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Danny Jordan is Interviewed about the Deadly Shooting over Masks; Vet with Weeks to Live Sounds Alarm; David Petraeus is Interviewed about Burn Pits and their Health Effects; Bishops Move to Deny Biden Communion. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired June 21, 2021 - 08:30   ET

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

[08:30:00]

DANNY JORDAN, SECURITY GUARD WHO TRIED TO SAVE LIFE OF GROCERY STORE CLERK: Can't believe this guy is actually fighting this female over a mask. So I took off to run down there and deal with him fighting her.

About five feet before I got to him, somebody yelled out "gun." And at that point, of course, I slowed down, drew my weapon, but almost simultaneously I just heard a gunshot. And I never actually saw her get shot, but I heard a gunshot and took cover and that's -- a few seconds later, he and I were in a gun battle.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: And you have escaped with your life. Laquita (ph) did not. And I wonder just -- you know, how do you make sense of this, that this -- it just feels so senseless. You know, someone that you knew, with a family who loves her, and, you know, she's no longer alive just because of the senselessness of this argument over a mask.

JORDAN: I've thought about this since this incident happened. I thought about it a lot. I wake up with her on my mind. I go to sleep with her on my mind just wondering why would someone be so violent? There's -- there's no answer I can come up with, my mind would not let me get to, because there's not an answer for that. And that's what I finally just had to realize. There is no answer why somebody would be that violent. He had every other option to go shop somewhere else or just simply pull his mask up. But to kill someone over a mask is just unthinkable.

Looking at the map that we saw earlier, people are getting killed all over the place just for senselessness. So this just falls right into the rest of this stuff that's going on in the country.

KEILAR: The victim's family, Queet (ph), as you call her, her family calls you a hero. There was another clerk that was grazed by the bullet in this gunfight who has survived. You were able to incapacitate the shooter. And so I wonder what you think. Her family is calling you a hero.

JORDAN: It's very tough for me to deal with the hero label. I've watched many of these and I've seen many officers talk before and I never imagined I would be in this situation. But I can honestly say that I understand what they're saying when you're just doing your job at that point. At that point I'm literally just trying to stop the threat, trying to save my life and hope that I can stop this guy from killing anyone else. And that -- that's all that was on my mind at that point.

I struggle with the hero part, honestly.

KEILAR: Well, Danny, we understand why her family does call you that and also why you are struggling with that. But we appreciate you coming on to speak with us. Our thoughts are with you as you recover and also with Laquita's family as they mourn her passing.

JORDAN: Understandably.

Just one last thing. The police profession is underworked -- overworked and understaffed and a lot is being required of them right now. No one else wants to do this job. Very few people want to do it. I'm very afraid what policing is going to look like in the near future because right now instance like this, I don't -- I don't know how we're going to handle these in the future and they seem to be happening more and more rapidly.

KEILAR: Yes, we certainly hear you with your background in law enforcement saying that.

Danny, thanks for coming on.

JORDAN: Thank you, ma'am.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Look, you know, I don't struggle with calling him a hero.

KEILAR: I know.

BERMAN: He's a hero. I will say, though, how he handles the emotions of this going forward, it doesn't just -- you don't just snap your fingers and have it be over. This is something that sticks with you over time. It's understandable.

KEILAR: And I think when you showed that map with all of the shootings, you realize, talking to him, it doesn't end. So think of all of those people who are dealing with the after effects of what they have been through, even if they were lucky enough to survive.

BERMAN: Right. And then the next time you see a shooting like that. A really great discussion.

Ahead, U.S. Catholic bishops moving to deny communion to President Biden. Hear why.

KEILAR: Plus, an American veteran who survived combat is now picking out his coffin, his own coffin, at just 35 years old.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STAFF SGT. WESLEY BLACK (RET.), COMBAT VETERAN WITH STAGE FOUR CANCER: I'm just a dumb Irish kid from Boston. All I know how to do is fight.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: We'll have more of his powerful story in his own words, next.

And General David Petraeus will join us live.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:38:28]

KEILAR: It is the Agent Orange of the generation that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, burn pits, which are exactly what they sound like, they are giant holes of burning trash used by the military for years on bases overseas.

