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Amanpour

The Relationship Between The U.S. And Russia; Effect Of Drone Strikes In Yemen; Supplies of Lethal Injection Drug Drying Up

Aired August 12, 2013 - 15:00   ET

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

HALA GORANI, CNN GUEST HOST: Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the program. I'm Hala Gorani, filling in for Christiane Amanpour.

Don't come home, at least for now. That's the advice to NSA leaker Edward Snowden from his own father. Lon Snowden says that American leaders have "poisoned the well," quote-unquote, against his son. He says he's not confident that Edward could even hope for a fair trial here in the United States.

Asylum for Snowden could be the straw that broke the camel's back in U.S.- Russian relations recently, causing the Obama administration to cancel a planned summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But there was already a considerable pile of problems to deal with. There's a notable lack of progress and arms control and trade negotiations between the two countries. Also there's Russia's staunch defense of Syria's Assad regime which continues to be an issue between the two nations.

On Friday, however, President Obama tried to tamp down the talk of tension between the two leaders. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I know the press likes to focus on body language and he's got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom. But the truth is that when we're in conversations together, oftentimes it's very productive.

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GORANI: That said, the body language is kind of hard to argue with. You kind of see it in that picture behind me. So can this relationship be saved?

Masha Lipman is a Moscow-based analyst who covers Russia for "The New Yorker" magazine. Thanks for being with us, Masha.

(CROSSTALK)

GORANI: Can the relationship be saved? Are we on --

MASHA LIPMAN, "THE NEW YORKER": Thanks for inviting me.

GORANI: Are we, Masha, on the precipice of a new Cold War or is that too dramatic?

LIPMAN: Well, I don't think we can talk about the Cold War if understood as an existential struggle between two worlds, with the USSR and the United States seeking to impose its model of development on parts of the world. It's a pole dividing the world into two different systems. Of course not. And Russia is so much weaker than the United States right now.

However if we see the Cold War as a time with a shortage of contact, as a time when the two nations would not even try to understand each other, leading to misunderstandings, to a lot of suspicions, in this sense I think the situation into these relations can be compared to the Cold War.

GORANI: It can be. In what sense can it not? I mean, this is reparable, right?

LIPMAN: Well, I hope it is even though I'm not sure how soon and on -- whether in actually Obama's presidency we can hope for the relations to resume.

GORANI: So let's talk about why, then. Is it a leadership issue in the form of Vladimir Putin? Is it a personal dislike between the two men? Is it completely different strategic interests between the two countries?

LIPMAN: Well, I think the two countries reached a point when they've got basically nothing to talk about. The differences between the two nations, between the U.S. and Russia have way outbalanced any potential for understanding. And the difference is applied to the most crucial issues of bilateral relations.

The issue of nuclear arms cuts, which has been at an impasse because of missile defense -- Syria, Iran, the most crucial issues plus the Snowden affair which, indeed, has been the last straw. So President Obama apparently found himself in a situation when he cannot longer help to get things done with Russia.

GORANI: And let's talk Edward Snowden. It is -- and it's something you mentioned in one of your pieces as well, Masha, sort of I suppose hypocritical on Russia's part to be lecturing anybody about human rights and freedom of expression when one of the examples you used is Alexei Navalny, who himself was jailed on embezzlement charges -- or convicted, I should say, on embezzlement charges.

But it was seen as a fabricated case against him.

LIPMAN: Well, indeed. For Russia to be sheltering somebody who actually can be a victim of unfair prosecution or who is fleeing America because he is afraid that the American justice will take revenge on him. For him to find shelter in Russia sounds a bit bizarre, given that Russia's own whistleblowers, like Navalny, like you mentioned, who' s been convicted on fabricated charges and privacy is not something that's well protected in Russia, to say the least.

So in this sense, this is a bizarre place for Snowden to find refuge in.

GORANI: Is that because perhaps he calculated correctly in this case that Russia would help him in his asylum request, while other nations perhaps were a little bit more reluctant to enter into some sort of diplomatic conflict with the U.S.?

LIPMAN: Well, I think from what we know about this story, he -- Snowden actually may have miscalculated thinking that Russia was but a stopover in his trip to someplace in Latin America.

It looked like he actually was headed there, but was stranded in Russia for -- in Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow for a while because Putin would not extradite him to America -- of course not -- neither would Putin actually dispatch him to any country in the world if he had suspicion that the Americans would seize him there and bring him to America and he will stand before American justice.

