60 Minutes - 01/07/2018: Disinformation Warfare, Predicting Murder, Impact

Episode Date: January 8, 2018

RT's editor-in-chief on election meddling, being labeled Russian propaganda; Predicting crime in Chicago; and, Combat veterans coming home with CTE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $5. New 4-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, English muffin sandwiches, value iced coffee and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side. Or B-side.

Or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Vladimir Putin made her one of the most powerful women in Russia, and U.S. intelligence believes that she played a big part for Russia meddling in the U.S. election. Let's talk about Russian interference in our election, which our intelligence agencies tell us happened. And you believe them, just like you believe that they were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In this intelligence report, I don't even know how many references to you.

Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven references to you. A photograph of you and a cartoon of you stepping over the White House. There's nothing illegal that we did. What if a murder could be predicted? What if police could intervene with the future victim or future killer? In Chicago, an experimental computer program is trying to do just that. It's called predictive policing.

You were in the top 1% in the risk group that they're following. Yeah, I know. I can believe it. Because, you know, I used to be wild. I was, man, real wild, you know? The goal of this operation is keep people alive. That's number one. Number two, keep them out of prison and jail. Dr. Ann McKee has spent 14 years Hernandez was the most severe case of the degenerative brain disease, CTE, she had ever seen in someone under 30. Tonight, we hear that

it's not only athletes who are at risk, but also the 300,000 soldiers who have returned home from war with brain injuries. Before he was deployed, you know, he said, Mom, you know, I could come back with no legs or no arms. But nobody ever said that he could lose his mind one day at a time. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. When the barbecues lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.

Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. It's widely accepted that Vladimir Putin used disinformation warfare to interfere in our 2016 presidential campaign. But how exactly did he do it? Well, according to a U.S. intelligence report, one of his weapons was a Russian television network called RT. It stands for Russia Today,

and you can find it on many of our cable or satellite systems, just like any other news outlet. We recently went to Moscow to meet with the head of RT, Margarita Simeon. We arrived just as the Justice Department was insisting that RT register as a foreign agent in the United States under an 80-year-old law enacted to expose Nazi propaganda. And Simeon was scalding mad. Should we close American media in Russia because they're all anti-Putin and they wage campaigns against him every single day? Should we close them? You tell me. No one's closing you. No one's closing you. No one's closing you.

What they're doing is destroying our reputation. Should we do the same thing here in Russia to all the American media? They're all anti-Putin. Should we do that? Probably should, shouldn't we? Margarita Simeon is blustery, a force to reckon with.

She's the head of a vast state-run TV network with almost 2,500 employees. They broadcast around the world with a Spanish channel for Latin America, an Arabic channel for the Middle East, and four English editions, including RT-UK, and RT-America, available on cable and satellite. While not a lot of Americans watch RT on TV, it is widely disseminated on social media and YouTube, where it has racked up more than 2 billion views. Welcome back, driverless. Much of their schedule is routine news of the day or talk shows, including this one hosted by Larry King. There is no movie like this movie. We wanted a CNN of our own.

You can put it in these words. That would be true. I can't deny it. Let me tell you what U.S. intelligence agencies say about RT. And I'm talking about the CIA, FBI, and NSA. They describe you as a weapon in an information war. All the Russian intelligence agencies call the American media the same. I think that's what the intelligence agencies do.

I think it's pretty much their job. She dismisses the U.S. intelligence report that assesses with high confidence that Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at the U.S. election and that RT, Russia's state-run propaganda machine, contributed to the influence campaign. In this intelligence report, I don't even know how many references to you. 27. 27 references to you, a photograph of you and a cartoon of you stepping over the White House. There's nothing illegal that we did. There's nothing murky. There's no weird activity that we're involved in. Nothing. To most of our questions, her answer was, well, what about you?