So what do they burn? In a word, everything. Food, clothes, used medical supplies, cans of paint, plastic water bottles, batteries, tires, big screen TVs and even entire Humvees too damaged by IEDs to salvage. And breathing in those toxic fumes threaten to kill many more Americans than combat has. People like Wesley Black, a veteran who is sounding the alarm.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STAFF SGT. WESLEY BLACK (RET.), COMBAT VETERAN WITH STAGE FOUR CANCER: These are memorial bracelets of all of my friends. Steve Delusio (ph) and Tristan Southworth (ph) were killed in Afghanistan on the same day and Steve actually died in my arms.

KEILAR (voice over): You probably can't tell by looking at him, but retired Staff Sergeant Wesley Black, 35 years old, is about to die himself.

BLACK: I could be dead tomorrow. I could live another six months. No one -- no one knows. It really all just depend on how my body responds to the oral chemotherapy.

KEILAR: Wes has terminal colon cancer. After surviving combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan with the Vermont National Guard, receiving a Purple Heart, it's smoldering trash from massive burn pits on U.S. military bases, sometimes acres in size, that will kill him.

BLACK: Soldiers tend to generate a lot of trash. Anything and everything that can be burned was thrown into these -- you know, the trash dump and then coated in diesel fuel and lit on fire.

[08:40:05]

KEILAR: In eastern Afghanistan, Black says the burn pit on the combat outpost where he served was located just 150 feet from the front gate.

BLACK: If you were the poor sucker standing gate guard when that -- when that burn pit was lit and the wind was blowing it into the -- into the main gate, I mean, you would be standing in the -- in the smoke for upwards of eight to 12 hours a day. KEILAR (on camera): Just breathing it in?

BLACK: Just breathing it in.

KEILAR (voice over): Just one of at least 230 burn pits used in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to a recent survey by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, 86 percent of vets from the two wars report exposure to burn pits. Almost nine in ten of those think they have related symptoms.

BLACK: I thought I was on easy street. You know, I was -- I was ready to chase my wife and my son around.

KEILAR: Now, after years of symptoms and a diagnosis from an outside oncologist that linked his cancer to burn pits, they are planning his funeral.

BLACK: My wife and I had to go to the funeral home and do the arrangements.

KEILAR: As the post 9/11 wars come to an end in the coming months, burn pit exposure threatens to kill more veterans than combat did and concerns about their plight extend all the way to the White House where President Joe Biden, as a candidate, pointed to burn pits as the likely cause of his son, Beau's death, from cancer in 2015.

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: He volunteered to join the National Guard at age 32. Because of his exposure of burn pits, in my view, can't prove it yet, he came back with stage four glioblastoma.

KEILAR: President Obama signed the Burn Pit Registry into law so veterans could document their exposure. More than 200,000 have signed up. President Trump signed a law that, in part, planned to phase out burn pits and require the Pentagon pinpoint where they have been used so the information can be cross referenced with sick vets. But the Department of Veterans Affairs has only approved about a fifth of related disability claims for a total of fewer than 3,000 vets.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR: (INAUDIBLE) says that he is the canary in the coal mine. He says it is too late for him but not for the next veteran who walks into the VA.

I want to talk about this with someone who is trying to influence this discussion, General David Petraeus. He is the former director of the CIA and he's the former commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan and he also oversaw all U.S. forces in Iraq.

General, thank you so much for being with us this morning.

GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Good to be with you, Brianna. Thanks.

KEILAR: You know, is there any doubt in your mind that there is a link here between health issues and burn pits? And I ask that because the VA has not outright acknowledged the link, although they do say that there is reason to believe now that there is a higher chance of having these long-term illnesses because of burn pit exposure. Any doubt in your mind about a link?

PETRAEUS: There really is not at this point in time. I think this is, as you said at the opening of this story, the equivalent of Agent -- what Agent Orange was for Vietnam veterans. And I'm hopeful that Congress and the VA will recognize the connection between the exposure to burn pit toxins and these various ailments now that are taking the lives of our veterans, such as Sergeant Black.

