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American Morning

Dick Cheney Breaks Silence on Hunting Accident

Aired February 16, 2006 - 09:00   ET

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

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. I'm Miles O'Brien.
ZAIN VERJEE, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Zain Verjee in for Soledad.

O'BRIEN: A bad day at the ranch. He says it's the worst day of his life. Vice President Dick Cheney finally has something to say about his hunting accident. We're live at the White House.

VERJEE: Disturbing new pictures of prisoner abuse in Iraq. So, will there be repercussions? We're going to take you live to Baghdad for the latest.

O'BRIEN: New developments in the Chicago area jailbreak. Now an admitted conspirator is changing his story. An update is ahead.

VERJEE: New medical technology is giving many people a look into the future. But is it good for everyone?

O'BRIEN: And buddy, want to get away with whippet's? The search is on for Vivi. Just where is she headed after a rather disappointing dog show, we might add. That's ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

Vice President Dick Cheney has finally weighed in, but will his post-shooting comments carry enough weight to stop the criticism? He said, among other things, "I am the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And you can say that is a day I will never forget."

Suzanne Malveaux live at the White House. Suzanne, White House hoping to put this one behind it. Are they doing it?

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, they're certainly hoping. And I guess it depends on Harry Whittington's condition. But so far, so good. We'll see how those briefings go today. But it took the vice president some 22 hours before that shooting, the hunting accident, became public. And four days before he came out to talk about it.

But he's unapologetic about how the news came out, yesterday explaining that Katharine Armstrong, the ranch owner who was also an eyewitness to the accident, was the appropriate person to go before the public and simply explain this the day after. He said, "I wanted to make sure we got it as accurate as possible. And I think Katharine was an excellent choice. I don't know who you could get better as the basic source for the story than the witness who saw the whole thing."

Cheney also goes on to explain those first 22 hours or so before this became public, saying that evening he was attending to Harry Whittington. He wanted to make sure that his condition was stable, that he also wanted to make sure that his relatives had gotten information and that it was accurate information. And that's why they put it off that first evening -- Miles?

O'BRIEN: Suzanne, obviously the White House under a lot of pressure to have Mr. Cheney say something about this. It comes four days after the shooting. To the best extent we know, can you take us inside that decision, why it too so long?

MALVEAUX: Sure. And actually, it's interesting because Cheney acknowledges in the interview, while he's praising the communications team at the White House, Dan Bartlett and Scott McClellan, he also acknowledges that they urged him to get this information out faster but that he made the decision himself ultimately Saturday night the evening of the shooting.

There was a statement that was being prepared by deputy chief of staff Karl Rove. That didn't happen. It was put on hold when Cheney said that he was going to talk to the sheriff's department the morning after. Sunday, there was a plan for him to go to the hospital to make statement. That didn't happen. Apparently, the news broke a bit late in the day. They put it off.

Monday and Tuesday, there was pressure from the White House. "Let's get this out as quickly as possible." Tuesday, Whittington's condition deteriorated. They decided to scrap it. It wasn't until his condition stabilized on Wednesday, they thought, "Let's go ahead, and we'll put him before the cameras."

O'BRIEN: Suzanne Malveaux at the White House. Thank you for the explanation -- Zain?

VERJEE: Miles, more disturbing images are surfacing from back in 2003 of apparent abuses by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison. The Australian TV network SBS originally broadcast the photos and the video. CNN's Aneesh Raman is in the Iraqi capital, and he joins us now.

Aneesh, tell us about what's been the Iraqi reaction to these new images? I mean, have most people even seen the pictures?

ANEESH RAMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, they are seeing it on Arab television. It began airing last night. It is in some of the papers today. But really a muted response from the Iraqis we've spoken to. We're not seeing that visceral anger, that fury that came out on the streets after the first round of pictures emerged.

Instead, really, they're pinpointing the Iraqi government for not coming and condemning the photos. One of them shows two naked detainees chained to prison bars. Another shows an Iraqi detainee hooded, similar to the photos we saw before.

And those that we spoke to really wanted their government to come out and say that they condemn this, which the government has done only in a statement, but not in any sort of public forum. Iraqis also have long said that Abu Ghraib has been over crowded and many of the people there are innocent. They are being detained for really no reason. So a lot of that has come back into the dialogue today. But we are not seeing mass demonstrations. We are not seeing anything similar, really, to what we saw back in 2004 -- Zain?

VERJEE: What is the U.S. military in Iraq saying about these pictures, Aneesh?

RAMAN: Well, it's interesting. We had a press conference just within the past hour. A spokesman for the military saying they're not seeing any increased hostility after the release of these photos.

You'll recall that one of the main argument for not releasing these photos, at least from officials back in the United States, was that if they did, it would spark further fury on the streets of Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world. But here, really, we have not seen that, and the U.S. military confirming that this morning -- Zain?