Let's talk about Russian interference in our election, which our intelligence agencies tell us happened. And you believe them, just like you believe that they were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Didn't you believe that? Continue to believe that Russian interference in American elections happened. In five years, you will know that it didn't. It's also Facebook and Twitter say the same thing now. What do they say? What do they say? They say that the Russians

used their websites to perpetrate pro-Trump, anti-Hillary Clinton information. I can't deny that there could have been Russian media that had their opinion on Twitter, on Facebook, whatever, broadcast. Is that bad? Is that illegal? Isn't that what the American media do as well? British media supported Hillary. No problem with that. No interference. Nothing. French media supported Hillary. No problem with that. No interference. Nothing. French media supported

Hillary. No problem with that. Some Russian media supported Trump. Oh, my God. Did RT support Trump? No. RT did not support Trump. Our fault is that RT did not support Hillary either. I know that. Yeah. I wanted to win somebody who would be nicer to Russia. Did you get that? No. Is it even possible? We don't know. One curiosity is RT's connection to Michael Flynn, President Trump's former national security advisor,

who has pled guilty to lying to the FBI in the Russia probe. Simonyan invited him to RT's 10th anniversary gala in 2015. You paid him $45,000 to come to the event and sat him next to Mr. Putin. It just conjures up the idea that eventually he may have been some kind of a conduit

when he did get close to Trump. Because he sat next to Putin? Not because he sat next to Putin, but there was some relationship. With Putin? Putin didn't know who he was. I give you my word on that. But members of Congress want this further investigated since Flynn failed to disclose these contacts on his security clearance forms. So you've had this job for how long? For 12 years now. 12 years. You started when you were 25. Yes.

She was a young reporter covering the Kremlin at the time, and Putin liked her work. So when RT was created, she was tapped to be the editor-in-chief of the new state-owned TV network. I marvel that a 25-year-old was given that job. I do too. But it worked, didn't it? When it started, the focus was on happy stories about Russia. But according to U.S. intelligence, under her leadership and Putin's guidance, RT morphed into a tool to attack the West. Its budget, set by the Kremlin, grew tenfold to over $300 million a year. That's because RT is part of a larger strategy. Five years ago, Russia's highest-ranking military officer

wrote what's known as the Gerasimov Doctrine, saying that in warfare, information can be more effective than a military weapon, an idea that was then put into action. Your defense minister said in February that he had formed a new branch of the military called Information Warfare Troops. I don't know if that's the case, if that's what the military is doing. We know that that's what NATO has been doing for years and years. They are military. We're not military. In 2012, you said that Russia needs RT the same way it needs a defense ministry.

And you've also said RT was fighting, quote, an information war against the whole Western world. I am not at any kind of war. I have two children. I'm a journalist. I've been a journalist ever since I was 18. Before that, she was a kid growing up in southern Russia. We were extremely poor, our family. We had rats this big in the, I can't even call it a house, in the room where we lived with my parents and my sister.

This was in the Soviet time. Yeah. Back then, she says, she was a big fan of the United States, especially when she was an exchange student in Bristol, New Hampshire. New Hampshire is absolutely beautiful. Did you watch American television? Mostly MTV. MTV? I was 15. I get the impression, though, that your views of the United States have kind of curdled. It didn't just happen to me. It happened to more or less all of Russians in 1999 when you bombed Yugoslavia. The U.S. called that NATO operation a humanitarian intervention to prevent ethnic cleansing. But to Russia, it was a sign of U.S. aggression too close to home. We found that absolutely unfair, outrageous, illegal because it wasn't approved of by the United Nations. It was a shock. America had Russia wrapped around a little pinky

through the whole 90s. We did everything you told us, and we were eager to do more and more. The whole nation, Russian nation, was like, tell us what else we can do to please you. We want to be like you. We love you. And then in 1999, bam, you bombed Yugoslavia. And that was the end of it. In a minute, in one day, and that's when you lost us, unfortunately. Tensions between our two countries have only grown leading up to the 2016 election,

during which RT was accused of going out of its way to delegitimize Hillary Clinton. Secretary Clinton has engaged in behavior that is criminal, that anybody else would be going to jail for. Hillary Clinton has bitten, kicked, punched, scratched and thrown hard objects at her husband. We asked Julian Assange whether he has the email that could put Hillary Clinton in prison. RT's most popular segment about candidate Clinton, with over 10 million views online, vilified her as hopelessly corrupt. So in 2015, 96% of the Clintons' charity went to themselves. That's not accurate, but it's right out of the Russian playbook.

