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U.S. GOP Presidential Candidates To Square Off In South Carolina Primary on Saturday; New Fox Poll Shows Clinton And Sanders Locked In Tight National Race; Pope Francis Comment On Contraceptives And The Zika Virus. Aired 12-1a ET

Aired February 19, 2016 - 00:00   ET

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


[00:00:08] ISHA SESAY, CNN ANCHOR: This is "CNN Newsroom" live from Los Angeles.

JOHN VAUSE, CNN ANCHOR: Ahead this hour, a wholly war of words: Donald Trump responds to those suggestions from Pope Francis that Mr. Trump is not a Christian.

SESAY: Plus, the lesser of two evils. Pope Francis also makes headlines with new comments on birth control.

VAUSE: And sending them to their deaths. How the twisted ISIS fought to martyr child soldiers is even worse than we once thought.

SESAY: Hello, and thank you for joining us. I'm Isha Sesay.

VAUSE: And I'm John Vause. Newsroom L.A. starts right now. U.S. Republican Presidential Candidates will square off on Saturday in the key South Carolina primary. Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Donald Trump just finished answering directly to the voters there in the second day of our town hall.

SESAY: Trump, who is dominating the state's polls, was challenged by undecided voters over his previous comments on September 11th and the Iraq War. Trump. Moderator Anderson Cooper also asked Trump to respond to Pope Francis who implied some of his actions aren't Christian. Trump said he's not fighting with a Catholic leader.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R) REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I have a lot of respect for the Pope. I think he's got a lot of personality. He's very different. He's a very different kind of a guy and I think he's doing a very good job. He's a lot of energy, but I would say that I think he was very much misinterpreted and I also think he was given false information.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VAUSE: He had a lot of energy. Trump also said he thinks the Pope has only the Mexican government's take on his proposal to build a wall along the U.S./Mexico border. Pope Francis told reporters on board his plane that he disagrees with Donald Trump.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

POPE FRANCIS, via translator: A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be located, and not building bridges is not Christian. This is not in the gospel. As far as what he said about whether I would advise to vote or not to vote I am not going to get involved in that. I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SESAY: Well joining us now is John Phillips, a talk radio host for KABC here in Los Angeles, Political Columnist for the "Orange County Register" and a Donald Trump supporter.

VAUSE: Also Christian Groser, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California. Guys, thanks for being with us.

SESAY: Welcome.

VAUSE: Let's get to this -

thank you.

VAUSE: -- (inaudible) with the Pope. I mean, it seems tonight that Donald Trump was trying to walk back a bit. The line here now is that basically the Mexican government got to him.

CHRISTIAN GROSE, POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: Yes, every time that Trump says something that is offensive or is going to potentially hurt him when he goes on these town halls or debates, he walks it back and then he goes back and offends someone else. It's sort of a repeat throughout the election.

VAUSE: Rinse, repeat.

SESAY: How is that not troubling for supporters? I mean, there is a sense though that Donald Trump is compart - or his supporters are able to compartmentalize the things he says and, kind of, they don't end up having any blowback for the candidate himself.

JOHN PHILLIPS, POLITICAL COLUMNIST, "ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER": Right. Well, first of all, there's nothing more Christian to build than a wall. After all, Jesus was a carpenter. So therefore, man cannot live by roof alone. So I think that Donald Trump has a biblical perspective and a biblical perspective to stand on.

SESAY: I know you're not being serious right now.

VAUSE: Nice try. He was actually a stone mason because there wasn't a lot of wood around at the time, but I get your point. This is the thing, when you take on the Pope, I mean, everyone looks at the polls and all the Christians in South Carolina, Catholics in South Carolina, he's going to get away with it, but eventually it's going to come back at you, isn't it? And that's what we saw tonight, that's why he started to walk it back.

PHILLIPS: Well, the Pope lives in a fortress surrounded by -

[Cross Talk]

PHILLIPS: -- but they're finding their way around the globe, they took in a family of four. If the United States could take the Vatican's policy on immigration I think Donald Trump would be a happy camper.

SESAY: But does it not trouble you though that he would take on the Pope? I mean, are there no red lines? I think that is the question that people are asking.

PHILLIPS: No, in fact, I would say that Donald Trump and the Pope are occupying the same space. The Pope -

VAUSE: What?

