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New Jersey Quarantined Nurse to be Discharged; Ottawa Shooter Made a Video; Lawmakers Worry Over Senate NSA Bill; Interview with Sen. Dan Coats; Handing Over Control to Afghan Forces

Aired October 27, 2014 - 09:30   ET

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

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: And good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me.

The quarantined nurse in New Jersey does not believe she will be tested again for Ebola, at least today. In a text to CNN, Kaci Hickox says that decision is actually up now to the New Jersey Department of Health, not her own doctor. This is a picture of Hickox in quarantine. It was taken by her lawyer. Hickox is making it clear she wants to go home.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KACI HICKOX, NURSE (voice-over): To make me stay for 21 days, to not be with my family, to put me through this emotional and physical stress is completely unacceptable.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: If the New Jersey Department of Health won't release Hickoxs, her lawyers hope the courts will. They plan to file a motion today asking for her mandatory quarantine to be lifted. CNN's Alexandra Field is live outside the hospital in Newark where Hickox is being quarantined.

Tell us more.

ALEXANDRA FIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Carol.

Hickox has said over and over again that she believes that her rights are being violated. She's being kept in a tent inside the hospital with a portable toilet, no shower. Her lawyers say they have spoken to her doctors and they see no medical reason for her to be held.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NORMAN SIEGEL, KACI HICKOX'S LAWYER: We believe that medically speaking there's no reason for the state of New Jersey to keep her quarantined. We believe that that policy infringes on the constitutional liberty interests of Ms. Hickox. And we think that the policy is overly broad. And what I mean by that, it sweeps in people who do not meet the criteria for being quarantined.

(END VIDEO CLIP) FIELD: And Kaci Hickox arrived here in the states, arrived at Newark Airport. She had been working for Doctors Without Borders treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone. She was taken from Newark to university hospital here in Newark, where she has been in isolation. But finally yesterday Kaci Hickox's lawyers say they were able to speak to her through a plastic window. They spent about an hour and 15 minutes with her before proceeding how to move forward and take this issue to court, Carol.

COSTELLO: She's from Maine, right, which is why she's under this voluntary -- well, mandatory quarantine in New Jersey. What is Governor Christie saying about that, anything new this morning?

FIELD: He has been speaking out and he has said that the knows that she is uncomfortable and he apologizes that she's uncomfortable but believes that the best interest of the people of New Jersey is what's most important to him. And he has, again, underlined this policy which was announced just on Friday. He has said that in a case where there is somebody who returns from an Ebola infected area and may be (INAUDIBLE), there will be a mandatory 21 day quarantine. He says but if you're a resident of New Jersey, you would be quarantined at home. If you are not a resident of New Jersey, every effort would be made to bring you home if feasible, otherwise the policy says it's up to officials here in New Jersey to determine where that quarantine would happen, Carol. And in this case we know it's happening much to this nurse's discontent here at University Hospital.

COSTELLO: Alexandra Field reporting live from Newark, New Jersey, this morning. Thank you.

This just in to CNN. That five-year-old boy we were telling you about. He is now in isolation and he is being tested for Ebola at New York City's Bellevue Hospital after he and his family returned from Guinea. We just got a statement from the hospital confirming the boy is being tested because of his recent travel history and pattern of symptoms. Preliminary results are expected within 12 hours. Of course we'll keep you posted.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, quarantined health care workers back from West Africa, even if they have no Ebola symptoms whatsoever. An expert in medical ethics says that's just wrong.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

COSTELLO: OK, so all morning long we've been telling you about the nurse, Kaci Hickox. She's under this mandatory quarantine in a tent outside of a New Jersey hospital because she was treating patients in West Africa. She was detained at the airport. She was taken to this New Jersey hospital and she was put into that tent for quarantine.

Well now we understand, and this is from the officer of the governor of New Jersey, and I'm going to read it to you because I'm seeing it for the first time. "Since testing negative for Ebola on early Saturday morning, the patient being monitored in isolation at University Hospital in Newark has thankfully been symptom free for the last 24 hours. As a result, and after being evaluated in coordination with the CDC and treating clinicians at University Hospital, the patient is being discharged. Since the patient had direct exposure to individuals" -- bla, bla, bla, bla, bla.

But, in sort, she is being discharged from this New Jersey hospital and she's being taken by private ambulance back to her home in Maine. I have Art Caplan, he's the director of medical ethics at NYU Medical Center, with me.

And, Art, I'm glad you're here. So, what do you make of this?

ARTHUR CAPLAN, DR. MEDICAL ETHICS, NYU LANGONE MEDICAL CENTER: Well, I think it shows us that quarantine is a pretty tough stance to take with Ebola. Look, Ebola's very hard to get. Fear is easy to get. Cuomo, Christie, governor of Florida, state of Illinois, even Connecticut, they've all been saying, well, we better quarantine people who have had contact with other people who may have had contact with folks with Ebola.

