Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Newsroom

U.S. Navy To Send a Destroyer to South China Sea; Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair Apologizes to United States; New Warning Today That Bacon, Hot Dogs, Cold Cuts Put You In The Same Cancer Threat Category As A Smoker; $1 million Bond for Adacia Chambers. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired October 26, 2015 - 15:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:32:00] BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN HOST: This is CNN, I'm Brooke Baldwin. We are following some breaking news here out of the South China Sea. CNN has learned that the U.S. Navy is about to send a destroyer there.

Let's go to our chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto. What do you know?

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brooke, defense official confirms that the U.S. Navy is prepared to second a destroyer within 12 miles of China's manmade islands in the South China Sea within the next 24 hours and that plan has the president's approval.

Why is 12 miles key? Twelve miles, those are internationally recognized as sovereign waters, but the U.S. does not recognize these manmade islands as sovereign territory of China. They say these are international waters and this sailing of a Navy ship inside that 12- mile line would be a message from the U.S. Navy saying these are international waters.

This is the second time this it year that the U.S. Navy would have sent such a message. You may remember, Brooke, that in May of this year, we flew on a U.S. surveillance aircraft, the P-8 Poseidon aircraft. Those images you are seeing right now were taken by that aircraft over this manmade islands. They flew that aircraft very close to these islands again as a message to say that the U.S., not only does not recognize the seas as being Chinese sovereign seas, but the air above those manmade islands. And you may remember that during our trip then, we have a lot of warnings, a lot of angry warnings from the Chinese Navy saying U.S. Navy aircraft go away. This is Chinese territory. This is a major issue that the U.S. and China have not been able to come to agreement on. And this sailing of this ship like this flying of that airplane is a strong message from Washington that they still don't agree.

BALDWIN: Jim Sciutto, thank you, sir.

SCUITTO: Thank you. BALDWIN: And now to this stunning apology from one of the strongest

U.S. allies in the Iraq war. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair sitting down for exclusive interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria apologizing for bad intelligence that led to the 2003 invasion.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST, FAREED ZAKARIA GPS: Given however that Saddam Hussein did not prove to have weapons of mass destruction, was the decision to enter Iraq and topple his regime a mistake?

TONY BLAIR, FORMER BRITISH PRIME MINISTER: You know, whenever I'm asked this, I can say that I apologize for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong because even though he had used chemical weapons extensively against his own people, against others, the program in the form that we thought it was did not exist in the way that we thought. So I can apologize for that.

I can also apologize, by the way, for some of the mistakes in planning and certainly our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you remove the regime. But I find it hard to apologize for removing Saddam Hussein. I think even from today in 2015, it is better that he's not there than he is there.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Fareed is with me now. And to hear these words, you know, mistakes, apologize coming out of Tony Blair's mouth and then to take is a step further with you and say because of these mistakes, it then led to the rise of ISIS. It's a big deal.

[15:35:11] ZAKARIA: That to me was in some ways the biggest deal of all. The fact that he would acknowledge that there were mistakes in the intelligence, he sort of had before. He never talked about mistakes in the post war planning and he had never said it explicitly in this way that really took responsibility for it.

But then he went on to acknowledge that, look, these things may have led to the rise of ISIS, you know. And doing this documentary, we went to senior Bush policymakers who are much more centrally involved in these decisions than Blair was. Blair was supporting these decisions. Not one of them would take responsibility. Not one of them would apologize. Not one of them seems to think anything went wrong.

BALDWIN: As we talk ISIS, we cover the war, we have reported on Friday the first American combat death since 2011 with the raid in northern Iraq. We now have some video. Look at this.

(VIDEO CLIP PLAYING)

BALDWIN: Rescuing about 70 hostages here in northern Iraq. As I mentioned, one American did die. Do you think this is the beginning of us seeing, you know, more cooperation between U.S., Kurds, Iraqi forces on the ground in places like Iraq? ZAKARIA: I do not. I think that -- remember Iraq is still a second

most violent place in the world. After Syria, Iraq is the number one place where you have this kind of violence going on. But the big problem and this is what the invasion couldn't solve, in fact, created in some ways was the division among Iraq's communities.

So you asked the question are you seeing more cooperation monk the Kurds, the Shiites and Sunnis. And the simple honest answer is no. In fact, you're beginning to see some deep divisions between the Kurds and central government in Baghdad. We have always known the Sunnis and the Shiites have been fighting. But the Kurds and the Shiites are now beginning to lose tension because the Kurds really just want to fight to protect Kurdistan. They are not interested in fighting to, you know, to make sure that the Baghdad government has more power.

