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American Morning

FEMA Failures; Minding Your Business; Cheney's Got a Gun

Aired February 14, 2006 - 07:30   ET

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

ZAIN VERJEE, CNN ANCHOR: All you need is love and a hot cup of coffee.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: What's a conversation heart? Did you see that? Eight billion? Oh, you mean those little letter -- oh, I get it. Yes. Eight -- you know the little . . .

VERJEE: Yes, yes, yes.

MILES O'BRIEN: Now I get it. Conversation hearts.

VERJEE: Not into Valentine's Day?

MILES O'BRIEN: The hopeless romantic that I am. No, I just never heard them explained that way.

VERJEE: Do you know something like 192 million Valentine's Day cards are shared and given out among people on Valentine's Day.

MILES O'BRIEN: Here's the thing. Sixty-two percent of people give them. And the 38 percent of guys who don't, they're in deep trouble. That's all I can say. I mean, who are these guys?

VERJEE: What is the backup plan?

Carol.

MILES O'BRIEN: I don't know, but they better have one.

VERJEE: Oh.

MILES O'BRIEN: Carol.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: (INAUDIBLE), I wasn't paying attention to you guys because I was busy out here.

MILES O'BRIEN: Oh, geez.

COSTELLO: Good morning, everyone.

Saddam Hussein was not in his pajamas. His half-brother was, but they did manage to squeeze in some testimony in Baghdad this morning but there won't be any more testimony until the end of this month. The announcement coming after three witnesses testified about torture under the Hussein regime back in 1982. But the real bombshell came from Hussein himself. He's apparently on a hunger strike in protest of the head judge. Saddam and his attorneys claim the judge is biased.

We are watching two major terror cases today. We just saw some cars pull up to a courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. That's where Zacharias Moussaoui is set to appear to discuss the logistics of his trial. He could be sentenced to death for terror conspiracy.

In the meantime, a Sacramento jury selection begins for a father and son accused of ties to a terror training camp in Pakistan.

Growing violence over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in the Muslim world. We just got these pictures in from Pakistan. Angry mobs targeting western businesses, places like McDonald's. At least two people have been killed.

Vice President Dick Cheney is the butt of a million jokes this morning and the focus of some serious questions. Authorities have cleared him of any wrongdoing in a hunting accident in Texas, but he did have to pay up. He was hunting without a proper stamp on his hunting license and had to send a check in for $7. This all comes after Cheney injured a fellow hunter with a spray of bird shot while hunting quail. The White House has been facing a lot of criticism for waiting to announcing the incident.

Emily Hughes was some big skates to fill. The 17-year-old was caught by cameras leaving practice into New York on Monday. She'll skate in Torino next week in place of Michelle Kwan, who pulled out because of that groin injury. If all goes as planned, Hughes will leave for Italy tomorrow or Thursday. The women's competition begins on Monday.

And late night host Conan O'Brien, who says he helped reelect the Finnish president, is expected to ask her for a job today. Inspector of saunas. That's the position he wants. Conan arrived in Helsinki Saturday. As you can see, he was welcomed by hundreds of fans. His show does airs in Finland. And he also looks like the red-haired, fair-haired Finnish president. Isn't that amazing resemblance? They're actually set to meet today. But if you ever watch his show, I mean he's got quite the stick going. It's funny.

MILES O'BRIEN: No, he's working it. There's no question. And the -- I don't know if you saw some of the campaign commercials he put together. They're pretty good.

COSTELLO: Yes, that's what I was talking about.

MILES O'BRIEN: Yes. All right. Thank you very much, Carol Costello.

Some fresh indictments for the Federal Emergency Management Agency this morning. And it's an agency that doesn't need any further indictments. Some scathing reports finding their way around Capitol Hill, talking about the failings of FEMA post-Katrina. John Copenhaver is a former regional director of FEMA. He now heads the Disaster Recovery Institute. He joins us from the CNN Center in Atlanta.

Mr. Copenhaver, good to have you with us.

