Interview with Congressman Adam Schiff of California
BURNETT: Our third story</s>OUTFRONT: an exclusive look inside Gitmo. We have going inside Gitmo all week on this program as the hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay nears its 100th day. Our Pentagon reporter, Chris Lawrence, has a firsthand and exclusive look at what's going on inside that prison. He has been given exclusive access to the grounds in an OUTFRONT investigation. We do want to warn you, though, some of what you are about to see and hear is graphic.</s>CHRIS LAWRENCE, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): CNN got exclusive access to camps five and six, where most of the detainees are being held. We saw individual cells, media rooms with leg shackles bolted to the ground, and communal areas that used to be filled with detainees. (on camera): Right now, the camp six detainees are being held in individual cells like these. (voice-over): Patrolling those cells, young guards the age of college students. For the first time, we're seeing the faces of those who guard the detainees.</s>CAMP FIVE GUARD: They use extremely vulgar language towards females. And I have had a lot of experience with that, unfortunately. So especially Caucasian females they don't like us at all.</s>LAWRENCE: She is 21 years old, and down in the cell blocks, she's called every name in the book.</s>CAMP FIVE GUARD: Most common is</s>LAWRENCE: The situation inside Guantanamo is dire. A hunger strike has gone from a half-dozen detainees to more than 100. Of those, about 30 refuse to take the liquid nutritional drinks and have to be fed through a tube. But officials admit that the clock is ticking on this option.</s>CAPT. ROBERT DURAND, JOINT TASK FORCE GITMO SPOKEMAN: If anybody's had a can of Ensure or muscle milk or whatever, it says right on it, it is not designed to be a long-term sole source of nutrition. So there are long-term consequences of getting all of your meals through a liquid supplement.</s>LAWRENCE (voice-over): All of this tension is leading to more conflict, including so-called splashing where detainees squirt guards with a mixed of water, urine and feces.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That's a biggest way to act out, is the throwing of feces at guards, and it's been happening consistently actually for the past month and a half. Every single day, there's a splashing.</s>LAWRENCE (on camera): In fact, you can see the result of some splashing on the ceiling, pieces of feces that are still stuck to the top of the ceiling. (voice-over): One guard says she's been splashed several times.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And you can go to the hospital. They draw your blood. Let you know that the detainee has any diseases. And then go right back to work.</s>LAWRENCE: In fact, she told me sometimes it is all she can do to sort of bottle it up and walk away. That prison guard was also a guard at Fort Leavenworth. But she says it doesn't compare to the experience of working right here. That is the side of the story that we have not heard before, but it doesn't mean we have forgotten about the detainees or the cost of keeping this prison open. All areas we're going to get deeper in to over the next couple of days, Erin.</s>BURNETT: All right. Chris Lawrence, thank you very much. As Chris said, there's investigation in those parts of the story. We'll continue through the week. But what you just saw there, incredible reporting as difficult as it was to watch. And now, I want to get to some other stories we're focusing with reporting from the front lines. An OUTFRONT update on the rise of drones. The Navy today completed its first-ever carrier based launch of its X- 47B unmanned aircraft. Navy says the flight showed the drone capable of navigating in air space on its own. And one commander called it watershed in naval aviation. Winslow Wheeler (ph) on the Project on Government though says the launch is actually the easiest thing the drone will do. Faced with an enemy air force is a very different thing and drones have proven helpless to real defenses and much more expensive than many seem to assume. Well, tougher drunk driving limits may be around the corner. The National Transportation Safety Board recommending today all states lower the blood alcohol content level from 0.08 to 0.05. Now, the current law is 10 years old. A 180-pound male will likely hits .08 after four drinks in an hour. In the new recommendation, it goes to two, maybe three. The beverage lobby is crying foul, questioning whether the science has changed over the past decade. NTSB says it hasn't but that when other countries lowered their levels, the entire population drinks a little bit less. I think it's fair to say that after four drinks in an hour, you probably shouldn't be driving. It has been 649 days since the U.S. lost its top credit rating. What are we doing to get it back? Well, the International Energy Agency says rising oil production in this country will transform the world market over the next five years. Supply from this country is going to grows by so much, American oil is going to account for 50 percent of the growth in oil output on this planet. That's big oil. And now, our fourth story</s>OUTFRONT: the Benghazi dilemma. How the administration handled the aftermath of the deadly attacks of U.S. consulate in Libya is dominating the headlines and Beltway politics.