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Clash Reported at Guantanamo; Sleep Disorder Causes Strange Behavior; Search For Jimmy Hoffa's Body Continues

Aired May 19, 2006 - 15:30   ET

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

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: The president of the United States right now in Highland Heights, Kentucky. He's addressing students and leaders in that community at North Kentucky University, talking about American competitiveness. We'll follow his speech, let you know what he says.
The terror suspects take on the U.S. military. It happened at the prison compound at Guantanamo, Cuba, nicknamed Gitmo. Prisoners, we don't know how many, reportedly attacked the troops, who were trying to keep another prisoner from hanging himself. The detainees lashed out with everything from sticks to fans and light fixtures. Word is no one was hurt. Almost 500 terror suspects are being held at Gitmo. Some have been held there since right after 9/11.

On the phone right, Chaplain James Yee, U.S. Army. Spent a lot of time there at Gitmo. Chaplain Yee, I understand you're in Dallas today, is that right?

JAMES YEE, FORMER ARMY CHAPLAIN: Right. I'm at -- currently at the airport.

PHILLIPS: OK, well I sure appreciate you touching base with us. And we wanted to talk to you for a couple of reasons. We've been trying to understand what happened at Gitmo. And, of course, try to understand how something like this could happen. First of all, why don't you tell me what your duties were when you were there at Gitmo?

YEE: Yes, you know, I'm now a former U.S. Army Muslim chaplain. But when I was down at Guantanamo, I was an adviser to the camp command regarding how religious aspects might affect the operation. As well, I was a chaplain to the prisoners themselves.

PHILLIPS: So put in to perspective for us then -- when you counseled these detainees, when you spent time with them, did they express to you on a regular basis their frustrations of where they were? And did they talk to you about committing suicide?

YEE: They were actually -- there were many prisoners who were experiencing a tremendous amount of frustrations with regard to them being held in Guantanamo and under the conditions under which they were being held. The situation was really dire, and it led a lot of the prisoners to fall into heavy depression and despair. And, you know, I've even written about how some of the prisoners have even childlike regressive-type behaviors as a result of the enormous amount of stress that they were under being prisoners at Guantanamo. PHILLIPS: So did any of the detainees say to you, chaplain, I just -- I don't want to be here, I'm going to take my life, I'm considering suicide? And did they ask for your advice, your help?

YEE: Back in 2002-2003, there were suicide attempts. But at that time, the suicide attempts were really carried out as a matter of protest, a protest of how they were being treated, how they were mistreated. And protests in regard to how Islam and the Koran was being treated, or mistreated and abused. Today what we're seeing is now prisoners are really attempting suicide out of despair and a deterioration of their mental state.

PHILLIPS: How often do you think suicide attempts happen there at Guantanamo?

YEE: They were -- when I was down there, they were occurring pretty often. And it became a problem, really because the intelligence side of the operation realized that, you know, if a prisoner did end up dead that he was really no longer an intelligence asset. So they actually turned to me to help solve the problem. You know, chaplains in the military, one of our areas of expertise is suicide awareness and suicide prevention.

PHILLIPS: So the word from the Pentagon is 40 attempted suicides since the detainees have been there. It sounds like a low number according to what you're saying.

YEE: Well, it's really a lot more. What happened when I was down there is they changed the terminology. Suicide attempts were actually relegated to a term called self-injurious behavior, and then they had a more stricter definition of what exactly defined a suicide attempt. So, really, the number of incidents regarding attempts on one's own life is a lot, lot higher than what's being portrayed by the Pentagon.

PHILLIPS: How do you think something like what we're hearing about today happened, the fact that someone was attempting suicide, there was a response from the military, and then those troops were attacked? Can you describe -- I mean, does that surprise you? And how do you think that happened? Because I thought these detainees were really isolated, and there were a lot of troops that were monitoring their actions and their activity on a minute-by-minute basis.

YEE: Right. In the general population, they are isolated in these open air caged cells. But this seems like it happened in camp four, which -- in which prisoners are allowed to live together in groups of ten. Now, this is actually not the first time that prisoners have assaulted the guards.