Disinform and distort in order to destabilize. RT often interviews as experts, conspiracy buffs, white supremacists, and actors. I just spoke at the Kremlin not too long ago. It traffics in anti-American crazy theories, like tying terror attacks to the FBI, or accusing the Pentagon of inventing Ebola. Can you blame anyone for distrusting the U.S.'s medical intentions at this point? They air a steady diet of violent protests and racial conflict to suggest the U.S. lacks the moral high ground to criticize Russia and is collapsing from internal divisions. A lot of your pieces are

about what's wrong with the United States. Right now, if we open a website of the American media funded by the American government and read what is there right now, that is what screams that not only Russian democracy is evil, Russia is evil, Russian authorities are evil, people are pretty much evil. No question we interpret events through our separate realities. Typically on RT, NATO is bad, Assad of Syria is not. The U.S. foments conflict, Russia does not.

You're telling me you didn't invade Crimea? No, we did not. You call it invasion. We call it the free will of the people. And now European leaders agree with the U.S. intelligence report. French President Emmanuel Macron, with Putin at his side, accused Russia of interfering in their election, calling RT an agent of propaganda. And British Prime Minister Theresa May made some of the same charges against the Kremlin.

It is seeking to weaponize information, deploying its state-run media organizations to sow discord in the West and undermine our institutions. RT says that in the U.S. it has begun facing repercussions from Silicon Valley. YouTube downgraded their preferred channel status and Twitter banned RT ads from their platform. And the Justice Department has labeled RT a foreign agent. Move, says the fiery Margarita Simonyan, that fly in the face of the U.S. Constitution's freedom of the press. Don't you represent the country that had always told us that difference of opinion is good? What happened to that? What happened to the American way? If you register as a foreign agent, you still are protected by the First Amendment,

and there is still no censorship. That's not true. It is true. No, that's not true, because effectively, not a lot of people would like to work being labeled a foreign agent. The same thing will happen to American media in Russia, exactly the same. And we will see how many people will still work for American media in Russia, being labeled a foreign agent.

You're going to retaliate? Not me. The Russian government definitely will. Will retaliate, definitely. They already said that. And indeed, Russia hastily passed a law enabling its justice ministry to label U.S. government-owned media like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network,

Visa provides scale expertise and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. What if a murder could be predicted? What if police could intervene with the future victim or future killer? In Chicago, an experimental computer program is trying to do just that. It's called predictive policing, and the city is counting on it to ease some of the worst gun violence there since the 1990s. There were 650 murders in the year just ended. That's more than New York City and Los Angeles combined.

The computer program spits out the names of those most likely to shoot or be shot. Police say the results are uncanny. But it's what Chicago does with the data that is saving lives. Ask Ernest Smith, who, according to the computer, should be dead or in prison by now. I got enemies, you know what I'm saying, and they don't like me, you know. I mean, it's all a part of growing up in Chicago. Ernest Smith was a trigger-pulling, drug-pushing menace to Chicago's West Side. One of the reasons you had enemies was you joined a gang.

Yeah, I'm a gang member. That's a gangster disciple's tattoo on your hand? Yes, a six, you know. Yeah. Smith was a star on the police department's strategic subjects list, which attempts to rank Chicagoans most likely destined for solitary or a cemetery. You were in the top 1% in the risk group that they're following. Yeah, I know.

I could believe it because, you know, I used to be, wow, I was, man, real wow, you know. The goal of this operation is keep people alive. That's number one. Number two, keep them out of prison and jail. Chris Millett runs the program that has so far saved Ernest Smith. You're at a crossroads right now. Millett is executive director of the Chicago Violence Reduction Strategy. The violence is unacceptable. It's not going to be tolerated. We will stop you if you make us. We will help you if you desire the help.

