President Bush is in Chicago tonight
for a speech to city business leaders.
Organizers of an antiwar rally
timed to coincide with his visit
are expecting one of the biggest turnouts
since before the invasion of Iraq.
Experts put the cost of policing the President's visit
at $1.5 million.
I remember the president said something to me like,
"Here goes, Larry," and he stepped out.
There he is.
For most people,
When a plane touches down and taxis, there is a feeling of relief.
But for us in the detail, it's a time when we know we're on,
and... the tension starts to build.
A million things you have to worry about come into your head.
You get ready to do your job.
I had a team of agents that arrived there two weeks in advance,
And they'd been liaising with the Chicago Police Department.
Our intelligence had been communicating with the FBl.
We had gone over survey reports.
We all have one in our pocket. We study it constantly for each site.
We'd gone over evacuation routes,
Building security, backup, medical,
Everything at least a dozen times.
Chicago could be a tough city in terms of protests,
Just like Portland or Seattle.
I was just focused on getting him in and out as quick as we could.
We planned to get him to the Sheraton. He'd make the speech.
Then we'd leave from O'hare again at 8:40 that night.
When we arrived in Chicago,
I rode in the limo with President Bush.
We were still doing a little work, which was unusual.
He was in Chicago to talk about the economy.
I had made a pass- what I thought a final pass-
at the speech the night before.
He had reread it, and he said,
"Ellie, we need to work on this some more. "
Our economy was struggling.
Oil prices were through the roof.
We were facing a lot of opposition on all fronts
In terms of our policy in Iraq.
But, as always, he was confident
that our policies were correct.
It was just a matter of time.
Chicago hates Bush! Chicago hates Bush!
You can't keep a presidential visit
to a city the size of Chicago a secret.
These various activist groups had plenty of time to organize as well.
Shame on you!
It's their constitutional right to assemble and protest.
I mean, regardless of what I feel about it,
it's their right to do that, and I expect that to happen.
In this particular instance, what was a big concern to me
was that within the larger organizations
there were some more militant groups that were completely underground-
violent individuals that would pose a threat to security.
No more Bush! No more Bush!
I had just been rotated into the press pool.
My vehicle was, I believe,
three vehicles behind the president's limo.
And even with the White House escort, it got ugly.
Everywhere I ever went with Bush,
we would run into protesters,
but this time was different.
I mean, this time it seemed to me there was real hate.
There was a lot on the White House plate-
Iraq, Korea, Iran, plus all the domestic stuff.
It was like everybody held Bush
personably responsible for all of it.
When we turned onto La Salle,
And I saw the number of protesters and the number of cops,
I thought, "there is no way they're going to be able to keep control. "
The two operative words in the First Amendment
are to be peaceful and law-abiding.
These people broke barrier lines.
They became violent.
They put the welfare of themselves, the people around them,
and more importantly the president of the United States
in jeopardy by exhibiting this kind of behavior.
So when that happened, basically we were in a situation
where the gloves had to come off.
That's what had to happen at that point.
Get off me!
I certainly respect everyone's right to protest,
but if someone anytime gets that close to the president,
that's not a demonstration anymore, that's a threat.
When that motorcade stopped,
that was an emergency situation.
In fact, I had my agents in the backup car make their weapons ready.
I had never seen anything like that-
people actually making contact
With the presidential car.
I mean, that was a major, major security breach.
It was the angriest group of protesters
I've ever seen in my entire experience
of working with the president.
I was terrified. And I looked over,
and the president was as calm as he could be.
And he said, "you know, Ellie,
I don't mind them having their opinions.
I just wish they could demonstrate peacefully. "
We were stretched out personnel-wise
along the entire motorcade route.
And at this particular point in time we were just outmanned.
To me it's like a heart surgeon-
when a major artery is clogged,
you have to find another artery A.S.A.P.
or there's going to be some serious trouble.
And that's what we did.
We do have five alternate routes in play if need be.
We did exercise one of those routes. We contacted the motorcade.