JOHN COPENHAVER, FORMER FEMA REGIONAL DIRECTOR: It's good to be here, Miles.

MILES O'BRIEN: Let's talk about Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff's plan. We got a couple of his ideas. He put forth his own ideas on how to fix FEMA. Among the ideas that he was putting out there is 1,500 full-time disaster preparedness coordinators, reconnaissance teams to report on conditions, database of approved private contractors, and then satellite monitoring of supply trucks. Is this to the point -- do these measures really address what we're talking about here as far as FEMA's failings?

COPENHAVER: I think that ideas like the database of private contractors that need (ph) approved so that they can quickly bring assistance from the private sector to bear. Satellite monitoring of supply trucks, that's probably a good idea. In some ways, it probably should have been done already, but it's good to start it now.

But the problem that I see with what's being done here is that almost everything is being considered except why FEMA has not worked but used to work. At one point in time, FEMA was a successful agency. Right now it's having serious problems and yet I'm not hearing anybody talk about should it be restored to the status that it had. Should it basically be reconfigured to look like it used to look back when it worked.

MILES O'BRIEN: Well, I got to say, reading this, given all the things we've talked about with FEMA and all the issues and the trailers sitting idle at airports and the people kicked out of the hotel rooms, to say the solution is to monitor supply trucks with satellites, I think, on the face of it, is difficult for a lot of people to stomach. It seems as if the agency is not being truly honest with itself.

COPENHAVER: I agree. I think that many of the problems stemming from FEMA's placement under the Department of Homeland Security, many of the problems that FEMA has experienced are problems of both structure and leadership. It's been put in a structure where bureaucracy is slowing down the decision-making process and requiring more points of communication and coordination. That's not a good idea when you're talking about responding very quickly to a disaster.

MILES O'BRIEN: Well let me ask you this, though, Mr. Copenhaver, because it seems to me this whole notion of removing FEMA from Homeland Security comes up time and again. In other words, it's a bureaucratic issue. But isn't it really, when you look at it, isn't it a failure of leadership at every level that caused this problem? And good leaders can rise above bad bureaucracies, can't they?

COPENHAVER: It's more difficult for good leaders to rise above bad bureaucracies. If you have a bad structure and good leadership, you can get adequate results in many instances. If you have a good structure and bad leadership, you can get good results occasionally. But when you have a bad structure and faulty leadership, as we have seen here, you can't overcome it. And I think that we need to address those two kinds of problems separately, structure and leadership. Let's make the structure one that works and let's put in the kind of leadership that knows how to manage disasters.

MILES O'BRIEN: Help us understand, though, because I think it's difficult for a lot of people to fully appreciate what separating FEMA from Homeland Security would really do to improve the response.

COPENHAVER: FEMA, in the old days, back during the previous administration, was made a cabinet level agency. Meaning that the director of FEMA reported directly to the president of the United States. And so when federal resource was required in a disaster response situation, the director of FEMA had a straight line to the president. And so that which the director himself could not make happen, he could go to his boss and it happened.

So things happen more quickly. There was less of a wall of bureaucracy that had to be penetrated for things to start moving. And, now, as we saw in Katrina, the word has to go up to this level, and this level, and this level and be vetted and all kind of different people need to check the veracity of the facts and offer opinions and it's just not working very well.

MILES O'BRIEN: Let me -- final thought here. Should Secretary Chertoff go? Should he resign as a result of all this?

COPENHAVER: I would not immediately call for his resignation. But I think that we certainly need to look very closely at the role of the secretary of Homeland Security in a catastrophic disaster response. Is it something that we really need to go through the secretary of Homeland Security as an additional layer of the executive branch of government to get what we need. And, in my opinion, I think that regardless of whether Secretary Chertoff was actually slow in responding or, according to the report, did some things that should have been done much earlier, the truth of the matter is, I don't know that it's as much his fault as it is the fault of the system for having been set up the way that it is. And so that's where we need to start looking for answers.