Mallette has assembled a coalition of cops, social workers, ministers and moms. We're looking to get people to put guns down. We're looking to get people to stop pulling triggers. And by we, I mean the collective partnership of local community folks who are partnering with local law enforcement to try to get this done collectively. It starts with that computer program, a $3 million experiment run by the Chicago Police and the Illinois Institute of Technology. We try to identify the subjects who are most at risk. Commander Kenneth Johnson explained that everyone arrested in Chicago is assigned a risk

score of zero to 500. Commander Johnson showed us the file of Shaquan Thomas, someone not unlike Ernest Smith, whose history of arrests added up to a risk score of 500. What are the things that go into that? Well, some of the things that go into the risk model is who they're associated with, their arrest history, and also whether or not they've been a victim or they've been an offender of a violent crime. How many gun offenses they've been involved in, those are all factors that go into it. Here he's fighting a police officer, and now he's unlawful possession of a handgun. And then here at the end, first- degree murder, and he's the murder victim.

End of timeline. At 22 years old. This is what Commander Johnson does with the data. The heart of the Chicago Violence Reduction Strategy is to personally visit those that the police believe are at high risk of being a shooter or a victim. The visit is based on the computer score and other factors, including recent shootings among friends and enemies or taunting in social media, which is a big driver of violence these days. You've been shot before, right? How long ago was that? A week and a half, two weeks. First, 21-year-old Aaron Green got a blunt letter from the superintendent of police, which reads in part,

if you engage in gun violence, rest assured, you will be subject to arrest and prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. But then, neighbors and social workers step in to offer a way out of gang violence. And the message is, listen, we love you, we value you, and we need you. We love you. We love you. Absolutely. We love you, we value you, and we need you. But here's the catch. We need you in your rightful place. We want to restore you to your rightful place in our community. When they came to your home, what did you think? What was the first thing you thought when you saw that police officer out there? Oh man, I thought I did something else. I thought they came back from some idea way back in the day. I'm like, oh man, they finally got me.

What did they say to you that day? They had a man with them and they wanted to talk to me about this program, you know, to help me get my life together. The man who came to talk to Ernest Smith was Charles Perry. So what I tell him is, I used to be you. What did you do? I sold drugs. I shot people. I mean, you name it, I did it. After 19 years and 29 days in prison, Charles Perry became one of the social workers essential to the Chicago strategy. Young people believe that they're not worth anything. Whatever they got in their immediate

surroundings is all they are, all they'll ever be. And it's so far from the truth. But how do you convince a young man who's known nothing else in his life that he is somebody. It's not my job to convince you. It's my job to plant the seed. Because nobody else has planted a seed in you other than destruction and death. The social worker takes his client by the hand, walks him through the DMV to get a driver's license, helps him with clothes, takes him to job training, and helps him find work.

We call it the big small stuff. There's some stuff to us that's just small stuff. Go get your license. Go get an ID. Go finish your degree, which is small stuff to the majority of us, I would say, but it becomes very big stuff to guys who are caught in this lifestyle, who've never engaged in that way. Ernest Smith didn't have an ID. Why did the ID matter so much? Because you learn you can't do nothing in life without identification. When I got the ID, it's like, man, like a huge weight got lifted off my shoulders, you know? I felt like a member of society again. An ID and Charles Perry got Smith his first job at the age of 31.

For a while, he worked part-time in a kennel. Now, he's looking for full-time work. Man, it was like heaven. You know, even though I was a drug dealer, you know, like I always kind of had money, but it feels different when you work for it. I want to keep working. I don't ever want to go back to the streets. When you come into someone's home and say, we're here to help you, how often do those guys believe

you? Well, if you look at who's reaching out for help, one out of three will reach out for help. One out of three. One of the obstacles to success is fear and loathing of the cops. Chicago police have an infamous history of brutality. So the violence reduction strategy enlists the neighborhood. They just want somebody to show that they love them, you know, to tell them that they love them. Let them know that their life is important, too. Somebody care about them. My name is Donna, and we're actually from the community. Donna Hall has a way of melting ice.

She's delivered mail in her neighborhood for nearly 20 years, but her heaviest burden, she carries special delivery. I'm not the person that I used to be. I was angry. I was mad at God. But in all reality, I was mad at Marshall. I was mad at God. But in all reality, I was mad at Marshall. I was mad at him for leaving me. Her son, Marshall, left in 2013. That's him at right in the parka.