PHILLIPS: In this sense: the Pope is an anti-establishment guy. He came in and replaced the Pope who had decidedly different political perspectives.

VAUSE: I'm writing this down.

PHILLIPS: Donald Trump is doing that in the Republican primary right now. They're both anti-establishment guys. They're both outsiders.

VAUSE: My head just exploded.

SESAY: Please, please respond to that.

GROSE: The Pope is in many ways an insider.

[Laughter]

GROSE: Maybe not on the -

PHILLIPS: Established by walls.

GROSE: -- but in seriousness, Catholic voters, a large percentage of the American public, not in South Carolina, but swing voters and also many are Republicans, could hurt him. Going after Bush wasn't enough. Go after the Pope, maybe that will be enough to start --

VAUSE: It probably won't hurt him in South Carolina, but it may hurt him in March '16 with some of those states that have a high Catholic population vote.

GROSE: Right.

VAUSE: March 15, Illinois and a couple other places go to the polls; who's going to remember it by then --

SESAY: Yes, something else would have been said.

VAUSE: -- because this is all moving at such a crazy speed that there will be something else by then, right?

[00:05:02] GROSE: Well, I mean, maybe if Bush continues to do poorly, drops out, but retains his Super PAC's, the Super PAC's will run it over and over again in the high Catholic states.

SESAY: The one thing that will be said, can be said for Donald Trump is whenever someone takes him on he continues to use it to his advantage.

GROSE: Absolutely; he takes it head-on and all the metrics show that Donald Trump is going to win in South Carolina and Nevada.

VAUSE: Yes, he never takes a backward step. I mean, he can't because that's the concern that he's established. If someone comes out at him he's going to go back farther which is why, instead of just saying I respectfully disagree with His Holy Father he said the comments were disgusting. He didn't need to say they were disgusting.

PHILLIPS: Right, and every time someone says this time he's gone too far. When he fights with John McCain, his poll numbers go up. When he fights with others, the poll numbers go up. I think the same thing will happen here.

GROSE: The poll numbers are starting to go down.

SESAY: Yes.

GROSE: He is still ahead, but they're - but he's making 49-48- percent. Republicans do not want to vote for him. So once candidates start to dropout --

PHILLIPS: But he is going to win South Carolina by double-digits.

GROSE: He'll win South Carolina. We'll see -- yeah, probably pretty heavily.

SESAY: So let's put the Pope's comments to the side and talk about another big moment out of tonight's Town Hall. Trump is repeatedly, on the campaign trail, trying to make a virtue of the fact that as he said he was opposed to the invasion of Iraq and has gone on and said that demonstrators, good judgment and all the rest of it. Now emerges, thanks to Buzzfeed who have released some audio of Donald Trump on the "Howard Stern Show" saying something quite different. Our own Anderson Cooper put that to him tonight. I want to take a listen to how he responded.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I could have said that. Nobody asked me. I wasn't a politician. It was the first time anybody ever asked me that question, but by the time the war started - that was quite a bit before the war --

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, this was 2002.

TRUMP: By the time the war started I was against the war. (END VIDEO CLIP)

VAUSE: Okay; but wait, there's more. Don't say anything yet, because he says I could have said that, he said that. Let's go to the audio tape.

(BEGIN AUDIO TAPE)

HOWARD STERN, RADIO HOST, "THE HOWARD STERN SHOW": Are you for invading Iraq?

TRUMP: Yeah, I guess so. You know, I wish -- I wish the first time it was done correctly.

(END AUDIO TAPE)

VAUSE: So he was for the war before he was against the war. John Kerry, 2004, hung around his neck; but not this guy. So what's the different here?

PHILLIPS: It sounds like he's in the same boat as Hillary Clinton but the problem is this. The problem is not where you were at the beginning, the problem is what happened after it didn't work? And the problem with the Bush Administration is their policy was to stay the course and that was the wrong policy. Donald Trump evolved. Donald Trump changed his position and that differentiates him from the rest of the Republicans who supported the Iraq War through the process.

SESAY: No, no, no. Donald Trump's whole point is I was against it. It shows my good judgment. I have a better grasp of foreign policy. I had better foresight. That's where I -

VAUSE: It's like the Bernie Sanders argument.

SESAY: Yes, you can't say that you -- you can't play out the spectrum and say that's how it played out and now I changed my position. That's not the point he's been making all along.