So this was actually the way America -- to use Putin's expression, scared a little bit, countries of the world, into cooperating with America, painted Snowden into a corner, did not leave him with much opportunity. But by the same token, actually painting President Putin into a corner with no opportunity except to give him shelter.

GORANI: What would life be like for Edward Snowden now in Russia? We understand he's possibly not even in Moscow. We don't know where he is.

LIPMAN: Nobody knows his whereabouts. According to his lawyer, he took a cab and went all by himself, his direction unknown, which is very hard to believe. He apparently does not take his own decisions right now and does not make his own choices. And in this case, his situation is not enviable. But I think if you have been extradited or otherwise faced American prosecution and justice, your situation would not be enviable, either.

GORANI: And one last question, I mean, we've been talking about all the problems. We talked about arms reduction. We talked about Syria, Snowden not being the least between the two countries. There's still a G20 summit in St. Petersburg an opportunity perhaps for the two men to have another awkward photo op, I don't know.

But on lower levels, there are conversations between the two countries and ministerial -- at the ministerial level. So what would it take to fix this problem?

LIPMAN: Well, the meeting of the ministerial level indeed took place. But I don't think it has any substance to it. When you know that your boss is the president of the two countries are -- basically are not going to meet, what can ministers do? I think basically nothing.

I think there was a -- there were voices from the American side which said that Russia should make concessions in order to repair its relations with America. But I think the word "concession" is something that's totally unacceptable to President Putin. He is not a kind of a leader and has proved that time and time again who'd conceded under pressure. And he's not in a position to concede now.

GORANI: Masha Lipman, thanks very much for joining us from Moscow with your analysis and take on this tense bilateral relationship.

Now in the streets of Yemen's capital, right now the buzz is all about the buzzing above. For two days, an aircraft circled above the city of Sanaa, which rarely sees this type of activity. At the same time, there's also been a sustained uptick in drone strikes across Yemen's various provinces, against suspected militant targets.

Freelance journalist Adam Baron is one of the few Western journalists in Yemen, and he joins me now.

Adam, we were talking with you and a few of your other colleagues about sort of unmanned aircraft, this kind of constant buzz above Sanaa, which is unusual, in the several days after the initial terror alert.

Is this still going on?

ADAM BARON, FREELANCE JOURNALIST: No, I haven't spotted -- seen any planes -- or, excuse me, spy planes with the same type that were spotted a few days ago over the skies (inaudible) about three days now.

So it's not presence, but the memory of that still ends up -- people are talking about it, you know, people are talking about it on a regular basis until now.

GORANI: What's the situation now in Sanaa?

BARON: If you look at the streets of Sanaa, it's hard to get the sense that anything is out of order, you know, traffic moves normally. Shops are closed, but that's because it's also it's a holiday marking the end of Ramadan. So if anything, this is -- the heat has gone off completely normally. Most businesses and (inaudible) will return to work tomorrow; schools will be open, things like that.

And for the most part for the average Yemeni, very little has been different for the past week, even as terror alert has dominated headlines in the U.S. and elsewhere.

GORANI: The terror alert as well as those drone strikes. What do we know about the targets? And who might have been killed?

BARON: At this point, all that's really known is that these are people that the government, the U.S. and Yemeni government suspects are militants. It's very hard to get confirmed identities for the people that are killed, both because of the location of many of the strikes and also because the bodies of people killed in the strikes tend to be burned beyond recognition.

What's clear at this point is that some of them were known Al Qaeda militants, albeit no prominent leaders, but also that some of the people killed were indeed innocent civilians, including at least one child. So this is something that in addition to killing militants as far as certain people are concerned, it also increases the resentment of the strikes across swaths of the Yemeni population.

GORANI: What do Yemenis things, those who are able to speak to in Sanaa and elsewhere? What do they think of Americans and what's been going on over the last several weeks?

BARON: I mean, generally, it's hard to say there's been an uptick in anti- American sentiment in terms of -- as an American living inside. I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary in terms of how people treat me. That being said, the drone strikes have dominated the discussion in Sanaa to an extent that I personally have not seen in my 2.5 years here. It's across societal lines.

You know, you'll have police debating the strikes and their results. And then you'll also have ordinary people, shopkeeper and what have you, talking about it in the streets. I think the danger is that these strikes are coming to represent the United States' intervention in Yemen, which is something that couldn't -- it has the potential to bode pretty poorly for the U.S. in the future.

GORANI: And regarding then the -- I suppose the future and the everyday concerns of Yemenis, we have very little opportunity to get these reports from Yemen.

