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CNN Saturday Morning News

More DNA Tests Collected in Duke Rape Case

Aired May 13, 2006 - 11:30   ET

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

BETTY NGUYEN, CNN ANCHOR: "Now in the News," take a look at this. An Indonesian volcano is rumbling, lots of smoke coming from it and an eruption may be imminent. Thousands of people are being evacuated. Back in 1994, 66 people died when this volcano that you see right here erupted.
Starting this life sentence this morning, al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui arrived at a maximum security prison in Colorado.

Now the Duke rape case, will it go forward? Some legal experts have doubts. The defense says a second batch of DNA tests didn't link the accuser and the accused.

CNN's Jason Carroll reports. .

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JASON CARROLL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Defense attorneys representing several Duke lacrosse players gathered late Friday to say exactly what they thought of the results of the second round of DNA tests.

JOE CHESHIRE, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: We can say to you categorically that this report shows no conclusive match between any genetic material taken on, about, in or from the false accuser and any genetic material of any Duke lacrosse player.

CARROLL: While they say the results are inconclusive, the report does name a third lacrosse player, someone whose DNA material was found on the alleged victim's fake fingernail. Defense attorneys argue the nail was found in a trash can in the bathroom of the lacrosse house and therefore is tainted. Even more importantly, they say the report shows semen was found in the alleged victim, but it does not match any of the players.

CHESHIRE: They did retrieve male genetic material from a single source, a single male source, from vaginal swabs. And that that source has been named in this report, is a person known to the Durham police department, to put is very simply, it appears that this woman had sex with a male, but it also appears with certainty that it wasn't a Duke lacrosse player.

CARROLL: Durham's district attorney Michael Nifong did not return repeated calls about the second round of tests. He has said in the past it's his moral obligation to pursue anyone he believes is guilty of a crime. The second round of tests Nifong ordered were done by a private lab. The first round done by a state lab showed no match between the players and the alleged victim. The young woman, an exotic dancer and student, says three players raped her during a lacrosse party. So far two have been charged, Reade Seligmann and Colin Finnerty.

(on-camera): The question now, will the new DNA results lead it a third arrest? Defense attorneys believe the district attorney will pursue another indictment. The next chance he'll get it do that is when the grand jury meets on Monday. Jason Carroll, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HARRIS: And let's go across America now. A Texas tree cutter is trying to recover after a ferocious attack. Did you hear about this? He was trimming limbs, about two stories high when he hit a bee hive.

NGUYEN: Oh, no.

HARRIS: Well, you know what happened then.

NGUYEN: Yeah, he got stung.

HARRIS: Here's the problem. The man was harnessed to the tree so he was stung while the bees sort of did their thing. He eventually got down. The man may have been stung hundreds of times.

A tremendous explosion has knocked an Oklahoma oil refinery off line. Firefighters let the blaze burn itself out. Homes, schools and day care centers were evacuated for a while. The refinery in Winiwood (ph) processed 54,000 barrels of crude a day.

Clean-up near Pittsburgh, fire retardant foam seeps from an airport hangar and spread onto the tarmac of Allegheny County airport. A power surge apparently cause the white out. Look at this.

NGUYEN: That's wild.

HARRIS: It is isn't it? Remarkably the airport says this big gooey mess didn't interfere with operations.

NGUYEN: Marshmallow goo.

HARRIS: Yeah, it is.

And California's high school exit exam is on ice today. A judge has suspended the test. He says the exam isn't fair for the poor and those who don't speak English. That means 47,000 seniors who failed may get to graduate, that is unless the state wins on appeal.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This a brief report on the impact of war upon a nationwide service.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NGUYEN: But is that reason enough for the government to look into your phone records? We're going to tackle the NSA phone issue. That's ahead.

HARRIS: Plus if you need to sign up for Medicare prescription coverage and haven't, we know a place where you can talk to a real live person. Stay with us.

