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U.S. Troops on Alert for Retaliation; House Refocuses on Security Fears; Market Update; Fmr. Congressman Defends Torture, Accuses Dems of Politics; Panthers QB Cam Newton Injured in Car Accident

Aired December 10, 2014 - 09:30   ET

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


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CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: And good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thanks so much for joining me.

U.S. troops on the alert this morning as jihadists issue a worldwide call for retaliation. On websites and in social media, Muslim extremists are seizing on Washington's release of the co-called torture report and its description of the brutal interrogation of some 9/11 terror suspects. Iran's supreme leader now weighing in on Twitter. He says the report is, quote, "a symbol of tyranny" and calls the U.S. government, quote, "a corrupt capitalist regime that debased and misguided its own citizens."

Barbara Star now joins us live from the Pentagon with more. Good morning.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol.

Let's talk about this report. Just one of the top detainees the U.S. was holding, Abu Zubaydah, he was deprived of sleep for days, subject to enhanced interrogations. But according to the report, that was just the beginning of it all.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STARR (voice-over): The brutality is shocking. The report reveals at least five detainees were subjected to what it calls rectal feeding, interrogation procedures that went on for months. At least one detainee died from hypothermia.

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D-CA), INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE CHAIRWOMAN: Stripped naked, diapered, physically struck, and put in various painful stress positions for long periods of time. They were deprived of sleep for days, in one case up to 180 hours.

STARR: One detainee had his lunch pureed and poured into his rectum. He eventually attempted to cut his wrists, chew into his arm and cut a vein in his foot. Much of the information, kept from President George W. Bush's own secretary of state.

FEINSTEIN: There are CIA records stating that Colin Powell wasn't told about the program at first because there were concerns that, and I quote, "Powell would blow his stack if he were briefed."

STARR: A former top CIA official says some details were held closed, but that the agency did not engage in torture.

ROBERT GRENIER, FORMER DIRECTOR, CIA COUNTERTERRORISM CENTER: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I mean people of conscience can disagree on this, but the people who are on the front lines were actually engaged in trying to defend America against terrorists. They have to rely on the legal advice that they are given.

STARR: Some of the worst abuse occurred at a secret location called Cobalt where detainees were walked around naked or were shackled with their hands above their heads for extended periods of time. CIA officers dragged detainees, hooded, down hallways, slapping and punching them. And an admission in CIA documents that waterboarding did cause physical harm. Abu Zubaydah, repeatedly waterboarded, became completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth. Internal CIA records called Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's waterboarding 183 times a series of near drownings. Torture that wasn't even effective, according to the report.

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: It produced little useful intelligence to help us track down the perpetrators of 9/11 or prevent new attacks and atrocities.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

STARR: Now, the CIA did issue a detailed and lengthy response saying what it did was legal, that it did get intelligence that helped prevent future attacks, but also acknowledging that some mistakes were made.

Carol.

COSTELLO: Barbara Starr reporting live from the Pentagon this morning.

This new threat of extremist attacks brings fresh urgency to Capitol Hill. Minutes from now, Congress will refocus its scrutiny on the deadly failures to protect the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. A House select committee is reviewing the 2012 terror attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. A key emphasis will be, what lessons have been learned and applied to protect U.S. facilities and Americans abroad. CNN's global affairs correspondent Elise Labott joins us from Washington with more on that.

Good morning.

ELISE LABOTT, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol.

Well, this House select panel, this is the second hearing that they've discussed how to protect U.S. facilities abroad. Obviously, there's been so much done about the attacks themselves and the aftermath and how the administration handled it. But one of the things this House panel will be focused on is how to protect U.S. facilities abroad. And in September, the assistant secretary of state, Greg Starr, who will be also for diplomatic security, who will be testifying today, talked about some of the recommendations that were made, about 70 in total, that the State Department has been implementing, such as increasing Marine presence at high-threat posts, increasing the type of security officers at these high threat posts and other types of security improvements to the actual facility.

Now, since the Benghazi attacks, Congress has increased funding. And senior State Department officials tell me that slowly but surely they are increasing the actual security infrastructure at all those posts, in addition to more personnel, Carol.

COSTELLO: Elise Labott reporting, thanks so much.

Investors are watching markets closely this morning following Tuesday's early losses and late rebound. The Dow plummeted more than 200 points before recovering sharply later in the afternoon.

CNN Money's Alison Kosik is at the New York Stock Exchange. Good morning.

ALISON KOSIK, CNN MONEY BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol.

And the bears are still front and center despite global markets in recovery mode. We do see European markets higher at the moment. The reasons we're seeing stocks in the red today, because the same issues that weighed on stocks yesterday, they're still here, specifically economies in the Eurozone and China are slowing down. They're some of our biggest trading partners.