So it is, you know, the fundamental problem in Iraq is that we could go in, we could get rid of a bad guy. You can't stand up a country and you can't stand up a country in which these three communities who really mistrust each other. And that's in a way a different version of that drama is playing itself out in Syria as well. We could go in there, but will that stand up a new Syria in which all these communities that are fighting with each other somehow say, yes, we're all one country again?

BALDWIN: Right. So much of this will be in this documentary that airs tonight. It's a Special Report. We are calling it "Long Road to Hell, America and Iraq," 9:00 eastern here on CNN.

Fareed Zakaria, as always, thank you so much.

ZAKARIA: Thank you, Brooke.

BALDWIN: Next here, hotdogs, bacon, sausage, you know what, apparently they can all cause cancer. That opinion coming down from the world health organization today. And they don't stop there. We will hear straight from the doctor, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:42:40] BALDWIN: OK. So what I'm about to tell you may have you rethinking your dinner plan, breakfast. A new warning today that bacon, hotdogs, cold cuts put you in the same cancer threat category as a smoker. Not only that, it takes it one step further, the experts saying beef, pork, veal and lamb are quote "probably carcinogenic." This is the doctor. I don't know. It's one of those words that trips me up.

Dr. Philippa Cheetham is a cancer specialist and medical correspondent for cure connections. I've talked to is many people about this. This is one of those that everyone like. No bacon, no cold cuts. I grew up eating turkey sandwiches and bologna as a kid. So far, knock on wood, I'm all right. But you know, this doesn't surprise you. You have known this all along. We have not.

DR. PHILIPPA CHEETHAM, MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT CURE CONNECTIONS: That's right. I mean, this is big news today. We're hearing, you know, red meat increases risk of not just breast cancer but prostate cancer, colon cancer, ovarian cancer, many different cancers that are being shown to be associated with the amount of red meat you eat and also the type of red meat, Brooke. And the problem is although there's hundreds of studies that have shown this association, we don't tell our patients the general public are not aware of how serious the cancer risk eating red meat is.

BALDWIN: So last hour I had Pat Lafrida on. If you live in New York City, you probably had, you know, stakes from Hamburgers from him. The provide me. And his family have been doing it for a hundred years, butchers meats, et cetera. And he actually said to me he had stomach cancer in 2003. His doctor said, you know, it is no in any kind processed meats. And he has cut it out, but he seems to think, you know, fresh cooked red meat is OK.

CHEETHAM: Well, let's just talk about what the risks are. We know that if you eat red meat, the more well done it is, the more barbecued it is, the more chant it is, the greater the risk of cancer. But what is it in red meat that causes cancer? These are poly-hydro (INAUDIBLE) chemicals that are released when meat is well cooked. That even organic meats, even meat that is not well-cooked, medium cooked, even rare --

BALDWIN: Do you eat red meat?

CHEETHAM: I do eat red meat, but in very small amounts.

BALDWIN: So that bottom line - tinny tiny amount.

CHEETHAM: I mean, I think at the end of the day, some people are eating red meat three times a day. They are eating large quantities and this study shows that processed red meats in particular are very, very bad for us. We have to remember that.

[15:45:00] BALDWIN: Dr. Cheetham, thank you so much.

CHEETHAM: Thank you.

BALDWIN: Dully noted.

Next here, the woman accused of driving her car into a crowd of people at a parade goes before a judge this afternoon. She is facing second degree murder charges. And now her family says she has struggled with mental health issues. We have more on that and our legal experts will weigh in on her case, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:49:49] BALDWIN: A judge has now set bond at $1 million for the driver accused of ramming her car into this parade at an Oklahoma state homecoming over the weekend. Police say Adacia Chambers was the one driving Saturday. She killed those four people including a 2- year-old boy, 47 other people are injured, four of them are critical. Questions have been raised about whether Chambers was intoxicated or mentally ill at the time.

Just before the court hearing, both her father and boyfriend revealed that she does have a history of mental illness.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

[15:50:23] JESSE GAYLORD, DRIVER'S BOYFRIEND: I know that there's no way she was drunk or impaired. No drugs whatsoever. She just wasn't that type of person.

FLOYD CHAMBERS, DRIVER'S FATHER: That's just not who she was. That's not who I raised. She had a mental hospital. She went to in Wagner at one time. They had her for a couple of weeks and they released her said there was really nothing else they could do for her.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Now, Chambers was initially charged with DUI. But prosecutors said they plan to file murder charges against her in the future.

I have with me our legal analyst Sunny Hostin and Phillip Holloway.

So let's get to it, Sunny, with you. First, they delay filling official charges for another couple of weeks, why?

