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Obama Wants 9,000 Troops to Stay Past 2014; Grieving Father Forced to Bury His Daughter; Satellite Data of Flight 370 Released; Is Diet Soda Good for Dieting?

Aired May 27, 2014 - 14:00   ET

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

WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: "NEWSROOM" with Brooke Baldwin starts right now.

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Wolf, thank you so much.

Hi, everyone. I'm Brooke Baldwin. Happy Tuesday.

Big news as well, watching the clock. Wolf just alluded to it. Forty-five minutes from now, President Barack Obama is expected to lay out his vision for U.S. military forces in Afghanistan. And we will be hearing a number that a lot of people have actually been waiting to hear. The number is 9800. That is the number of troops who stay in Afghanistan by the end of the year, which means more than 22,000 Americans will be coming home.

Under the president's plan, just two years later, by the next presidential election, the only American soldiers in Afghanistan could be a pretty modest force protecting the embassy and capital of Kabul.

CNN senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta joins me now.

And, Jim, we've heard a lot of numbers, you know, in the recent year, two years, but when I hear 9800, that is new.

JIM ACOSTA, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That is absolutely new, Brooke. And when you consider that the president is, you know, going to be at West Point tomorrow talking about his foreign policy for the next two and a half years of his administration, he was at West Point a few years ago, laying out the surge in Afghanistan, taking the force level up to 100,000 troops and more.

And so to hear the president come out today, as he will in the Rose Garden in about 45 minutes, and say that the U.S. combat mission is coming to an end at the end of 2014, we've basically heard that before from this president, but that he also is going to lay out this residual force level that is going to be in place from 2014 and on. And that is basically 9800 U.S. armed forces, personnel, next year, about half of that in 2015.

And then by the end of 2016, Brooke, it is going to be down to just embassy security. And so he is bringing this war to a full stop before the end of his presidency. You know, essentially to make sure that a successor could not come in and perhaps ratchet things back up again. That is why you're hearing folks like Lindsay Graham who's been Twitter today saying that the president is not ending wars, he's losing wars.

But the -- there has been, you know, I guess some divide on the Republican side, House Speaker John Boehner put out a statement earlier today saying he welcomes the president's decision because he feels it's in line with what military commanders have requested. And those military commanders, Brooke, have said that they need at least 10,000 troops to keep a lid on al Qaeda and to conduct counterterrorism operations and to help train these Afghan security forces.

Of course, all of this, Brooke, is contingent on the new Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who said he's going to sign --

BALDWIN: Who's going to sign --

ACOSTA: -- a bilateral security agreement. But the two men who were vying to become the next president of Afghanistan have said publicly that they will sign that security agreement. That is why the president is feeling comfortable coming out today and making this announcement -- Brooke.

BALDWIN: OK. Jim Acosta, we will not get too far from you. Forty minutes from now in the Rose Garden we'll be watching for the president.

ACOSTA: OK.

BALDWIN: Thank you so much.

We'll bring that to you live.

Meantime, it is a day of mourning all across the state of California. Not just in those communities of Isla Vista and Santa Barbara. But University of California campuses from San Diego all the way northward to the bay area. They were sorority sisters, roommates and a visiting friend, and a college student shopping at a deli, just grabbing a sandwich. These six innocent young people caught in the middle of a young man's deadly plot of revenge.

Classes are canceled today at UCSB, set to resume tomorrow, as students prepare for exams and graduation. A memorial service will take place on campus at 4:00 local time.

And at UCLA, the so-called sister campus of UC Santa Barbara, students there gathered just last night to show their solidarity. There have been calls all across social media to keep the victims' names in the headlines, as much as the man who killed them.

Since the tragedy over the weekend, parents of the victims are speaking out. In fact, our own Sara Sidner sat down with the father of Veronika Weiss who describes the moment he found out his daughter was dead.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SARA SIDNER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Bob Weiss had a special bond with his daughter Veronika. She was his first born child and he was a stay-at-home dad until she was 12.

BOB WEISS, FATHER: So I changed her diapers, took her to preschool, taught her how to throw a ball.

SIDNER: The two were almost inseparable. Pictured here with her brother Cooper.