MILES O'BRIEN: John Copenhaver, thanks for helping us explore some possible answers here. John is with Disaster Recovery Institute, that's a nonprofit, formally a senior manager with FEMA. Thanks for being with us, out of Atlanta.

COPENHAVER: Thanks, Miles.

MILES O'BRIEN: And let's go a few floors upstairs from where John is right now to Chad Myers who's looking at the forecast.

Hello, Chad.

(WEATHER REPORT)

MILES O'BRIEN: We did get an e-mail from somebody. I was complaining all day yesterday about my trip from (INAUDIBLE) five and a half hours.

ANDY SERWER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right. I remember.

MILES O'BRIEN: They said, you know, would you please just explain how long it normally takes? That's a good point. It's normally about three and a half hours. It took me five and a half.

SERWER: Right.

MILES O'BRIEN: And everybody said, so what's the big deal with that, two hours. You're right. It could have been much worse.

SERWER: But you had kids and dogs.

MILES O'BRIEN: There you have that.

SERWER: That's why.

MILES O'BRIEN: And, yes. I think anybody who's a parent understands how that goes.

SERWER: Yes.

MILES O'BRIEN: Andy Serwer is here.

SERWER: Hello, Miles. We've got some business stories coming up. Salaries for new college graduates. Do boring jobs pay the most?

Plus, great news. Tim Allen movies any time you want them. Stay tuned for that on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MILES O'BRIEN: We have a very exciting service on the web you need to know about. It's called Pipeline. Cnn.com/pipeline is the place to go. It allows you to see all kinds of things. Live feeds, packages from our reporters. It basically gives you as much control over the video content as a producer has of a program. In addition to that today, at 10:15 a.m., a big premier. We will be reading and answering your e-mails on one of the pipes there.

VERJEE: Is that you?

MILES O'BRIEN: You might call it a halfpipe.

VERJEE: That doesn't look like you.

SERWER: Yes, (INAUDIBLE).

VERJEE: Yes, is that me. No, it's my evil twin Skippy there who will be doing the e-mail thing. Yes, send the e-mail now to am@cnn.com. We're going to, you know, 15, 20 minutes. Who knows. You know the beauty of pipeline, you can just keep going on and on. Which just the thought of that makes Alex Corson (ph), who's sitting there in the control room right now, I think he just fell of his chair. Go on and on?

SERWER: Endless Miles? VERJEE: You?

MILES O'BRIEN: Did Miles say go on and on? Me?

VERJEE: You, never.

SERWER: Yes, Endless Miles. Boy, that's what we need.

VERJEE: What kind of questions do you get when you (INAUDIBLE)?

MILES O'BRIEN: Some good, some not so good.

SERWER: Miles, and Miles and Miles.

MILES O'BRIEN: But we're going to take them all. We'll take the high, hard ones, folks, so send them along at am@cnn.com.

VERJEE: Andy.

MILES O'BRIEN: Maybe I'll have Zain come in the office and take a few of them, too.

VERJEE: Yes, that would be fun.

MILES O'BRIEN: Andy you want to come in 10:15? It's going to be right in my office.

SERWER: Oh, yes. Yes, sir, sure.

VERJEE: Are you going to have hot tea with milk or sugar?

MILES O'BRIEN: For you, I will. Yes. Right.

VERJEE: OK. I'll be there.

Andy.

SERWER: Thank you.

Want to talk about college degrees and which ones pay the most. You know it goes back to that movie "The Graduate," remember, one word, plastics. Chemical engineers, getting the big bucks. There they are, up 4.2 percent. This is the class of 2006. The 4 percent is up from 2005. Pulling in about 56k. Double e's, that's what they call electrical engineers, double e's, remember that.

MILES O'BRIEN: Yes. Excellent. You're down with that stuff aren't you? Yes.

SERWER: Oh, yes. And, you know, these guys get paid a lot of money because these jobs are kind of tedious, hard, difficult. Maybe . . .

MILES O'BRIEN: Ocupotetorish (ph).

