Warning Signs?; Oprah to Quit in 2011; Can U.S. Count on Karzai?; Surveillance Cameras Become More Common; Panel Clarifies Breast Cancer Screen Recommendations - Part 2
| By Frances Townsend, Campbell Brown, Atia Abawi, Susa |
|---|
xfdls CAMPBELL-BROWN-01
<Show: CAMPBELL BROWN>
<Date: November 19, 2009>
<Time: 20:00>
<Tran: 111901CN.V08>
<Type: SHOW>
<Head: Oprah Winfrey Ending Talk Show; Who Missed Fort Hood
Massacre Warning Signs?; Oprah to Quit in 2011; Can U.S. Count on Karzai?;
Surveillance Cameras Become More Common; Panel Clarifies Breast Cancer
Screen Recommendations - Part 2>
<Sect: News; International>
<Time: 20:00>
BROWN: Sharon Waxman, of course, editor in chief of TheRap.com --dot com. Sharon, good to see you. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it.WAXMAN: Thanks, Campbell.
BROWN: When we come back, for better or worse, America's future in Afghanistan now depends, in large part, on President Hamid Karzai. He was sworn in today, of course, but can we trust him? We're going to look at why the Obama administration isn't so sure.
And new questions tonight about the government panel that says women in their 40s don't need regular mammograms. Who are these people? Do they even know what they're talking about?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. DANIEL KOPANS, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL: In listening to some of the responses over the past few days from panel members, it's clear to me that they're not very familiar with the mammography screening data.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: The U.S. has no choice now but to hope it can count on Hamid Karzai. The Afghan leader was sworn in today for his second term as president. In his inaugural speech, he vowed to take on corruption in his own government. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HAMID KARZAI, PRESIDENT OF AFGHANISTAN (through translator): Corruption is a very dangerous enemy of the state. And we would like to take this matter quite seriously, so we could have a director dealing with the corruption. Our anti-corruption unit.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BROWN: With President Obama promising an answer soon on sending what could be as many as 40,000 more U.S. troops, the fact is we are betting our future there, not to mention the lives of our troops, on one man: on Karzai.
And CNN's Atia Abawi has spent the last year on the ground, covering Afghanistan extensively. We are very lucky to have her with us tonight.
Welcome to you. It's good to have you here in the studio and in person.
ATIA ABAWI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's good to be here.
BROWN: We know that U.S. officials have deep concerns about Karzai. And I just want to walk through them with you and have you talk it out with us. The first being corruption in his government. They think he knows about it and he lets it happen.
ABAWI: That's the biggest issue when it comes to the U.S. relation with Afghanistan right now when it comes to the international mission in Afghanistan, at the moment, because there's -- there's no doubt that billions and billions of dollars have been poured into Afghanistan. Even the average Afghan will tell you that they haven't even seen one dollar of it. Every time I go from province to province, that's what I hear.
The fear right now is that the government that President Karzai has surrounded himself with in the last administration and his new administration is just more corrupt individuals. And what they're fearing at the moment is that nothing will happen, in fact, that they'll take advantage of the situation that Afghanistan is in right now to increase their power.
BROWN: And they have, and increased their wealth. A lot of them have become very rich people.
Second big concern, obviously: Afghanistan is a narco state. I mean, even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called it that. And Karzai's own brother has been linked to the drug trade.
ABAWI: He's allegedly been linked to the drug trade. Many officials will tell you -- they won't tell you on the record; they'll tell you off the record that they do feel that he's connected to the drug mafia.
President Karzai himself and his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the individual that they're talking about, have denied these allegations. This is a man who's in charge of the provincial council in Kandahar in Southern Afghanistan, one of the most volatile provinces, and area that's surrounded by poppy fields, by the drug mafia.
But he still says to this day that he's not involved in it. But it has hurt the credibility of not just his brother but President Karzai himself and his entire administration.
BROWN: And third, broken trust -- we know about that one --between U.S. officials and Karzai. And this has really exploded. There are reports that he's had run-ins with everybody from the vice president on down.