Veronika headed off to university less than a year ago, and now her father is having to do something he could not bear to do with her -- bury her. Veronika Weiss was one of the six students killed in a diabolical plan carried out by a disturbed 22-year-old.

As soon as news of the shooting hit the airwaves, Weiss began receiving messages.

WEISS: The first ones were things like, oh, we heard about Santa Barbara. Everything is OK, right? Well, no. It's not right at all. Veronika is dead.

SIDNER: He and his wife and son raced up to the university when they didn't get a phone call from their normally conscientious daughter. While waiting for word from officials, they tracked Veronika's cell phone. It was still on. It even began to move, but she wasn't answering.

(On camera): How did you know? How were you sure that she was gone?

WEISS: We got on her iPhone and located it in the middle of the crime scene. And then we actually were looking at the phone while they were moving her body away from the -- probably to take her to the morgue. But we've seen this little dot move across the screen on the phone, on a working phone. A phone she could have picked up and dial on if -- if she was OK.

SIDNER (voice-over): They knew then that she was one of the girls who died here on the front lawn of the sorority.

Police say 22-year-old Elliot Rodger carried out an attack on as many beautiful girls and popular boys as he could. The kind of people he perceived as having everything he had been denied.

WEISS: He was very troubled. Another problem with the system is that -- to identify and property treat him or ills. It was impossible the way things were set up, I guess. It's preposterous that a kid who is in that bad a shape could go to three different gun stores and buy an arsenal, but it happens all the time.

SIDNER: Weiss wishes Rodger had known the truth about who he actually killed.

WEISS: She was kind. She was the person who would reach out to the kids who weren't the popular kids, some of the nerdy kids, some of the kids that were a little bit like this Rodger kid described himself as, as being kind of a little bit of an outcast.

SIDNER (on camera): Does it strike you how terribly ironic it is that he then turns around and goes this to someone like Veronika?

WEISS: Very much so. He had no idea who he was killing because if he was able to communicate with Veronika she would have reached out to him. She would have tried to help him. And she would have -- she would have tried to be friends to him.

SIDNER (voice-over): Now the Weisses and the other victims' families are left with only memories to turn to, to remind them of who their children really were.

WEISS: This is something I don't have any experience close to this in my life. The outpouring of support and love. I can say this, when somebody close to you dies, reach out to survivors, because even though it feels awkward and you don't have anything to say, every little word, every little sentence on Facebook, it all means something. It means that you're not alone.

SIDNER: Sara Sidner, CNN, West Lake Village, California.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BALDWIN: Sara, thank you. And you heard him say, not alone. They're not. We'll be talking to a student organizer from UC Irvine, that campus holding a vigil, one of several, tonight. Just showing all these campuses from across California coming together in honor of these young lives lost.

Just ahead, after months of waiting, that raw data from missing Flight 370 is now public. But here's the thing, families say something is still missing.

Plus, do diet soda drinkers lose more weight than people who drink other things? A new study is sparking all kinds of controversy on that one.

And did the Pope just open the door on allowing priests to marry? To have sex? Hear what he said on a plane, coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Welcome back. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

You know, for 82 days now, families of missing on Flight 370 have not seen, have not embraced, have not spoken to their loved ones. And for nearly as long, the families have made one very specific request. And today, that request was fulfilled. But here's the but. Now some loved ones say it's not complete.

What am I talking about? The raw data between Inmarsat satellites and that Malaysian airliners. It's 40-plus pages of log. You look at this. It makes me think of my cell phone bill. But they're numbers, though. This is the heart of this plane's search.

Let me take you back. When the Malaysia Air flight first disappeared, officials determined the plane could have traveled on an arc. Remember they talked about that? The northern arc or the southern arc from a plane's last known flight path. Then based upon analysis of these pages and pages of data, searchers concentrated to the south, specifically those waters off the coast of western Australia.

And since then, with no plane found, the question has been, how did Inmarsat pinpoint this area? So our aviation go-to guy, Richard Quest, he traveled to London, he talked to the man behind the data, Inmarsat's VP of Satellite Operations, and he asked him what his gut reaction was when he realized he knew where that plane most likely was.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MARK DICKINSON, VP OF SATELLITE OPERATION, INMARSAT: Let's check this. Let's check it again. Because you want to make sure when you come to a conclusion like that, that you've done the right work. The data is as you understand it to be.