We had to break up the protesters
and get that route going, and we did do that.
I was very relieved to get him into the hotel,
which was a secure environment compared to outside.
The building was well covered.
It did have an elevation which concerned me slightly,
but we'd, of course, secured all the buildings
in the surrounding area, the adjacent buildings.
We also had multiple I.D. checks in place
in case any protesters tried to pose
as G.O.P. volunteers or media
so they could get inside and cause a disruption.
We say stop the killing,
stop the bombing, stop the torture,
And stop bankrupting our neighborhoods and communities
to pay for a war based on lies.
All right, we want two groups
At Monroe and La Salle by 5:00 P.M.
No later, or we'll miss it.
What the fuck, man?
After what happened with the motorcade,
we sent some officers in among the protesters
to try and identify the ringleaders.
An individual was stopped in Federal Plaza.
Our undercover officers did stop him.
We detained him because he had an unusual amount of information
about the president's movement that day.
Unfortunately, we had no grounds to detain him at that point,
but we were concerned that he was one of several people
planning to breach the security cordon.
How many kids did you kill today?
Hey, Bush, what do you say?
How many kids did you kill today? Hey, Bush-
We won't take it no more.
- We want money for housing. - Not for war.
We won't take it no more. We want money for testing.
Not for war.
No blood for oil! No blood for oil!
There were four main rallying points
for demonstrators throughout the city.
My worry was that they were all now planning
to converge on the Sheraton.
We'd issued permits for the demonstrators
which would allow them to come within three blocks.
After what was going on, there was no way I was going to let that happen.
We had to get the protesters pushed back
a significantly further distance away from the Sheraton
to basically keep the president secure.
The speech was about the economy,
but, really, in the speech
was another warning to North Korea.
We'd had this wonderful glimmer of hope,
And then the Sea of Japan incident
put our relations with Kim ll-Jong back into the deep freeze.
We had intelligence at the time
that they were about 18 months
from being able to direct nuclear warheads at American Cities.
They defied the U.N.
Along with Iran.
And the president wanted to make sure
that he was not misunderstood,
that all options were on the table,
that we would use force if necessary.
And we had to somehow find
the language for that in the speech.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Welcome to this very special meeting
Of the Economic Club of Chicago.
I'd like to alert you that, because of the large number of protesters,
Chicago P.D. have forbidden anyone to be outside
In the streets around the hotel
for 20 minutes after the president leaves the room.
All cars and taxis will be prohibited
from being in the area,
and foot traffic only will be allowed.
What does a police state look like?
This is what a police state looks like!
What does a police state look like?
This is what a police state looks like!
What does a police state look like?
This is what a police state looks like!
What does a police state look like?
This is what a police state looks like!
What does a police state look like?
Film them!
We'd transitioned a lot of officers into riot gear;
that showed the protesters that we did mean business.
When that motorcade was compromised,
they were very happy with themselves.
I think it actually empowered them more,
and that made them all the more unruly.
Again, this put a lot of tension in the air.
I knew we would need to exercise a lot of restraint,
and...
we just felt that...
it was a very delicate situation.
Ladies and gentlemen,
The president of the United States.
Thank you all very much.
It's, uh...
it's a windy day out there, which is a...
good day for a windy speaker.
I- I'm honored to be your guest
here at the Economic Club of Chicago...
It was a very warm room,
and the crowd loved him.
President Bush was at his best in front of a live audience.
This is one of America's great cities.
And one of the reasons why
Is because you have a great mayor in Richard Daley.
We're from different political parties,
but we have some things in common.
We both married above ourselves.
You know, I don't think my...
best jokes made it into that speech.
Uh...
Karl Rove always said the president shouldn't appear to be too funny,
But I disagree with that.
I think that it doesn't demean
The office of the Commander In Chief
to have a good punch line now and then.
We both have famous
and influential... brothers.
Our dads spent a little time in politics.
And we love our country more than we love our political parties.
