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What Prompted North Korea's Internet Outage?; NYC Mayor Calls for Protests to Stop Until Funerals are Over; Cuba Signals It Won't Return Fugitives

Aired December 23, 2014 - 06:30   ET

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


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back to NEW DAY. There's a lot of news this morning, so what do you say we get to Christine Romans, in for Michaela with the top stories.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Hi.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. It's a busy Tuesday.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio pleading for a stop to protests and political finger-pointing at least until the slain police officers are properly buried. De Blasio says critics who blamed for creating an anti-cop culture in the city are wrong, as the NYPD beefs up security for the big New Year's Eve celebration, after receiving now more than a dozen Internet threats against police officers.

In Milwaukee, a white police officer will not be charged in the shooting death of a mentally ill black man. Officer Christopher Manney was fired after allegedly shooting Dontre Hamilton 14 times. But Manney said he opened fire after Dontre grabbed his baton and D.A. office Manney acted in self defense. The Department of Justice has now opened an investigation into that case.

Despite headlines about exploding air bags and massive recalls, it appears that vehicle safety is actually approving. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety releasing its annual list of the safest cars today it's expected to show 71 models earned a top safety designation for 2015, up from 39 last year. Toyota reportedly has the most cars on the 2015 list.

Friends and fans remembering legendary British rock legend Joe Cocker.

(MUSIC)

ROMANS: What a voice, raspy, soulful, Cocker died Monday after a battle with lung cancer. He was known worldwide for hits including "You Are So Beautiful". That's a great one. The duet "That's Where We Belong" and his cover of the Beatles "With A Little Help from My Friend", who can forget, it was theme for the wonder years, remember? Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr paying tribute. McCartney thanks Joe Cocker for turning the song into a soul anthem. Joe Cocker was 70 years old. That voice.

CUOMO: Danced in a trance, that man, when he sang.

ROMANS: Oh, yes, on-stage presence really something to match the really something voice.

CUOMO: Our thoughts to his family.

ROMANS: Yes.

CUOMO: All right. We're going to tell about North Korea now. The Internet there went out for some nine hours on Monday, coincidence? I don't know. Still limping, today, several North Korean-run sites are hard to access. Is this the proportional response to the Sony hack that President Obama promised? Or is it just a low-tech country suffering from its own low tech?

Kyung Lah is live for us in Seoul.

What do you think, Kyung? No, you can't have an opinion. But what do we know ?

KYUNG LAH, CNN CORRESPODENT: Well, it's the big whodunit. We simply don't know, Chris, what we do know is that at about 1:00 a.m. overnight in Korea, the Internet went down. And it didn't just go down by a little bit. It went down hard. It is as if someone completely cut the cord coming out of North Korea.

Now, there's not a very huge bandwidth coming out of that country. Remember, it's still a reclusive hermit state, but it still wasn't there. So, what happened was, when you tried to log on to the main Web site that North Korea uses to express its propaganda to the world, you got this blank white error page, as the Web site was trying to get back up, you got flowers.

It was sort of unusual. Throughout the day today, here in Korea, what you saw were the Web sites coming up and down. So who did it? We just don't know.

Is it the United States? Because the president did as you mention say there was going to be some sort of response. We spoken to number of people in the hacking community, as well as cyber intelligence, and they all roundly say -- they don't think so. This looks like the work of some rogue hackers, because the internet would not be struggling to come up and then come back down -- Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Interesting. Quite a mystery, Kyung Lah, thanks so much for that.

Also, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio under fire this morning. He's pleading with protesters and political foes to put down their signs and stop demonstrating following the assassination of two city police officers. Is that the answer? Also, concerns about the safety of police officers who will be patrolling Times Square on New Year's Eve. CUOMO: And everything is nice-nice with Cuba now, right? How about

handing over the dozens of U.S. fugitives that Cuba is still harboring? We're going to tell you what Cuba says about that idea, ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO (D), NEW YORK CITY: I'm asking everyone, this is across the spectrum, to put aside protests, put aside demonstrations, until these funerals are passed, let's focus just on these families and what they have lost.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: That was New York Mayor Bill de Blasio calling for a break from protests, following a deadly ambush on two police officers.

This as a new CNN/ORC poll underscores the challenges facing the country. According to the poll, this was conducted before Saturday's shooting, nonwhites feel that 42 percent of police officers in their neighborhoods are prejudiced against blacks, but whites feel that only 17 percent of officers are prejudiced.

What can be done to bridge this gap?