And after recovering yesterday, we're seeing oil prices fall yet again, down 2.5 percent. What changed things today is that OPEC's monthly oil report came out and that group really influences the price of oil. And what they said was that they're forecasting less demand for oil next year. And that's really, Carol, been a big part of why we've seen stocks become so volatile lately. I mean, you know, as we're enjoying those lower gas prices, I know I love to fill up under $3 a gallon when I fill up my car. These are prices we haven't seen in years. The problem is, at least how Wall Street sees it is, it's wreaking havoc on energy companies that rely on high oil prices to make a profit.

You're also seeing investors wrestle with a couple of questions. Are we seeing these falling energy prices, are they -- is that good or bad and are they falling because there's more supply or are they falling because of a lack of demand because of a slowdown in economies. Chew on that question a while, Carol.

COSTELLO: So should we expect volatility to be the norm again?

KOSIK: It may not be the norm, but I would say expect things to be a bit rockier until there's something that really drives the market higher with conviction. And, you know, it's not such a bad thing to see these little pullbacks in the market. It's healthier instead of just shooting straight up because it gives opportunity for others to maybe jump in when they saw the market just skyrocketing higher.

We could see an incentive for a buy-in tomorrow if retail sales numbers for November come out positive. The big question as well is, is that extra money that consumers have in their pockets from lower gas prices, is that extra money going to holiday shopping? There is some skepticism whether or not that's happening. We'll see how those retail sales numbers come out tomorrow, Carol.

COSTELLO: All right, Alison Kosik, thanks so much.

Still to come, under fire. A new Senate report is slamming the CIA for using brutal tactics to obtain information from suspected terrorists. Here's the catch, lawmakers say it didn't work. So why is a former congressman telling angry Americans to grow up. We'll ask him, next.

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COSTELLO: Waterboarding, forced rectal feeding, sleep deprivation and mock executions, those are just a few of the grisly details outlined in a new Senate Intelligence report that slams the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists. Now the report found that brutal tactics often led to false confessions, dead leads and faulty intelligence. It also concluded torture tactics did not lead to Osama bin Laden's capture.

Well, this morning, the report is being met with mixed reaction. In fact, one former congressman named Joe Walsh is causing quite a stir online tweeting this, quote, "look, quit navel-gazing on this CIA torture report. Yeah, we engage in torture, good, big deal. Now go focus on defeating the Islamic enemy." Walsh now works as a radio host and he joins me live this morning.

Welcome, Joe.

JOE WALSH (R), FMR. ILLINOIS CONGRESSMAN: Good to be with you, Carol.

COSTELLO: So tell us about some of the reaction your tweets have been getting?

WALSH: It's been lively. Look, I was trying to make a serious point. I'm amazed. I was in Washington for two years. Everybody is all abuzz that we had to do some pretty tough things to fight an evil enemy. I'm glad they put the report out. I'm glad though because I don't think we should be ashamed of what we put out. Again, we're fighting an evil enemy. There are times when we need to get our hands dirty when we fight that enemy.

COSTELLO: You said some of the responses you got were spirited.

WALSH: Yes.

COSTELLO: One response was from Glenn Greenwald and he responded to your tweet, quote, "this cretin --

WALSH: This cretin.

COSTELLO: --was in the U.S. Congress." He called you a cretin.

WALSH: And I respect -- yes. No, and I respect a lot of Glenn Greenwald's work. I agree with him. I think that this information should be released. The difference is, I don't have a problem with what's released. I think we can never, ever forget who we're dealing with. I mean we're dealing with ISIS, al Qaeda. They don't -- they don't abide by the Geneva Convention. They can't even spell the Geneva Convention. This is a different kind of war that demands captive --

COSTELLO: So tit-for-tat?

WALSH: Well --

COSTELLO: Is that what you're saying?

WALSH: We need to get our hands dirty to fight this enemy.

COSTELLO: I don't mean to be crass or disrespectful, but is an American hero someone who is instructed by our government to conduct rectal force feedings on a prisoner or chain someone naked to a concrete floor until he dies, or nearly drown them two to three times a day, is that the definition of an American hero?

WALSH: It may part -- it may, Carol, be part of the job description. Our men and women, and again the CIA, they've been on the ground now --

COSTELLO: Really?

WALSH: Absolutely. We forget as Americans who we're dealing with. You got to be frank: we're dealing with animals. We're dealing with groups of people who behead, blow up, exterminate people.

COSTELLO: So we, too, should be animals?

WALSH: The way you defeat an animal, Carol, oftentimes is to act like one.