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Was there a moment of disbelief?

DICKINSON: Having messages for six hours after the plane was lost is probably the biggest disbelief in terms of what you have.

QUEST: Inmarsat quickly realized the analysis of data from MH-370 to the satellite would produce an extraordinary result and needed to be tested. So they ran the model against other planes which had been in the sky at the same time on the night, and against previous flights of the same aircraft. Time and again they ran the model, over dozens of flights. And the planes were always found to be exactly where they were supposed to be.

DICKINSON: No one has come up yet with a reason why it shouldn't work for this particular flight when it works for the others. And it's very important that this isn't just an Inmarsat activity. There's other people doing investigations, experts who are helping the investigation team, who have got the same data, who made their own models up and did the same thing to see if they got the same results and broadly speaking, they got roughly the same answers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: OK. So this is fascinating. This is what people have been calling for, Mary Schiavo. We've grown very accustomed to your face now. You are on our CNN aviation analyst who were once the inspector general for the Department of Transportation. And you heard that interview on -- you know, with the Inmarsat VP saying roughly that no one has not come up with a reason why it shouldn't work when the series we saw with Richard, they looked, you know, at other planes. But then you have, I'm sure, Mary, family members saying well, at the end of the day, they haven't found the plane. Is that fair?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, certainly it's fair, because obviously the proof in all of these efforts and calculations and these trials and retrials, and the data would be to find the plane, except, you know, there's some limitations. And one of those is that they haven't mapped the ocean floor which they're about to do. But the data that they released, the 47 pages, is very interesting because you can see the key numbers, there's something called burst timing and burst frequency, that doesn't matter, but what matters is you can see at key events where they're trying to track the plane, they really are different.

I mean, there's data differences and there's a whole lot of data there. But what's missing is exactly how they did their calculations and what their calculations are. And that lies with the repose with the Malaysian investigators. Inmarsat says it's OK with them if they release it but it's up to Malaysia.

BALDWIN: So what you're -- you know, when I hear that, it makes me think of math class back in the day when your teachers say show your work. Right? You have the solutions but you don't get the credit until you show your work.

SCHIAVO: Exactly.

BALDWIN: So they want to see the work. And then -- then you have, you know, some family members from these passengers saying that they want to take it and that they will take this data to experts for another set of eyes. Should there be some kind of protocol to oversee that? Because I can't blame the families for wanting to do that.

SCHIAVO: You know, families do that in every accident, no matter what the cause of an accident. Pilot error, icing errors, whatever. They so desperately want to know and to find everything out. And particularly here, where they don't have the plane and they don't have their loved ones. And that's to be expected. Anyone that thinks it doesn't happen hasn't been around a lot of investigations.

And Australians say that they continue to review the data. And they're also putting out bids for the next parts of the contract for mapping the ocean floor and for finding the plane. And those contractors who are bidding on this job will want to review the data, too, because they don't want to track for something they can't deliver on.

BALDWIN: Do you think, though, eventually, Mary, that, you know, if they do show the work, and you can see how they arrive from point A to point Z, and that they bring in fresh sets of eyes, whomever may be requesting that, but at the end of the day, what does your gut tell you they will finally find this plane?

SCHIAVO: My gut tells me they will. Sometimes it takes an awful long time. And I worked on Air France 447 on behalf of some families. And it may take that long, it may take longer. But I think that they will. And I think there's -- like I say, they've only produced the data, they haven't produced the analysis. But with so many eyes looking at it and the Australians evaluating it and now the contractors are going to bid on the job, I think they'll have a pretty good sense of confidence when all said and done.

BALDWIN: Took them two years for Air France 447. Let's hope it takes shorter than that. Mary Schiavo, thank you, thank you, thank you.

SCHIAVO: Thank you.

BALDWIN: Just ahead here, Pope Francis, surprises reporters on his plane ride home from the Mideast, saying that celibacy for priests is, quote, "not a dogma of fate." How about that? What could this mean for the church going forward? We'll discuss. Also ahead, a new study paid for by people that made diet soda, by the way, said, you guessed it, diet soda can help you lose weight. Elizabeth Cohen joins me next on their reasoning.

