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American Morning

'Morning Buzz'

Aired January 21, 2002 - 07:23   ET

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

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Time now to talk about some of the stories in the Morning Buzz with my pals Paula and Anderson. What's up?

PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Well, there was a piece in the "Washington Post," I think, that should command a lot of attention this morning, and this is a story about some missing samples or stolen samples of anthrax in Fort Dietrich, Maryland.

Now this is the lab where apparently some experimental work was done on wet spores. The folks who run the place told us never had they experimented with the dry powder forms. But now you learn in this article from a former worker there that, in fact, a byproduct of experimenting with these wet spores was the dry anthrax and guess what? Now it's being confirmed that a couple of samples from 1991 are missing.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right. It's pretty alarming. It's actually a report, the "Washington Post" has it today. The "Hartford Courant" actually had it over the weekend, as well, and they did a long investigation. And what was amazing about their report is the picture they paint of this lab back in the early 1990s. You know, security was incredibly lax. A couple of the people quoted said that anyone with a security clearance could have walked out with some of these biological agents.

And not only that, there was a lot of rivalry amongst the scientists and even charges of sexual harassment and racial harassment.

So I mean it's, the vision that, the picture that was painted of this place is pretty alarming and it didn't just end in the early '90s. It went all the way to '97.

ZAHN: And then they also confirm that weekend work was done...

COOPER: Oh, right. No, not only weekend work, late at night work. Like people would come to work in the morning and find that someone had been working there at night and no one ever discovered who it was.

CAFFERTY: They're also fairly sure now that the anthrax that wound up in Washington, D.C. at Tom Daschle's office came somehow, some way, out of this particular facility in Maryland. COOPER: Something like 27 samples are missing. The good news is it's not just anthrax. It's also like Ebola, hanta virus. It's a whole slew...

ZAHN: Oh, that's real good news.

COOPER: It's a whole slew of things.

CAFFERTY: That's to form a drugstore out there.

COOPER: Right.

CAFFERTY: Oxycontin, the big painkiller, apparently they are prosecuting in some places doctors for prescribing this stuff over and over again -- I guess they call them like pill mills -- charging them with manslaughter and in some cases murder charges are contemplated against physicians who have prescribed or over prescribed, according to the prosecutors, Oxycontin. Which it's very unusual for a doctor to be brought up on criminal charges for writing a prescription.

ZAHN: You use it for pain, right?

CAFFERTY: Right.

ZAHN: But people have been abusing it by wanting to feel whatever it is when you O.D. on it.

COOPER: Right, especially down south.

CAFFERTY: Yes.

COOPER: Yes.

CAFFERTY: And I guess if you take enough of it, you're not here anymore.

COOPER: No.

This, you know, this weekend I was probably the only guy who spent like several hours on the Internet and wasn't downloading porn. But there are a lot of interesting headlines this morning on the Web and I thought we'd just run over some of them.

ZAHN: Sure.

COOPER: The first one, "The Drudge Report," Matt Drudge, the paragon of journalistic credibility, cites an article in the Britain's "Daily Mirror." And what's interesting about this, the headline is "Britain and the U.S. In Rift Over Terrorist Prisoners." What's interesting is basically the coverage in England of this story has been, the U.S. has been coming under a lot more criticism than, in British papers than it has in the U.S. for the treatment of the prisoners in Guantanamo.

"Daily Variety" online, "Stars and Cars Go Through Tight Night." Unfortunately, obviously a tight night did not, unfortunately, refer to the amount of liquor that was served at the Golden Globes last night. It's talking about security. They had a great quote from HBO Film president saying, "With all the security you'd think we were going to something that was actually important."

The last quote, Slate.com reported, has an article, "Can Saint Jack Bless Enron?," an interesting article about why former Senator John Danforth agreed to review Enron's management records.

So some good stuff on the Web.

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