COSTELLO: And I ask you these questions because Eric Fair, a man named Eric Fair. He was a former interrogator and self-professed tortured Abu Ghraib. He wrote this in "The New York Times". Quote, "I can't be forgiven for Abu Ghraib. Most Americans haven't read the report. Most never will. But it stands as a permanent reminder of the country we once were." He echoes what Senator John McCain said on the Senate floor. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: -- painful and unnecessary. And, contrary to assertions made by some of its defenders, and as the committee's report makes clear, it produced little useful intelligence to help us track down the perpetrators of 9/11 or prevent new attacks and atrocities. I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: All right, so John McCain was a prisoner of war. He was tortured himself. He knows what he's talking about. He's a hawk. He's a Republican. He often disagrees with President Obama.

WALSH: Right. Right, and he's one voice.

COSTELLO: So is he wrong?

WALSH: Yes, he's wrong in this respect. He's one voice, Carol. And for every John McCain --

COSTELLO: How can you say he's wrong?

WALSH: Because I can produce other folks who have served who disagree respectfully with Mr. McCain. I've listened to your show this morning. There's an honest disagreement as to the effectiveness of interrogation and torture. Plenty of people say it's an important tool. All I'm saying is, war is messy.

COSTELLO: Our CNN analyst, Bob Baer, said the CIA cannot cite one specific example of how enhanced interrogation thwarted an attack, not one.

WALSH: Bob Baer --

COSTELLO: They say they kind of led to stuff, but they're not specific. He says the CIA ought to be specific and then maybe there wouldn't be an argument.

WALSH: They should be. Bob Baer also said he doesn't know --

COSTELLO: How can you say it works when we don't have a specific incident?

WALSH: Well, there are -- again, when you listen to our folks on the ground, and Bob Baer also said he doesn't know, I don't know, you don't know, which is why the CIA should put it out there. The CIA, our intelligence officials, have said that interrogation methods helped lead to the capture of Osama bin Laden, helped prevent possibly, Carol, a West Coast 9/11. I don't think we should discount that.

COSTELLO: This is what happened according to the Senate intelligence report with Osama bin Laden, so Zubaydah, that's the guy who gave them the information.

WALSH: But let's remind ourselves of the Senate intelligence report. This was a Democrat report. They didn't even interview the people on the ground responsible for this program. It wasn't bipartisan, which they typically are. Look, I agree that they should have put the report out, but they put it out for totally different reasons -- to embarrass this country.

COSTELLO: So you think it was all political, just to embarrass the country? And Democrats would do that just to embarrass the country? Because what's in their report were CNN -- or CIA testimonials, right? So it wasn't just they were just pulling this from the air.

WALSH: You know what's fascinating, Carol -- COSTELLO: These were CIA records they were overseeing.

WALSH: The report doesn't make one recommendation. That's unheard of, not one recommendation. I have a lot of respect for Dianne Feinstein. She does not believe the United States should be engaged in this behavior. That's why they put it out. I believe we should be engaged in this behavior because we're fighting an enemy unlike the likes anything we've ever fought before.

COSTELLO: Well, let me run one other thing by you.

WALSH: Sure.

COSTELLO: CIA director John Brennan, he's defending the CIA, right? He's come out and defended it. But he seemingly did not approve of its tactics in 2013. This is what he told a Senate panel just last year. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN BRENNAN, DIRECOTR OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: I was aware of the program. I was CC-ed on some of the documents. But I had no oversight of it; I wasn't involved in its creation. I had expressed my personal objections and views to some agency colleagues about certain of those EITs, such as waterboarding, nudity, and others, where I professed my personal objections to it, but I did not try to stop it because it was, you know, something that was being done in a different part of the agency under the authority of others.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: So even he had personal objections to some of the things that they were doing.

WALSH: And he also said, in response to this report, that the interrogation methods helped. Look, you and I can argue this back and forth. I'm glad it's out there. Let the American people decide. The only point I was making with my commentary yesterday was -- grow up, America. This is messy. We are fighting animals who would behead you and I, Carol. To defeat that enemy, we've got to get our hands dirty.

COSTELLO: But they're still doing that. And we acted like animals, right, during Abu Ghraib and also after 9/11, and ISIS is beheading people. It didn't stop anything.

WALSH: No, and it's going to be a difficult war. And part of this exercise of tying the hands of and men women trying to defend us I find comical. Let them do their work. Let them do their job. We're debating what we do. You've got the U.N. calling for trials, CIA torture trials. Now how comical is that? look at the enemy we're fighting, Carol.

COSTELLO: There are U.N. rules in place about torture and even though no one is calling this torture, what the CIA did, there are others who believe it definitely was.

WALSH: U.N. rules in place about torture that ISIS and al Qaeda don't even understand or abide by.

COSTELLO: So we should be, as the United States, should be excused but other countries should not?

WALSH: We have to do what we have to do to defeat this evil enemy, absolutely.

COSTELLO: Thanks for coming in, I appreciate it.

WALSH: Carol, thank you. Thank you.