Nurses like Kaci are saying, I'm not -- I don't have any symptoms. You tested me. I don't have any virus in my blood. Why are you keeping me in a tent in a hospital in Newark. And if she had sued, she would have won. There's no way they would have held her. So I think she's making the point that quarantine is not our best weapon here. What's our best weapon, trust the health care professionals, in particular, to report their symptoms, take their temperature, be prudent, don't run around. I mean I think we can advise them to, you know, kind of stay home, not like Dr. Spencer who went bowling and so on, even though I'm not worried about that. I don't -- unless you had sex with him, you weren't going to -- at the bowling alley, you weren't going to get Ebola. But let's trust these people to do the right thing.

COSTELLO: Well, so she's going to be transported by private ambulance back to her home in Maine because she is from Maine, right?

CAPLAN: Maine, right.

COSTELLO: She had to come in to the New Jersey airport because there's only five airports that will accept people who've treated people with Ebola in West Africa.

CAPLAN: Correct.

COSTELLO: So I'm just -- I'm just curious to know what might happen to her in Maine. Will they just like set her free?

CAPLAN: I think -- I think she will roam the woods and meet the bears. I mean she's -- she is not going to do anything other than stay in her home. She'll probably take her temperature twice a day just to make sure that nothing is happening. And if she feels ill, I presume she's going to show up at a hospital in Maine that is properly trained to deal with it, or they're going to send the private ambulance back and -- back to Bellevue or Newark she goes.

But the point is this, quarantine, you know, people get nervous and they say, we better lock these people up. It only works to the extent to which people cooperate. You need their -- you know, if we had 100 people in quarantine and they don't want to be there, they're going to sneak out the doors, they're going to find ways not to get there. You need them to cooperate with you.

COSTELLO: Well, here's the -- the most confusing thing to me. So Dr. Spencer is now in the hospital and he's being treated for Ebola --

CAPLAN: Right.

COSTELLO: By doctors --

CAPLAN: Right.

COSTELLO: Who go home at night --

CAPLAN: Correct.

COSTELLO: Who I presume go out to restaurants. So why haven't they been placed under voluntary quarantine?

CAPLAN: Best question of the day. They're at the highest risk. They're with an active Ebola patient. But we know they have trained at -- it's my hospital. They've trained. They've got the equipment right. They know what to do. So people put their faith in the doctors that should they get sick, they're not idiots, they're going to come out and say, I have a problem and then you do contact tracing after the fact to see who were they around.

So, best policy for us right now, let's stop the political posturing about quarantine, let's start to rely on our health care workers to self-monitor. I don't mind telling them to stay home. That's fine. I don't mind giving them nice thermometers to take their temperature, giving them advice not to scare people by wondering around. Not because I think they're going to infect anyone, but it just keeps public trust in place.

So, OK, kind of stay home, feed the bear, whatever you're going to do in Maine. But you -- going to quarantine -- if you show pictures of people in a tent at the Newark Airport, no one is going to go to Africa to fight this disease. You're going to lose the trust of health care workers because they know that's not consistent with the science. So what we want to do is keep them supportive in the war against Ebola --

COSTELLO: Right.

CAPLAN: If we're going to isolate, if we're going to try and say, don't roam the streets, give them some pay, don't ask them to spend 21 days, you know, with no money coming in. You've got to set this up so it's a carrot, not a stick.

COSTELLO: Art Caplan, thanks for being here. I appreciate it.

CAPLAN: My pleasure. COSTELLO: Again, Nurse Hickox is being -- she's being transferred out, I guess, from that New Jersey hospital and she's going to be taken by private ambulance back to her home in Maine. After that, we don't know what happens, but we're trying to find out. We'll have more information for you after a break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: In Ottawa, Canada, police say the man who carried out a bold, daylight attack against Parliament last week made a video of himself shortly before he shot and killed a soldier in cold blood. The video has not yet been released, but police say the gunman, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, was driven by ideological and political motives. He was killed after he stormed the Parliament building, armed with a vintage hunting rifle.

Authorities are looking into whether he acted alone or had any help. It is tough to stop someone who acts alone, like Zehaf-Bibeau, a lone wolf. That's why some lawmakers, like Senator Dan Coats of Indiana, are criticizing any drastic change to the way the NSA operates. He worries that a Senate bill to curb the NSA's power will endanger the country.

The chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, disagrees. His bill, that came out of committee, would require the government to be more specific about which records it wants, narrowing down requests by names or addresses instead of entire cities and zipcodes. The NSA would also have to show how any information it wants is linked to a foreign terrorist. The government would also be forced to disclose how much data it actually collects, and privacy advocates would be allowed to argue before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA. Right now, the government can lay out it's case before these judges without any opposing viewpoint.

With me now, Republican Senator Dan Coats of Indiana. Good morning, sir.

SEN. DAN COATS (R), INDIANA: Good morning.

COSTELLO: Welcome, I'm glad you're here.

COATS: Thank you.