Let's bring in CNN political analyst and editor in chief of "The Daily Beast", John Avlon, and ABC News contributor and retired New York City police detective, Nicholas Casale.

Great to see you, guys.

JOHN AVLON, THE DAILY BEAST: Good morning.

NICHOLAS CASALE, ABC NEWS: Good morning.

CAMEROTA: OK. Can we talk about Bill de Blasio's speech, John, yesterday? Was he overcompensation as having been seen as siding with the protesters? Now he's saying no more protests, no more demonstrations, is that the right tone?

AVLON: It's a tone he needed to say, and yes, he was overcompensating, because he's been more closely affiliated with the protesters than he has with the police over the course of his term, not just the past few weeks. So, he's calling essentially for a truce until the funerals. It's a right thing to do. It's an attempt to reset relations.

CAMEROTA: Is it? I mean, is that the right thing to say -- put aside your First Amendment right, put aside your freedom of expression? How about just, hey, guys can protest peacefully, but if anybody lay as hand on a police officer, the full extent of the law will come down on you?

AVLON: The problem is that the protests have gotten out of hand. And again, this administration has close relations with the protesters and protest groups than they do with the police. So, that's the nature of the wedge right here. It's a persistent distrust between the police and this mayor.

So, in an attempt to say the extremes on both sides are using overheated rhetoric, very centrist language. We need a truce, a time out effectively to cool down and put the focus on the families. Those are the right things to do. The question is, is it too little too late to repair relations especially with the police which is going to need --

CAMEROTA: Nick, what do you want to hear, as a former police detective, from the mayor?

CASALE: I think the mayor had the opportunity to bridge the divide and has -- he has lost did. You know when you look at the both the unions, police officers union saying do not attend the funeral. And you look at the mayor looking to make sound bytes about the funerals, you have to realize this -- the funeral is out of respect to the memories of Police Officer Liu and Ramos and their families.

(CROSSTALK)

CAMEROTA: So, that means the mayor shouldn't go to it?

CASALE: No, the mayor should go to the funeral. The mayor as the chief executive should be at the funeral. I think anybody who disrupts the funeral is a person that's saying I, me, my, and they are discounting the suffering that those families are going through.

CAMEROTA: But you say that the mayor had a chance to bridge the divide? What would do that had sounded like? What should he be saying?

CASALE: Look, the mayor appeased to his constituency and he has every right to, but as a police officer, you're always taught give everybody 100 percent. If you want to give somebody else 110 percent, that's fine. But everybody should get a 100 percent.

Where the mayor has failed, mostly through I believe inexperience and immaturity is that the mayor listened to his constituency that got him elected, but he didn't give 100 percent to the police, he sold them short. And equally, what I called for in my piece was I believe that President Obama also had the opportunity, starting in Ferguson, to bridge the divide.

CAMEROTA: And say what?

CASALE: To say we must come together.

And I think that President Obama, if he had a little more common sense, he'll be at the funeral of two police officers.

CAMEROTA: John -- oh, you think he should go. OK, John, go.

AVLON: You know, whether you think the president should go, and I do think this is something that happens, the assassination of these two officers, as Eric Holder called it yesterday, happens at a time when we're having deep debates about the need to reform police. And the CNN poll that shows the stark racial gap about --

CAMEROTA: Let's pull it up so people can see how blacks perceive police being much more prejudiced than whites believe.

So, go ahead.

AVLON: The point here is if there's a differentiation and experience among nonwhite communities and white communities, and current attitudes about the police, but it occurs during a time of record low crime. The resurgence we've seen in New York City here in terms of people being able to live and move and thrive in many outer boroughs is due to a dramatic, historic decrease in crime, which is due to the cops, not the politicians.

The problem what de Blasio's in right now, is that he's been seen as being closer to the protesters and Al Sharpton, than the cops who really created the context for citywide success. And in his heart, he is much more ideological and a political operative than he is an executive and most mayors are nonpartisan problem-solvers and he is very partisan, and he's much more of an ideologue.

CAMEROTA: So, what does he do now, given that the city is now in this crisis?

AVLON: He's got to try to rise above it, he's got to re-center himself, but he's got to be more than rhetoric. He's got to show in actions that he cares as much about the cops on the front lines and he's got their backs. And that's got to talk, be a lot more than words, it's got to be actions over a sustained period, because his success as mayor, any success as mayor, is built on the back of the cops who keep the city safe.

CAMEROTA: And, Detective, what does that look like? Should he have gone ride-alongs with the police? Should he walk the streets with police? How can he truly embrace the police?