A surveillance camera recorded the end of his life. Boom, boom, boom. And he falls. Shot for no known reason, by someone unknown. Donna Hall helps lead the Sisterhood, a movement of moms of the murdered. We, the community, we have to get on the front line. I don't like to march. I'm not marching. Because you can't hear me in the crowd. All about meeting people one-on-one. Because if I'm sitting here because you can't hear me in a crowd. All about meeting people one on one.

Because if I'm sitting here, we can hear each other. You receiving it better because I'm telling you what I went through. It's real. This pain is real. Don't some of them just look at you and think, I can't wait for this lady to get out of my house? Probably so. A lot of them. A lot of them do. But once, but when it's over, I stop them right there. And I tell them, if you've got to close your eyes, just picture your mama standing right here for a minute. You're breaking my heart. It would break my heart if something happened to you. But not even a mother's plea is enough most of the time. Jamal Cain is one of the roughly 66 percent who refuse help. The cops put you on their

list of people likely to shoot or get shot. Were they right about you? Yes. I guess I've been shot six times. When the violence reduction strategy team came to his home, he saw the cops and he hid. His grandfather took the social worker's card. I just looked at it and threw it down because I had no intention of calling. I never did call because I don't think the police want to help me. You regret that now? Not really. You still don't believe it? No. When we saw Kane, he was in jail on a gun possession charge. I grew up in a bad neighborhood, but that don't make me bad. It just makes me stuck.

Stuck? What do you mean? I'm not necessarily a bad person. It's just the things I do make me bad. If you grow up and you see everybody selling drugs, getting money the fast way, you want to do it. It don't necessarily mean you want to be violent. Violence has come along with the life that we live. We don't necessarily consider these guys to be bad people.

They could just be very dangerous at times. And there's a bit of a difference. What's the difference? Well, I think the difference is if people are driven to what they think is their barrier and their breaking point, what are they willing to do? When you see them out of that element of just engaging on the street, you see them as fathers, you see them as sons, you see them as community members. You know a lot of people watching this interview right now are thinking,

he's coddling criminals. You need to lock these guys up forever, and the problem will be solved. I think some of them need to be locked up. But here's the reality, Scott. They're going to keep coming back. You solve the problem by engaging and interacting with individuals. But it's tough for individuals to break from a gang. Just wanting out doesn't change the neighborhood.

Ernest Smith was sorely tested when his former girlfriend, the mother of his child, was murdered. Man, I was hurt. I was mad. You know, I was ready to get out there and go back to my old ways. Before that home visit with the police and with Charles, you would have gone out to find somebody to shoot. Oh, yeah, I would have went crazy. I would have snapped out. But he didn't, and he hasn't been arrested since joining the program a year ago.

But how hard is it to stay out of crime? Really, to keep it honest with you, it ain't. We basically, we make up excuses to go back. We make up excuses to go do the things we want to do. You know, I got demons. They fight with me. You know, like, you broke. Go take this. Go do that. But I learned to wait and be patient, you know, and ever since, good things can happen coming through the door for me. And Chicago will have to be patient. It's taken four years for the violence reduction strategy

to visit nearly 1,500 people. Of them, 78% have no new arrest for a violent crime. And in 2017, shootings were down 21%. Can the violence end? Will it end? Yes. How do you get there? We're doing it to ourselves. All we got to do is stop ourselves from doing it. There's no one riding in on the white horse to save us. The Savior is right there in the community. They right there. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life, but you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month.

With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. Until a few years ago, NFL players who struggled with severe depression, bouts of rage, and memory loss in their retirement were often told they were just having a hard time adjusting to life away from the game. Doctors have since learned these changes can be symptoms of the degenerative brain disease, CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, caused by blows to the head. What we're learning now is that CTE isn't just affecting athletes, but also showing up in our nation's heroes.

Since 9-11, over 300,000 soldiers have returned home with brain injuries. Researchers fear the impact of CTE could cripple a generation of warriors. He's in! He's in! Ready! Aim! Fire! When Joy Kiefer buried her 34-year-old son this past summer, it was the end of a long goodbye.

May his soul rest in peace. Kiefer's son, Sergeant Kevin Ash, enlisted in the Army Reserves at the age of 18. Over three deployments, he was exposed to 12 combat blasts, many of them roadside bombs. He returned home in 2012 a different man. His whole personality had changed. I thought it was exposure to all of the things that he had seen, and he just had become harder, you know. But he was not happy.

