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Gary Sinise Foundation Serves Veterans; White House Accidentally Outs CIA Station Chief in Afghanistan; Mental Health Evaluations in California; Pope Francis Wraps Mid East Trip

Aired May 26, 2014 - 15:30   ET

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

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BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Just past the bottom of the hour, you're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin, and you're about to see a familiar face, actor Gary Sinise.

He took a movie role and, in a way, made it live way beyond the screen, to the point, Memorial Day can no longer merely be a holiday for him. Sinise earned an Oscar nomination for playing Lieutenant Dan in "Forrest Gump."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GARY SINISE, ACTOR, "FORREST GUMP": You must be my FNG.

TOM HANKS, ACTOR, "FORREST GUMP": Good morning, sir.

SINISE: Get your hands down. Do not salute me. There are snipers all around the area who would love to grease an officer.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: The man who played a vet onscreen is advocating for vets as his full-time job.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SINISE: They're the ones that made the sacrifice, but somebody like me has to come forward and tell their story.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: That was Gary Sinise, just Sunday, as the host of the National Memorial Day concert on PBS.

His foundation works to raise money for veterans' groups. Sinise calls service members "freedom fighters," and he wants communities to get to know their local heroes.

SINISE: We as Americans who benefit from that freedom should do everything we can to support those who provide exit defend it, and that's what Memorial Day is about, but to me, every day is Veterans Day. Just making sure we take care of our service members before, during and after the battle is very, very important. It's critical. And we have a lot of residual effects from over 13 years of war now, and we're going to be facing those effects for a long time and the sacrifices that people have made going to Afghanistan, Iraq and throughout the years.

BALDWIN: Given the sacrifices, given the facts that our men and women are coming home and apparently not getting the help that they need, that this massive V.A. story, CNN helped break this wide open, and, yes, we know that there have been issues with V.A. facilities across the country for years, but I'm curious, because here you are in Washington. You're so active with veterans.

In the wake of this story, Gary, what are they telling you? A lot of times we focus on heads rolling, but in terms of solutions, how we can fix this?

SINISE: It's a very difficult problem. It's a giant bureaucracy, obviously. I think, you know, there are over 46,000 military non- profits out there that have popped up in the last dozen years.

That should tell you something, that there is a great need within the military community and a great hunger from the American people to serve the veterans' needs.

Now, if many of those military non-profits were not as successful as they are, I think we'd have a huge, huge catastrophe on our hands.

We have residual effects, as I said, from 13 years of war. Thankfully, there are non-profits working in partnership with government, but also just independently, that are doing a lot of things.

I have my own foundation, the Gary Sinise Foundation, whose mission is to serve and honor the needs of our military, our veterans, our first responders, their families, Gold Star families.

There's a lot of need out there. Unfortunately the government is never going meet all of those needs. It's important that non-profits work together to get more done and that we highlight within all the communities around this country the fact that they all have veterans.

And if those communities just take care of those veterans, we'll help to get the problem solved.

BALDWIN: Absolutely. We can all do better. Gary Sinise, thank you so much for your time and for stopping by for us in Washington, D.C., today. Thank you so much.

For this next story, let's stay in Washington because the White House now is facing backlash after accidentally revealing the identity of the top CIA officer in Kabul.

The agency's cover -- the agent's cover was blown as President Obama embarked on that unannounced trip over the weekend to Afghanistan.

So, senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta has more on this one for us now, and so, Jim, how the heck did this happen?

JIM ACOSTA, CNN SENIOR WHITE CORRESPONDENT: That is a question that a lot of people are asking, not just people inside the White House and over at the CIA, but inside the press corps.

And basically at this point, Brooke, the White House and the CIA are not commenting at this point. And we should point out that CNN and other news outlets are not revealing or identifying the CIA station chief's name who was revealed, basically, during the president's trip to Afghanistan yesterday.

But here is basically what happened. White House press officials provided this name to the print reporter who is traveling with the president.

That print reporter was part of the pool, as we call it, that small group of reporters who travel with the president, watch his movements, report them back to the other colleagues who want to know what's going on but can't get inside that security bubble that's around the president.

And then that print, pool reporter took that name along with the other participants involved in the presidential event. This is something that typically happens at all these events. The White House provides a list of names of all the people who are involved.

That print, pool reporter put that list inside his pool report, sent it back to the White House. It went through the White House again and then out to the 6,000 or so representatives of the news media, who received that pool report.

And it was at that point that the print reporter who was involved of all this noticed the name in there and said to the White House, hey, wait a minute, do you want the station chief's name from Afghanistan, the top intelligence operative in Afghanistan, in this pool report?

White House said, No, let's get it out now, and they made the correction, but by that point, the identity had been put out there.

And now privately I will tell you that, people inside the White House and inside the CIA, they are very worried and furious, really, about what happened here, Brooke.