SERWER: Yes. Yes. Men and women, I should say, of course. Computer science. I don't know why you have a little slippage there. Bean counters doing well. Econ and Finance. And then we get to the last category. And you can see way down at the bottom there.

MILES O'BRIEN: There's Bodden (ph) College right there, yes.

SERWER: Ah, there's Georgetown University.

VERJEE: I'm in that bottom category.

SERWER: There you - yes, the three of us. OK.

MILES O'BRIEN: Maybe you should (INAUDIBLE) . . .

SERWER: What can do you with a liberal arts major? Well, you can be a historical reenactor, you know, like one of the those civil war people. That's good.

MILES O'BRIEN: That's a gig.

VERJEE: OK.

SERWER: A screen writer. You could do that.

VERJEE: OK.

SERWER: You could train dolphins at Seaworld. You could work at CNN. There's a lot of things you could do with that job. So, parents, don't worry about it. You know, some of these people actually turn out to be OK.

MILES O'BRIEN: You could actually -- you could end up writing headlines like this, "Wascals."

SERWER: I like that. I thought that's very, very good.

MILES O'BRIEN: That's an - I guarantee you that's a liberal arts guy. Wascals.

VERJEE: Cwittics bwast the White House.

SERWER: And I liked hearing Carol Costello read that. That was really great television.

MILES O'BRIEN: Oh, what do you know. Yes.

SERWER: I love that. It was fun.

VERJEE: Disney's going to offer movies on demand?

SERWER: Yes, they are. I think we're going to talk about that next time up, though, is that true?

VERJEE: It could well be.

SERWER: Can we talk about that next time. VERJEE: It -- next time.

MILES O'BRIEN: Well, think of you as being on-demand. We'll tell you when we're going to talk about it (ph).

SERWER: Tim Allen any time you want it.

MILES O'BRIEN: Run for the exits.

VERJEE: Which category did you fall in? What's you degree in?

SERWER: I was a bottom. I was at the bottom. Can you imagine?

VERJEE: No, I couldn't possibly imagine such a (INAUDIBLE).

SERWER: Very diplomatic of you.

MILES O'BRIEN: Onward we go.

Coming up, comedians take their best shots at Vice President Dick Cheney, so to speak. We'll take a look at all the hunting accident humor with our friend, Andy Borowitz.

SERWER: Borowitz.

MILES O'BRIEN: Yes. Yes.

And later, "New You" checkup time. The Rampollas. They were working out and eating right but did a vacation slipup ruin their hard work as the "New You" turns next on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

VERJEE: Well, the kings of late night are having a field day really with Vice President Cheney's friendly fire hunting accident. Let's take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TONIGHT SHOW WITH JAY LENO: On a quail hunting trip in Texas, Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter. A 78-year-old lawyer. And when people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity now 92 percent.

DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART: Peppered. Yes, Harry Whittington seasoned to within an inch of his eye. Peppering is what you do to a caesar salad. He shot that dude.

LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN: We can't get bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney. Number four, I thought the guy was trying to go gay cowboy on me. Number three, excuse, I hit him, didn't I? Number two, until Democrats approve Medicare reform, we have to make some tough choices for the elderly. And the number one Dick Cheney excuse, made a bet with Gretzky's wife. There you go!

(END VIDEO CLIP) MILES O'BRIEN: All right. Yes, it's such low hanging fruit. It's so easy it almost puts more pressure on a comedian, right, doesn't it? Andy Borowitz is here to talk to us. He's with the borowitzreport.com.

ANDY BOROWITZ, BOROWITZREPORT.COM: Thank you, Miles.

MILES O'BRIEN: And, Andy, when you get material like that, it's almost harder, isn't it? Because it's so funny, it's such a rich treasure trove, right?

BOROWITZ: A little bit. You know, although, with my website, I'm writing a column, a humor column every day of the week, and that's a hard thing to do.

MILES O'BRIEN: I've noticed.