PHILLIPS: Which Republican still in the field was against the war prior to Donald Trump?

[Cross Talk]

SESAY: Which Republican in the field has made a point of suggesting that that set him apart and makes him a better candidate?

PHILLIPS: Well I think it does show good judgment because, again, that's when the point of failure was. The point of failure was staying the course after it was clear that we were making mistakes and it wasn't working. If Donald Trump is malleable enough to recognize it's not working and it's time to change, I think that's a good thing not a bad thing.

SESAY: You think that's a good thing, the malleability?

GROSE: Yes, I don't think the malleability, especially on the war issue will matter for Trump because if you like him already, this sort of flip flop is not that big of a deal.

VAUSE: Yes.

SESAY: Very interesting.

VAUSE: It's like, people do compartmentalize and that was then, this is now. Let's move on, which is why it's interesting that all the others act like he was pro-choice, pro-gay marriage. None of that stuff; right?

GROSE: I think that is potentially more concerning for conservative Republican voters in some states, being in favor of socially liberal issues and switching while the war, I don't think, sticks with as many conservative voters.

VAUSE: Okay; there was also another sticky moment during this Town Hall and it came from a question of one of the voters in the room and it was about this controversy if you like between Donald Trump and George W. Bush and did W. Bush lie as a basis for invading Iraq in a search for weapons of mass destruction?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Well, a lot of people agree with what I said and I'm not talking about lying. I'm not talking about not lying. Nobody really knows why we went into Iraq. The Iraqi's did not knock down - it was not Saddam Hussein who knocked down the World Trade Center, okay?

COOPER: What you said was they lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction and there were none. They knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

TRUMP: Well there are a lot of people that think that. There were a lot of people who think, look, bottom line, there were no weapons of mass destruction. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. I was against the war when it started.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So do you think the President of the United States, George W. Bush, lied to the American people -

[00:10:02] TRUMP: Look, I'm not going to get your vote, but that's okay.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm just giving you another shot at it.

TRUMP: I'll just tell you very simply. it may have been the worst decision to going into Iraq. It may have been the worst decision anybody has made, any president has made in the history of this country. That's how bad it is, okay?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SESAY: Why not just stand by what he said in the debate last --

VAUSE: Because the debate was very effective.

SESAY: So as a Trump supporter, why not?

PHILLIPS: All I heard all weekend was the fact that he went after George W. Bush, who's going to cause him to lose South Carolina because he's so popular in South Carolina.

VAUSE: I don't think he's going to lose.

PHILLIPS: Byron York of "The Washington Examiner" went to a Jeb rally, the rally that George W. Bush spoke at and he talked to, like, 30 different voters and asked voters at the Jeb rally if they were voting for Jeb, only 3 of them said yes.

SESAY: Christian, are you surprised?

GROSE: That he -

SESAY: That he refused to basically double-down at the Bush comments that he made at the Town Hall?

GROSE: I'm not surprised, because the Pope is popular among some voters. George W. Bush is popular amongst some Republican conservative voters. So at some point he's got to be careful about hitting people and get some attention, but it really will just start making more and more of the people supporting Kasich and Bush and the other candidates who might drop out not want to vote for him.

VAUSE: My theory is, and I'm going to leave it with this, but I think he's just place-holding. I think he's got two or three days to go for the primary. He's out in front by a country mile. He just didn't want to do anything that's going to ruin that.

PHILLIPS: That's right, and the wave, I think, is going to take Nevada with South Carolina.

VAUSE: I think you're right. Guys, thanks for coming in.

SESAY: Thank you so much. Always good to have you on the program. Thank you so much.

All right; well, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton had some airtime too. MSNBC held a Town Hall too in Las Vegas for the Democratic contenders. They talked health care, immigration reform and the fight brewing between Apple and the U.S. government.

VAUSE: While the candidates have some common ground they did not hide their differences on Thursday night. Senator Sanders responded to Secretary Clinton's claim that he is a single issue candidate.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BERNIE SANDERS (D-VT) DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: If she happened to come to one of my rallies, I -- which she has not yet, but I welcome her, she would hear me speaking for about an hour and 15 minutes and we would cover 15 or 20 separate issues. I'm not quite sure where she comes up with this single issue idea.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SESAY: Meanwhile, Clinton defended Democratic Party principles after the Town Hall moderator quoted some of what Sanders said on his flight to Nevada.