VERJEE: What are the conditions like today at Abu Ghraib prison?

RAMAN: Well, the military always quick to point out that the photos do not represent what is happening in Abu Ghraib today. But we simply don't know. The press has been brought in very infrequently to see the conditions there.

The last time I can recall we went was after the first round of pictures emerged back in 2004. A huge issue there has been overcrowding. And they've tried to deal with that by getting better facilities and by releasing detainees they do not deem security threats anymore. But again, we simply don't know. Their word is that things are hugely better than they were back in 2003 -- Zain?

VERJEE: In Baghdad for us, Aneesh Raman -- Miles?

O'BRIEN: No peace, no privileges. That's what jailers in southern California are saying. They've locked down all 18,000 inmates in L.A. County jails. This moves comes after fights at several of the jails killed two, injured dozens of inmates. Now officials say no phone calls, no visits allowed, until calm is restored in those jails.

Another twist in that wild Cook County, Illinois, jailbreak saga this morning. The question is, why did a guard allegedly help inmates get away? Yesterday, we told you a tale of political intrigue. This morning, we're learning there may have been greed as a motive, as well. Ann Kavanagh of our affiliate WFLD reports from Cicero, Illinois.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANN KAVANAGH, REPORTER, WFLD: Good morning. I'm in Cicero outside the home where a family was held hostage for hours by the escaped inmates. The prison guard Darin Gater is free on bond this morning. He was released last night after his family posted a $500,000 bond. Prosecutors say he gave a written confession, saying that the motive for helping with the escape was political. He wanted to discredit the sheriff here in Cook County. But now, they say, it may have been money. He flunked a lie detector test according to prosecutors and indicated that he was promised $50,000 for aiding the escape. The investigation here in Cook County continues.

Live in Cicero, Ann Kavanagh.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'BRIEN: That was a little while ago. She's not live. Our thanks to Ann Kavanagh of our affiliate, WFLD.

Let's go to Carol Costello who is, in fact, live in the newsroom.

Good morning, Carol.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: I am, indeed. Good morning to all of you. Representatives of the group Hamas will travel to Moscow in early March for talks. The news confirmed to CNN just a short time ago by a spokesman for the militant group and by Russian foreign ministers.

The U.S. and some European countries have threatened to cut funding after Hamas won that landslide victory at the Palestinian polls. Russia will now play mediator, trying to keep the Mideast peace talks from falling apart.

Thousands of mobile homes sinking in the mud. A Senate committee investigating the response to Hurricane Katrina called them the $300 million trailer trash. Richard Skinner, the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security, says the mobile homes were never delivered, but they can't be used, either.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICHARD SKINNER, DHS INSPECTOR GENERAL: Putting these homes in a floodplain is putting more families at risk again, particularly in a floodplain that's hurricane prone. The last thing Louisiana or Mississippi needs to see is a bunch of FEMA homes floating down the street.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: New York Governor George Pataki underwent surgery this morning. The 60-year-old Pataki's appendix was removed. A spokesman said the governor checked himself into an upstate hospital on Wednesday with abdominal pain. He's in recovery, and he is reportedly doing quite well. So his operation went just fine.

Back to you, Zain.

VERJEE: ...CNN center and to Bonnie Schneider for a quick look at the weather forecast -- Bonnie?

(WEATHER UPDATE)

O'BRIEN: Can't keep a good dog down. At least, that seems to be the case for Vivi Le Whippet. Actually, her name is

VERJEE: (inaudible) She went -- the joy of life.

O'BRIEN: She went AWOL on her way home from the Westminster Dog Show. She had a disappointing fifth place finish in her breed. She escaped her cage somehow -- a little Houdini act -- as they were boarding her on the sky kennel thing there at JFK. And now the search is on.

VERJEE: They're looking in some marshland areas around JFK.

O'BRIEN: Now, Vivi, being a whippet, can go up to 25 miles an hour. Vivi won't be found, if she doesn't want to be. So our advice for the searchers is, when something is going wrong who you must whip- it. Now, whip it into shape. Shape it up, get it straight. Go forward, move ahead, try to detect it. Whip it good.

VERJEE: Whip it real good.

O'BRIEN: Keep that in mind while you're searching.

VERJEE: Miles, that woke me up.

O'BRIEN: I'm sorry. I can't resist.

VERJEE: All right. Well, coming up, Andy is minding your business. He's going to tell us why one company spent thousands of Dallas on an ad campaign for a product that doesn't exist.

O'BRIEN: Also, Vice President Cheney is finally talking about his hunting accident. But is it too late to undo all the P.R. damage?