REYNOLDS WOLF, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Hi, folks, I'm meteorologist Reynolds Wolf. And for your hurricane 101 segment, we are going to talk about inland flooding. When these hurricanes make their way onshore, one of the biggest threats they pose to us is the threat of flooding. Often times the rain is measured not just in inches, but in feet. In fact this video that we're showing is from hurricane Floyd back in 1999 and as far as the eye can see, it's water, water, everywhere. Now for more information about these tremendous storms, all you have to do is go to cnn.com/weather or simply stay tuned to CNN, your hurricane station.

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NGUYEN: Security watch now, the first lawsuit over the NSA controversy. A couple of public interest lawyers claim Verizon violated the customers' privacy rights. "USA Today" reported this week Verizon and other major telecoms are voluntarily giving millions of call records to the government. No one in government or at the phone companies has confirmed or denied that report.

Again this morning though, President Bush is urging the Senate to approve his choice to head the CIA, but General Michael Hayden may be in for a tough slog of it. Some don't like the idea of a military man leading the agency and this week's claim that the government is nosing about your phone records, well that's not helping. Hayden led the agency that allegedly did the snooping. If true, this spying wouldn't be unprecedented though. Here's national security correspondent David Ensor.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is a brief report on the impact of war upon a nationwide service.

DAVID ENSOR, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): For as long as there have been telephones and even well before that, the major communications companies have cooperated closely with the U.S. government. Former employees say during World War II, the government under President Franklin Roosevelt received copies of every single telegram sent in or out of the United States, not by law, but by request. A former administration official says the same thing is apparently going on now between AT&T, Bell South and Verizon and the U.S. government. And that it is legal, according to the Supreme Court.

RICHARD FALKENRATH, FMR. HOMELAND SECURITY ADVISER: They said call records that are stripped of personal information about the customer are not covered by the Fourth Amendment and therefore may be held and used by a Federal agency that gets them voluntarily.

ENSOR: Such as the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland which is analyzing telephone call records. It is legal, too, says Falkenrath for the companies to give the phone call data, just the telephone numbers under the telecommunications act of 1934 and subsequent laws. But clearly, not everyone agrees. The then CEO of Qwest Communications, Joseph Nacchio refused the government's request for his customer's phone data. In a statement, his attorney says quote, when he learned that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the telecommunications act. Accordingly, Mr. Nacchio issued instructions to refuse to comply with these requests.

Phone calls are not the only issue. In this AT&T building in San Francisco, according to a retired 22-year employee Mark Klein, who is a witness in a lawsuit against the government, the NSA scoops up e- mail and Internet traffic from the whole region.

JAMES BROSNAHAN, ATTORNEY FOR MARK KLEIN: He became aware and was assigned the job of assisting in a split of the fiber optic cable, so that it took a complete copy of all the e-mails and all of the web browsings that people do, people of all kinds, companies of all kinds and sent it to a secret government room.

ENSOR: NSA and AT&T officials offer no comment on the lawsuit.

(on-camera): Bell South, Verizon and AT&T also declined comment on their dealings with the NSA, but in a statement, Verizon said, it does not and will not provide any government agency with unfettered access to our customer records or provide information to the government under circumstances that would allow a fishing expedition. David Ensor, CNN Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

NGUYEN: All right, let's stay on subject with Ron Brownstein. He's a columnist for the "Los Angeles Times" and a CNN political analyst. He joins us this morning from Washington. Good morning to you.

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Good morning.

NGUYEN: All right. The NSA snooping around our phone records. Politically what does this do to the president who is already down in the polls?

BROWNSTEIN: Look, this is one of the big issues we face in the age of terror is devising the boundary between privacy and security. It's an issue we've faced already on several fronts, the Patriot Act in 2001, the revelations the National Security Agency was listening in on international calls without a warrant last year. And we are facing it again. By and large, the public has leaned towards the side of security. They've been willing to accept some infringements on civil liberties in order to increase the -- or reduce the odds of another terrorist attack.

The initial polling on this has been supported as the polling has been consistently on the revelations last fall about the NSA. So on balance, it's not likely that you're going to see a big firestorm in the public about this. Now there is a different question though and it's much more of a complication for the president in his dealings with Congress, I think.

NGUYEN: Let's talk about General Hayden, the president's pick for CIA, the director there. He over saw the NSA from 1999 to 2005. In his bid to be CIA director, how is this going to play out?