SUNNY HOSTIN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: My understanding is that there's still a victim in the hospital and that person is not doing that well.

BALDWIN: Sort of touch and go.

HOSTIN: It's touch and go. So prosecutors are still I'm sure investigating this case as we just heard there are so many issues. We are talking about mental illness, possible DUI, possible intent because the prosecutor said today, Brooke, which was shocking to me, they thought she intentionally drove into the crowd. That is a very big distinction in the law when you're talking about manslaughter, which is, you know, not an intent crime, and homicide second degree that is pretty significant. So I think the prosecutors are weighing all options. But this is going to be a very, very serious case against her.

BALDWIN: Let me come back to intent because that's a huge point you're making with Phillip. Here's where I'm confused because, you know, she faces this DUI charge but her defense attorneys say she wasn't drunk. Which was it?

PHILLIP HOLLOWAY, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Well, we just don't know yet, Brooke, because the toxicology has yet to come back from the crime lab. I understand they have asked for it to be expedited. So that is probably a large part of the reason that prosecutors are going to wait a few more weeks to decide what formal charges they're going with.

Now, to Sunny's point if I might mention this, I agree with her. This is a much more sinister allegation now that there was some purposefulness behind this act. And the upgrading to murder charges is surprising to me. I was expecting something along the lines of manslaughter, but not murder. But second-degree murder, Brooke, does not require any kind of purposefulness. It doesn't require -- in fact, it specifically excludes an intentional act or an intent to kill someone. That would be murder in the first degree in Oklahoma.

So I'm a little bit perplexed as to why on the one hand they're saying it was purposeful yet using second-degree murder.

BALDWIN: What about also the fact that the attorney says he was flagged to her mental state. You heard her father talking about how she was in and out of some mental hospital, flagged her mental state because she had no emotion when she was told that she killed four people.

HOSTIN: Yes. And quite frankly any of us that have been prosecutors or in law enforcement we've dealt with what we call EDPs, Emotionally Disturbed People, and that is typically quite frankly one of the responses that sort of flat affect. And so again, I think this investigation will uncover a lot of details of this woman. We have now heard from her family there saying she does have a history of mental illness. And it's something, Brooke, you and I speak about all the time, bottom line is the criminal justice system is ill-prepared to deal with defendants that suffer from mental illness.

Was she legally insane? That's such a high threshold, high bar. Very rarely do people meet that threshold. But when you talk about mental illness and someone committing a crime, our justice system just hasn't caught up.

BALDWIN: You want to jump in on that, Phillip. And also speak to the fact bond set at $1 million.

HOLLOWAY: Right. They don't expect her to get out. That's not a bond anyone can make. Sunny is entirely correct. The criminal justice system is very, very ill-equipped to deal with people with mental illness. I'm not talking about necessarily people that are criminally insane that rise to that level, but just people who have mental illness in general. The criminal justice system does a terrible job.

Her affect following the crash, you got to consider if you look at the photographs you see the airbag deployed, it probably hit her right in the face or in the upper torso. And sometimes those things can cause a concussion. So the way she was acting in the hours and minutes immediately after the crash could possibly be related to the airbag deployment.

BALDWIN: OK. OK. That's fair. Sunny Hostin, Phillip Holloway, thank you both so much. We'll stay on that one for sure.

Straight ahead here, Donald Trump in foreign territory, foreign territory being second place. Ben Carson jumping out to a massive lead in Iowa as Trump is questioning Carson's religion. That's coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:59:06] BALDWIN: I'm going to leave you with this. Not even President Barack Obama can resist a beautiful walk on a perfect autumn day such as today. Photographers -- here he is little waves, some screams. Photographers captured the commander in-chief just a little while ago as he decided to ditch the confines of his presidential motorcade and walk to lunch. How about that?

He was spotted shaking hands with law enforcement officers there on the closed off streets and he was out for the rare stroll with his chief of staff by his side. My goodness. Can you imagine the crowds watching this? Just so happen to catch it. His destination the metropolitan club for lunch with former senators Tom Dashiell (ph) and George Mitchell.

And quickly, just another reminder. We talked to Fareed a little bit ago. I just want to remind you to tune in to CNN tonight at 9:00 eastern here. This is Fareed Zakaria Special Report "Long Road to Hell, America in Iraq." That's 9:00 pacific here on CNN.

I'm Brooke Baldwin. Thank you so much for starting your week with me here on CNN. We'll be back tomorrow. In the meantime let's go to Washington. "The LEAD" starts now.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Brooke.

Donald Trump says he knows what it means to struggle. "The LEAD" starts right now.