BOROWITZ: Thank you. So when something like this happens, you just have to be grateful because Dick Cheney is doing all the heavy lifting here. We just have to do so little to kind of push it over the finish line.

VERJEE: What have you said in your column about what the protocol for something like this should actually be?

BOROWITZ: Well, we, you know, I've talked about it a little bit in the column. I mean actually the story we went with yesterday, sort of our breaking news, was that he shot the guy and his decision to shoot was based on faulty intelligence. I mean that was really where he was and he thought it was Zawahiri and it wound up being this Whittington guys. Today we're sort of -- I'm just sort of hammering away at this story relentlessly. I mean I think as most comedians are going to do. Today we're talking about Homeland Security has issued a Cheney alert system because he could attack at any moment. And we got the . . .

VERJEE: What color code are we on? Elevated or High?

BOROWITZ: We're at elevated because we don't, quite frankly, we don't know where Cheney is and that's the biggest problem. He's at that secure, undisclosed location and we can't find him.

MILES O'BRIEN: It's -- just the fact that you have a vice president hunting, that's just, you know, it's great risk right there. But then you have this.

BOROWITZ: It's great. You know, I was watching the McClellan thing yesterday where he just got hammered for, you know, about half an hour. And I think the mistake the White House made was they kept on trying to sort of back and fill and say, well, the most important thing was that Whittington got his medical care, so that's why we couldn't tell anybody and all that.

MILES O'BRIEN: There was nobody available to call, yes.

BOROWITZ: Yes. I just -- when they get into those spirals, it's such a mistake. I think they would have been better off if they had sort of turned this into a positive and said, look, the vice president of the United States has a gun, he is not afraid to use it, so look out president of Iran. I think if they had just said, this is it, you know. Because, you know, Dick Cheney has avoided military service for decades and the fact that he's now willing to take up arms, I think we ought to give him some credit for that. I really do.

VERJEE: Do you think that we should know the vice president's activities a little better? Sort of his day-to-day schedule? What do you think?

BOROWITZ: Well, I think now we should. I certainly want to know where he is just so I can plan my day a little bit. I think it will be a good thing.

MILES O'BRIEN: Now he, of course, turns out he didn't get his stamp, so it was illegal hunting.

BOROWITZ: Right.

MILES O'BRIEN: But, otherwise, he's going to send the check and that will be OK and then he's cleared of any wrongdoing. Where does this story go? Does it have some legs?

BOROWITZ: I think any sort of rational thinking American would agree it's the 78-year-old dude's fault. I think we all agree that that guy was just making himself a target. And I think the White House is going to have to just educate hunters a little bit better. They're talking about this new program called no quails left behind. And I think that that -- that will be really a great thing because we can't allow other 78-year-olds to put our vice president in a situation like this, I don't think.

MILES O'BRIEN: I don't think. Andy Borowitz.

VERJEE: Thank you, Andy.

BOROWITZ: Thanks for having me.

MILES O'BRIEN: The borowitzreport.com. Ask for it by name. Thank you.

In a moment, former gold medal skier Picabo Street will join us live from Torino. We'll ask her about that brutal wipe out by the U.S. medal favorite Lindsey Kildow. And see whether she's got any shot at coming back from that fall. That's nasty.

And it's week six of the "New You Resolution." The Rampollas have been working hard to get in shape but can they overcome a little vacation slip-up? We'll fill you in.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MILES O'BRIEN: Good morning. I'm Miles O'Brien.

VERJEE: And I'm Zain Verjee in for Soledad. MILES O'BRIEN: Hunting for answers at the White House. Why did it take so long to find out that the vice president had shot someone? A live report just ahead.

VERJEE: Saddam Hussein on strike. Back in court. He says he won't eat. Another chaotic day in the Iraqi courtroom. We're live in Baghdad.

The search still on for escaped al Qaeda operatives. New details now on how they got away in the first place.

MILES O'BRIEN: Stuck in the mud. Thousands of temporary homes for Katrina victims may not be going anywhere soon. We'll explain why.

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