COSTELLO: Senator Leahy's bill would prohibit the NSA from collecting phone data from entire zipcodes or cities. He wants our spy agency to focus it's investigation on those it actually suspects. What's wrong with that in your mind?

COATS: You know, we're both, I think, trying to strike this balance between protecting American's privacy, which needs to be protected and is constitutionally required to be protected, and also having the tools necessary to identify those who want to kill Americans, use terrorists attacks to do so.

This program emanated out of the post-911 committee. It is a program that has effectively stopped a number of terrorist attacks, and it doesn't listen to anyone's phone calls. What it does, simply, is identify a phone call that is being made to a known terrorist individual or terrorist organization. That comes up through the computer as oh, we have to look at this. But they have to take that evidence to a judge first to get approval to do so.

It's just like the police saying we have some suspicions about this person collecting guns or making bombs in his home or in his basement, and they go to a judge to get a warrant to search - -

COSTELLO: Well, sir - -

COATS: - - the property to see if that's really true, and that's exactly what this program does.

COSTELLO: It's not exactly like that, because the NSA has the ability to hear something, right? You know, in space. And then they collect all of this data and then they go through and they can collect all of this data without a warrant, right?

COATS: No. What they have is the ability to match a phone number to a phone number that is known to be a part of a terrorist organization or held by someone who is identified as a foreign intelligence person. This has nothing to do with these things that happened in America where the lone wolf makes a decision to do something that's not connected to a terrorist organization, a foreign terrorist organization.

And then, only then, they cannot get the content unless they take it before a judge and get approval to then look at it and search to see is there something bad going on here. We're trying to balance the privacy, not listening to anyone's phone calls, it would take 300 million people to listen to the billions of calls we all make everyday. There's no interest in that whatsoever.

What we do want to know, if a phone number is calling a phone number for a terrorist in a foreign country that may be plotting to do harm to the United States, and with this ever growing threat that we're having from ISIS, we need these tools. Now, this has more oversight than any other program. The Intelligence Committee, those which I serve on, those of us get up everyday and look at these terrorists threats, know the American people want us to do everything we can to prevent this from happening, another 9/11 or something even worse. And, so, that's our challenge, and trying to find that balance is what's so necessary.

COSTELLO: In fairness, in fairness, the way the NSA operates, it didn't stop the growth of ISIS. That already happened. It didn't stop Americans from being beheaded. So, Senator Leahy might argue that, you know, there's evidence that collecting all of this data doesn't help any way.

COATS: Well, look, we use our U.S. military and military forces to stop what ISIS is trying to do overseas. This program is designed to stop terrorist attacks against - foreign terrorist attacks from Americans here in the United States. It has the most oversight, both executive branch, judicial branch, and congressional branch of anything, any program that the government has.

We have passed a comparable bill in the Intelligence Committee. It was supported 11 to 4 on a vote. The chairman, Democrat chairman, supported it. The Republican vice chairman supported. It keeps in place a program that can keep us from these attacks, but it also affirms that we are not listening to people's calls and we have - - it's illegal to do so. We just think that the Judiciary Committee's bill goes too far, dissembles the program to the point where it's ineffective. And I think we do have a charge to protect the American people, while recognizing their rights of privacy, and we think our bill is superior to Senator Leahy's judiciary bill.

COSTELLO: Senator Dan Coats, thanks for being with me this morning. I appreciate it. I'll be right back.

COATS: Good talking to you, Carol. Thank you.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: U.S. and U.K. flags lowered for the last time at a key base in Afghanistan's Helmand province.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

COSTELLO (voice-over): Handing control over to the Afghan security forces. The ceremony also marks the end to 13 years of U.K. military operations in the war-torn country. U.S. forces are winding down, but will remain in Afghanistan. In total, 2, 349 U.S. troops have died to date. 453 U.K. troops died fighting in Afghanistan. CNN's Barbara Starr joins us live from the Pentagon with more.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

COSTELLO (on camera): So, tell us more about what this means.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: You know, this is a real marker for both American and British troops in this 13-year war in Afghanistan. I've been to these bases in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. They were massive.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

STARR (voice-over): You know, thousands of troops, airfields running around the clock, troops going out on patrol, Camp Leathernec for the U.S. Marines, Camp Bastion for British forces and, of course, Britain's own Prince Harry served his second tour of duty in Afghanistan at Camp Bastion.

This is a real marker in the wind down of the operations in Afghanistan. The British, now fully out of combat missions. The U.S. drawing down to about 10,000 troops or so in the coming years and the plan, at least, is to be fully out by 2016. But look, Carol, when we see what's going on in Iraq with the withdrawal of coalition troops there, raising a lot of questions about Afghanistan.

(END VIDEOCLIP) STARR (on camera): Will the Afghan forces fare better in maintaining security in that country? Will they be able to hold on to the gains? The Taliban still a very strong presence in so many areas of that country. Carol?

COSTELLO: Barbara Starr, reporting live from Pentagon. Thanks so much. The next hour of CNN NEWSROOM after a break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)