in the region.
In January, 2000, Hambali was videotaped meeting with two of the September 11th hijackers in Malaysia, Hadid al-Medhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, this according to intelligence sources. They say Zacarias Moussaoui, now facing terrorism related charges in the U.S. met with Hambali's aide later that year.
Philippine investigators remember Hambali as the Director of Konsojaya, a Malaysian company which funded a terrorist cell broken up here in 1995, and those investigators say if the U.S. had followed up on what was learned from a seized computer then, September 11th might have been averted.
FARISCAL (through translator): They should have prevented it because the plan then and what was going to happen in the future is there in the discs.
RESSA: The computer belonged to Ramsey Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. He wanted to bring the buildings down but failed.
According to classified documents obtained by CNN, he didn't stop trying. When he was arrested in 1995, he was working on plans to attack the Twin Towers again, along with a host of other buildings. Yousef's partner, Abdullah Hakim Morad (ph), was trained as a commercial pilot. Under interrogation, he said he was one of the first pilots recruited for what was supposed to be a suicide mission.
COL. RODOLFO MENDOZA, PHILIPPINE POLICE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) how he explained it to me, the proposal of Mr. Yousef to use or hijack commercial planes and dive it into the Langley, Virginia structure, the CIA Headquarters, and the Pentagon.
RESSA: But a fire in the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) apartment in 1995 led to the arrest of Morad and forced Yousef to flee to Pakistan where he was arrested. Evidence found here would later convict Morad and Yousef in the U.S.
ANDREA DOMINGO,IMMIGRATION COMMISSIONER: There were five cells, but the four cells have already been decimated before September 11th and there's just his one cell, which I guess is being run by this person Hambali.
RESSA: Philippine police now believe Hambali may have been behind a series of bombings in Manila and Jakarta in 2000. Philippine intelligence officials say the 1995 attack plans were clearly documented and handed over to their American counterparts. A senior U.S. officials acknowledges the U.S. did get that information, but that same official points out that the U.S. Government gets literally dozens of tips on terror plots and ideas every week.
(on camera): Filipino officials here say they believe that if all agencies were working together then as they are now, September 11th might have been prevented.
Maria Ressa, CNN, Manila.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: Well there are yet other disturbing questions about what might have been. White House officials today confirmed intensive negotiations are underway with Pakistan for the extradition of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the top suspect in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
It turns out the Bush Administration had asked Pakistan to arrest Saeed Sheikh in early January, two weeks before Pearl was kidnapped. We've assembled a POINT panel to discuss how the War on Terrorism can shift from reacting to developments to trying to stop terror before it happens.
In Boston, Harvard University's Juliette Kayyem. She is a former member of the National Commission on Terrorism; former FBI investigator Bill Daley is here in New York; and in Washington, author James Bamford. He specializes in U.S. intelligence gathering agencies. Both the "Puzzle Palace" and his latest book "Body of Secrets" are about the National Security Agency. Thank you all for being with us tonight.
We really want to try to be looking forward tonight, not -- you know, it's very easy in hindsight to say what should have been done, what might have been done differently. We're really trying to look for solutions in how to make this War on Terror more effective.
James Bamford, I want to start off with you. What is No. 1 on your list of what we need to do now?
JAMES BAMFORD, AUTHOR: Well the key thing, I think, in terms of intelligence is building up a language capability. One of the problems we've had is having a tremendous ability to intercept a lot of information, to pick it out of the air and to eavesdrop on communications and to some degree break codes. But we haven't had enough people that can understand the language.
When U.S. troops went into Haiti, for example, the National Security Agency, which has the largest collection of linguists in the United States, only had one person that spoke the local language, Creole. So and in Afghanistan, they only had one or two that spoke Pashtun and Dari, the local languages. So I think building up a language capability is one of the, very near the top of the list.
COOPER: Is that a question of recruiting more language specialists, spending more money? How do you make that happen?
BAMFORD: Well, it takes long term planning, because we have crises that break out in all parts of the world now, and you need language capabilities in a lot of areas. I mean one possibility is developing a sort of language reserve. Find people in different parts of the country that speak these languages. This country is a huge melting pot of people that speak a lot of languages and sort of train them and have them in a sort of intelligence reserve, ready to call them forward if you need them in a crisis.
COOPER: Juliette Kayyem, I want to bring you in now. Conventional wisdom says look, we need to be spending more also on human intelligence, people overseas. Do you agree?
JULIETTE KAYYEM, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Yes, absolutely. I want to put a caveat to that. No one should think that human intelligence is going to be the cure all for the problems of infiltrating terrorist groups, getting into them and finding out about them. Terrorist groups are, by definition, difficult to find out about because you don't become a terrorist unless you sort of commit to them and do awful things.
So we shouldn't focus so much on human intelligence that we swing the pendulum and we forget about signal intelligence, the sort of electronic surveillance and other things that have been so helpful in the past. But yes, I think the CIA needs to be more consistent, less risk adverse towards trying to find out more about terrorist groups. That may mean dealing with people that are not so fabulous.