VERJEE: And later, today's high tech heart scans can save lives by predicting your chances of heart disease. But there's a growing controversy over whether they're for everyone. Dr. Sanjay Gupta takes a look ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: Well four days after the vice president of the United States shot a hunting companion, he spoke finally, carefully orchestrated event with one reporter, and said a few things about what happened finally, setting the record straight, or at least attempting to at this point. CNN political analyst and "L.A. Times" columnist Ron Brownstein joining us from Washington to talk about it.

Ron, good to have you with us.

RON BROWNSTEIN, "L.A. TIMES" COLUMNIST: Good morning, Miles.

O'BRIEN: Just overall impressions of what you saw in that interview?

BROWNSTEIN: Well, I thought Cheney was much stronger in describing the specification of what happened and explaining why he delayed until the next day and making available the information about what happened. By and large, I think he answered most but not all of the questions people are going to have about the actual event.

But I thought his explanations of why he delayed making this public when even many -- several now -- former Republicans high level press secretaries said that was a mistake. I thought his answers on that front were pretty weak.

O'BRIEN: Well, it's a tough one to explain, but he did say he has no regrets in the way that was handled. I thought that was interesting.

BROWNSTEIN: Well, being vice president means never having to say you're sorry. He hasn't expressed a lot of regret on a lot of different front. I mean, look, you can look at just a practical point of view. They made the story bigger by not getting it out. And in that sense, what he did was counterproductive, if nothing else.

O'BRIEN: Counterproductive because the story developed a life of its own, right?

BROWNSTEIN: Yes. I was talking the to a former White House chief of staff yesterday who said that the president -- noted the president was in Ohio. Did you know the president was in Ohio yesterday talking about healthcare? No one knew the president was in Ohio. We're all talking about Cheney. And that is something that no vice president should ever be in a position of doing to the president, who after all, everyone in the executive branch is supposed to serve.

So in that sense, it was clearly counterproductive, the strategy they chose. It was striking for the vice president to say in this interview that the White House staff clearly wanted him to go public with the information but deferred to him on how to do so, which is an extraordinary statement of the level of autonomy he has achieved after five years in this presidency.

O'BRIEN: All right, here's the undercurrent that's out there. Or maybe not even undercurrent. It's right there at the surface. A lot of people would tell you this is the press corps, the White House press corps in particular, being a bunch of whiners and babies because they were not notified and he was reported by the Corpus Christi newspaper. What do you make of that?

BROWNSTEIN: I really -- you know, I hate to be defending the White House press corps (inaudible), but I thought it was a very silly argument. I mean, it's almost as if he's saying the White House press corps wanted to be told for its own sake. What is the White House press corps? It's a conduit to telling the American people.

It was ultimately the American people who were not told about this event for another day. And, you know, whether it came out on the next day through the national press corps or the local paper wasn't really the issue. It was when, not who, I think.

O'BRIEN: In the final analysis, how important was it for Americans, you think, to know this right away? For example, let's turn it around. What if Cheney had been shot? That's a different story, right?

BROWNSTEIN: I think either way, the American public had a right to know. And, you know, there are some larger questions here. I was struck in talking to people yesterday who have worked in previous administrations of both parties of the sense of unease about the confusion and hesitancy with which the White House initially handled this in the first 24 hours.

The president, for example, was not initially informed, by the White House's own admission, that the vice president was the one who had fired the shot. And in some ways, in a much smaller way, it echoed the confusion in the opening hours of Katrina, which we saw reported yesterday in extraordinary detail by a House select committee led by Republicans.

There are some underlying operational issues here about this White House, which is very good at executing its own plans. How effectively it responds to unanticipated challenges -- and I think we saw some of the same kind of confusion and hesitancy here than we've seen in other cases in the past.

O'BRIEN: The White House is -- it's well known for running a tight ship. It seems as if, looking at this from afar, that Dick Cheney has his own set of rules. Do you think that's the case? Do you think that the Bush administration is going to try to rein him in somehow?

BROWNSTEIN: Well, you know, every vice president has a degree of autonomy. I was talking to someone yesterday who pointed out that when Dan Quayle gave his Murphy Brown speech, the only really significant thing he did in the four years that people remember, he didn't notify the White House. So vice presidents are known to go off on their own, to some extent.

But certainly, I think most people agree, that what we're seeing with Vice President Cheney is an unusual degree of autonomy. He, according to his own words in the interview, did not talk about President Bush about this incident until Monday, two days after happened, which I think is kind of an extraordinary statement on both men, that the vice president did not feel to compelled to call and explain, and that the president did not want to call and get the information after being told on Saturday night that the vice president had fired the shot.

So yes, I do think this is -- there is more freedom for this vice president than there has been for most. Whether they will try to rein him in, I think it's very difficult to do. They've certainly indicated some displeasure from the White House with the way this was handled. But the operative sentence on that relationship in the interview was that they deferred to his judgment on what to do. And that really was kind of an extraordinary indication.