ABAWI: Absolutely. This is not the cozy relationship that we saw with the Bush administration and the Karzai administration. This is a completely different relationship at the moment.
President Obama, the second that he came into office, it's been somewhat of a symbol, when you talk to sources on the ground, that he hasn't been to Afghanistan since he's been elected as president.
Then you look at Joe Biden, the vice president, when he was in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and he was in Afghanistan prior to the Obama administration coming into office, there are reports that he stormed out of a dinner with President Karzai.
We've also heard of reports that have been denied by Richard Holbrook, the special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, that he, too, slammed out of a room with President Karzai when it came to talking about corruption, saying that President Karzai has denied that there is widespread corruption. But obviously, the U.S. officials don't feel the same way.
BROWN: And fourth and finally, there are certainly doubts about the legitimacy of his government. I mean, you were there on election day. Despite the swearing in today, you know, what do you think? What really happened?
ABAWI: Well, we ourselves, we went to a polling station in Kabul. This is an area that seems to be controlled and actually better off than the rest of the country, that has some sort of security.
We saw around 200 people come out to vote. When we were leaving, I was asking how many ballots they were counting. They were counting 1,000 ballots. And this is an area where there seems to be control. This was an area where we saw international monitors come in.
President Karzai himself states that it's the international media that's blowing up, stating that there was widespread corruption when there wasn't.
But obviously, we saw the drama that occurred. The elections happened on August 20. There wasn't a firm answer to who the president of Afghanistan was going to be until November and the swearing in today. So, yes, there is allegations of these -- this corruption.
BROWN: We appreciate you being here in person and hearing your perspective on this, Atia. Thanks so much.
ABAWI: Thank you for having me.
BROWN: Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, you may be on camera. Tonight our series, The End of Privacy, how far one American city is willing to go to keep an eye on everyone, all in the name of safety.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COOPER: Tonight more of our special series The End of Privacy. At any given moment, whether you like it or not, somebody could be watching you: in the store, at the bank, on the corner of the street surveillance cameras catch your every move.
As CNN's Susan Candiotti shows us, it is a digital-age dilemma, pitting the right to privacy against the need for safety.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SUSAN CANDIOTTI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In New York City it seems like everywhere you turn it's like being on candid camera.
DONNA LIEBERMAN, NEW YORK CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION: Here's another one. There you go. There's one. And there's another, and there's another, and there's another. You can go over there diagonally. There are two cameras: one, two, a little higher than the traffic light.
CANDIOTTI: In this post-9/11 world, privacy has often had to take a back seat to security.
(on camera) Do you ever get the sense, walking around the city, that you feel like your privacy is being invaded because there are so many surveillance cameras around?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I do, but there ain't a whole heck of a lot I can do about it.
CANDIOTTI (voice-over): We went behind the scenes at New York's police counterterrorism command post. Here they monitor cameras 24/7. Some 300 cameras are operated by police, some provided by private businesses.
RAYMOND KELLY, NYPD COMMISSIONER: It's happening incrementally, and indeed, it's happening in every major city in America.
CANDIOTTI: This shot is just one angle near Wall Street. Here's the same shot from our camera outside.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I must be oblivious. I just go from working in a cubicle to the subway. So thank goodness for the security.
CANDIOTTI: Next year the city will spend another $24 million in homeland security money on cameras to keep a closer eye on high-security targets, as well as public streets.
(on camera) How many cameras are there?
LIEBERMAN: Well, you know, the New York Civil Liberties Union did a survey of Manhattan ten years ago, and we were shocked to find out that there were over 2,300 cameras on the streets of Manhattan.
Well, we tried to repeat that survey back in 2005. We got as far as at 14th street and called it a day.
CANDIOTTI: Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union showed me how many cameras there are on just on her block.
LIEBERMAN: Those pictures can be captured and used by anybody for any purpose. Sometimes it's the government who captures the pictures. Sometimes it's private entities. But there are no limitations on what anybody can do with that -- those images.
