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NBC News Poll for Election Voting; Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is Interviewed about the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza; Exclusive Look at Chinese Panda Conservation. Aired 9:30-10a ET

Aired October 16, 2024 - 09:30   ET

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

[09:30:00]

JOEY JACKSON, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Second trial, would it have made a difference to the outcome? That's what they're examining. That's why it's so critical, Kate.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: So what then is the central question now? Because the DA has said there's no question they committed the crime. That is - that is - that is not in question.

JACKSON: Right.

BOLDUAN: The central question now before that could be reviewed and could potentially lead to a review of the sentencing is?

JACKSON: So, there's two things. Number one,, as I alluded to -

BOLDUAN: Yes.

JACKSON: With this letter, and the information regarding sexual abuse, would it have been outcome determinative? Meaning, if a jury heard about this, would it have swayed that jury to conclude, right, knowing that they did commit the murders, was this justification and now for self-defense?

BOLDUAN: But, Joey, is this - does this have anything to do with how - how criminal justice is viewed and sexual abuse is viewed wildly differently from the late '80s to today?

JACKSON: Without question, right? Because things change in society, right? If you look at everything that's changed, the fact that there was not gay marriage before, now there is. Social mores (ph) change. Not Me Too before. People thought they can get away with abusing women with impunity. Now, you don't do that. It's Me Too.

As it relates to the issue of sexual abuse of children, et cetera, taken a lot more seriously. And so to your question, you look at this and you say, you know, if the core reason or the criminal justice system, when someone is found guilty, is punishment, rehabilitation, and deterrence, could they be rehabilitated, have they been rehabilitated, and what will the DA now do? Will the DA now say, hey, let's go before a judge. Will the judge set them free if the DA decides to do that, saying they've been rehabilitated enough. Will the judge say, we'll impose a sentence, whether you only serve a little bit more time or will there be a new trial?

I doubt there'd be a new trial at all here. So, I think what they're looking at, if the DA buys into this, is a potential release.

BOLDUAN: If a judge does reconsider their sentencing, how does the time that they've already served, does it factor into the - the factors that the judge will take into account?

JACKSON: In a big way, Kate. Why? Because they were serving and are serving life without parole. So now the issue will be, are they going to serve something less? They've been in for 30 years. So, the question is, is that punishment enough? Is it sufficient?

And then one last thing, Kate. What happens is, is that they killed, that - there's no question that they killed them.

BOLDUAN: Right.

JACKSON: There's something else on the books called manslaughter. It means you killed, but who were provoked to do it. If you get sentence for manslaughter, you've got what's called time served. Plenty of time in for that. They would be released.

And so the issue for the DA, I think, is if even if it's manslaughter, they would, based on what the statutory law provides for sentencing, have served that sentence already and would have to be released. Let's see what the DA does. But if the DA buys in, the district attorney in California, this will be really big.

And it seems like they're evaluating this, they're taking it seriously. Is enough, enough? Will they be released? We will soon know.

BOLDUAN: There definitely seems to be momentum, but we will see together.

JACKSON: Yes.

BOLDUAN: It's good to see you, Joey. Thanks for laying that out.

JACKSON: Always. Thank you.

BOLDUAN: John.

BERMAN: All right, record breaking early voting numbers in some places. What it absolutely positively tells us about who is going to win the election.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:37:46]

BERMAN: All right, this morning, a new NBC News poll finds just more than half of likely voters plan to cast their ballots early in Georgia. The secretary of state's office says a record 328,000 people cast ballots on the first day of early voting. This will set off the quadrennial speculation about what it all means and who it benefits.

CNN's senior data reporter Harry Enten is here.

And this is kind of like a public service announcement with guitar.

HARRY ENTEN, CNN SENIOR DATA REPORTER: Yes. Yes.

BERMAN: OK. What does early voting tell us and not tell us? You're skeptical that it tells us everything.

ENTEN: I rarely beg the audience for anything. I beg of you, don't read anything into any of these trends, please. Every four years we do the same gosh darn thing.

Look, here's the bottom line, an Election Day vote counts the same as an early in-person vote or a mail vote. We know from the polling, and we know through history, that Kamala Harris is very likely going to win that mail vote. We know the early in-person vote is going to be very, very close. A point lead in this poll. I can find a few polls, in fact, where Trump is ahead in that.