And if I can pick up on the last point, interpreting the information is absolutely essential. We are very good in America with a lot of noise. We have wiretaps and surveillance everywhere. There's a lot of information coming in. What we're not so good at is analyzing the information coming in.
What lessons can be learned from September 11th and the information is how do we prioritize information coming in? What is it saying to us? What lessons can we learn? Are a bunch a guys seem to be taking, you know, flying lessons? Things like that, so we need to have a core of people, both within the FBI and CIA who will take a step back and try to find the gems from all the noise that we have coming in. COOPER: Bill Daly, it brings up an interesting point. You were with the FBI. How good is the sharing of the information between government agencies?
BILL DALEY, FORMER FBI INVESTIGATOR: Well, in fact, that would be my one point, Anderson, is that if there is something that needs to be streamlined, and I think they're moving towards it, is more sharing of information. But right now, it takes place more on a more ad hoc basis, is that we don't have systems. We don't have linked systems that are able to easily share information and cross-reference material.
For instance, in your earlier piece, which talked about information which may have been in the government's hands, to be able to sort that through and identify people who have some links together. So I think that, if anything, I would highlight, would be the key point.
COOPER: James, a lot of emphasis, as I said earlier, has been put on human intelligence but there's a lot of different kinds of human intelligence that we could be devoting resources to, to case officers, Knox (ph), foreign nationals. What sort of human intelligence do we need?
BAMFORD: Well, the problem is, I think there's been too much emphasis on case officers. These are people who sit in, CIA people who sit in embassies overseas and have a diplomatic cover. They're a cultural attache or whatever, and they go out and they try to develop local sources who will go out and find information.
There are two problems there. One of them is that these people are a lot of times very unreliable and the information you get from these local people are very unreliable. And the second point is that we should be developing a capability to actually penetrate these organizations with actual CIA officers.
And although the CIA for years has said that that's almost impossible and that they've done very little in terms of trying to do that, one perfect example is John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban from Marin County who happened to grow a long beard, study the Koran for several years, wander around the Middle East, and happen to basically walk into al Qaeda and learn bits and pieces of the plot before it took place.
COOPER: Juliette, what about the money trail? It seems like that has been a big focus of the Bush Administration in the last couple of months. How important is that and is that an aspect we should be pursuing more?
KAYYEM: I think the way we're pursuing it is probably just about right. It's sort of the untold story of this War on Terrorism. The New Patriot Act, which was passed a couple months ago, about half of it deals with money laundering. That's essential because terrorist groups need money to do their work. They don't need a lot of money, but they certainly need some money. What's more significant is it's been very helpful. What we're learning about terrorist groups is men, and it's predominantly men, join terrorist groups for a number of reasons, and one reason appears to be money.
So if we make it difficult for the leaders of terrorist organizations to keep their employees, so to speak, then we've gone a long way at insuring that there's not sort of a long line of people, you know, ready to join the cause.
The sums of money we're talking about are very difficult to trace. That's why there are so few cases out there from the law enforcement perspective. But it's certainly that, I think you know, post September 11th has been an essential focus engaging the private sector, engaging international banks to insure that we get compliance with trying to track down the money trail.
COOPER: Bill, there has been an idea that has been floated out there about reconfiguring the FBI to solely focus on terrorism. You're a former FBI man yourself. What do you think about that?
DALEY: I certainly don't think that's a great idea. I think there is some paring down of some of the cases they investigate. There's been talk about paring off bank robberies, perhaps some fraud associated with Medicare, and some other crimes, which might be given to other agencies.
But I think in the long run, we're best served by the FBI's capability to be able to support other investigations, criminal investigations here in the U.S., which will continue to be a need of ours. You know, we certainly have focused on terrorists today, but we do have other domestic issues.
So I think it can be pared down and I think it can be grown to be able to support the activities that need to be accomplished. We can see today where the FBI is taking more of an international role, where they're responding in larger groups to scenes, to crime scenes, to investigations overseas. I think that's something more of what we need to see take place. We need to be looking more towards the prevention, rather than the investigation, which traditionally has been their model.
COOPER: All right. Bill, thanks very much for your comments. Juliette Kayyem, James Bamford, Bill Daley, thanks very much for being with us tonight. It is certainly a fascinating topic in a very murky world, and we appreciate you shedding some light on it this evening. Thank you very much.
KAYYEM: Thank you.
DALEY: Thank you.
COOPER: THE POINT will return after a short break and tonight's MONEYLINE update.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK) COOPER: And welcome back. Let us know what you think about the Jayson Williams case and about the war on terrorism. Send an e-mail to thepoint@cnn.com. We do read them and I try to get back to as many as I can personally, so we appreciate your e-mails. I'm Anderson Cooper in New York.
Up next, Representative Gary Condit sits down for an exclusive interview with Larry King. I'll be back here tomorrow night. We'll see you then.
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September 11 Have Been Prevented?>
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