There was an incident when I was down there that occurred back in 2003 where a prisoner was somehow able to get out of his cell and assault three of the guards. The floor guards on that cellblock were actually able to easily manhandle the prisoner down to the ground. And as a result, there was actually, in my opinion, a successive force on the part of the guards after that prisoner was already subdued. And it was a bloody affair. So it's not the first time that there's been scuffles or physical struggles between the prisoners and the guard.

PHILLIPS: Former U.S. Muslim Chaplain James Yee. We sure appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

YEE: Oh, thanks for having me today.

PHILLIPS: Well, we're going to stay on the story.

The news keeps coming. We'll keep bringing it to you. More LIVE FROM right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIPS: ...not quite awake. Strange things can happen, sleepwalking, night terrors, sleep eating and talking, even sleep punching. Dr. Sanjay Gupta takes a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): You're looking at good sleep gone bad, a twilight zone, where the normal barrier between sleep and wakefulness is blurred. These people are actually asleep, but they suffer conditions called parasomniacs, disorders that frequently interfere with sleep like sleepwalking or night terrors. In extreme cases parasomniacs show all sorts of strange behavior, eating, talking, throwing punches.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're at the Minnesota regional sleep disorder center.

GUPTA: Dr. Carlos Shank (ph) helped discover one of the most bizarre and dangerous sleep conditions, REM behavior disorder or RBD.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Men with REM behavior disorder usually either stay in bed and become violent or charge out of bed, run into the furniture or the wall and then awaken.

GUPTA: The REM cycle is when we do our most active dreaming. In healthy REM sleep the body is paralyzed even as the mind races, but with RBD the safeguard of paralysis is gone and patients act out their often violent dreams.

CAL POPE, PARASOMNIAC: Kicking, fighting, cussing, whatever.

GUPTA: Cal Pope was one of Dr. Shank's first patients more than 15 years ago.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Cal's was quite severe. As severe almost as the most severe case that we had seen.

GUPTA: And yet Cal Pope's case was in some ways typical in that the patient wasn't really aware of what was happening.

POPE: Maybe once a week, but it wouldn't be that bad. ROWENA POPE, WIFE: Well, this happened every time he went to sleep and more than once a night.

GUPTA: Fortunately, it turned out there is a very effective treatment. The National Sleep Foundation says a drug called Clonazepam stifles symptoms in nine of 10 patients if taken in the proper dosage every night. Cal Pope showed us a hole he kicked in the wall on the night when he missed a single dose.

Ninety percent of patients are men, mostly older men. No one knows exactly what causes RBD, but Shank has found one major clue, a disturbing discovery, that a majority of patients develop Parkinson's Disease within 10 or 15 years.

Pope is lucky. It's been 27 years since his first escapade, as he calls it, and he shows no signs of Parkinson's.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, reporting.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PHILLIPS: And you can catch Sanjay's one hour special on sleep airing this Sunday at 10 p.m. Eastern right here on CNN.

Well, a 7-year-old Afghan boy gets a new chance at a healthy life after heart surgery in Washington. Doctors at Children's National Medical Center are keeping a close eye on Mohammed Omar, as he recovers from a delicate repairs to a potentially deadly defect.

CNN's Carrie Lee brings us up to date.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CARRIE LEE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): His name is Mohammed, but he is affectionately nicknamed blue, that was the color of his lips, fingers and toes when a U.S. Army surgeon found him last year in a remote village in Afghanistan.

MAJ. SLOANE GUY, ARRANGED "BLUE'S" OPERATION: I think, you know, all of the doctors and nurses in the hospital there really loved the little kid.

LEE: But 7-year-old Mohammed Omar was sick, very sick. He literally had a hole in his heart, a congenital heart defect, restricting the flow of oxygen, stunting his growth and causing his skin to turn blue. Without surgery he would die.

Earlier this week after a year of bureaucratic wrangling, Mohammed flew to the United States aboard a U.S. military plane for a life-saving life-changing operation. As doctors took special care in prepping Mohammed, they offered words of encouragement to their young patient.

DR. GERARD MARTIN, PEDIATRIC HEART SPECIALIST: And if everything goes well, you will go home and run just as fast as your brother and other kids in the village and a big smile from ear to ear and a thumbs up.

