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American Morning

Cheney to Speak to Wyoming Legislature; Gambling Business Running Again in New Orleans

Aired February 17, 2006 - 09:00   ET

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

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. I'm Miles O'Brien.
ZAIN VERJEE, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Zain Verjee, in for Soledad.

O'BRIEN: Weather changes on the way, but what should expect? Seasonal uncertainty could be blown away by an arctic blast.

Entire villages swept away by a wall of mud. The rescuers try to reach hundreds who may still be trapped.

VERJEE: Texas police decide whether to file charges in the VP hunting mishap. We're live at the White House with the latest.

Repaired hearts may need repair again. A surprising shelf life for a life-saving surgery. Our heart health series is just ahead.

O'BRIEN: And what would you do with 365 million big ones? A record lottery jackpot is just a few lucky numbers away. The grand prize could be yours. Stay with us on "American Morning."

You know the saying, if you don't like the weather, just wait a minute. That seems to be very true these days. An arctic blast is heading east. It's going to change spring to winter in a hurry in some parts of they world. For example, it will reach 58 degrees today in New York, tomorrow 35. The same will happen in Washington, 57 today, Saturday 38.

A 20 degree drop is expected in Atlanta. Prepare to go from t- shirts to winter coats, 65 today, 45 tomorrow. It's a trend we're starting to get used to, I think.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: When extreme cold butts heads with unseasonable warmth, well, let's just say they don't get along. Now those hard-headed competing weather titans are ready to rumble. First came the winter bob and weave after the warmest January on record, the temperatures 8 1/2 degrees above average.

A snowstorm of historic proportions blanketed the Northeast. Nearly 27 inches fell in New York City. Days later, it was positively spring like. Temperatures in the 50s and 60s. Just as Punxsutawney Phil predicted winter may be here, but just a shadow of its former self.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's my shadow, I see. Six more weeks of mild winter weather there will be.

O'BRIEN: Indeed, it was raining ice in Chicago, mild temperatures melting chunks of ice off the hundred story John Hancock building. And in Minnesota, ice fishing became just plain fishing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is one of the worst years that I've seen out here in quite a while for this time of year.

O'BRIEN: By back to your corner, Phil. The gloves are now off, and the fireworks have begun. In Utah, they're digging out from nearly a foot of new snow. High winds and bone-chilling cold across the upper Midwest.

Storms and high winds knocked out power to thousands of homes in Michigan overnight. The Chicago airport's a mess. And storms created havoc across parts of Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Now those squall lines are headed east. So enjoy the warm weather while you can. That terror from the north, arctic cold, is closing in fast.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(WEATHER UPDATE)

VERJEE: Dick Cheney cuts his teeth on politics in Wyoming. And that's where he's going to be later today. He speaks to the Wyoming legislature in Cheyenne. It's his first public appearance since the Saturday hunting accident.

CNN's Chris Lawrence is at the state capital there, and he joins us now live.

Chris, can we expect him to talk about the accident today?

CHRIS LAWRENCE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Zain, the focus of the speech is going to be here on Wyoming. But my colleague at the White House, Dana Bash, says that Cheney will talk about Whittington and the shooting incident. Now right now, it's cold and it's quiet here. But, you know, newspaper headlines notwithstanding, Cheney is going to get a pretty warm welcome once he arrives here later this morning.

After all, he got his start here in the building right here behind me. Cheney was an intern here some 40 years ago. Now, this will be his first public speech since last weekend when he accidentally shot his friend Harry Whittington while they were both hunting Quayle there in Texas.

Today, we may get more insight into what Cheney was thinking or has been thinking over the past few days, or he may just reiterate what he said Wednesday. That it's all his fault and one of the worst days of his life.

Some people have criticized Cheney for not taking responsibility until four days after the shooting. Other people have said the media are blowing this out of proportion. But later today, Cheney will be here back in his home state. Very friendly territory -- Zain?

VERJEE: Chris Lawrence reporting.

There has been a terrible mudslide in the Philippines. Many lives have been lost. Let's go to Carol Costello for more on that -- Carol?

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: That's right, Zain. An entire village reduced to splinters. Two weeks of torrential rains causing a deadly mess in the eastern Philippines. Rescue crews now digging through the slabs of mud, looking for survivors. The Red Cross estimates at least 300 people were killed.

We're also now hearing that U.S. naval vessels are heading to the disaster area. The Philippines president says help is on the way by land, by sea, and air.