So at this point, you're thinking this decline, this change in my child, is just that he's been in war and he's seen too much. Right. Did he tell you about blasts that he experienced during that time? What did he tell you? That they shook him. And he was having blackouts, and it frightened him. Ash withdrew from family and friends.

He was angry, depressed. Doctors prescribed therapy and medication. But his health began to decline quickly. By his 34th birthday, Sergeant Kevin Ash was unable to speak, walk, or eat on his own. Looking back on it now, was there anything you feel like he could have done? Because? Because it was his own. Looking back on it now, was there anything you feel like he could have done? Because it was his brain. The thing I didn't know is that his brain was continuing to die. I mean, before I went into the service, he said,

you know, I could come back with no legs or no arms or even blind. Or I could be shot. I could die. But nobody ever said that he could lose his mind one day at a time. His final wish was to serve his country one last time by donating his brain to science. A gesture he thought would bring better understanding to the invisible wounds of war. Joy reached out to the VA Boston University Concussion Legacy Foundation Brain Bank, where neuropathologist Dr. Anne McKee is leading the charge in researching head trauma

and the degenerative brain disease, CTE. Think about some of the military cases. McKee has spent 14 years looking at the post-mortem brains of hundreds of athletes who suffered concussions while playing their sport. This past summer, her findings shook the football world when she discovered CTE in the brains of 110 out of 111 deceased NFL players, raising serious concerns for those in the game today. And when Dr. McKee autopsied Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, who killed himself after being convicted of murder, she found the most severe case of CTE ever in someone under 30. Now, she's seeing a similar pattern in deceased veterans,

who experience a different kind of head trauma, combat blasts. Of the 102 veterans' brains Dr. McKee's examined, 66 had CTE. I can understand a football player who keeps hitting his head and having impact and concussions, but how is it that a combat veteran who maybe just experienced a blast has the same type of injury? This blast injury causes a tremendous sort of ricochet or a whiplash injury to the brain inside the skull, and that's what gives rise to the same changes that we see in football players as in military veterans. Blast trauma was first recognized back in World War I. Known as shell shock, poorly protected soldiers often died

immediately or went on to suffer physical and psychological symptoms. Today, sophisticated armor allows more soldiers to walk away from an explosion, but exposure can still damage the brain, an injury that can worsen over time. It's not a new injury, but what's been really stumping us, I think, as physicians is it's not easily detectable, right? You've got a lot of psychiatric symptoms, and you can't see it very well on images of the brain, and so it didn't occur to us. And I think that's been the gap, really, that this has been what everyone calls an invisible injury. This is the world's largest CTE brain bank. The only foolproof way to diagnose CTE is by testing

a post-mortem brain. So these are full of hundreds of brains. Hundreds of brains, thousands really. Researchers carefully dissect sections of the brain where they look for changes in the folds of the frontal lobes, an area responsible for memory, judgment, emotions, impulse control, and personality. Do you see there's a little tiny hole there? That is an abnormality. That is a clear abnormality. And what would that affect?

Well, it's part of the memory circuit. You can see that clear hole there that shouldn't be there. It's connecting the important memory regions of the brain with other regions. So that is a sign of CTE. Thin slivers of the affected areas are then stained and viewed microscopically. It's in these final stages where a diagnosis becomes clear, as in the case of Sergeant Kevin Ash. So this is Sergeant Ash's brain.

Right. This is four sections of his brain. And what you can see is these lesions. And those lesions are CTE. And they're in very characteristic parts of the brain. They're at the bottom of the crevice. That's a unique feature of CTE. And they're in very characteristic parts of the brain. They're at the bottom of the crevice. That's a unique feature of CTE. And in a healthy brain, you wouldn't see any of those kind of brown spots. No, no. It would be completely clear. And then when you look microscopically, you can see that the tau, which is staining brown and is inside nerve cells, is surrounding these

little vessels. And explain, what is the tau? So tau is a protein that's normally in the nerve cell. It helps with structure. And after trauma, it starts clumping up as a toxin inside the nerve cell. And over time, and even years, gradually that nerve cell dies. Dr. Lee Goldstein has been building on Dr. McKee's work with testing on mice. We're in the neurotrauma laboratory. Inside his Boston University lab, Dr. Goldstein built this 27-foot blast tube