Stay right here.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: The alarm bells are going off today involving this new study about what we drink. I'm sure you've seen the headline, we need to go deeper because it says diet soda may be better than any other drink if you're trying to lose weight. Why? Because folks who kept drinking diet soda during their diet lost an average about four more pounds than dieters who stopped cold turkey.

Senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen joins me live.

And, Elizabeth, can you explain the reasoning here, please?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: OK. So, Brooke, as you said, it's when people kept on drinking diet soda. And this is critically important. This is not saying that diet soda is better than other liquids when you're trying to diet. These are folks who love their diet soda. They drank a lot of it. And they needed to lose weight.

So the researchers told half of them, all right, keep drinking your diet soda and we're also going to teach you how to eat well and exercise. They told the other half we're going to teach you how to eat well and exercise, too, but you cannot drink diet soda. You can drink anything else you want, but not diet soda.

And so let's take a look at what the differences were. All of these folks started out at about 205 pounds. They needed to lose weight. And the group that was allowed to drink the diet soda, they lost about 13 pounds in three months and the folks who were not allowed to drink the diet soda lost about nine pounds. So a four-pound difference. Not huge. Not huge. Go ahead.

BALDWIN: OK. Sorry. Just -- this one got me, got a lot of us today, because, you know, we're all guilty of just reading a headline of the story and not really getting into the meat and potatoes of something. And, I mean, let's just call out the study, the fact that it's the diet soda industry behind the study.

COHEN: Well, the beverage industry is behind the study. And that was going to be the next thing out of my mouth, which is it was funded by the beverage industry, the folks who make diet sodas as well as regular sodas and bottled water. But yes, they make a ton of money off of diet sodas. And so unfortunately this is the way that research is often done these days. They're -- you know, we don't have the kind of money that we would like to have from NIH and other places, and industries of all kind funds a good number of studies.

These researchers are highly respected. I have interviewed them myself in the past. We ran this study by outsiders who said that it was -- it was good work. The big point here that I think people need to listen to is that these were folks who were already drinking a lot of diet soda. And what it found is that on average, it did not pay to give up that diet soda.

And so here's what I would say. Since there have been studies that go back and forth on this, we as dieters, can say this, look, I like diet soda. I'm going to keep drinking it and see how I do when I diet and exercise, and if it doesn't work well for you, then get rid of the diet soda. Empower yourself to be your own study subject. You don't need -- you don't have to listen to the beverage association, to the beverage industry. Do it yourself and see what works best for you.

BALDWIN: I have my vices, but I tell you, I went cold turkey on any kind of soda for the most part some time ago. I felt it just kind of made me nuts. But I guess some people need it, can't win them.

Elizabeth Cohen, thank you so much for that.

COHEN: Thanks.

BALDWIN: Let your mind (INAUDIBLE), because this is something really exciting here at CNN. Coming up this Thursday, 9:00 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, make sure you tune in to CNN's new 10-part series, it's called "THE SIXTIES." It's a look at pop culture and the music and the politics of the decade that changed the world. And each episode is executive produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman. Here's a preview.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our government is asking us as citizens, good citizens, to refrain from traveling to foreign lands.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. All you guys in Vietnam, come on home.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The times were changing so quickly in the '60s, and we didn't change them.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We just reflected on them.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What are you doing?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm getting ready to go to college.

DAVID BIANCULLI, TVWORTHWATCHING: CBS gave the Smothers brothers that show, because they were clean-cut folk satirists. You know, they wore blazers, they could sing well, they were funny.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mom liked you best.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You lower your voice.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mom liked you best.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: The space race, free love, civil rights and much more. "THE SIXTIES", the new CNN original series, again premieres Thursday night 9:00 Eastern and Pacific only here on CNN.

Coming up next, in the Catholic Church, should priests be allowed to marry. The Pope may be opening the door here to change those rules. We will tell you exactly what he said.

Plus, as the president gets ready to make a huge announcement about troop levels in Afghanistan, the CIA's top agent there is no longer a secret. The White House outing the station chief apparently by total accident.

So what happens to that person's sources, connections on the ground? I'll speak live with a former CIA station chief himself. Next.

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