to an end. libyan rebels made fast and furious advances over the weekend. they claim they now control a great majority of tripoli. it could be a mortal blow to leader moammar gadhafi s 42-year rule. some of his forces are still putting up a fight. there have been reports of tank fire near gadhafi s home. there was no sign of gadhafi yet himself. the rebels are saying they ve got three of their sons and opposition leaders already are making plan to govern. [ crowd noise ] as you might expect, there are celebrations around the world. libyans living in manchester, england, took to the streets to celebrate the leader s push into tripoli. we ve been suppressed for 42 years. now we re testing the freedom, the freedom of speech, the freedom of movement, the freedom of everything that mean libyan people are free, no longer suppressed, and gadhafi, the dictator, is out, his sons are being captured, and we are we can t describe the joy we re feeling right now. [ crowd noise ] a
good morning to you. thank you for being with us. 6:00 a.m. in new york this morning. tuesday, july 19th. i was hearing that in parts of iowa the heat index felt like 130 yesterday. it s been brutal out there. even this morning on the east coast, it felt different. it felt hotter. we ll be covering that. we re watching that and millions are watching with a worldwide media empire hanging in the balance rupert murdoch is just hours away from facing his defining moment. in less than four hours, murdoch, his son and former top newspaper executive will appear before the british parliament. they will be asked what they knew about this phone hacking scandal that s growing wider by the day. it s threatening to take down news corp and perhaps murdoch himself. and the question is what they are going to be called upon to explain, what they re going to be compelled to explain and how that s different from being called before congress. who is going to be asking the questions today
squeeze until he decides it is time to go because that s the only end that will be meaningful here. senator lieberman, the president, as you note, has said he wants gadhafi to go. what about senator graham saying, look, it s just time to go, take the fight to him, go to tripoli, bomb his military installations there and go after his inner circle so that they wake up every day wondering if it s their last. he termed it cutting off the head of the snake. he says it is going to be a lot quicker than what we re doing now. what s your response there? well, my response is that the most significant thing i think lindsay said is that it is very important that gadhafi and his family and everybody else near him wakes up every day thinking it is their last. because if they think they re just going to tough it out against us becau, they re going have a stalemate. whether we directly target
that when the president turned over leadership to nato, in one sense that was exactly the right thing to do because we can t fight every good fight in the world alone. we need our allies. i appreciate that they ve come in. but we re the heart of nato and it s not exactly as if we took the ball and gave it to nato. we re still nato and i think some of our assets that we removed, including those two kinds of planes that can hit targets from lower, closer to the earth, the ac-130s and a-10s, ought to go back into the fight. i think every time we pull back it says to gadhafi that he can tough this out. and i want him to feel that we re just going to squeeze and squeeze until he decides it is time to go because that s the only end that will be meaningful here. senator lieberman, the president, as you note, has said he wants gadhafi to go. what about senator graham saying, look, it s just time to go, take the fight to him, go to
gadhafi and his family, i m talking about forces in the field. it s been a month now that they ve been out there under attack more or less from nato air power. they re still there, they re still fighting at least in a disciplined way, in materials of aborting and evading nato air power. what s motivating them? who are those guys and why are they still in? one of the things that we ve seen over the past couple days are reports that the u.s. and others are looking for some place for gadhafi to go. some place in africa. do you see signs that is this contingency planning? do they know something we don t know? frankly, candy, we were talking on this network, i pointed out that secretary clinton said gadhafi must go. i was waiting for the rest of the sentence, must go where? we had to give him an exit through which he could slither and go offscene.