Plan In Works To Transfer Gitmo Detainees; Tsunami: A Decade Later; Putin Cancels Holiday; Money Missing After Van Spills Cash
DANA BASH, CNN GUEST ANCHOR: Welcome back to THE LEAD. I'm Dana Bash in for Jake Tapper. In our World Lead today, the Obama administration appears to be moving forward on closing the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. CNN has new details about plans to transfer dozens of detainees from the facility. Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr joins me now. Barbara, how soon could these transfers happen?</s>BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, some of them have are already been under way and what we are all learning here now is that expect to see several more transfers, perhaps half a dozen, by the end of the year and then dozens more through the first half of 2015. This gets the president at least further down the road to making the population of Guantanamo Bay smaller. Maybe he can get it down to just several dozen. Whether he can get it closed or not is going to be an issue. There's a lot of political and legal controversy about all of that. But they are on the road to try and ship out basically as many detainees as they can, send them back to their home countries or get a third country to take them. One of the big issues, they have dozens of detainees from Yemen. You cannot send them back to Yemen. Al Qaeda is very strong there right now. So they're trying to solve that problem. If they can do that, they might be able to really get the numbers down. President Obama is closer to his vow to try and close Guantanamo Bay.</s>BASH: Barbara, you mentioned Yemen. You well know that a lot of the complaints from Capitol Hill that I hear on a daily basis from Republicans is the rate of recidivism, the people who they end up releasing, on purpose or not, they go back into the battlefield against the U.S. What are you hearing about that from your sources there about how they try to avoid that?</s>STARR: That's one of the reasons they don't want to send them back to Yemen. Very careful about where they are sending them. In fact, just a few days ago, they sent several detainees to the South American country of Uruguay, hoping that would be a relatively safe place to keep them.</s>BASH: Barbara Starr at the Pentagon, thank you for that information. Today marks ten years, hard to believe it, since this powerful wall of water rushed land in Southeast Asia killing nearly 230,000 people. That was December 26th, 2004. A tsunami came after a 9.1 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. It was the third strongest quake on record. The tsunami that followed left people devastated in 14 countries. Now, ten years later, you'll notice something striking about children in Indonesia. CNN's Andrew Spencer shows us the psychological scars that remain.</s>ANDREW SPENCER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): If you see enough children in the Indonesian village here, you'll soon realize few of them are older than 10, because ten years ago, a tsunami killed most of the kids in this village. It also wiped out the village where this boy lived. Martinez had been playing soccer on the beach when the waves hit the shore. He was found three weeks later still alive and still owns the Portugal jersey he was found in.</s>MARTUNIS, TSUNAMI SURVIVOR (through translator): I was alone on the sea for 21 days and I saw dead bodies around me. I ate what I found in the sea.</s>SPENCER: The images from ten years ago were startling, but few could show the scale of the devastation more than 1.7 million people displaced, more than 227,000 believed to have died. For weeks, photos of the missing and lists of names papered bulletin boards in Thailand, many of these people were never found. The third largest earthquake ever recorded measured at a magnitude of 9.1 is believed to have displaced several feet of water across 600 miles of the Indian Ocean floor. The resulting wave grew to be massive, drawing water away from the shore before hammering the coastlines of 14 countries in Southeast Asia. A second wave would follow, moving even farther inland. The resulting damage was incomprehensible. Ten years later, the damage has been cleaned up and homes rebuilt. But the emotional and psychological scars remain. I'm Andrew Spencer reporting.</s>BASH: In Russia, Vladimir Putin is asking Santa for higher oil prices for this Christmas. He delivered a different natural resource to the people of Russia, coal, in their stockings. With his economy tanking, Russia's president announced that he's canceling holiday leave for government employees saying Moscow can't afford to take a vacation. They celebrate Christmas on January 7th. But Putin also ordered a cap on rising vodka prices also blamed on the falling ruble. So at least people can throw a few back to forget they have to work through the New Year. Here is an ethical question for you, what would you do if cash started to rain on you from a city street? Would you grab the money and run? That's exactly what dozens of people did in Hong Kong on Christmas Eve. The doors on that money man somehow malfunctioned and three boxes of cash fell out. That is $3 million. That's equivalent to about $2 million here. Crowds dashed towards it on the street, even dodged traffic. Others stopped and grabbed their cash out of their cars. Police eventually showed up. Officers blocked off the area that that was in and picked up leftover cash that blew in the bushes. The next day, detectives tracked down two people and arrested them for hiding the money in their homes. Police are now asking any other takers to voluntarily return the cash. If not, they, too, could face charges and jail time if officers track them down. In our politics lead, he had been an instant front-runner, but the star quickly faded after a series of embarrassing blunders. So will Rick Perry be able to reinvent himself for a possible 2016 run? And is Hillary Clinton any closer to making up her mind. That's next.