What is their biggest concern? We know what the West thinks about first and foremost with regards to Yemen. What about ordinary Yemenis?

BARON: For the average Yemeni, it's about eking out a living. It's about having -- being able to put enough food on the table. It's about dealing with high unemployment and an economy that has yet to pick up after the anti-government uprising against Ali Abdul Saleh in 2011. When it comes to sort of political issues, (inaudible) seen as a result of other things.

People will talk politics. They'll talk about the developments. They'll talk about these central governments' inability to really hold control over many areas outside of Sanaa. So I think for Yemenis the concerns are two things.

It's economic and then it's security. Well, security tends to be equated with Al Qaeda when it comes to Yemen, outside of Yemen. Inside, if your security is seen as a host of other issues, which are seen as fueling the AQAP presence.

GORANI: Sure. It's always more complex than it seems from the outside as always.

Adam Baron, thanks very much, talking to us from Sanaa in Yemen.

BARON: Thank you.

GORANI: And while we continue to associate Yemen with drone strikes and Al Qaeda, in Yemen's capital city of Sanaa, there's over 2,500 years of culture and tradition there, a UNESCO World Heritage site nestled in the mountains, the Old City of Sanaa is home to over 100 mosques and has been a center of learning and a thriving trading hub for centuries before these difficult years.

And after a break, we'll turn to a story here in the United States that you may find hard to believe. What if the death penalty were to die? Not for lack of support but because of a lack of supplies? We'll explain when we come back.

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GORANI: Welcome back to the program. I'm Hala Gorani, filling in for Christiane today.

Texas in the United States, the most active death penalty state in the country may not be able to carry out executions by next month because Texas is running out of pentobarbital, the sole drug it uses in lethal injections.

The supply of the sedative, which is deadly in very high doses, began to dry up two years ago after European human rights groups spoke up against the drug's use in executions in the U.S. A Danish drugmaker responded by cutting off its distribution for use in capital punishment.

Liliana Segura is associate editor at "The Nation" and reports extensively on the death penalty in the U.S., and she joins me now from New York.

Thanks for being with us, Liliana. First up, so this issue with the supply of this lethal drug that is used in a combination to execute inmates in Texas, the fact that this supply may dry out, what impact will it have on these scheduled executions in this state?

LILIANA SEGURA, "THE NATION": Well, because we're talking about Texas, the immediate impact is quite significant because Texas does outpace every other state and just that the number of executions it carries out.

But what we've seen, this is really the second time in two years that Texas has faced this kind of shortage. And what we've found, not just in Texas, but even in states like California, whose death penalty has been suspended for years, states that are intent on obtaining drugs used for lethal injection will find a way to do so.

And this is really part of a much larger story that shows incredible efforts across the country by death penalty states to find drugs to use in lethal injection in some of the more most far-flung places and actually breaking the U.S. law to do so.

GORANI: How so, breaking U.S. law?

SEGURA: Well, the -- so, for example, when we saw a few years ago in Georgia that actually the Drug Enforcement Agency had to come in and seize Georgia's supply of drugs that were being supplied specifically of sodium thiopental, which was the first of three drugs being used in lethal injection to carry out lethal injection in Florida .

And what happened was that there were concerned that it -- those drugs had been exported in a sort of corrupt manner in secret. Georgia has since attempted to actually make secret the process by which it obtains its execution drugs.

And the more important sort of significant fact involving Georgia is that those drugs had actually been found to be expired and were linked to executions that were actually botched, meaning that the prisoner actually suffered a very grisly death and one that -- which really would be considered unconstitutional because --

GORANI: And you've written about that, I was going to say, Lilian, in "The Nation" about some of these executions that were supposed to be painless and quick, and the inmate, in fact, was awake and suffered quite a bit before dying.

SEGURA: That's right, that's right. And this actually goes back to the sort of method that we have designed to make executions look like humane events. They're not. But what happened in Georgia is that the first of this three-drug cocktail, as it was known, sodium thiopental was meant -- it's a sedative that's meant to put a prisoner under.

The second drug in that series is a drug that actually is a paralyzing agent that masks any outward evidence of what is actually happening to a prisoner's body. And then the third drug induces a heart attack. And so what happens if the first drug doesn't work, is that that paralyzing agent masks actually evidence of great suffering and this has been documented a number of cases.

GORANI: OK. Let's expand this from Texas to the rest of the country. It's not in every U.S. state that capital punishment is enforced or utilized. What -- how do you explain regional differences in the U.S.?