VAUSE: The Senator apparently attacked Bill Clinton's legacy as president and has, in the past, called U.S. President Barack Obama weak.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY) DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I just don't know where all this comes from because maybe it's that Senator Sanders wasn't really a Democrat until he decided to run for president and he doesn't even know what the last two Democratic Presidents did. Well it's true. It's true. You know it's true.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VAUSE: You know it.

SESAY: Loud reaction in that room. Those comments, as you heard, were met with applause and boos in a final push to sway Latino voters in Nevada. Clinton's campaign released a new ad.

VAUSE: Yes, now this is all showing about the emotion and trying to actually humanize Hillary Clinton. It shows a 10-year-old girl who starts crying as she tells Mrs. Clinton that she's worried about her parents being deported.

[Playing of Clinton Campaign Ad]

SESAY: Remarkable moment from the campaign trail there.

VAUSE: It's like Hillary Clinton, we have not seen her like that in a very, very long time and this is something which many people have said the campaign needed to do a long time ago. Maybe it's going to be too little too late because we've got some poll numbers which have come out.

SESAY: We certainly have. A new FOX News poll shows Clinton and Sanders locked in a tight race nationally, with Sanders leading 47 to 44-percent.

VAUSE: The new numbers come ahead of the crucial contest in Nevada. It's the first battle of the campaign season in the Western part of the U.S. Jonathan Mann explains why the caucus is important for both parties.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JONATHAN MANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The Nevada caucuses could turn into an old fashioned Wild West showdown.

HARRY REID: You look at Nevada, it's a micro-chasm of our country. It is what America is all about. MANN: It is the first contest of the campaign calendar held in

western U.S. Democrats turn out February 20th; Republicans three days later. It's relatively new to the process. Nevada's first caucus was just in 2004, but now it's seen as a critical battleground for Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, fighting to win over an electorate more diverse than Iowa or New Hampshire, with more Hispanic and African- American voters.

While the state is geographically large, the race will likely be won or lost in just one city, Las Vegas. Sin City and surrounding Clark County are home to nearly three-quarters of the state's population. Recent history suggests Nevada is Clinton country. Hillary Clinton narrowly won the vote in the 2008 caucus, though Clinton carried the state in both the 1992 and '96 elections, helping him win the White House both times.

The Sanders' campaign hopes to change that, spending millions on TV ads in both English and Spanish and adding at least 50 staffs in 11 offices across the State. Nevada Senator, Harry Reid tells CNN the race in his home state is too tight to call.

SEN. HARRY REID, (D-NV): I expect it to be very close.

MANN: You think it's a tossup?

REID: I think it's going to be very close.

MANN: Odds-makers agree, giving both Clinton and Sanders a 50/50 chance of winning. We'll find out which candidate hits the Nevada jackpot on Saturday.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VAUSE: Jonathan Mann there with that report. We'll take a short break here. When we come back we'll have more on Donald Trump's clash with Pope Francis and we'll discuss this whole issue with a professor of Catholic Theology.

SESAY: Yes, we certainly will and we'll find out how Donald Trump's rivals on the campaign trail are responding to it all. Plus, the Pope also raised a few eyebrows with his comments about birth control when he said using contraception may be the lesser of two evils.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[00:20:42} VAUSE: Welcome back, everybody. So, Donald Trump's Republican rivals are coming to his defense in his disagreement with Pope Francis. The Pontiff had suggested on Thursday that Trump's immigration policies are not Christian.

SESAY: CNN's Dana Bash takes a look at how the controversy began.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DANA BASH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Just when you thought 2016 couldn't get weirder, tonight Donald Trump is in a war of words with the Pope, and Pope Francis started it, pontificating about Trump.

POPE FRANCIS, via translator: A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be located, and not building bridges is not a Christian. This man is not a Christian if he has said things like that.

TRUMP: He actually said that maybe I'm not a good Christian or something. It's unbelievable, which is not a very nice thing to say. For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful. I'm proud to be a Christian.

BASH: As unusual it is for the Pope to question a presidential candidate's Christianity almost as unusual, that Candidate's response.

TRUMP: If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which, as everyone knows, ISIS's ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president.

BASH: As for the Pope's core criticism about Trump's call to build a wall between U.S. and Mexico.