But we know that Donald Trump is going to crush the Election Day vote. And it doesn't matter when the vote is cast, they all count the same. One vote counts for one vote, whether it's cast today or whether it is cast on November 5th, John.

BERMAN: And that goes for people looking at this from both sides.

ENTEN: Yes.

BERMAN: There's nothing magical about an Election Day -

ENTEN: No.

BERMAN: Versus a vote that's mailed in early.

There are trends though that you can compare when you're talking about early voting, mail voting, in-person voting.

ENTEN: You can try. You could certainly try. But remember where we were four years ago? There was a pandemic. We were in the midst of the Covid pandemic. John and I couldn't stand next to each other four years ago. The bottom line is this, there's no discernible baseline in most of these states because in 2020 69 percent of the vote was cast early, in person or by mail. This year we're looking at maybe about 52 percent. So, how are you supposed to compare this year to four years ago? And more than that, you know, you might say, OK, all that record early, in-person voting, right? But here's the deal, even the components of that early vote are going to change because the mail vote is going to be way down. Here's a projection, 23 percent for this year compared to 43 percent four years ago.

[09:40:05]

The early in-person vote could actually go up. That's what the NBC News poll is suggesting, 29 percent versus 26 percent four years ago. But the overall complexion and the overall number of folks who are going to cast a ballot before Election Day is going to go way down. But the way they're going to do it is very likely going to change. It just makes it impossible. I don't know how anyone could compare this to anything to be honest. Maybe they know something better than I do, John.

BERMAN: The important thing is that people are voting. People are voting and that's a good thing. But you have one final warning.

ENTEN: Yes, a quote before Trump's 2016 win comparing party registration trends from 2012, some political scientists that early voting predicts who wins. This is good news for Democrats. I don't think Hillary Clinton won that election, John, do you?

BERMAN: No. Early voting, not a good predictor. If you run a campaign, I will say this. If you're running a campaign you like early voting -

ENTEN: Sure.

BERMAN: Because it's, you know -

ENTEN: You bank the vote.

BERMAN: Exactly. It's there. It's done. You can turn your focus to someone else. Maybe a persuadable voter there. But in terms of predicting who's going to win, no, please, no.

ENTEN: Please, please, I'm begging you, please, please.

BERMAN: Don't make Harry sad.

Sara.

SIDNER: All right, thank you to you both.

The head of UNICEF told our Christiane Amanpour that over 40 children per day have been killed in Gaza for more than a year during this war and the Israeli airstrikes. This comes as the U.S. is putting pressure on its ally, demanding Israel improve the humanitarian conditions in Gaza if they want military aid.

With me now is Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, the trauma surgeon who worked in Gaza from March 25th to April 8th of this year. You penned an article in the "New York Times" titled, "65 Doctors and Nurses: What We Saw in Gaza."

You worked with the "New York Times," gathered the folks that had been there, the doctors that had been there, and nurses that had been there. First to you, what did you witness in those couple of weeks that you were, I think, in Khan Younis in hospital?

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA, WORKED TWO WEEKS AT KHAN YOUNIS HOSPITAL IN GAZA THIS YEAR: Correct. Yeah, I was at European Hospital on the southeastern edge of Khan Younis. When I was there, that was probably the best-resourced city block in the entire Gaza Strip, and it was still an absolute and total disaster. While I was there, on average, I saw one kid shot in the head every single day. Every day we had mass casualty events, mostly from bomb blasts. The hospital was completely overwhelmed. There were 10 to 15,000 people sheltering on the grounds of the hospital itself, and even within the hospital. So when you're moving a gurney through the hospital, there's tents on both sides of the hallway. You're trying not to run a little kid's fingers over.

There, the hospital had inconsistent water, inconsistent electricity. The only supplies we had were what we brought in with us. And it was a 220-bed hospital with 1,500 people admitted to it, half of whom were severely injured children. So it was a very, very difficult situation.

SIDNER: You talk about children particularly in this article, and I think the very first graph that is there, when you looked at and talked to 65 doctors and nurses along with the "New York Times" who were on the ground, in the first graph it says 44 of the 65 doctors and nurses and paramedics saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head. Are you and these other doctors and nurses saying that children were specifically and purposely targeted by the Israeli military?

SIDHWA: So it's important to remember, we're not war crimes investigators or something like that. We're sitting in the hospital, and then these kids come to us. We ask their families what happened, of course, and they would say that they were shot by the Israelis. But it's very hard to infer intentionality from our data in this case or that case or that case. That's not what anybody should take from this. What they should take from it is the overall pattern.