SEGURA: It's one of those recurring questions that has to do -- it's a cultural question. Texas, it is a sort of an outlier, although it's important to note, too, that Texas is actually handing down fewer and fewer death sentences every year. I mean, its executions continue apace, but when it comes to the sort of broader trends around capital punishment, a state like Florida, for example, actually is one to watch in terms of they're really trying to quicken the pace of executions.

But there is something obviously about the American South that has shown its predilection for this kind of most ultimate punishment, so to speak.

GORANI: And you know what, also what I find interesting, having lived and having been raised in Europe my whole childhood and teen years, and the fact that in France, for instance, capital punishment was outlawed in the very early '80s -- in 1980, I believe -- nowadays even the suggestion that capital punishment should be reinstated is met with shock and disbelief. There is such a huge cultural gulf between the U.S. and European countries with regard to capital punishment.

And the question is why, because on so many values, they're similar.

SEGURA: It's true and I don't know that there's a way to sort of pinpoint the explanation for that. I will say, though, that you -- from country to country it's sort of -- there is popular support in Europe for the death penalty in theory. It's just when it comes to actually the sort of appetite or political appetite to reimplement it, it sort of dissipates.

And so actually we've seen a similar trend though here in the United States. I mean, here in New York, where I am, there was an opportunity for the state, the death penalty sort of was suspended in an unexpected manner. And when it came to actually making the effort to bring it back, it was -- politicians really didn't feel the need to make that a priority.

And what we're seeing now, increasingly, is that states like Maryland, Illinois, New Mexico, Connecticut have taken legislative action to get rid of the death penalty. So we're seeing a change there.

GORANI: There is a change; however, you look at Texas, 500 people killed by lethal injection since the '80s. You mentioned Florida as well. So that's not ending there. And then of the supply or drugs dries out, then they will simply find it somewhere else, is what you're saying.

SEGURA: That's true. And actually there's been talk including in California, again, in California there was a bill to actually bring back the gas chamber because the state's lethal injection protocol has been all tied up in litigation for so many years.

So it is true that states that are intent on killing prisoners will find a way to do so. But I do think that it lays bare the kind of grotesque nature of the issue and that I think a lot of Americans are sort of turned off -- increasingly turned off by that, especially as we've seen innocents, the possibility of executing innocent people become such an issue.

GORANI: Right. There's a small percentage, but it always exists, that you're killing the wrong person, I suppose, and there's also the debate about why not just broadcast it on television if you support it and pay for it.

SEGURA: Absolutely. I believe that if Americans actually had a front row view into executions and the way that they're carried, I think that it would disturb a lot of people. A lot of people aren't willing to stand up for the worst of the worst, so to speak, as death row prisoners are labeled. But I think that people -- if offends people's sense of decency that this is the way we carry (inaudible).

GORANI: Have you witnessed one?

SEGURA: I myself have not, no.

GORANI: All right. Liliana Segura of "The Nation," thanks so much for joining us with your take on this very sensitive issue. Thank you so much.

And after a break, diehard Texans are fond of saying, "Don't mess with Texas." When it comes to capital punishment, they have a long history of enforcing that warning, as we've discussed with Liliana. The Lone Star State of justice -- we'll have that when we come back.

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GORANI: A final thought tonight, as we've heard, the state of Texas faces a shortage of lethal chemicals to administer the death penalty. But imagine a world where Texas has always found a way, with more than 1,000 executions in its long and checkered history.

Back in 1819, before it was even a state, the Spanish territory of Texas ordered its first hanging. Over the next 100 years, as Texas became an independent republic and eventually a state, part of the U.S., 394 convicted felons would meet the same gruesome fate. Then in 1924, Texas replaced the gallows with this, the electric chair.

When five inmates were executed in a single day. Within four decades, 361 Texas prisoners would die in the chair, nicknamed "Old Sparky." There was a brief reprieve in 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court found the death penalty to be, quote, "cruel and unusual" as a punishment.

But four years later, the court reversed itself in 1982. Charles Brooks Jr. convicted of murder by a Texas jury became the first person in the U.S. to be executed by lethal injection. Even though the prosecutor in the case had doubts about his guilt and called for his sentence to be commuted.

Since then, Texas has executed 503 people by lethal injection and even if the supply of deadly chemicals dries up, the Lone Star State will no doubt find another way.

That's it for tonight's program. Meantime, you can always contact us on the AMANPOUR website, amanpour.com. And find me on Twitter, @halagorani. Thank you for watching and goodbye from the CNN Center.

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