TRUMP: The Mexican government and its leadership has made many disparaging remarks about me. See, the Pope was in Mexico. He doesn't see how Mexican leadership is outsmarting our President; and Obama and our leadership

has no clue as to the negotiation or anything else.

BASH: In an instant this mano-a-mano between the Trump and the Pope overshadowed everything on the campaign trail. Jeb Bush, a devout Catholic and the candidate most critical of Trump, in this case, came to the billionaire's defense.

JEB BUSH (R-FL) REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I think he is Christianity is between him and his creator.

BASH: Do you think the Pope was wrong to question his Christianity?

BUSH: I don't question anybody's Christianity because I honestly believe that's a relationship that you have with your creator and it only enables bad behavior when someone from outside our country talks about Donald Trump.

BASH: This is not the first time Catholic Republicans have distanced themselves from the outspoken Pope Francis on political issues.

RUBIO: I will be a president for all Americans.

BAAH: Marco Rubio, also a Catholic, was cautious about commenting on the Pope's statement about Trump; but two days before South Carolina Republicans vote was eager to defend America on immigration.

RUBIO: We're a sovereign country and we have a right to control who comes in, when they come in and how they come in. Vatican City controls who comes in, when they come in and how they come in, as a City State. And as a result, the United States has the right to do that as well.

Dana Bash, Columbia, South Carolina.

VAUSE: Father Thomas Rausch is with us now for more on this -- I don't want to say a war of words, maybe this dispute between Pope Francis and Donald Trump.

SESAY: Yes, and Father Thomas, we should say, is a Professor of Catholic Theology at Loyola Marymount University, right here in Los Angeles. Thank you so much for joining us, Father.

FATHER THOMAS RAUSCH, PROFESSOR OF CATHOLIC THEOLOGY, LOYOLA MERRYMOUNT UNIVERSITY: Thank you; it's nice to be with you.

SESAY: I've got to ask you, first and foremost, just sort of big picture, what you make of this spat, John doesn't want to call it a war of words so let's call it a spat between Donald Trump and the Pope? For a lot of people, they're saying they can't ever remember a time where the Pope has weighed in in such a way in an election year, any pope.

RAUSCH: It seems like he's addressed Trump very personally, but his trip to Mexico he's been challenging the government of Mexico. He's been challenging the bishops. He's been rebuking them for palling around with the wealthy and not being sufficiently attentive to the poor. He's talking about the drug trade and the corruption and the marginalization of the minority peoples; and I think this is more example of the same thing.

This whole event on the border was set up with this platform overlooking the border and into the United States and I think he really wants to make the issue of immigration, which there are hundreds of millions of immigrants today and he is saying this is an issue for Christians to address.

VAUSE: Father, I want to ask you though about your response to what Donald Trump said tonight during our Town Hall. He kind of walked this all back, [00:25:02] just a little bit. He's saying, well, Mexican Government got to the Pope, told him all the bad things about the wall and he wasn't fully informed. Do you think that's --

RAUSCH: I doubt that entirely. This Pope is enormously informed and he's doesn't say thing accidentally. I mean, he's very careful about what he says. I think you have to realize this is not somebody who spent 30 years in the Vatican Diplomatic Service. This is a Latin American. He's --

VAUSE: This is a working -

RAUSCH: This is a working Pope. He comes from the Villa Paz (ps) area in Buenos Aires, where he's worked with these priests that work in the inner cities, with these very poor people. He's very direct, and he's very hard to keep quiet. So, you know, he likes to go off the record. He likes to go off the cuff and he drives the officials of the Vatican crazy because he says what's on his mind, but it's always planned. SESAY: It's always planned, so you would have known that there would have been this big eruption after?

RAUSCH: I think he would have known that if he addressed the immigration issue as clearly and as strongly as he did there would be a strong reaction.

SESAY: One thing I wanted to ask you: it's one thing to criticize the policy of immigration, but it's another thing to go that extra step and call, indirectly, Donald Trump, we know he's talking about him, unchristian.

RAUSCH: That's true. I mean, somebody's a Christian that's been baptized. That's the first point. You know, it's more a question of are they acting like Christians? Maybe the Pope is a little tired of these candidates that wrap themselves in the bible and forget about the words of Jesus -

VAUSE: You mean -

RAUSCH: -- feed the hungry and shelter the homeless and welcome the stranger and I don't hear this from a lot of the candidates today and I think the Pope is very conscious of that. And in his prophetic role he's trying to say, this is what Jesus taught. This is what Jesus taught, let's not just wrap ourselves in the bible and forget the beatitudes and the teaching themselves.