CANDIOTTI: The police say their tapes are destroyed every 30 days. They'd like the city to look like London where four million cameras are on the watch, one for every 15 people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I've seen them (INAUDIBLE) women on the street, continue by themselves (INAUDIBLE).
CANDIOTTI: Those camera images connected two men to suicide attacks that killed 56 people on subway trains and a bus in 2007.
Some critics say London's system isn't very good at preventing crime. And one study claims as many as 80 percent of the images are too poor to make a criminal case.
But New York police say crime dropped 30 percent in public housing the first year cameras were installed.
KELLY: It just cut it down tremendously. And there's many, many examples of that. So by and large, cameras are a public safety benefit, a public safety godsend.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My guess is they're doing it for our protection. I'll trust them.
CANDIOTTI: Trust for safety's sake, even as all those lenses keep popping up.
Susan Candiotti, CNN, New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: Coming up at the top of the hour, LARRY KING LIVE what do you have for us tonight, Larry?
LARRY KING, HOST, LARRY KING LIVE : We've got a lot going on. We've got more on Oprah's breaking news, Campbell. We're going to talk about Palin mania. Why are people getting up in the middle of the night to go see her?
And some late-breaking developments on the horrible North Carolina case, the mother charged with human trafficking in the disappearance and death of her own 5-year-old daughter.
LARRY KING LIVE is next at the top of the hour -- Campbell.
BROWN: All right, Larry. We'll see you in a few moments.
When we come back, a new twist to that story about mammograms. We're going to have Sanjay Gupta here to try to clarify all of this for us, when we come back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: There is enormous outrage from Congress to doctors' offices about the controversial new recommendations for mammograms, this coming from an independent government panel.
The panel, or one of the members of the panel did an interview that's just coming in now. A telephone interview with The Wall Street Journal. They are now trying to clarify their position because of all the confusion that this story has brought on.
The finding, their original finding was that women in their 40s should not get routine screenings for breast cancer. Again, this finding from an independent panel called the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.
But according to The Wall Street Journal, a member of the task force now saying that their message is not to say to women they should not get mammograms when they're in their 40s, but it should not be mandatory, per se, that they should at least make the decision themselves in consultation with their doctor.
I don't know if this helps clarify things or not. But we're going to go to Sanjay Gupta now and try to get more on this.
There are also a lot of questions about why these people are qualified to make these kind of decisions. Listen to what a doctor told me on our program last night about this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KOPANS: This panel has been labeled as a panel of experts. I know all the experts in the United States in mammography screening and all the ones around the world. I don't know any of these people. I don't know who actually chose the members of the panel.
I'm sure they're very nice people. I don't mean to denigrate them. But in listening to some of the responses over the last few days from panel members, it's clear to me that they're not very familiar with the mammography screening data.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BROWN: And we are very lucky to have Dr. Sanjay Gupta with us tonight to help again clarify all this.
And Sanjay, I may have confused things even more. This report from The Wall Street Journal just crossing, clearly the panel not realizing they were going to cause this kind of uproar, is now trying to clarify things to put their recommendations in perspective and tone it down a bit, it sounds like.
And then we also have this issue of what Dr. Kopans just said right there, questioning the integrity of the panel. About whether these people are qualified to be making these kind of recommendations in the first place. Give us your take on all of this.
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, first of all, it's sort of interesting. Because you know, I read the recommendations pretty thoroughly, and they do say that they do not recommend routine mammograms for women anymore between the ages of 40 and 49.
It goes on to say that women should have a consultation with their physician before getting the mammogram to learn about the risks and benefits. And high-risk women should get screened and get the mammogram.
What's confusing about this, Campbell, and I think this is something that you've touched on, is that about -- around 75 to 90 percent of women who get breast cancer don't have any risk factors and don't have any family history.
So you know, as a doctor, and I've talked to a lot of other doctors about this, I'm not sure what we doctors are supposed to tell patients when they're getting that consultation before getting the mammogram. If you hear that the vast majority of women never had a risk factor, most women are going to want the mammogram. You know, there's nothing to sort of tell them yes or no.