O'BRIEN: And just to follow up here, they've been portrayed as being very close politically and as a friendship. The fact that neither called the other is kind of interesting, isn't it? BROWNSTEIN: I found it extraordinary. Just from a management point of view, if you are the president of the United States and you are told that the vice president has been involved in an accident and has shot -- I just find it really difficult to imagine that he did not pick up the phone until Monday. Nor did the vice president talk to anyone on the White House staff himself until Sunday.

So, again, there is a level of autonomy there, but there's also this issue about how the president seeks and processes information. It's obviously been raised on other issues. Again, this report that came out of Katrina yesterday from this House committee showed a breakdown in the White House ability to understand what was happening, to process and synthesize the information. And we've had similar questions raised around the WMD issue. So I think there's a larger management issue, but this provides a small window into it.

O'BRIEN: Interesting. Ron Brownstein, "L.A. Times" columnist, CNN political analyst. Always a pleasure.

BROWNSTEIN: Thanks, Miles.

O'BRIEN: Zain?

VERJEE: Miles, coming up, some health news. We're going to look at the growing controversy over some high tech heart scans. They can predict your risk for heart disease, but doctors say that they are not for everyone. Dr. Sanjay Gupta has that.

Plus, the truth about calcium. It might not protect women's bones as much as everybody thought. What every woman needs to know. That's ahead here on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

VERJEE: Imagine being able to look at your heart and tell if you will eventually develop heart disease. Many of today's high tech heart scans can actually make the predictions. But some cardiologists are warning that these devices should be used for people that really need them and not just as medical fortune tellers. Dr. Sanjay Gupta looks at why some of these scans have become so controversial.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: You're looking at pictures of the human heart. Images so clear it's as if the surgeon had removed the organ from the body without using a scalpel. Doctors can now diagnose heart problems much faster and more easily because of high speed MRI and CT machines.

MICHAEL MICHAELIS, HEART PATIENT: I had had no warning of any problems with my heart.

GUPTA: When Michael Michaelis came to Suburban Hospital's emergency room in Bethesda, Maryland, six years ago, he wasn't feeling well. But he didn't think it was his heart. After running tests, doctors put Michaelis through a high speed MRI machine. The instant images showed he had a small heart attack and minimal damage to his heart.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is what a moderately small heart attack looks like.

GUPTA: By catching the problem early, physicians could treat him and get him back on his feet.

DR. ANDREW ARAI, SUBURBAN HOSPITAL: Unfortunately, the heart doesn't heal well. And so it's really critical to diagnosis someone before permanent heart damage is done.

GUPTA: Most cardiologists recommend sethe devices in order to diagnosis heart ailments. Yet some practitioners have started using certain scans like crystal balls to look at a patient's heart future. One machine they use is the coronary calcium scan. It can offer clues as to whether a patient is heart healthy, even if they aren't ill. The scan detects calcium in blood vessels, which may indicate if someone is at higher risk of developing a heart attack long before and symptoms occur.

DR. DOUGLAS JONES, SUBURBAN HOSPITAL: What it does is it looks at the extent of plaque buildup or atrial sclerosis (ph) within the coronary vessels. And as the plaques progress, they often become calcified.

GUPTA: That calcification can cause a heart attack. But these heart scans aren't for everyone. While some medical storefronts advertise that a quick heart scan can save their lives, the use of the scans does remain controversial.

Many doctors and researchers, along with the American Medical Association, question just how reliable certain heart scan technology is, who can benefit from it, and even if the information it reveals is useful. Many times, there are false positives. And even if a patient's heart is calcium free, it doesn't mean they'll never suffer from heart disease.

JONES: The limitations of the examination are that you could still have a narrowing of the vessel by a plaque that's not calcified.

GUPTA: The American Heart Association recommends only certain patients, usually high risk ones, think about having a heart scan. High risk factors include a combination of things such as family heart disease, patients with very high blood pressure and cholesterol, heavy smokers, and those who are obese. And they recommend that patients consult their physicians before they get a scan to make sure that one is really needed.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, reporting.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VERJEE: And tomorrow, our healthy heart series will continue with a look at patch heart repairs. Those are the babies who had heart defects fixed 30 years ago. They may be in for a rude awakening. There's a doctor who wants to check in on them and make sure they stay fixed -- Miles?

O'BRIEN: Coming up, a company spends thousands to promote a product it doesn't make. Maybe not the best use of resources, you might ask? Sounds like a job for Andy Serwer, right? Well, he'll be here.

Plus, the "CSI" effect. Some experts say the hit TV show is making it harder for real life investigators to solve real crimes. We'll explain, ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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