KEILAR: And burn pits were in operation in Iraq and Afghanistan while you were commanding troops there. I wonder, when you look back at this, what is the lesson about managing these threats in a conflict beyond just, of course, the most acute one you have on your hands, which is the threat of service members being killed in action?

PETRAEUS: Well, that's part of the problem, of course, you didn't exactly have a county landfill down the road, Mt. Trashmore, to which you could take your trash. And every operation outside the wire was a combat operation. And we -- we were conscious of this to a degree. I asked the occupational health people and the preventive medicine folks to examine this and asked the Pentagon for alternatives.

But, you know, there was a war on. And so you keep fighting and, you know, you hope that there can be some kind of solution to this, or various options provided. You know, none of them really worked all that well until more recently.

So this is something with which we now have to live. And, again, it is heartening to see Congress seized with this, it's heartening to know that Denis McDonough is the VA secretary, someone I know from the past, and I'm sure will be seized with this issue.

But, again, we've got to get on with this so that we don't do to our Iraq and Afghanistan veterans what we did to our Vietnam veterans on the issue of Agent Orange.

I might add that my -- both my father-in-law and my greatest mentor while I was in uniform and beyond, General Jack Calvin (ph), both had died of what we believe were connections to Agent Orange exposure.

KEILAR: Certainly. And that is the story, of course, of such a large number of folks in the Vietnam era.

[08:45:00]

And I understand how you don't want this to happen again. They waited too long, really, to be recognized for the issues they were dealing with.

You know, one of the reasons we wanted to do this story on Wes, we actually had done a story on him a little over a year ago. And we wanted to revisit it because, of course, you know, he -- his time here is coming to an end. But so, too, is the war in Afghanistan. And I think this is going to be the fallout from it. When President Biden announced two months ago that he's withdrawing

all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by 9/11, you said that you were really afraid that we're going to look back two years from now and regret the decision. I wonder, as you watch the drawdown, which is actually ahead of schedule, are you more or less concerned maybe than you were then?

PETRAEUS: Actually, I'm more concerned. Look, I hope that my worst fears are not realized. But you can already see a crumbling of the Afghan forces, which is something I thought might take a bit longer because there's a psychological component to this.

But the real issue here is that once the air mobility provided by the C-130 aircraft and Blackhawk helicopters, who have provided to the Afghan forces, and the close air support, their fixed wing and rotary wing attack aircraft, once their maintenance degrades, which will happen because we're also pulling out the apparently 18,000 or so contractors that have kept their air force in the air, there's got to be some stop gap found for that, because once there is no longer anyone coming to rescue and the Afghan forces realize that, you're going to see a rapid crumbling of the situation throughout the country.

And I -- and I fear, as I did a couple of months ago, that we are consigning Afghanistan to a very bloody civil war with a lot of implications in terms of refugees, loss of life, fighting similar to what we saw, in fact, after the collapse of the post-Soviet Afghan government.

KEILAR: Do you think al Qaeda and ISIS will re-establish strongholds there that could threaten U.S. national security?

PETRAEUS: I think they will establish strongholds. They have tried to do that repeatedly, al Qaeda did, and then more recently the Islamic State Horasan (ph) Group has established an element there between Afghanistan and Pakistan as well.

I'm not as convinced that they will be able to threaten our homeland the way al Qaeda did when it planned the 9/11 attacks on Afghan soil under Taliban control and also conducted the initial training of the attackers there. That would take a good bit longer. And I don't think they have that capability. Moreover, I'm much more confident in the capability of U.S. intelligence and a variety of other processes, organizations and so forth that we've put together to ensure that we would detect something akin to a 9/11 attack.

KEILAR: One of the issues that service members, when you talk to them, bring up over and over, and even their family members, you know, spouses that I talk to will bring this up, they're so concerned about the interpreters, the drivers, the engineers and other Afghans who help the U.S. There are tens of thousands of people and many more family members who are in this category. And their lives are in danger.