So that's -- that's where it gets really confusing, and that's where I think a little bit of a disservice was performed here by this task force, because it left both patients and doctors a little bit in the lurch here without any clear guidance.
BROWN: And I think, Sanjay, that -- that they're trying to play a little PR here, as well. I mean, they're getting a lot of blowback. And you're right. I mean, their recommendations said what they said.
GUPTA: Right.
BROWN: You went through them very clearly.
But talk to us a little bit about the qualifications.
GUPTA: Sure.
BROWN: Because we've heard this criticism raised a number of time -- a number of times. There are no oncologists, no radiologists actually on this panel. So -- so who are these people, really?
GUPTA: Well, you know, I think if you talk to most medical folks, they're going to say this is a pretty -- this is a pretty esteemed group of people, you know, by their own qualifications, their training. They come from all different sectors of the health-care system.
This task force has been around for about 25 years and was set up as part of, you know, trying to find the best preventive and primary care sort of measures.
It's got 13 physicians, two nurses, one Ph.D. that's on the panel. And also, they come from a broad variety of disciplines: epidemiology, public health, family medicine, pediatrics. You can read the list there.
Two -- two of the folks on the panel kind of work for the nonprofit part of the insurance industry at one point or another.
Dr. Kopans is absolutely right, on the task force itself, there are no oncologists. There's no mammography experts. But what they do is they sort of outsource it, if you will, to an evidence panel that is made up of oncologists and mammography experts, who then present the data to the task force. This group of doctors don't --they don't make any recommendations. The task force takes this data and then gives us what we -- what we've been talking about the last few days.
BROWN: So -- so are there any real criteria that they're using in order to reach their decision on this kind of thing? Is it just kind of they sit around and debate it a little bit and you know?
GUPTA: I think there is probably a lot of debate. And every couple of years they sort of decide on a topic that they're going to pursue. You know, diabetes screening, for example, blood pressure screening. It's not just cancer.
You know, you can talk about who's -- how do you screen for diabetes in pediatric populations, for example. So that's part of the reason they have such breadth.
But you're right. You know, back in 2002, when they had mammography guidelines, it sort of hinted at this idea that they were going to recommend against screening in this age group. They didn't do it back then. But we're seeing it this time. You know, they looked at the same data back then, look at the same data now and have arrived at different conclusions.
BROWN: And Sanjay, we're out of time here, but just very quickly, your bottom line recommendation to women is get a mammogram when you turn 40, right?
GUPTA: Get a mammogram when you turn 40. Do it every year. And keep in mind, again, that most of the women who get breast cancer -- this is an important point -- did not have a family history, did not have a risk factor. So just because you don't have those things, you've still got to get this mammogram. It's an important screening test.
BROWN: Sanjay Gupta for us tonight. Sanjay, thank you.
GUPTA: Thanks, Campbell.
BROWN: LARRY KING LIVE starts in just a few minutes. He's got more on the Oprah Winfrey news. Her getting ready to quit her talk show.
And up next, tonight's Guilty Pleasure, the video we just can't resist. Did a soccer team win big by cheating? Where was the ref?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: LARRY KING LIVE in just a few moments. But first The Guilty Pleasure. Tom Foreman in Washington with the video we just can't resist.
Hey, Tom.
TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Well, you know you don't have to know the finer points of soccer to know this: keep your hands off the ball.
Last night in overtime, with Ireland poised to upset France for a World Cup berth, a French player slapped the ball -- look at this guy -- twice with his hands before passing to a teammate for the header and the winning goal. You just cannot do that. The ref missed it.
And to add insult to injury, as the French are so good at, he admitted afterward that he did it. So today a big international uproar. Fans in Ireland say the French cheated. But this is not America. There's no instant replay there, so the call on the field stands.
BROWN: Oh, no!
FOREMAN: Yes, that's it. Unbelievable.
BROWN: I feel so bad for the Irish guys.
FOREMAN: If you could do that in soccer, I would have won a lot of games.
BROWN: Tom Foreman. Thanks, Tom. Appreciate it.
That's it for us. LARRY KING LIVE starts right now.