Whenever Bush would give a speech,
he would do this down-home, kind of a country-boy thing,
and he was really good at that,
which is kind of strange considering that he's the son of a president.
He knew what people thought of him on some level,
and I think he knew how to work that.
He...
he was very skilled
at using the fact that people underestimated him.
We have a responsibility
to meet great dangers to our country
wherever they gather.
One by one
we're showing these merciless killers
the meaning of justice.
Bring the war home!
- Iraq, Iraq is not alone! - Bring the war home!
Iraq, Iraq is not alone!
Bring the war home!
- Iraq, Iraq is not alone! - Bring the war home!
When the president was making his speech,
I was seriously concerned that the sheer weight and numbers of protesters
meant that we'd be looking at a siege-type situation.
We had over 12,000 people on the streets,
and a lot of them were starting to converge around the hotel.
I think there's a new breed of anarchist.
These are the people that have the mentality that anything goes.
And it's a sad fact, but the only way
to deal with this kind of individual is with brute force.
No justice, no peace.
Fuck the police.
No justice, no peace.
Fuck the police. No justice, no peace.
And we're dealing with North Korea as well.
It's a regime that has expelled international inspectors...
and is attempting to defy the world
through its nuclear weapons program.
The United States
and other nations
will confront this threat as well.
We have no aggressive intent...
no argument with the North Korean people.
We're interested in peace...
on the Korean peninsula.
As we deal with the dangers of our time,
different circumstances require different strategies.
Yet, our resolve in each case will be clear.
We will not permit any regime
to threaten the freedom and security
of the American people
or our allies and friends around the world.
When you're writing speeches for the president,
it's kind of like playing tennis
with a really gigantic racket, you know?
You have all this power in your hand.
You just have to be sure to hit the ball softly.
We're meeting the challenges to America.
We're strengthening our economy,
and we're taking the battle to our enemies.
By the courage and by the enterprise
of the American people,
this great nation will prosper.
And there's no doubt in my mind
this great nation will prevail.
May God bless you all,
And may God bless America.
Stop the war! Burn it down!
Move back from the barricade!
We're not going to move!
Move back beyond lllinois street!
You have to understand, we asked these people to move back.
They did not. Not only did they not move back,
they were spitting at our officers.
They were doing every single thing they could
to push their buttons and to incite them.
I... absolutely not.
We took the appropriate action.
On my command, push and spray!
Push and spray!
He was in a good mood. His speech went well
and he had a sort of informal meet and greet
with some of the guests that were there.
as soon as we could, we took the president
to a holding area, which is the norm.
It gives us a chance to check in
and address any last-minute security issues.
It also gives the president some time
to make any phone calls he needs to make
and check in with members of his staff.
I was very uncomfortable
with the president doing the rope line
that he was scheduled to do on the way out,
probably because of the events earlier in the day-
the motorcade being stopped.
I thought we should pass on this one
and I made my feelings known.
He told me that I was the only person around him
that ever told him no.
But...
he was determined to do it.
The speech had gone well. He was in a good mood.
He did not want to disappoint the people who had showed up to meet him.
I checked ahead with my agents on the main entrance.
Everyone there had been searched and "magged. "
They'd been through the magnetometer, which means no one had a weapon.
Everything that we, the Secret Service, could do had been done.
But sometimes you just have a feeling.
Not necessarily a...
rational feeling that you could base on anything concrete,
but I just...
had a bad feeling about that rope line.
I reiterated my concerns to him,
and he looked at me and said,
"Larry, is there a problem?"
I remember saying...
"No, sir, there's no- there's no problem. "
Good to see you.
Howdy. How are you?
Very inspiring, Mr. President.
Thanks. Nice to see ya.
- Gonna sing in a minute. - That's what I heard.
Thank you. Hey there.
Nice to see you all.
- Hey there. - God bless.
- I'm praying for you. - Thank you. Thanks.
When the president looks you in the eye and shakes your hand,
there is no one else in the world.
He devotes himself to you 100o/.