BALDWIN: On the worry point, does this individual who we are not naming need to be yanked out of Afghanistan for any period of time? Is that person's security vulnerable right now?

ACOSTA: Brooke, I can only imagine that that is already taking place, or if it hasn't taken place, it will take place, or at least it's going to be seriously considered, because you'll recall this just doesn't happen very often, where, you know, the top CIA official in a very vulnerable and dangerous hot spot such as Afghanistan is released. And we really don't see covert operatives names ever really put out there. It only happens rarely.

You'll recall back during the Bush administration, Valerie Plame.

BALDWIN: Of course.

ACOSTA: Remember that name, Valerie Plame? Her name was outed by members of the Bush administration who were upset about her husband's criticism about the case for war in Iraq. And that became a big deal. And somebody from the Bush administration went to prison over it.

And so this just doesn't happen. And Valerie Plame, by the way --

BALDWIN: She tweeted about it.

ACOSTA: -- tweeted about it, and said, "Astonishing. White House mistakenly identifies CIA station chief in Afghanistan."

That goes to, Brooke, some of the feelings that exist inside the intelligence community that sometimes the people at the White House, doesn't matter which party is in power, may not always have their back.

But sometimes these screw-ups can happen and this was a colossal one, Brooke. There is really no sugar-coating it.

To have something like this happen, there's really just no underscoring how potentially dangerous this could be to this operative, members of his family, other people in the field whose identities could also be revealed as a result of all this.

BALDWIN: We will watch for the presumable fallout. Jim Acosta, thank you so much, at the White House.

ACOSTA: You bet.

Coming up next, we will take a closer look at what can be done to stop tragedies like the one that unfolded over the weekend in California.

We know that the gunman had a therapist, had therapists, for years. Should health care professionals have a bigger role, more authority when it comes to warning police about their patients?

Let's go there, next.

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BALDWIN: Reading through this Santa Barbara shooter's manifesto, pages and pages, you can't help be surprised.

At times, it sounds normal, at others, just totally deranged, and sometimes both, like when he describes practicing his shooting before this planned rampage, he wrote, "I couldn't believe my life was actually turning out this way. There I was, practicing shooting with real guns because I had a plan to carry out a massacre." Even Elliot Rodger sounds stunned that he is plotting to kill several people. And so people are now suggesting Elliot Rodger may have suffered from mental illness.

But what really does that mean? And what needs to happen to change to stop this from happening?

Here, joining me once again, Doris Fuller, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, and, Doris, told you over a commercial break, and I love having you on, but I hate all these subjects that we have to delve into, but it's important to talk about mental illness, because I feel like sometimes it's the broad term people try to -- this blanket term people try to use to explain why people murder. But it's incredibly nuanced and complicated.

But in this case, it seems like, with the shooter, there was ample evidence that something was up.

DORIS FULLER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, TREATMENT ADVOCACY CENTER: You're absolutely right; mental illness is very nuanced, and it gets thrown around and describes a lot of different things.

When we look at someone like Jared Loughner or James Holmes in Tucson or in Aurora, when you looked at the videos, you looked at some of the background, you could clearly see someone with symptoms of a severe psychotic disorder, which it came out later they did have.

Elliot Rodger is a different case. You look at that video, and as misogynist and hateful as it is, he seems lucid, he seems under control, so on and so forth. So how do we know who's at risk, and how do we act? Those are questions that are of burning concern right now.

BALDWIN: Right.

FULLER: In this case, as you say, the thing is with Elliot Rodger, there was ample evidence to some people that he was dangerous. Danger is the threshold that every state has for getting someone evaluated for psychiatric distress.

Elliot Rodger didn't get evaluated, so one of the questions is, where did the system fail so that we not get this young man who was making very specific threats about killing people, also about killing himself, why didn't he get caught?

BALDWIN: It seems, though, when you read more about him, apparently he had been seeing therapists, off and on, since he was eight, I think, most recently, seeing two different therapists, almost on a daily basis, is what I had read.

Yes, his mother had seen some bothersome videos on YouTube back in April. She contacted the therapists who contacted a mental health official who contacted police to check him out.

But my question really is, when it comes to these therapists, what authority do they have to ring the alarm bell? FULLER: Well, it really depends on the -- the states all set up their own rules for who can notify, who can initiate an emergency evaluation to see if somebody is in trouble.

Now, unfortunately, California is one of those states where citizens can't initiate. So in a state where they could have, Elliot's parents could have gone to a court and said, We believe our son is dangerous. They could have presented the evidence they have --

BALDWIN: So it's a court system and all of that battle?

FULLER: -- and they could initiated it.

It's the law. It's what the law allows, and the law in California closes -- is very narrow.

Only a mental health professional and I believe that some designated professionals could initiate that process, and that's really -- that is the entry door for getting someone who is in trouble at least evaluated.

Doesn't guarantee they will get treatment. Doesn't guarantee what happens afterwards. But it does mean they will get looked at, not by a police officer who isn't a trained mental health worker, but get looked at by a professional in mental illness.