VAUSE: Pope also made some headlines on Tuesday by suggesting that contraception may be used to prevent the spread of the Zika virus. Let's listen to what the Holy Father had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

POPE FRANCIS: Avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil. In certain cases, such as this one, such as the one I mentioned of Blessed Paul VI, it was clear. I would also urge doctors to do their utmost to find vaccines against these mosquitoes that carry this disease. This needs to be worked on.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VAUSE: Father, is this a big dramatic change because this is sort of a continuation of the policy which the Church has had for some time; isn't it?

RAUSCH: Certainly the condemnation of contraceptives is a continuation of policy, but to recognize that contraceptives can sometimes be used with legitimate ends is not new. In 1960 Pope Paul VI said, in the early '60s, he said that religious women, sisters, in the, what was then the Belgian Congo, when the revolutionaries were using rape as a method of the war, that they could take contraceptives to prevent pregnancy. Pope Benedict, in 1910, said that couples could use contraceptives if one of them was HIV positive, so the intention was not primarily birth control but really to prevent disease. It's the same thing here. That's why I think he referred to it as the lesser evil. This is not something new. It's something that the church has recognized before.

SESAY: Having said that, when the Pope was asked about the issue of HIV and condoms last year, specifically in relation to Africa, he said it was a complicated situation for the church. So some are saying that there's some kind of contradiction here, in what he's saying in relation to Zika and what he said last year in relation and the spread of HIV in Africa.

RAUSCH: I think in regards to the spread of HIV, you know, the Popes and the bishops have been very cautious about saying as long as you use condoms everything is fine because there's all sorts of other ways that HIV is transmitted. Abstinence is much more effective in preventing the spread of HIV; there's all sort of statistics that show that. So when they say it's a more complicated issue, I think that's what they had in mind because there's some evidence that when people use condoms the lack of caution goes down.

VAUSE: Father, it's good to speak with you. Thank you so much for being with us.

SESAY: Thank you.

RAUSCH: Thank you, again.

SESAY: Thanks for joining us.

VAUSE: It's been a pleasure.

SESAY: We're going to take a quick break now. ISIS has stepped up its recruitment of child soldiers. Just ahead we'll introduce you to a boy picked to be a suicide bomber; what the militants made him do before he ran for his life.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[00:32:52] VAUSE: Welcome back, everybody; you're watching "CNN Newsroom," live from Los Angeles. I'm John Vause.

SESAY: And I'm Isha Sesay; the headlines this hour: (HEADLINES)

VAUSE: A new report released just this hour shows ISIS is mobilizing children and teens at an alarming rate. The results first published in "The CTC Sentinel" looked at the deaths of 89 children eulogized in ISIS propaganda.

SESAY: The majority were killed detonating improvised explosives or as soldiers in battle. 60-percent were adolescent between 12 and 16 years old. 6-percent were younger than 12.

VAUSE: Just over half died in Iraq. 36-percent were killed in Syria. The rest were killed in Yemen, Libya and Nigeria.

CNN has seen firsthand how ISIS is recruiting children.

SESAY: CNN International Correspondent Nima Elbagir traveled to one town to in Northern Iraq to meet with survivors of the terror group. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NIMA ELBAGIR: CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Five-year-old Sara was captured alongside her mother with ISIS. Now free, when her parents aren't looking she runs to cover their face. It's what their ISIS captors taught her at gunpoint.

El Faro Institute, in Raqqah, ISIS claims it is their main child soldier training facility. To "jihad, to jihad" they're chanting. In this [00:35:04] propaganda video spread out on either side of an ISIS trainer, blank faced rows of children sit. One boy shakes, visibly. Others, unable to raise their gaze. These are the so-called "cubs of the caliphate," ISIS' army of child soldiers.

And by god's grace, he's saying, in the coming days they will be at the frontlines of the fight against the nonbelievers.

The (inaudible) front line, south of the Kurdistan regional capital, Erbil, the Peshmerga commander tells us this is one of their most contested front lines.

Just the other side of that river there, that's where he says the ISIS positions are. Just the other side of that broken bridge and it's from there he says that desperate children are fleeing, making their way through that river, swimming through the river, under cover of dark, risking their lives to make it here, to safety. But not all manage to escape.