And that's where he was that night.
He was shaking hands with the people of Chicago.
Good to see you all.
Good to see you. Hi there.
What's your name? Nice to meet you.
What do you think?
I look for anything that seems out of place,
Anything that looks wrong.
Some agents look at hands.
I look at eyes,
and I look for that stare, for that look that says,
"I'm not a big fan of the president. "
- Good to see you. - Good morning.
Hey there. Thank you.
- President Bush. - Hi. Thanks for wearing that shirt.
- Good to see you, sir. - Good luck to you, sir.
Thank you. How are you all doing?
And then I saw Danny Williams.
Danny Williams was a guy who'd been following the president.
He showed up to any event that he could afford to get to.
He was one of these environmental nuts.
This guy had a screw loose.
He should never have been allowed on the rope line.
So I felt very relieved when we dealt with him
before he had a chance to make a scene.
Thank you.
Get down!
Shots fired! Shots fired!
Here he is! He's here!
Gotta get out of here. Somebody shot him.
I moved my hands along his body to see where he had been hit.
He was bleeding from his chest, and he was having trouble breathing.
So I tried keep the airway passage open,
And I was just praying that he would keep breathing
until we got to the hospital.
Stay calm. Stay calm.
This guy is 7-0! This guy is 7-0!
Stay back! Stay right here!
Nobody leave! No one leaves till I say it's clear!
Nobody move! Nobody move!
Stay back! Everybody stay back!
Hit the ground.
Nobody leave! Nobody leave!
We're just getting reports of a shooting incident
at the Chicago Sheraton
where President Bush has been speaking.
It's not clear if the president himself has been hit,
but apparently there are casualties.
The Secret Service's job is to protect the president.
The moment they fail at that, it comes to me.
My job, and the Bureau's job,
is to find the attacker and bring him to justice.
As far as I was concerned, the gunman was there somewhere.
And the odds of catching the person or persons responsible for this
were going down by the second.
The Secret Service believed initially
that the shots had been fired from within the rope line...
but all the guests had been searched.
And soon it emerged that several of the witnesses on the rope line
indicated that the shots had come
from one of the tall buildings overlooking the Sheraton.
Every available officer was out searching the area for a suspect,
but we had no idea what he or she looked like.
then, three minutes after the shooting,
officers saw an individual run
from one of the buildings overlooking the hotel
and into the building next door- 420 North Park.
The SWAT team was sent over,
and the individual was detained at gunpoint.
We'd run him out by the time they got him back
to Metropolitan Correctional Center.
He'd actually been stopped by Chicago P.D. earlier in the day.
His name was Frank Molini. He was 28,
pretty much a full-time activist.
He had been kicked out of the University of lllinois in Chicago after a year.
He was part of a group of protesters
that were subject of an NSA wiretap
back in 2004,
kids who had planned a break-in
during the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004.
He broke through the cordon into a restricted area
when the president was speaking.
Right there we had something to charge him with.
They cuff me and throw me in a van,
take me down to the detention center.
I just sat silent,
let 'em ask all the questions in the world they wanted.
I wasn't going to help 'em out.
I just didn't want to cooperate.
If you believe in the death penalty,
he was a candidate.
You know, he...
he had been responsible for over 100,000 deaths,
and if he had been... tried
in a war crimes tribunal and found guilty...
then... he would have been a candidate.
Okay, move it through here. move it through.
I didn't know if he could hear me or not,
but I tried willing him to stay alive,
to keep breathing, keep breathing until we got to the hospital.
we were there so quick that the hospital had not completely finished
clearing out an area, securing it for the president.
And we got him inside the hospital,
and... the medical staff took over.
And I just... just...
kept... saying,
"please, please... please don't let him die. "
Who's been injured?
- Can you tell us anything? - Anything you got.
Basically, we have this information:
he's been hit twice. He's being treated for his injuries.
That's literally all I can tell you about the president at this time.
- It's the president? - The president.
Did he say anything?