BALDWIN: What needs to change?

FULLER: The law in California --

BALDWIN: What needs to change?

FULLER: Well -- well, we need to fix the system, so where does that start? One thing -- we always say this, Brooke, every time you and I talk. We need more hospital beds.

Here's the deal in Santa Barbara. If Santa Barbara had the state average number of acute crisis beds, it would have 70. It has 16. So it doesn't have the beds for people in crisis.

So now the police get called. They go out and interview someone. In this case he looked pretty good, but let's say he didn't even look pretty good. They know there's only 16 beds. Are they going to roll him in and he's going to be kept? This is always a question that the police have to worry about.

So then we have a situation where we've got a law that doesn't let the parents get him. We don't have any beds. The police know we don't have beds. The parents are cut out of the system.

And it goes -- you know, it's kind of like microcosm of all the problems, so then nothing happens.

BALDWIN: OK. And nothing happens --

FULLER: And he's dangerous. BALDWIN: -- and then you have dead, young people.

FULLER: He's dangerous.

BALDWIN: Doris Fuller, we could do and we have done a half hour on mental illness.

Doris Fuller, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center. Let's keep the conversation going. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it --

FULLER: Thank you, Brooke.

BALDWIN: -- important to have that talk.

Coming up next, the pope's historic trip to the Middle East, why his remarks about Palestinians made headlines around the world.

We will tell you exactly what he said.

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BALDWIN: Pope Francis is wrapping up his three-day trip to the Middle East with visits to key places in Jerusalem that are important to Muslims and Jews there.

Today, he met with six survivors of the Holocaust and kissed their hands in a gesture of humility. He removed his shoes and prayed and left a note at the Western Wall, the holiest place where Jews can pray.

Here to look at the significance of the pope's stops, why they are so worthy, Father Beck, nice to have you on.

FATHER EDWARD BECK, CNN RELIGION COMMENTATOR: Thanks, Brooke. Good to be here.

BALDWIN: Let's talk about some of the poignant moments, specifically just looking over my e-mail that you sent me, seeing the pope standing with Peres and Abbas inviting them back to the Vatican to pay for peace.

BECK: Yes, it seems that the pope wants to continue his image as a peace broker. He said, please, no military aggression.

He had another day of fasting and prayer and intervening in that peace process and it seems that he's intent in intervening, too, even though there's controversy thus far about his interventions, especially, of course, his stop at the security wall where he bowed his head in prayer.

BALDWIN: Why is he doing this, beyond the role of peacemaker? Bigger picture here, Father?

BECK: I think the pope sees it a question of justice. How long does this land need to continue to be divided? So when he stood at that security wall, we know that he's not in favor of that wall because from his perspective and from the perspective of many others, there are oppressed people that are encamped behind that wall.

Now, I understand that Prime Minister Netanyahu did not like the fact that the pope stopped at that wall, and it's reported that they had a little bit of a testy interchange when Netanyahu said to the pope, you know, Jesus is from Israel and Jesus would recognize the need for this wall and security. He spoke Hebrew.

And the pope corrected him. He said, No, he spoke Aramaic, and I will talk to you about the security wall once the reporters leave the room.

So the pope pushed back a little at Netanyahu and said, we need to talk about this. Yes, Israel is entitled to security. It's a necessity. But Palestinians are entitled to freedom. How can we make this work?

BALDWIN: Looking at these pictures, is this a first for the pope?

BECK: Yes. It's also the first for the pope to enter the territory through the West Bank there.

BALDWIN: Flying directly in.

BECK: Exactly. He came through Jordan and he wanted to first meet at the West Bank, the occupied territory, with the president of the Palestine. Only then did he meet with the president of Israel.

So something symbolic is being said here by the pope, but, of course, he balanced that all out, Brooke.

Then today we saw those wonderful images of him laying a wreath at the tomb of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, who said, of course, that Israel has a right to security, a right to a homeland.

You showed those images at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum. Usually people come up to the pope and they kiss his hand or his ring. What does this pope do? Once again, he turns it around. He kissed their hand.

So he made remarkable, remarkable images and gestures during this short trip.

BALDWIN: So exciting talking about and covering this pope, Pope Francis. Father Edward Beck, thank you so much --

BECK: Thank you, Brooke.

BALDWIN: -- for sharing your perspective with us. Appreciate it.

And coming up next, we will take you to the largest Memorial Day event in the nation. Stay right here.

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BALDWIN: And before I let you go, here we go, live pictures from Washington, D.C.. This is the National Memorial Day Parade.

This is actually the largest Memorial Day event in the nation and, of course, honors those killed in every war since the American Revolution. It's actually broadcast live to troops all around the world.

I'm Brooke Baldwin. Thank you so much for being with me on this Memorial Day.

"THE LEAD" with Jake Tapper starts right now.

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