AZIZ ABDULLAH HADUR, COMMANDER, PESHMERGA ARMY, via translator: Many times when we are fighting ISIS, we see children at the frontline. They're wearing explosive vests.

ELBAGIR: What it's like for you to have to open fire on children.

HADUR: They are brainwashed. When they make it throw our lines, they kill our fighters. It's an unbearably hard decision. You don't know what to do; if you don't kill them, they'll kill you.

ELBAGIR: U.S. military sources tell CNN as ISIS comes under increased pressure on the battlefield they are relying on child soldiers to fill out the ranks. This 12-year-old boy was featured in the El Faro Institute propaganda video. He says he was training to be a suicide bomber. Now, reunited his mother, he's asked us not to broadcast his face or his voice. He's asked that we call him Nasur, not his real name.

NASUR, FORMER ISIS TRAINEE: There were 60 of us. The scariest times for us all were when the air strikes happened. They'd lead all of us underground into the tunnels to hide. They told us the Americas, the unbelievers, were trying to kill us, but they, the fighters, loved this.

ELBAGIR: This, of course, was all part of the indoctrination. His ISIS handlers would tell him they were now his only family.

NASUR: When we were training they would tell us our parents were unbelievers, unclean and that our first job was to go back and kill them; that we were cleaning the world of them, of all unbelievers.

ELBAGIR: Nasur says the youngest of the boys was 5 years old; none of them exempt from the grueling training.

NASUR: We weren't allowed to cry, but I would think about my mother, thing about her worrying about me and I'd try to cry quietly.

ELBAGIR: Highly stylized and romanticized, ISIS has released a number of videos showcasing its child army, but the reality is, of course, very different.

HADUR: When they arrive to us they are so skinny. They barely look human. They tell us they've been living in a hell.

ELBAGIR: Back at the camp, Sara's mother hopes her little girl will eventually forget about the headscarf and the face-covering and the men with guns who threatened her life.

Nima Elbagir, CNN, Iraq.

(END VIDE CLIP)

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[00:40:45] SESAY: Dramatic video out of the U.S.; a helicopter with five people on board crashed into Hawaii's Pearl Harbor Thursday.

VAUSE: Horrified onlookers describe the scene as the chopper came spiraling down.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DARLA THOMPSON, WITNESS: When we first saw it I actually turned and I said, do those land on water because it looks like it's coming and then within a second somebody else yelled get down and we just kind of turned and ran and tried to take cover.

DANIEL ROSE, WITNESS: If he would have hit on land, there was 100 people standing right there. He would have hurt a lot of people, but the pilot looked like he pulled it back into the water. Honestly, I don't know how much control he had of the plane, but it looked like he was trying not to land on land because there's no landing area there, just people were standing around looking at all the different sites here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SESAY: Absolutely terrifying. Well, Navy and fire department both responded to the scene, rescuing everyone on board. CNN affiliate KHON says a 15-year-old boy is in critical condition.

VAUSE: The crash temporarily shut down operations at the Pearl Harbor Visitors Center and the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial

SESAY: Frightening. Now, a stunning image from Yosemite National Park in California. As you look at that image, that is not lava that you're seeing but a different kind of natural occurrence that people call the "Fire Fall".

VAUSE: The effect happens around this time every year when the setting sun hits the waterfall in just the right way, making it appear to glow.

SESAY: Very pretty.

VAUSE: Nice stuff.

SESAY: Kind of other worldly.

VAUSE: A little bit, I guess.

SESAY: Well, good news for all you Harry Potter fans out there. The "Wizarding World" - you're a Harry Potter fan?

VAUSE: Well my daughter is.

SESAY: You are -

VAUSE: We feel like a bit of (inaudible).

SESAY: Well the "Wizarding World" is opening at Universal Studios Hollywood in just a few weeks.

VAUSE: I can see it as I'm driving in to work every day, on the 101. You look up and there you go. it's slowly going up and after you've had the rides and the rides and you're being told the shops, then you go eat.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Rose and butter beer for all Muggles.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: John, Isha, take a walk inside. They did everything possible to capture the spirit of the Harry Potter books and the movies. This restaurant, "The Three Broomsticks." This room, "The Antler Room"; and now joining me, Executive Chef Eric Capello. You really want out of your way to capture the spirit of English fare. Tell us about that.