We was all in the emergency room,
and the Secret Service people came in and said, "get out, get out. "
And then they said, "get the hell out. "
So that's when I got up out of there.
What is the state of the president? Is he conscious?
- Is he bleeding? - They brought the president in.
That's when I seen him. He was on a stretcher
and he was unconscious. He wasn't talking a lot.
They shot Bush. They shot the president!
- They shot Bush! - Bush has been shot!
We determined that the shots were fired
from the 20th floor of 422 North Park.
Immediately, we locked that building down.
We seized the surveillance footage
from both the building and the city cameras.
We got the employee list from the building.
We wanted to know the names of everyone who worked there,
or who had been in and out of the building within the past week.
Like at any crime scene, you'll have
the local law enforcement, your first responders.
In this case, you had the Chicago field office
of the FBl on the scene immediately.
The E.R.T. from D.C.-
that's the Evidence Response Team-
they fly in.
They get there in about 90 minutes,
and they start going through the evidence.
And then they start sending stuff
to their forensic lab
at Quantico, which is where I was.
So we started getting stuff within a few hours.
They identified the room that the shooting took place in.
And so there was a lot of forensic evidence in that room.
You know, a sniper is in a hurry.
He's acting fast, and he's going to make mistakes.
And those mistakes are what you want
because those are evidence.
It was a very promising scene forensically,
because you had a lot of evidence.
You had...
hair and fiber
and... literally shell casings. You had an open window.
There were a couple hundred fingerprints from that room.
Then what you're trying to do is match that
with what they call a "person of interest. "
I was going back to my car
down on lake,
and these cops just, like, came out of nowhere,
jumped out of the car, threw me up against this gate,
you know, being all aggressive, asking me for my I.D.
I showed it to 'em, and they put me in cuffs,
threw me in the back of the car
and took me in and started asking me all these questions.
They saw I was a vet.
They assumed I was there for the protest.
I told them I wasn't.
Told them these people had a right to protest if they wanted to.
My dad did, right after David got killed.
But I just never chose to get caught up in that stuff.
It didn't make no sense to me to be out there
screaming and yelling at Bush when he wasn't going to listen no way.
The last time I saw the First Lady,
we were speaking about how eager she was
for the president to leave office very soon,
and their time together after.
When she arrived at the hospital,
she had her...
ever-present dignity,
but you could tell, of course, that she was devastated.
I was being constantly informed by the doctors.
I knew it was quite grave.
I knew that his chances were slim at that time.
We stepped into the elevator,
and I felt Mrs. Bush scanning my face
for any clue,
any sign of how things were going.
And I couldn't speak.
Okay, I have a short statement.
The president suffered two bullet wounds.
The first entered just under the right armpit.
It traversed about three inches of the chest wall,
then ricocheted off the fifth rib and exited.
The second damaged the aorta
and passed into the left lower lobe of the lung.
That bullet has now been removed.
The president is about to undergo a surgical procedure
to repair some of the inferior aorta.
Although his injuries are very serious,
Dr. Wu has said he's never seen such a strong heart
in a man of the president's age.
So the outlook is good, very good.
That's all.
The gun was found in the bottom
of a garbage chute in the building.
It was a US-made sniper rifle,
which is certainly an extremely strong piece of evidence,
although there were problems.
It's very tricky, actually,
to find fingerprints on a gun,
because a gun is very oily,
the handle of a gun is often textured,
and fingerprints just...
aren't easily found on guns,
even though you might think they are, from the movies.
The serial number of the gun had been removed.
So this suggested that this was done
by someone who was very professional.
4:00 A.M., we had about 300 people in custody.
The truth is, the sheer volume of detainees
that we had as a result of the material-witness statutes
made the task very very difficult.
You know, in a normal homicide investigation
motive is very helpful
in narrowing down a list of potential suspects.
But... in this case, two hours before the shooting,
we... saw over 10,000 protesters,
displaying what, in many cases,
was overt hatred for the president himself.