CASALE: Before he does any of that, he has to start off with apologizing to the police and that's going to be the first step. The second step is that the police aren't the cure-all of society. I mean, violence, poverty, racism, handguns, these are not addressed by the police. These are addressed by legislators. You need change.

And if de Blasio wants to save his administration from being a one- term run, he's going to have to look at these. And he cannot look at the police as the absolute cure. The police have lowered crime substantially, starting with Mayor Giuliani. Throughout the Bloomberg administration, crime is at an all-time low.

So, we have to understand what a cop goes through. And we have to support them. First thing he does -- apologize.

CAMEROTA: Nick Casale, John Avlon, thanks so much for your suggestions this morning. Great to see you guys. Chris, back to you.

CUOMO: All right. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie demanding Cuba send back an American fugitive who gunned down a state trooper in the '70s. Now, that U.S./Cuba relations appear to be improving, that should be a possibility, right? Not so fast.

We'll tell you what Cuba is saying.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: For decades, Cuba has been a haven for dozens of American fugitives. There had been hopes that Cuba would begin to return these fugitives with diplomatic relations warming, excuse me.

Let's bring in Patrick Oppmann, he's live from Havana.

Sorry about that, Patrick. Tell us the latest from there.

PATRICK OPPMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, hey, good morning.

You know, Joanne Chesimard was on the run for the last 30 years, she didn't live like it in Cuba. Chesimard who's also known as Assata Shakur lived openly here. She taught at the university. She appeared in pro-government rallies. I even met her and talked with her on two occasions, and she fully admitted who she was.

She's one of dozens of U.S. fugitives believed to be hiding out in Cuba. Many of them hiding in plain sight. There's some people the FBI say are terrorists, bank robbers and people who have killed police officers over the years. So, what's Cuba going to do about it?

It doesn't seem like anything. As we reported last week, this was brought up in year and a half negotiations between the United States and Cuba to normalize relations. Cuba said these fugitives have political asylum. They're not going to send them back. The U.S., of course, is pushing very, very hard.

But here's the real problem -- is that political asylum to these fugitives was given by none other than former Cuban leader Fidel Castro. So, even though he's not in charge any more, his word carries as lot of weight.

And this just goes to highlight that even though relations are not normalizing, there still exists severe differences between these two countries and this is definitely one of them -- Chris.

CUOMO: All right. Patrick, thank you very much. That's the difference between normalizing and normal I guess.

Let's get an expert to weigh in, Philip Peters, the president of the Cuba Research Center.

Phil, it's good for you to be with us.

Let's look at both sides of this, OK? We have -- to the extent there are two sides. We have the statement from Cuba, all right, here's what it is. To give voice to what Patrick was referring to.

"Every nation has sovereign and legitimate rights to grant political asylum to people it considers to have been persecuted." That's the important, right? "We've explained to the U.S. government in the past there are some people living in Cuba to whom Cuba has legitimately granted asylum."

That's their side. Here is the side of Governor Chris Christie on that. Listen to him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV, CHRIS CHRISTIE (R), NEW JERSEY: So, Joanne Chesimard, a cold- blooded cop killer, convicted by a jury of her peers, in what is without question the fairest and most just criminal justice system in the world, certainly much more just than anything that's happened in Cuba under the Castro brothers, she's now, according to an official of the Cuban government, persecuted.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CUOMO: Where do you come down on this, Philip, is this a situation where Cuba should say this isn't a legit political asylum situation?

PHILIP PETERS, PRESIDENT, CUBA RESEARCH CENTER: Well, I don't see that there's any political color to her crime. And I agree with Governor Christie, that she's a cop killer, she was convicted, she escaped from jail in Huntington County, New Jersey. And it would be good for her to be returned.

But it's a difficult issue between us and Cuba, because they did grant political asylum as Patrick pointed out. It was a Fidel Castro decision. So it makes it very difficult for them to undo there.

On top of that, countries usually work these types of things out in the context of extradition treaties, and those treaties involve reciprocity, where each side agrees to render fugitives to the other. And it's hard to imagine that the United States would start rendering fugitives to Cuba.

So, I would put this under the list of the harder issues that we have to confront and it's going to take some time. But, you know, President Obama is opening up full diplomatic relations with Cuba and this should be on the list. And actually President Obama has created an opportunity for us to work this over the long-term and hopefully get results.