LEE: Finally the big day, they wheeled Mohammed into the operating room at Children's National Medical Center in Washington. The operation, a success. Mohammed's father was grateful and relieved.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have taken him to a lot of places, but there was no hope for him. And except those people they brought him here and give him a hope.

LEE: Doctors say the surgery could not have come at a more critical time.

GUY: And I doubt that he would survive the next year so I'm glad that we got him here when we did.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PHILLIPS: Well, doctors expect Mohammed to return to Afghanistan in about two months with a healthy heart and perhaps a new nickname. The boy's surgery, by the way, was paid for by the Larry King Cardiac foundation, a very heartening end to this story.

Well, Jimmy Hoffa makes headlines again. Does Hidden Dreams Farm hold hidden clues? We are going to fill in the blanks right after this.

But first our weekly series, life after work.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How are you?

RICHARD KOCA, FOUNDER OF STAND UP FOR KIDS: I'm OK. How are you?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm alive and well.

KOCA: Yes, you are working out here.

JENNIFER WESTHOVEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Day and night, Rick Koca and his team of volunteers have food, clothes, computers and most importantly compassion for street kids.

KOCA: Where have you been all my life? Oh, my goodness.

I traveled all over the world, 40 some foreign countries, and saw homeless kids in other cities and other countries, but I never expected that they would be in mine. And I just saw them here, and I was just so upset.

WESTHOVEN: So he did something about it. Sixteen years ago, the former Navy officer started stand up for kids.

KOCA: So how can we help you get back into the job corps?

WESTHOVEN: Volunteers go out into the streets and find kids. Their mission, to care about them and then at every point prove it.

KOCA: We're trying to be the family, the brother, the sister, the mom the dad, depending on who you are. That's the piece we're really trying to play for them to be for them because they don't have that. So almost 18 years now I've been walking the streets talking to homeless street children and being, you know, involved in their lives. And I said in all that time I never really met a kid who wanted to be on the streets ever, not one.

Jennifer Westhoven, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIPS: They're still digging in Michigan. For a second day, federal agents are at a suburban Detroit horse farm sifting for clues in the 1975 disappearance of teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.

Even after all these years, even after all the wild goose chases, many detectives and reporters just can't let this go. That includes career journalist Bill Kurtis who told me his history of being hooked on Hoffa.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PHILLIPS: So take me back. You're a reporter and an anchor in Chicago. You've been all over this story from the very beginning. What do you remember?

BILL KURTIS, HOST, "AMERICAN JUSTICE": Well, it was a huge crime, and the pieces were pieced together much like they are today in a cold case. We knew exactly the restaurant, the parking lot, the players that you have just named, Chuckie O'Brien who drove the car.

And as the car was coming out of the restaurant parking lot, a truck driver -- how ironic -- almost runs into it, and identifies Jimmy Hoffa as sitting in the backseat and beside him what appeared to be a shotgun.

Chuckie O'Brien later was dead, Provenzano dead, Giacalone was dead eventually, and no one has ever been charged with a crime, nor has there been a valid body of circumstantial evidence that was strong enough to actually bring any indictments. So it's a mystery, the Holy Grail of cold cases.

PHILLIPS: And that led to another question. Why do you think so many resources are being put into this, specifically this tip? Because aren't they flooded with so many other cold cases? I mean, why do they want this one so badly?

KURTIS: Well, they must think that this is really strong. They also may want to send the signal that no cold case is going unturned. But it is -- or perhaps the lead prosecutor just has a thing about the Hoffa case. I have caught the spirit. I actually went running on one of those tips. It came from an inmate, very similar to this, a felon inside a penitentiary who claimed to be the driver.

Who else would know that he ...

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PHILLIPS: Apologize. We had to break out of that and get straight to Jamie McIntyre at the Pentagon. He just got off that conference call, Jamie, talking about these attempted suicides at Gitmo. What more did you learn?