Not guilty. That's the plea entered on behalf of accused killer Neil Entwistle. Entwistle was silent during his brief arraignment on Thursday. He's charged with fatally shooting his wife and 9-month-old daughter in Massachusetts last month.

Off the hook. That's the former mayor of Spokane, Washington, feels. Federal authorities found there wasn't enough evidence to charge him. Jim West was recalled in December amid reports he offered jobs to gay men he met over the Internet.

Global warming is taking a much more serious toll than originally though. A new report shows Greenland's glacier are dumping twice as much ice into the Atlantic Ocean as they did ten years ago. So does this mean the east coast is going under? Not exactly, but scientists say it is a wake-up call.

Do you believe in miracles? If so, you might want to get in on the Powerball frenzy. Tomorrow's jackpot, $365 million and growing. That is the biggest jackpot in U.S. history. Don't get your hopes up too high, though. The chances of winning, one in 146 million. So a big good luck to you.

O'BRIEN: Sounds like a good investment plan to me.

COSTELLO: Why not, though? It's fun.

O'BRIEN: Take the 401k money. Invest it that way. Probably better than Enron was. Anyhow, all right. Thank you, Carol Costello.

Do you feel lucky? Speaking of luck, Harrah's in New Orleans sure does. Six months after Hurricane Katrina, the casino is finally open for business again. Susan Roesgen, we tore her away from the slot machines. No, they're not actually open just yet, right? But she's stacking up her quarters, getting ready, right?

SUSAN ROESGEN, GULF COAST CORRESPONDENT: Just for you, Miles, I'm going to go in there and play the quarter slots, and I'll see how well I do. I think Harrah's is getting ready for a big party today. It starts around noon, and they'll probably working on it right up until the last minute. Workers are out here behind me sprucing up the outside while inside, they are getting ready to roll the dice. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ROESGEN: After nearly six months away, Nanita Jones was dealing cards again, loosening up her fingers and loving being back at Harrah's Casino.

NANITA JONES, DEALER: When I walked down the street for the last week, and they'll see my badge that we're now opening. You know, a lot of people ask me. It's going to be hectic in a way, but I'm quite sure it's going to be fun.

ROESGEN: Sixty-five percent of Harrah's employees lived in areas hit hard by the hurricane. And so far, Harrah's has only been able to hire half of its workforce back. Jones is lucky to be here, but her two teenage daughters still live in Dallas while she tries to find temporary housing here in New Orleans.

GARY LOVEMAN, HARRAH'S CEO: Welcome back. I'm really grateful to you for coming back.

ROESGEN: Harrah's CEO Gary Loveman says luring customers back is next.

LOVEMAN: We had a fantastic business here before the hurricanes came at the end of the summer. And we feel that over time, that business will come back.

ROESGEN: Harrah's wants that business, and so does Louisiana. In exchange for being the only land-based casino allowed in New Orleans, Harrah's must pay the state $164,000 a day, a payment Harrah's continued to make even when it was closed.

Now with three quarters of the city's population gone, no one knows how many locals will spin the wheel again. Before Katrina, half of Harrah's customers were local. Then there's a question of tourists returning.

LOVEMAN: None of us can predict how quickly all that's going to come back. We're in this for the long haul. We're going to be here a long, long time. And we think that over time, this will be revitalized. We're very confident about it.

ROESGEN: And Anita Jones is glad to be back.

JONES: It was hard for me. I mean, I had no sense of direction, which way to go, you know. So to get back to New Orleans, great. And Harrah's was the perfect reason to do that. Get back to work.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROESGEN: Right after the hurricane, Harrah's casino became the base for the first responders, Miles. You might remember the news conferences with the police and firefighters out here. Now, Harrah's Casino wants to see the stretch limousines come back and open the door to high rollers like you, Miles. O'BRIEN: I'm one of those guys that helps build casinos. I'm a big fat loser. Let's talk about another important milestone, the Convention Center, which will always be remembered for some very terrible scenes post-Katrina. Trying to get back to what it was.

ROESGEN: That's really true, Miles. It reopens today, as well. And you know, the tourism and convention folks have been working feverishly behind the scenes to try to lure back some of the giant conventions that support the New Orleans economy.

They recently got word that a big medical convention will come back with about 40,000 out-of-towners not this spring, but next spring. So they're really counting on those kinds of events, all those out-of-towners and all their money to boost the New Orleans economy again.

O'BRIEN: Thank you, Susan Roesgen. We'll see you soon in New Orleans.