BROWNSTEIN: Well, I think -- what this revelation really does I think is deepen the sense in Congress, especially among Democrats but among some Republicans as well, that they don't really have a handle on the overall surveillance undertakings of the NSA since 9/11. There was a lot of concern when this came out in the newspaper on Thursday from Arlen Specter, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, many Democrats, that they simply, sort of reinforced their belief, they just don't know enough. They haven't gotten enough answers about this program.

Now the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, says we know everything we need to know. Others disagree. What's that going to mean for General Hayden? What it's going to mean is this hearing becomes an opportunity for Democrats and even some Republicans to ask the questions they feel they have not been able to get answered from Attorney General Gonzalez and others since these hearings began on the NSA program gone earlier this year.

NGUYEN: No doubt there's a lot of questions and bottom line, Congress is going to be expected to act. People are going to want Congress to act. Really, what can they do at this point?

BROWNSTEIN: Well, this is where there's another complication. Senator Specter was hoping to begin as soon as next week, marking up legislation that would try to oversee the overall NSA operation. There's a competing bill from another group of Republicans, Senators Mike DeWine, Lindsay Graham and others.

What Democrats are arguing is that it it's premature to try to write any rules for this program when we know so little about it. And I think this is really going to intensify that argument, the sense that can you go ahead and write a legislative framework for a program when you don't really understand the full parameters of it. That's going to be a debate that starts probably as soon as next week.

NGUYEN: Tomorrow, actually Monday I should say, it may spark some more debate. The president is going to be speaking to the American public, a lot of it dealing with immigration, illegal immigration. What are you expecting to hear?

BROWSTEIN: Well, the White House has gone out and made clear yesterday, they're going to focus on the security side, of beefing up the borders, perhaps even providing financial incentives to encourage the use of the National Guard along the border. The basic balancing act the president is undertaking here is that he supports an approach in dealing with illegal immigration that balances border security with a guest worker program for future workers and some path to citizenship, some path that would allow people who are here illegally to stay in the country and work.

Now, in the House, the conservatives want a security only approach. The Senate wants a more balanced approach. What the president is trying to do is thread a path between those two polls at a time when, as you mentioned, his numbers have been declining not only among independents and Democrats but also conservatives and Republicans that I think is going to make him leery of going too far away from his base. It is a very complex political puzzle and whatever he says Monday night, it's still an uphill fight to get legislation done before this mid-term election.

NGUYEN: We're also expecting him to talk about sending National Guard troops to the U.S./Mexico border so a lot to be heard from the president on Monday night. Ron Brownstein, thank you for that insight.

BROWNSTEIN: Thank you.

NGUYEN: Well, you don't want to miss CNN's immigration coverage on Monday. Before the president's speech, we're going to have a special edition of "THE SITUATION ROOM" at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Monday and you will certainly want to hear what Lou Dobbs has to say after the speech. He is known for having an opinion or two or three, many in fact, on illegal immigration. And then we're going to hear from Larry King. Plus Anderson Cooper will be live at 10:00 p.m. with his own take on illegal immigration. It's all here. You don't want to miss it on CNN Monday night. And remember to stay tuned to CNN both day and night for the most reliable news about your security.

HARRIS: And top stories now -- time is running out for millions of older Americans. They must enroll in a Medicare prescription drug benefit program by Monday. For answers, you can log onto medicarematters.org or you can look up local events in your area where you can talk to real people.

Time is also running out for thousands of people in Indonesia. Authorities fear a volcano is about to erupt. They have ordered residents near Mount Merapi to evacuate immediately.

And fire danger warnings in Florida. Forecasters say conditions today are ripe for wildfires. Nearly 37,000 acres were scorched this week in the Daytona Beach area. So the question for Reynolds Wolf is, is there any rain in the forecast for Florida which needs it right now so badly?

NGUYEN: Florida is on fire. Can you help out a little bit?

WOLF: I wish I could. I really really wish I could. We couldn't make the weather happen, although you would be surprised. I'll tell you.

HARRIS: About your powers.