In the absence of a mass evacuation of these Afghans who help the U.S., what's going to happen to them? PETRAEUS: Well, if they are left behind and if security does crumble

the way it could -- and, again, I hope that my fears are not realized, but if that happens, they and their families are very much in jeopardy. We've already seen targeted attacks by the Taliban on those who helped us. And, again, keep in mind, these are individuals who shared hardship and risk on the battlefield alongside our soldiers, multiple tours of that, the equivalent of that. And the process by which they get a special immigrant visa has been glacial at best. It takes far longer, multiple times what it took to put a rover on Mars to get through that process.

There's hope as well here that there could be legislation that could streamline that process. There's hope that the State Department, being more aggressive on this, can speed the numbers. But the bottom line is, you're not going to get 18,000 interpreters and their families out by the time that we are gone. And then, if the situation does deteriorate rapidly, I think we're going to see a very serious situation for them, in addition to a number of others in Afghanistan.

KEILAR: Sir, thank you so much for being with us. General David Petraeus.

KEILAR: Thanks, Brianna.

KEILAR: Up next, the Catholic Church taking action against pro-choice politicians. Could President Biden be prevented from taking communion?

BERMAN: And who will get to watch the Summer Olympics? The big decision just announced in Tokyo, just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:52:03]

BERMAN: President Biden's Catholic faith has long been a cornerstone of his identity. On Friday in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted to begin a process that could, if successful, deny communion to public figures who support abortion rights, like the president. When asked about how he felt on the matter personally, Biden said it was a private matter and that he didn't think it was going to happen.

Joining me now is Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large of "America Magazine." He's also the focus of a new documentary about his LGBT ministry called "Building a Bridge," which premiered last week at the Tribeca Film Festival and is available for streaming now throughout the festival.

Father, thanks so much for being with us.

FATHER JAMES MARTIN, JESUIT PRIEST: My pleasure.

BERMAN: Given that -- I can't remember, maybe Jimmy Carter was the last time we had a president for whom faith was such a central part of his character and central part of his daily being. I wonder what message you think it sends that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is doing this. MARTIN: Well, I think that's a good question. And I think you have

someone who considers himself a devout Catholic. And I think people are seeing it as focusing on one particular issue in a sense over and above all the other issues, you know, that make for what's a good Catholic.

BERMAN: Do you think it's political or how -- how much is politics playing into this?

MARTIN: Oh, I think the bishops who are proposing this are sincere. They are pro-life. I'm pro-life. But I think the problem is, again, that, you know, for example, when you consider someone like Attorney General Barr, who, you know, expedited executions, you know, the death penalty is against Catholic teachings, too, and there was no call to deny Attorney General Barr communion. And so I think people are seeing this as a, you know, rather focused on the president, which I think is unfortunate.

BERMAN: Choosing one issue rather than another, asking people or public figures in some ways, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, to bat 1,000, to have a perfect record on issues that are important. Is communion about perfection?

MARTIN: Well, it's funny you say that because Pope Francis said the Eucharist is not a prize for the perfect but nourishment for those who are sick, and he said that just a couple of weeks ago. And, interesting, the Vatican has made it clear that they are not in favor of a document like this. They said that it has to be, in a sense, unanimous, that the Vatican will have to approve it.

And, you know, by the same token, it is the local bishop who has authority over whether or not someone receives communion or not. And so the U.S. Bishops Conference is kind of, you know, sort of consultative and has a moral authority but they cannot tell the local bishop, who in this case would be the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Gregory, who or who cannot receive communion.

BERMAN: And Bishop Gregory I think has made clear that he thinks that President Biden should continue to receive communion.

Father James Martin, I appreciate you joining us this morning. I look forward to continuing this discussion going forward.

MARTIN: My pleasure.

BERMAN: The president expected to invite members of Congress to the White House this week for crucial talks on infrastructure. We have a live report. News just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:59:25]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FOO FIGHTERS (singing): But I (INAUDIBLE) leave it all behind. (END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: This is "The Good Stuff" today. The Foo Fighters, or the Foo Fighter, as Christopher Walken called them, bringing rock back to Madison Square Garden in the first full capacity concert since COVID- 19 shut the party down in March 2020.

[09:00:01]

I did that for you, John Berman. You always channel him on that.

The Garden crowd, all fully vaccinated, by the way. They were just soaking this all in.