CUOMO: All right. Philip, use your savvy to knock this down, because I'm going to present it as more simple than that. Because if you're going to normalize relations, this to me is low-hanging fruit, the person was convicted already. There is no political color to it. You did it during a time -- I'm making you Cuba in this analysis, by the way -- you did it during a time where you were being spiteful of the U.S. every chance you could be.

That time has passed. Now, you can look at it a different way. And this is an obvious easy pull for Cuba.

PETERS: Well, OK. If you want to continue, you want me to play that role.

CUOMO: Please?

PETERS: I'll bet you -- I'll bet what you the Cubans would say is, OK, fine, let's talk about it. Let's have a long talk about her. And let's have a long talk about some terrorists that committed crimes against Cuba, that committed terrorism against Cuba, specifically Mr. Luis Posada Carriles, who lives in Miami freely, who the United States admits was behind the bombing of an airliner that killed 73 people in 1976, including the Cuban fencing team. Just as we have the Lockerbie families, they have families of the people who died on the airplane in Barbados.

And so, why does the United States harbor a terrorist and why doesn't the United States extradite him to Cuba or to Venezuela where he plotted that crime?

CUOMO: Why doesn't it? Why is the U.S.'s high ground argument on that?

PETERS: I don't think we have a high ground argument on that?

CUOMO: So, why did we do it? Why does the U.S. do it?

PETERS: Why did the U.S. accept him? He came in -- the Bush administration fumbled for a while they he entered U.S. territory. They tried him on immigration fraud charges. He was acquitted on that.

But the United States doesn't want to render him to Venezuela or to Cuba, and I think that the United States officials, if they were here, they would probably say they don't think he'd get a fair trial in any place. But at the same time, the Bush administration called him a terrorist, there's no doubt from the reports in the U.S. intelligence community, from things that Secretary of State Kissinger said at the time, he's a terrorist who was involved in the downing of a civilian airliner.

CUOMO: Right. It was about protecting people who hurt the other side. But if you're going to normalize relations, that's got to go. And obviously Chesimard is high on the list, how about Guillermo Morales, the guy was fighting for Puerto Rican independence supposedly , but he was bombing in New York City, killed people.

You know, this was about protecting people hurting your enemy at the time. Now if you're not enemies any more, do you go backwards? That's the question.

PETERS: Well, like I say, I think this is one of the tougher nuts to crack. But at least Obama has opened up diplomatic relations and we're going to work on a series of issues and I think the approach should be to dump all the issues on the table and try to solve the easy ones first and to continue working on the hard ones this is definitely a hard one, because the politics on both sides are complicated.

I mean, Mr. Posada Carriles, for example, most officials in office have treated him as a hero in Miami.

CUOMO: So, looking forward, just give mere your sense, Phil, do you think that Cuba is going to change as a function of this? You know what the suspicion is you're going to do things for Cuba, but really you'll just be doing them for the regime. It won't trickle down to the people who need help the most. And, you know, this is just a good move for Cuba, but not a change move for Cuba.

PETERS: You're talking in general about what President Obama did with the totality?

CUOMO: Yes.

PETERS: I think it is good for Cuba. I don't think it's going to transform their political system. I think it's up to Cubans to decide and to act.

But things that President Obama did are very good. Opening up more travel is good for a flow of people and information and ideas. That's a good thing. Between the travel and some of the commercial openings, I think it will help the Cuban economy and it will help a lot of private entrepreneurs in Cuba. I applaud what President Obama did, but it's not going to transform the relationship, as he pointed out in his statement last week, a lot of really tough issues.

CUOMO: But, you know, that there's a lot of push-back because it seemed like it may be rewarding the regime.

But, Philip Peters, thank you very much for the perspective. As always, we'll have you again. Appreciate it.

PETERS: It's one of the big stories. But there's several big stories to look out for this morning, let's get right to it.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Assassination.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This a difficult time for both of our families.

DE BLASIO: Until these funerals are passed, let's focus just on these families.

BILL BRATTON, NYPD COMMISSIONER: The experience of this man, in terms of some cops not liking him, is nothing new.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Shots fired, shots fired. Officer involved.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A former police officer cleared after shooting and killing a mentally ill man.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No mother should bury their child. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Kim Jung-Un's god-like generosity and love of

his people, primetime programming on North Korea's only television station.

Would you have ever made fun of Kim Jung-Un?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CAMEROTA: Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to NEW DAY. I'm Alisyn Camerota with Chris Cuomo.

New York City's embattled mayor pleading for a pause to the protests and the politics following the assassination of two police officers. Bill de Blasio calling for calm out of respect he says for the slain officers.