How can it possibly be that in the catchment area of every hospital in the Gaza Strip for an entire year, internationals have seen children shot in the head on a regular, if not, like in my case, a daily basis. That, it's hard to believe that that's not intentional on the part of the people doing the shooting.

SIDNER: I do want to let you hear what the IDF said in this case. A spokesperson for the IDF that we talked to responded with a statement. He did not directly answer whether or not the military had investigated reports of shootings of preteen children or if any disciplinary action had been meted out.

But in part, the statement says that "The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes. The IDF is fully committed to respecting all applicable international legal obligations, including the law of armed conflict."

You talked about taking pictures, and you did take some, and we've been looking at some of those pictures from your experience there where you say that you didn't even have soap sometimes to wash your hands in this devastating situation. There is also another picture that was published. It's one of the first things you see, and it's very disturbing. And here is that picture. It shows three children. I think it's a CT scan. I am no doctor -- SIDHWA: That's OK, yeah.

SIDNER: -- but I think it's a CT scan there. And it shows several children, three of them, where you can actually see the bullets in their skulls or down that have gone from their skulls to their neck.

[09:45:04]

And it's breathtakingly awful.

But there is controversy over this. There were people that came out and said these were lies, that this was fake. The New York Times has responded, saying it's too graphic to publish the actual pictures that went with this. What is your take on why this controversy erupted, because those pictures are so stark?

SIDHWA: Yeah, I think the controversy is precisely because the pictures are so stark. Anybody -- I just want to be very clear about this. I'm a trauma surgeon. I see about 10 CT scans per day. I work in Stockton, California. I see plenty of people who are shot in the head. It's part of my daily work.

There is absolutely no reason to doubt the authenticity of these pictures at all. Any doctor who says they are is either not a doctor or is lying to you. And I just want to be very clear about that.

I've seen the CT scan itself. What you're seeing is a CT scout image, which is like a two-dimensional picture so that you can set up how high the CT scan is going to go and how low it's going to go. I have the full video of the CT scan, in particular of that child that Dr. Saeed took. And I also have a picture of her forehead. Her eyes are closed. She has a breathing tube in, and there's a bullet wound right where you would expect it to be based on the scan. The claim that these photographs are faked is just, it's beyond ludicrous.

SIDNER: Lastly, I just want to ask you how you are doing after witnessing such horror in Gaza.

SIDHWA: You know, I'm fine. I wouldn't make it about me. I would focus on the fact that the Palestinian healthcare workers there are targets of the Israeli military. The Ministry of Health put out a statement that almost 1,000 identifiable healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza. That's one out of every 20 healthcare workers in the Gaza Strip. So that's devastating.

A lot more have been taken, tormented, tortured, starved. Their own families have been killed. They're all displaced. They're all homeless. And yet they go to work every day, and they're not even being paid for it. So I think that's admirable, but everybody has a limit. And we need to stop what's going on before that limit is passed, and there's no hope after that.

SIDNER: Dr. Sidhwa, thank you so much for bringing your story to us and explaining all of this and what's going on there in Gaza from the perspective of a trauma surgeon. We appreciate it.

SIDHWA: Thank you.

SIDNER: We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:51:40]

BOLDUAN: So, the eagle has landed, and in this case the eagle is two very cute giant pandas.

Bao Li and Qing Bao have officially arrived in Washington.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DEANNA MARTIN, FEDEX EXPRESS CAPTAIN: Every time anyone would enter the cargo area, he would look, you know, he wanted to see who's coming and will they give me treats.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: But don't plan your visit yet. They will not be making their debut at the National Zoo still for a few months. But this panda diplomacy, as it has long been called, is an elaborate and highly coordinated missions.

CNN's David Culver was there for the adventure.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID CULVER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: They're saying Bao Li, Qing Bao, have a safe trip.

You are getting a very rare look at the panda sendoff here in China. I've never been this close to a panda, but there she is.

CULVER (voice over): A few hours earlier, a private farewell for the three-year-old panda pair and the ceremonial transfer of care from China to the U.S.

We got here a few days ahead of the sendoff.

CULVER: We made it. It's a long journey.

CULVER (voice over): Traveling to Chengdu and meeting up with the panda keepers from the Smithsonian's National Zoo.