</s>REPORTER: Obama's being compared to President Nixon. How does he feel about that?</s>JAY CARNEY, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I can tell you that people who make those kind of comparisons need to check their history because, you know, what we have here with one issue in Benghazi is so clearly as we're learning more and more, a political sideshow, a deliberate effort to politicize a tragedy.</s>BURNETT: Political sideshow or an Obama administration cover-up? OUTFRONT tonight, Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff of California on the House Intelligence Committee. And thank you very much, Congressman. Always great to talk to you.</s>REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D), CALIFORNIA: A pleasure to talk to you.</s>BURNETT: So, when we talk about this -- the talking points did include in their early stage when the CIA handed them for edits, a fairly detailed description with the mention of involvement of al Qaeda, that said that there had been warnings of a possible terror attack in Benghazi. All of these were taken out. It is still unclear at this point by whom, whether in the State Department or in the White House or somewhere else. How can you defend the administration for such substantial edits to those talking points?</s>SCHIFF: Well, the key thing on the talking points is most fundamental error in them actually stayed in throughout the editing process, and that was the error that said that this began as a protest. And that error was solely an error of the intelligence agencies. They thought it began as a protest and they got that wrong. There's never been any indication that the State Department or White House was responsible for that error. There were other changes made basically that watered down the talking points. I think there were a number of motivations there, some to protect classified sources; others, you know, in an effort to fight over turf between State and CIA. But none of that indicates that there was some crime that's been covered up here. To compare it to Watergate I think is just preposterous.</s>BURNETT: In one of the e-mail exchanges about the talking points, that the State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland talks about some of these edits, and one of them in particular that she refers to in this email was the fact that the repeated warnings about terror attacks in Benghazi were removed. And she justifies that by saying that they should be removed because, quote, "that fact could be accused by members of Congress to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we feed that, either?" Congressman, obviously, there are people, Democrats, who are saying the Republicans are on a witch hunt because of this. But when you read a sentence like that, that sure as heck sounds like the Democratic administration was playing politics with this last fall.</s>SCHIFF: I think what was happening here is that, you know, you had two facilities, one that was a State Department diplomatic facility, one that was an agency facility. And so, State Department I think felt why is CIA trying to set it up like they were warning, they were doing everything right when, in fact, the CIA facility was just as vulnerable as the diplomatic one. And so, that's kind of an early effort to say, let's not jump to conclusion about who is more at fault, or whose facilities were more at risk. Yes, when you take it out of context like that, it certainly doesn't reflect positively on the State Department. But, you know, putting some gloss on these talking points hardly earth shattering, hardly the stuff of Watergate or major scandal. Part of what happens every day in the interagency process.</s>BURNETT: Right.</s>SCHIFF: I do think that, you know, the talking points ultimately got watered down to a point they weren't very useful, but, again, hardly the stuff of great scandal.</s>BURNETT: But there is one point, though, that people who are frustrated me that I want to ask you about. That is, just talk about the basic thing. Removing al Qaeda from this, which, of course, we now know and we knew fairly soon afterwards that the CIA was aware of that, in the immediate aftermath, and that was in the original talking points as we now know. This administration and this president was running for re-election on a platform that included repeated references of al Qaeda being on the run and Osama bin Laden being killed. A narrative that all of a sudden you have an attack and an American ambassador dead because of al Qaeda really does go against that, and it does seem that the removal could lead some people to feel that that really was political. It goes against our narrative, so we're going to take it out. What do you think about that?</s>SCHIFF: You know, I understand that theory and, you know, I guess you can follow it logically. At the same time, you know, the president talked about this being a terrorist attack. Even, you know, the ambassador talked about extremists attacking the diplomatic facilities. So there wasn't any hiding the fact that we were attacked. We had our people killed. And those facts and in terms of al Qaeda's potential involvement and Ansar al-Sharia's potential involvement, came out very quickly. So it's hard to claim I think that this was part of a political campaign orchestrated spin. I will say this, too. You know, the fact that we were attacked in part by al Qaeda on 9/11, I don't know that in the context of the campaign when the country tends to rally around the commander in chief, that the theory really makes much sense that somehow it was better for the administration to make it sound like a spontaneous protest against the U.S. After all, the administration was also saying it made an outreach in the Muslim world and the other side could easily claim that, well, their outreach obviously wasn't working because we were a subject of this, y know, uprising and this attack. So I'm not sure, although the narrative is coherent one, it really makes a lot of sense here.