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SR. PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, interesting, the U.S. military commanders down there -- in fact, the top commander -- insists that what really happened here was in the case of the most dramatic incident, what he called the most violent outbreak in the four-and-a-half years at Guantanamo, was that he said they believed that there was essentially a ruse, a trick, to try to get the U.S. troops to come in where the prisoners there could attack them by staging what appeared to be a hanging.

That precipitated an hour-long melee in which the detainees there were attacking the U.S. military guards with improvised weapons including sticks and light fixtures and parts of a fan, and it took about an hour to get the whole thing under control using pepper spray and eventually the U.S. had to fire nonlethal weapons including shotguns that fire rubber bullets and another weapon that fires a sponge grenade.

They also say of the two -- the three suicide attempts earlier in the day, they think only two of them were serious ones. And they think that essentially drugs were squirreled away over a long period of time and then provided to these two detainees who either decided or were told that they were to take their lives in order to draw attention to the case in Guantanamo.

The commanders were quite laudatory in the way that the U.S. military handled it in that none of the detainees suffered any serious injuries and there were no serious injuries to the U.S. military as well.

But they say it demonstrates the resolve that these enemy combatants have in still trying to attack the United States. And by the way, in the four-and-a-half years at Guantanamo, nobody has died there either from suicide or for any other reason.

PHILLIPS: And, Jamie, that's interesting to point out because it does bring up the issue of attempted suicide. It has happened quite a bit there at Guantanamo Bay, but at the same time, U.S. troops respond immediately because the last thing they want is a death.

MCINTYRE: Right. Well there have been 41 attempted suicides if you include the two yesterday, by 25 different people. But in each case the U.S. military -- the U.S. has been successful in preventing the suicides. And there's no doubt that detainees there are unhappy about the conditions, unhappy about their indefinite detention.

And just a short while ago, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said he would like to close Guantanamo, but he can't do that until the issue is resolved about military commissions, something that is before the Supreme Court now pending a decision.

PHILLIPS: All right. Jamie McIntyre at the Pentagon. Thanks, Jamie, so much. And, of course, you can get a lot more on this story. Jamie will be joining Wolf in "THE SITUATION ROOM" coming up very soon.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIPS: Well, it's Friday and it's been a pretty wild week on Wall Street. Ali Velshi takes us to the "Closing Bell." How are things looking, Ali?

ALI VELSHI, CNN ANCHOR: It's fine over here. Did you see what was going on out at that Apple store? Are they giving free stuff away?

PHILLIPS: No, Susan Lisovicz -- well, Susan Lisovicz and I were talking about it, and I know. Isn't that insane?

VELSHI: Look at this. It is raining. I don't know what they're doing. There's an Apple store in Soho, guys. Take the bus. It'll cost you two bucks and you can get whatever you need. Apple is happy to take your money. Wow, it's a glass building. Oh, let me stand outside for 12 hours.

PHILLIPS: Come on, people are fascinated by architecture. Look at how many people come to the Time Warner Building where you are just to check out the cool architecture.

VELSHI: I know, I work here every day, but how much do you pay for this tour? Yes, I mean, as a business journalist, this all fascinates me that people pay for stuff like that. I'm going to start, like, just standing out in the corner and selling tickets and people will probably buy them.

PHILLIPS: Well, if you advertised it on, you know, LIVE FROM, then maybe we can get a cut and get a few more resources and have you live out there.

VELSHI: You know, there is big penalties for indecent stuff on TV now.

PHILLIPS: You are far from indecent.

VELSHI: I'm keeping my vest on the whole time.

PHILLIPS: Ali, we'll see you -- Ali, have a great weekend. I'll see you on Monday.

VELSHI: That was vest I said, Kyra. I said vest just in case you misheard me. PHILLIPS: Difference between dress and -- well, you know.

VELSHI: I know, you're -- might be time to get the hearing checked there, Kyra. So good to see you.

PHILLIPS: For those that maybe didn't see the "Will & Grace" interview. OK, yes, great to see you too.

VELSHI: Yes, you were asking about whether -- what somebody thought of someone else's dress is what it sounded like to the rest of us. Got to go. Look at the time.

PHILLIPS: See you, Ali.

VELSHI: Have a great weekend, Kyra.

(STOCK MARKET REPORT)

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