WOLF: I'm telling you. One of the big problems we have in Florida is not only that it's so dry, but the palmetto fronds, at the same time all the pine thickets when they're really dry as they have been, that is perfect, perfect tinder for those fuel for those fires to form and spread. And I tell you, with the light breeze that's coming in today with those dry conditions, it is really a problem, could be a problem there today. And so we're going to have to watch very carefully.

Meanwhile to the northwest we go, up in Alabama, some scatters showers and storms. Up in the northeast, we're seeing more of the same near Boston. It's been raining all morning up in Boston. Meanwhile, in parts of Pennsylvania, we're seeing some scattered showers as well and also just south of the Great Lakes and through Grand Rapids back over to Detroit, the rain continues to fall and should fall, not only through much of today, but possibly through much of the weekend.

Meanwhile temperatures, highs for today, try 50 degrees on for size for Chicago, 73 in Atlanta, 84 in New Orleans, 90 in both Houston and in Dallas. And tomorrow for Mother's Day, Sunday, looking at a lot of rain still back along the eastern seaboard into the deep south as well. But nice and sunny out in the west, Phoenix expected to hit 104 tomorrow for Mother's Day with plenty of sunshine. So I wish high better news for you with regards to central Florida, but it looks like it's going to stay dry until maybe Tuesday afternoon and evening. Hopefully we'll get some rain, but only then a 20 percent chance.

NGUYEN: All right, we'll keep a watch.

HARRIS: Reynolds, appreciate it. Thank you, sir.

NGUYEN: Coming up today including Brianna Keilar. She is joining us

HARRIS: What's up?

NGUYEN: Hi, how are you. Welcome.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Thank you. You have to take a look at this video. It looks like someplace out west doesn't it, but actually it's not. It's Titan. It's one of the moons of Saturn and we're looking to talk to the leader...

NGUYEN: That's in outer space.

KEILAR: That's right, not out west. It's in outer space and we're going to talk to a leader of the team that interprets these pictures. One thing, guys that I can tell you right now, there is a big surprise on Titan. So stay tuned.

NGUYEN: No, no, no, you're going to sit here and tease us like that.

KEILAR: That's where it ends.

HARRIS: Surprise in your show. Well what...

NGUYEN: It's a Titanic surprise.

KEILAR: That's right, very nice.

HARRIS: Well thank you.

NGUYEN: We'll see you soon Brianna. Well, this, check her out, one happy granny, she always wanted to jump out of a plane and her story is one of the most popular stories on cnn.com. Veronica de la Cruz has those details when we come back.

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HARRIS: And time now to see what people are watching online. Veronica de la Cruz joins us from the dot com desk with that story. Veronica, good morning.

VERONICA DE LA CRUZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, guys. We've got a great story for all those thrill seekers out there. All I can say is I wish I had guts like this. I wish I did. This woman in Portland, Oregon, said that she always wanted to skydive, so at the age of 86, Glennis Sparks (ph) took the plunge. And when she touched the ground, she said next time, I'd like to try something a little more dangerous.

NGUYEN: No she didn't. All right for her.

DE LA CRUZ: 86 years old. Glennis' wish was fulfilled by the volunteers who make senior wishes come true at Oregon health care foundation. Great story.

And a fat cat meets another fat cat. Sam the fattest cat in Georgia, maybe the United States, was invited to meet the governor of the state, Sonny Perdue. Sam tips the scales at 45 pounds. Check him out.

NGUYEN: Can he walk?

DE LA CRUZ: He can roll around, but veterinarians say that he is healthy and he is not overfed, believe it or not. I know. According to his owner, you guys, he has one cup of dry kibble a day. He is offered two, but Sam will only eat one.

HARRIS: What is he on steroids?

DE LA CRUZ: Slow metabolism.

NGUYEN: He needs more exercise then Sam.

DE LA CRUZ: And you can find all those stories at cnn.com/video. What is it?

NGUYEN: We need to put Sam on the treadmill.

DE LA CRUZ: We do, kitty on the treadmill right away.

NGUYEN: All right, Veronica, thank you.

CNN LIVE SATURDAY is up next. Brianna Keilar is in for Fredricka Whitfield today, coming up right after this short break. So don't go away.

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