</s>BURNETT: All right. Congressman, thank you very much. We appreciate your taking your time, giving his side of the story. And now to the breaking news in Cleveland. We have obtained tonight a new and exclusive photo of Michelle Knight. Now, this photo is from a 1997, 1998. Her school year. You will see if she looks different. Hair back in the ponytail in this picture. Something about the face, though, does make your heart fall when you think about what happened to her afterwards. Knight was the first to be missing in 2002. This is from the first images we have seen of her. In fact, we have kept looking at only one. So, this is a new picture. We have new and exclusive details of missed clues that nightmare that Knight, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus endured more than a decade, allegedly at the hands of Ariel Castro. Those who were close to Castro said he would often seem to consume large amounts of food especially for a single guy. He always seems to be struggling to get more. The way he kept the shelves stocked did raise suspicion, but not in the way you might think. CNN's Martin Savidge is OUTFRONT tonight from Castro's neighborhood. And, Marty, what more can you tell us about these missed clues that right now when we see that we missed them is -- it's just so agonizing.</s>MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right. And to so many people, you are right, Erin. They are now going, oh my gosh, it makes perfect sense but it didn't then. And the latest of talking to people who know Ariel Castro is the fact that he seemed to have this insatiable appetite for food, especially for a guy, as you say, he was supposedly living alone here on Seymour Avenue. And then on top of that, not only collect so much food, such as instant food and canned meats, well, they thought that he was actually preparing for the end of the world.</s>SAVIDGE (voice-over): In my exclusive interview with the brothers of Ariel Castro, it was Onil who talked about his brother's garden.</s>ONIL CASTRO, ARIEL CASTRO'S BROTHER: He was in the vegetables. He loved his vegetables. Don't eat the greasy food. Eat the veggies. Now, he's starting his little garden. I said, that's great. You know, you're doing great. He was always such a health fanatic, you know, like to keep himself, eating good stuff.</s>SAVIDGE: Only now does his healthy eating habits reveal another potentially sinister purpose -- to help provide food for the three women and a young child he allegedly was holding prisoner inside his home. Also, those close to Castro said he often frequented church and community food banks, stocking up on nonperishable food items, like soups and canned meats, so much so he was thought to be a survivalist -- someone getting ready for disaster. He also allegedly fraudulently obtained additional food stamps to buy more groceries. Pedro Castro was a more frequent visitor to his brother's home, but always had to follow one strict rule.</s>PEDRO CASTRO, ARIEL CASTRO'S BROTHER: I used to go there more than he did, to work on cars. Clean the yard. You know? Help him out and stuff. But never go beyond the kitchen.</s>SAVIDGE: But Ariel Castro's backyard may have its own story to tell, as these pictures obtained by CNN seem to show -- a spool of barbed wire, another of chains, and tarps that appeared to be for blocking anyone from looking in. There was also this mirror at his back door for an early visual warning of anyone in his driveway. Most haunting of all, this photo showing a child's bicycle. Castro was seen several times with a small child believed to be the daughter of one of the captive women, Amanda Berry.</s>P. CASTRO: I asked him, who's that? And he said, this is a girlfriend's (ph) of mine.</s>SAVIDGE: The daughter belonged to a girlfriend of his?</s>P. CASTRO: Yes.</s>SAVIDGE: Meanwhile, authorities say Castro kept the women in lockdown with the victims telling police they were allowed out twice in 10 years.</s>DEPUTY CHIEF ED TOMBA, CLEVELAND POLICE DEPARTMENT: When you see where the house is situated and the garage is situated, we were told they left the house and went in to the garage in disguise. So those are the two times there were mentioned or that they can recall.</s>SAVIDGE: Just more clues that people in this neighborhood can't believe were missed by so many who lived so near or visited this now infamous home on Seymour Avenue. For OUTFRONT, Martin Savidge, Cleveland.</s>BURNETT: And still to come, CNN can now confirm that the IRS was targeting certain groups. So why does our legal expert is willing to come on television in front of you, many of whom are angry, and defend it? Well, he's going to do it. Plus, love your smartphones and your tablets? Well, a new tax could be on its way. That's next. And a U.S. diplomat expelled from Russia. The Russians say the man in a strange blond wig was a CIA spy.