Sure, the vast majority of those were peaceful protesters
exercising their rights under the constitution,
but among them were also some much more militant individuals-
people like Frank Molini who somehow got hold of information
about the president's schedule,
which should not have been out in the public domain.
The Bush administration had tried
to trash civil liberties.
So as a protest movement, we had to get smarter.
We had to go for what we called
"intelligence-led protests. "
We had...
to get information like this,
because Bush had made it so impossible
to have a meaningful protest,
that having this information allowed us
to make ourselves seen.
I saw some Secret Service guys talking to the cops.
And then, all of a sudden,
it seems like the cordon was too close to the hotel.
This was just the pattern that always happens in Chicago.
You have a permit to protest,
and Bush just stomps all over them.
As the fight started,
I ran through the police line,
and nobody stopped me.
I was trying to get in any building opposite the Sheraton,
and I tried a few doors that were locked.
And then finally I found this revolving door
that was open, and I went in.
And the minute I got in, I just completely lost my nerve
'cause there was this guy coming at me.
So I just turned around and went right back out and ran.
I had the banner on me,
and I planned on going to a building opposite
and hanging this banner so that Bush would be forced to see
how we feel as a people.
When we realized Molini couldn't have pulled the trigger,
we turned our attention to another man
who broke through the cordon within seconds of Molini.
We'd identified the man in the white baseball cap as Samir Masri.
He was picked up at a vehicle checkpoint,
trying to leave the downtown area about an hour after the shooting.
I knew, right when they looked at my ID, they knew.
My family's from Yemen, but I'm an American citizen.
I was born in Detroit.
I'm a Lions fan.
They didn't read me my rights. They didn't offer me a lawyer.
They didn't tell me anything about why they were questioning me.
They told me that they knew my father was a terrorist as well.
He was arrested after 9/11 because, when he came here from Yemen,
it was on a tourist visa, and he decided to stay.
Millions of people overstay on their tourist visa.
Millions. I mean, that doesn't make it right,
but it also doesn't make them a terrorist.
Bush and Ashcroft deported
my mother, my father and my brother,
and that's why I was here protesting.
They said that if I didn't cooperate,
I could be declared an enemy combatant.
I could lose my rights to a civil trial.
We weren't just rounding up people.
We had probable cause every single time.
Also many of the suspects were detained
due to the description of a non-white male seen on the 20th floor
of 422 North Park earlier in the day.
We needed to establish if this was the same man
seen leaving the service area under the building
three minutes after the shooting
or the man who was seen leaving the building
as Molini tried to go in;
or if it was Casey Claybon,
seen crossing lake street a couple of minutes prior to his arrest.
That day I'd been looking for work.
I went down to the veteran one-stop center.
I was a mess.
I broke up with my wife.
Couldn't stand to be around my parents.
Caught back up using drugs again.
Biggest conversation we had when I first got to Iraq
was, "how are we going to be looked at when we get back home?"
You know, are we going to be looked at as heroes,
or these fools over there fighting for Bush?
You know, that's what was going on through my mind that day.
You know, these people are not looking at us as heroes.
We look like fools to them.
I was being informed in the course of the evening,
along with Mrs. Bush...
but I don't think I really understood
the extent of the injuries
until about 1:30 in the morning
when I called up and said, "how's my boss doing?"
And the nurse started crying, and I think that was when I knew.
I immediately went to the chapel
to talk to Mrs. Bush and to pray with her.
The country entrusts us to protect our president.
That's our job.
You don't do "a pretty good job" of protecting the president.
You either do it, or you don't.
And the Secret Service failed that day,
and I failed.
This is not official, but a source
inside the hospital has confirmed-
We are hearing from a source inside the hospital that-
The word from Northwestern Hospital...
...is that the 43rd president, George W. Bush...
- ... is dead. - ... died.
- ... died a short while ago.
He was 61.
Vice President Cheney is in a secure location.
We don't know where he is,
but will presumably take the oath of office shortly
to become the 44th president of the United States.