Also, the Big Easy is getting ready for Mardi Gras. It's only 11 days away. The party really kicks off tomorrow. Marchers stepping out for the first of a dozen Mardi Gras parades over the next week and a half. The theme this year? May God bless New Orleans. That's a good one.

And AMERICAN MORNING will be live from New Orleans Mardi Gras week. Soledad and I will be there. The whole crew. Much of the crew here. Maybe some of the crew. They're all shaking their head. We wish we were going. We will be there Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to tell you about not just the parade and the Mardi Gras, but what's going on in the city in some of those neighborhoods that have yet to recover.

Coming up in the program, alarming news for people who had heart defects fixed as children. It seems a lot of the repairs were not so permanent. Dr. Sanjay Gupta with that.

VERJEE: And also, the other story dogging Vice President Cheney, the CIA leak probe. Does he really have the power to declassify secret documents?

O'BRIEN: And later, America's newest golden girl, Hannah Teter, will join us live. She aced the halfpipe and cruised for gold in Turin. We'll find out what's next for her, and maybe getting a few tips on snowboarding, maybe. We'll see.

VERJEE: Are you that bad?

O'BRIEN: I think the bottom side pad would be good. That would be the first thing I should do. Anyway, there she is, checking it out, making sure it's real gold. That's ahead on "American Morning."

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: Who in the government has the right to reveal secrets? That's a question that is very much on our mind as the whole CIA leak case unfolds. The issue of Scooter Libby, the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, and whether he was authorized, or so he thought, by superiors to divulge the name of a CIA covert operative.

CNN's senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin is here. The latest wrinkle in all this story is on another network. Vice President Cheney was asked about this, whether, in fact, he as the vice president feels he has the authority to reveal certain secrets. Does he have that authority, Jeff?

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: You know what? He answered the question, you know, his interview with Brit Hume on FOX, and he said, "I have the authority as an executive order to this effect. End of story." And, you know, I know a lot of people who are very familiar with this. And they sort of said, "What? We don't know anything about any executive order."

But you know what? Cheney was actually right. There is an executive order that deals with this precisely.

O'BRIEN: All right. Tell you what, let's get this exact phraseology out there, since I forgot to do that right here in the opening. He said exactly this: "There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority. Obviously focuses first and foremost on the president, but also includes the vice president." So these executive orders -- executive order is something that is signed by the president.

TOOBIN: Has force of law.

O'BRIEN: Force of law. And the president has a fair amount of latitude in these things, right?

TOOBIN: In what he can put in them. That's true.

O'BRIEN: And they are not always out there in the public, right?

TOOBIN: Well, they are in public, but they're not always read by the public. They're lost (ph), and they're very hyper-technical. They're not dealing with subjects that are very much in the news.

And this one, Executive Order 13292, was an amendment to an order that President Clinton passed several years earlier. And it was in March of 2003, right after the Iraq War started. And it was about who in the government can classify documents. And the amendment that was added, among other things, was adding the vice president to the list of the people who could classify documents.

O'BRIEN: So constitutionally speaking, the president has this latitude to do this. Would legal scholars tell you he has the authority to make that addendum?

TOOBIN: Yes. I think it's pretty clear. There a couple of little legal wrinkles, though. One is the document is less clear on who can declassify documents. It very clearly says the vice president can classify, but it's somewhat more ambiguous about declassifying. Also, the practice in the government when you're declassifying documents is to go back to the original agency that classified it in the first place and said, "You know, is it OK that we declassify that?"

It would be interesting to see if Cheney in fact ordered the declassification of this document, whether he went back to the CIA from whence it came and said, "Is this OK?" But in terms of violating the law, it seems that Cheney is very much in the clear on that.

O'BRIEN: He's on firm ground. So give us the big picture, then. How does this in any way change the investigation of Scooter Libby?

TOOBIN: Well, Scooter Libby has never been charged with improperly disclosing classified information. That's not -- he's charged with lying to the grand jury, a separate crime. The case, I think, it somewhat helps Libby because it suggests a theme that will probably be a big part of his defense which was, "Look, I'm just doing the bidding of my superiors. They authorized me to do this. This is just one part of that."

O'BRIEN: Is that a good defense, you think?

TOOBIN: Well, you know, legally it's not. I mean, in the sense of, you can't break the law because your superior tells you to. But nothing is a crime until a jury says it's a crime.