CULVER: Thanks for making time. I know you guys are busy, Marrio, Trish.

CULVER (voice over): We catch them just outside the panda quarantine zone.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This was what I worked for. And it feels so surreal.

CULVER (voice over): The majestic mountains of Sichuan Province are the natural habitat for these beloved creatures.

CULVER: Chances of us actually seeing one out here we're told are quite slim.

CULVER (voice over): We're granted access to a reserve that tourists aren't allowed, joining researchers from the Smithsonian who specialize in panda rewilding, or efforts to reintroduce them to their natural habitat.

MELISSA SONGER, CONSERVATION BIOLOGIST, SMITHSONIAN'S NATIONAL ZOO: Part of the reason for putting them in an area like this, in keeping them away from people, is so that they're not acclimized to people. You wouldn't want to release a panda and have them approach a village, for example.

CULVER (voice over): We're told we can meet some of the forest panda trackers. But first, we need to suit up.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think (INAUDIBLE) should fit these.

CULVER: All right, let's try it.

CULVER (voice over): A panda suit, just in case we stumble across a panda cub.

CULVER: They don't want humans to become part of their everyday routine. So, it's for that reason that we're suiting up to look like them.

Does it look like a panda.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You're not only putting on just the suit by itself. You're also going to put panda's urine and pooh-pooh on so you have the scent.

CULVER: Has that been on this suit before? This is for distance (ph).

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is clean. It's been cleaned.

CULVER: Oh.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So, if - if they sense on a signal that a cub is nearby, they're going to put on a hood and just - and go into hiding.

CULVER: The hood goes on.

CULVER (voice over): Conservation efforts like these are funded in part by the panda exchange program.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Our two guys that came over 20 years ago and -

CULVER (voice over): Zoos, like the Smithsonian's, pay $1 million a year to host a pair of giant pandas, adding to the pressure.

BRANDIE SMITH, DIRECTOR, SMITHSONIAN'S NATIONAL ZOO: We just imagine everything we do. The entire world is watching and there's no margin for error.

CULVER (voice over): Especially given how beloved pandas are in places like Chengdu. The creatures are larger than life here. And their most loyal fans stand hours in line to catch a glimpse of their favorite ones.

[09:55:02]

CULVER: You could see, look like everybody gets super excited. They've already got their positions.

CULVER (voice over): And there are even panda influencers like A'Qiu, who post content from his bedroom.

CULVER: So, you're into pandas.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I should, sorry, before we start, can we just move one big panda to that one there?

CULVER (voice over): Which doubles as his studio.

CULVER: Why do you love them so much?

A'QIU, PANDA INFLUENCER: Cute. So cute.

CULVERS: The pandas that go part of the exchange program from here in China to the U.S., what do you make of that?

A'QIU (through translator): This is an agreement between China and the U.S. And because I love my country, and I love pandas, I support it.

CULVER (voice over): The panda exchange, or panda diplomacy, dates back to 1972. President Nixon's historic visit sparking China to send pandas to the U.S. and now to many other countries. Months of planning to pull off this transfer. And in Washington, renovations to make sure Bao Li and Qing Bao's new home is just right.

LAURIE THOMPSON, ASSISTANT CURATOR OF GIANT PANDAS: We've done some tree trimming here also because we know they're going to climb. They love to climb.

CULVER: The zoo's been advertising pandas are coming. And now, they've arrived.

David Culver, CNN, Chengdu, China.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BOLDUAN: Thoughts?

SIDNER: They're such rolly-polly chunks. I think they're adorable.

BOLDUAN: That's what you takeaway from this?

SIDNER: That was my takeaway. But my biggest takeaway was the panda outfit -

BERMAN: Well, do you know what's interesting.

SIDNER: You need one.

BERMAN: Is David actually was assigned the story because he already had the panda outfit. It was - it was cost savings.

BOLDUAN: But he just - he did (ph).

BERMAN: We have to find a reporter who dresses up like a panda. It turned out David Culver.

SIDNER: How - David is going to come for you in so many ways and I can't help.

BOLDUAN: David is an award-winning journalist and he's going to win another one with that.

SIDNER: You leave David alone.

BERMAN: With a panda - with a panda suit.

BOLDUAN: Guys, that was - we know what we're going for Halloween.

Thank you so much for joining us. This is CNN NEWS CENTRAL. "CNN NEWSROOM" is up next.

BERMAN: In a panda suit.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)