Mount St. Helens Erupts; Accident At Boston Area Elementary School Injures Several Critically; Analysis of Bush, Kerry Debate - Part 2.

(From CNN News)

BUSH: Seventy-five percent of known al Qaeda leaders have been brought to justice. BLITZER: That's the CIA estimate. Among terror specialists, it has been questioned. But more significantly, they say, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has resulted in thousands of new al Qaeda recruits and sympathizers around the world. BUSH: Ten million people have registered to vote in Afghanistan in the upcoming presidential election. BLITZER: Here, too, critics suggest that number has been inflated. The group Human Rights Watch accuse Afghan authorities of allowing multiple registration of voters. And then there was this apparent appeal for votes among American Jews and other supporters of Israel. BUSH: A free Iraq will help secure Israel. BLITZER: Here, too, critics insist Palestinian opposition to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is likely to continue irrespective of what happens in Iraq. Kerry had his share of questionable assertions as well, including this on Osama bin Laden. SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Unfortunately, he escaped in the mountains of Tora Bora. We had him surrounded. But we didn't use American forces, the best trained in the world, to go kill him. The president relied on Afghan warlords that he outsourced that job to. That's wrong.

BLITZER: But retired U.S. Army General Tommy Franks, now a Bush supporter, insists it was never certain that bin Laden was in Tora Bora.

RET. GEN. TOMMY FRANKS, FORMER CENTCOM COMMANDER: The fact of the matter is, within 72 hours of the time we receiving reporting on where Osama bin Laden was in Tora Bora, I received similar reporting everyplace from Baluchistan to a lake up to the northwest of Kandahar.

BLITZER: Kerry also charges that Bush got rid of U.S. Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki because he recommended that lots more U.S. troops would be needed to secure Iraq, a position the president and his advisers supposedly didn't want to hear.

KERRY: Instead of listening to him, they retired him.

BLITZER: But, in fact, Shinseki served out his full four years as chief of staff, a point acknowledged by former NATO Commander Wesley Clark, himself a Kerry supporter. WESLEY CLARK (D), FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: But what Rumsfeld did to him was, he named his successor a full year in advance in a way that basically cut Shinseki's legs out from under him inside the very sensitive bureaucracy of the Pentagon.

BLITZER: And, finally, there was this verbal gaffe.

KERRY: And I was probably one of the first senators, along with Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire, a former…