And juries often say, "Look, if an underling was directly ordered to do something by a superior who had authority, we're going to be very reluctant to find someone guilty." So as a technical legal matter, no, but in a jury matter, it might help.

O'BRIEN: Jurors have bosses. They can relate to that.

TOOBIN: Absolutely. And that's one of the geniuses of our legal system, which is, that you know, ordinary people make these decisions. And if you have the vice president of the United States saying, "Go do x," and it's not, "Go kill somebody," it's something that is fairly subtle in its legality or illegality, the jury might say, "You know, cut the guy a break."

O'BRIEN: Interesting. Executive orders. I guess we've got to start reading the federal registry.

TOOBIN: I'm going to count on you to do that, and you report back to me. Anything interesting you find, you let me know.

O'BRIEN: Probably a lot of good nuggets in there.

TOOBIN: So I'm told.

O'BRIEN: Jeffrey Toobin, always a pleasure -- Zain?

VERJEE: Miles, coming up, if you don't like the weather now, just wait a few days. It will change. What's behind the wacky weather lately? We want to take a closer look at that. The publisher of the old Farmer's Almanac will join us.

And next, a rude awakening for some people who thought they had successful heart surgery as a kid. It seems now as though they weren't really cured. Dr. Sanjay Gupta explains why, next on "AMERICAN MORNING."

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

VERJEE: Many people who had heart defects fixed 30 years ago as infants are in for a really rude awakening. Recent research shows that adult survivors of congenital heart surgery actually were not cured. They now face a dramatically increased risk of additional cardiac problems. Dr. Sanjay Gupta takes look now on our series on heart health.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: When she was just eight years old, Deepa Sinha had an operation to correct a very common but complex congenital heart defect. It's called tautrology of pholo (ph), a set of problems that include a hole in the heart. Deepa thought surgery had fixed her problem until years later when she became pregnant, her health began to fail.

DEEPA SINHA, HEART SURGERY PATIENT: I was having a palpitation. I was tired all the time. I was sleepy all the time. I couldn't get my work done.

GUPTA: She's 37 now and joins more than a million other who had similar operations in the late '60s and '70s

DR. KAREN KUEHL, PEDIATRIC CARDIOLOGIST: Anything as simple as just closing a hole within the heart to opening a pathway to the lungs which wasn't there to making a circulation that worked for a heart that didn't have four chambers.

GUPTA: They were called miracle babies back then, and around 90 percent lived to be adults. But even then, there was this nagging suspicion that these fixes weren't necessarily cures. They could fail over time, resulting in enlarged hearts, irregular heartbeats, even sudden death.

DR. GEORGE RUIZ, CARDIOLOGIST: We see folks come in after they were sick for some time. And because they were young, they don't think anything is wrong, they may have lived for a long time with a perception that they were cured or fixed. And then they show up when they're pretty sick.

GUPTA: And that's why Dr. Karen Kuehl and Dr. George Ruiz are now following patients like Deepa. Kuehl is a pediatric cardiologist, and Ruiz an adult cardiologist. Together, they started the Washington Adult Congenital Heart Center. There are fewer than 80 sub-centers in the country. It's a fairly new subspecialty. Ruiz, for example, is one of only a few cardiologists trained to manage adult patients who in fact have pediatric heart problems.

RUIZ: They need to be followed closely to make sure that if there are things that need to be changed or adjusted that we do that.

GUPTA: Deepa found out about her condition the hard way, but still considers herself lucky. Last year, she had corrective surgery. She had a valve replaced. And already knows it will need to be replaced again in 15 years. But for now, she feels great. Kuehl and Ruiz say these complications can be tested, diagnosed, and treated. The key: getting into care sooner rather than later.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VERJEE: Now, if you've had corrective surgery and you want some more information, what you need to do is just contact your doctor or contact the Adult Congenital Heart Association. The website is www.achaheart.org -- Miles?

O'BRIEN: Coming up, a guy who puts your exercise plan to shame. We'll tell you why he's walking clear across America. Kind of a Forrest Gump thing.

And later, halfpipe gold medalist Hannah Teter will join us live. She's 19 years old. She's the best in her sport, she's got a gold medal. What next? I'm sure she's got something up her sleeve, or we'll see. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: Get the latest news every morning in your email. Sign up for AMERICAN MORNING quick news at CNN.com/am.

Still to come on the program, last week record snow. This week, warm enough to melt it. Tomorrow, freezing temperatures. What's going on here? Who could predict such weather? Well, what about the old Farmer's Almanac? We'll check in with them next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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