COSTELLO: I'm back in a minute.

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COSTELLO: Carolina Panthers star quarterback Cam Newton is in the hospital this morning with two fractures in his back after a car accident. Newton's truck flipped after a collision with a car near the Panthers' home stadium. The driver of the other vehicle also hurt.

Our CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta and CNN sports anchor Rachel Nichols both join me to talk about this. First of all, let's talk about his injury because that sounds really painful.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: It does sound painful. So he -- I brought this model to try and show you this. This is not that uncommon an injury, especially in people in car accidents. What happens is the body is sort of moving, suddenly stops as a result of the accident, and the spine has a lot of movement down it.

The bone that we're talking about, I don't know how well you can see this, but it's this bone right in here called the transverse process. It's sort of one of the bones that's sort of on the outside of the spine. That's important for a couple reasons. Over here's the area where all the nerves are and the spinal cord can be in that area. This isn't in that area, so it's line likely he's going to have injury to the muscles that control his legs or take away any of his strength or anything like that. It is surrounded by a lot of other muscles and those muscles just get inflamed, they get angry. It's painful.

RACHEL NICHOLS, CNN SPORTS ANCHOR: Angry muscles.

GUPTA: Angry muscles.

COSTELLO: The worst kind!

(LAUGHTER)

GUPTA: It hurts a lot, but in terms of his spinal cord injury or nerve injury or something like that, it's very unlikely. And this has happened to other people.

COSTELLO: Is it a fast recovery? GUPTA: It depends a bit. Everyone recovers at different speeds.

I'll tell you, I had a similar injury myself not from -- I'm not an athlete or anything, but I fell down a flight of stairs. And it takes -- you're just sore.

COSTELLO: You're a big man to admit that.

GUTPA: It spasms in your muscle. Yes, I fell down stairs. The stair falling part. I was sleepy.

The -- but it hurts for a while, you get spasms. But I wasn't throwing a football or doing that kind of activity either, so I could recover more quickly probably then --

COSTELLO: Well, the amazing thing is Tony Romo played with something like that, right, Rachel?

NICHOSL: Yes, it's sort of an odd coincidence because Tony Romo was injured playing football. He actually took a knee to the back during a Reds game -- against the Redskins. He didn't play the following week; he played the week after that, after a lot of treatment, by the way, and several painkiller shots. So we'll have to see what happens with Cam Newton.

I'm going to put it out there, the Panthers do play these Tampa Bay Buccaneers this weekend. That's a team with a 2-11 record. Possibly a team you might still feel competitive with if you field your backup quarterback instead. We'll just have to see. But if that is the scenario that happens, then I think Panthers fans would hope that, if they don't have Cam Newton this weekend, they possibly could have him the following weekend when they play the Browns. They're still competitive in that hunt for the NFC South Division title.

COSTELLO: Oh, that's why. I was going to say, I was thinking of the Panthers record, but you're right. It's a bad division.

NICHOLS: But it's a bad division, so it's anyone's game. Well, anyone except the Bucs, really.

COSTELLO: Yes, exactly. So would it be a good idea to put him back in the game? We talk about how players are abused on the field because they're put back in too early after injuries. And so why take the chance? Even if he would have made all the difference.

GUPTA: I don't know what your thoughts are, Rachel. But, unlike a concussion -- concussive injury, for example, where the brain has actually been bruised and if you bruise it again that could be a really, really devastating problem -- this is really much more about comfort thing. There's no risk to damaging the nerves or the spinal cord or anything like that. So it's how much he can tolerate it. If you give him a lot of painkillers in his back, again, how much that affects his play, I don't know.

NICHOLS: Well, what's interesting about this discussion, this leads into one of the other discussions we have had, Carol, about NFL players and painkillers. Right? There's a huge lawsuit going on with former players saying that, with injuries like this one, where it's just supposedly about pain tolerance eventually and can you shoot them up and get them out on the field, well, those former players are suing for many, many millions of dollars, saying their long-term health was damaged and they didn't really know the risks. Now we're in that position right now with a player trying to possibly --

COSTELLO: And in some cases, they got addicted, right?

NICHOLS: Yes, absolutely. So we'll have to see what happens.

GUPTA: It's got to be a short-term proposition, but I don't -- so if it's for a short time, it shouldn't be a problem, but it's an excellent point.

NICHOLS: Certainly a lot of pressure for Cam Newton to get back on the field after this, right?

GUPTA: Especially after you bring the Romo thing up. He's back in after one game.

NICHOLS: Exactly. Hey. How tough are you? That's what the question becomes for these guys as opposed to a question about their long-term health.

COSTELLO: Rachel Nichols, Sanjay Gupta, thanks so much.

GUPTA: Yes, thank you.

COSTELLO: The next hour of CNN NEWSROOM after a break.

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