where a mouse, and in this demonstration, a model, is exposed to an explosion equivalent to the IEDs used in Iraq and Afghanistan. When it reaches about 25, this thing is going to go. Dr. Goldstein's model shows what's going on inside the brain during a blast. The brightly colored waves illustrate stress on the soft tissues of the brain as it ricochets back and forth within the skull. What we see after these blast exposures, the animals actually look fine, which is shocking to us. They come out of what is a near lethal blast exposure, just like our military service

men and women do, and they appear to be fine. But what we know is that that brain is not the same after that exposure as it was microseconds before. And if there is a subsequent exposure, that change will be accelerated. And ultimately, this triggers a neurodegenerative disease. And in fact, we can see that really after even one of these exposures. The Department of Defense estimates hundreds of thousands of soldiers have experienced a blast like this. What does that tell you? This is a disease and a problem that we're going to be dealing with for decades.

And it is a huge public health problem. It's a huge problem for the Veterans Administration. It's a huge moral for the Veterans Administration. It's a huge moral responsibility for all of us. A responsibility owed to soldiers like 33-year-old Sergeant Tom Bates. We were struck with large IED. It was a total devastation strike. Bates miraculously walked away from this mangled Humvee, one of four IED blasts he survived during deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you remember feeling the impact in your body? Yes.

What does that feel like? Just basically like getting hit by a train. And you were put back on the front lines? Yes. And that was it? Mm-hmm. When Bates returned home in 2009, his wife Libby immediately saw a dramatic change. I thought, something's not absolutely right here.

Something's going on for him to just lay there and to sob and be so sad. You know, what do you do for that? How do I help him? He would look at me and say, if it wasn't for you, I would end it all right now. You know, I'm like, what do you do? And what do you say to somebody who says that? I love this man so much. You're going to the VA.

You're getting help, but did you feel like you weren't getting answers? Yes. And so you took it into your own hands and started researching. I knew the way everything had gone and how quick a lot of my neurological issues had progressed that something was wrong and I wanted an answer for it. That led him to New York's Mount Sinai Hospital, where neurologist Dr. Sam Gandy is trying to move beyond diagnosing CTE only in the dead by using scans that test for the disease in the living.

By having this during life, this is sort of now gives us, for the first time, the possibility of estimating the true prevalence of the disease. It's important to estimate prevalence so that people can have some sense of what the risk is. In the past year, 36 veterans and athletes have been tested for the disease here. Tom Bates asked to be part of it. The injection I'm going to give you has a radioactive substance tracer. That radioactive tracer, known as T807, clings to those dead clusters of protein known as tau,

which are typical markers of the disease. Through the course of a 20-minute PET scan, high-resolution images are taken of the brain and then combined with MRI results to get a 360-degree picture of whether there are potential signs of CTE. Scan results confirmed what Tom and Libby had long suspected. On the right, we see a normal brain scan with no signs of CTE. Next to Tom's brain, where towel deposits, possible markers of CTE, are bright orange. Here, these could be responsible for some of the anxiety and depression that he's suffered, and we are concerned that it will progress.

My hope is that this study becomes more prominent and gets to more veterans and stuff like that. So we actually get like a reflection of what population might actually have this. All right, I want to just watch you walk. Okay. There is no cure for CTE. Dr. Gandhi hopes his trial will lead to drug therapies so he can offer some relief to patients like Tom. Dr. Ann McKee believes some people may be at higher risk of getting the disease than others. While examining NFL star Aaron Hernandez's brain, she identified a genetic biomarker she believes may have predisposed him to CTE, a discovery that could have far-reaching implications on the football field and battlefield. Do you think you'll ever be your old self again?

I don't ever see me being my old self again. I think it's just too far gone. So what's your hope then? Just to not become worse than I am now. And now... 50 seasons of 60 Minutes, this week from the first Sunday in January 2014. That's when we ventured to Iceland and the edge of an erupting volcano for a look at one of the greatest forces of nature. Our guide was volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson. I'm looking right into the crater. Scientists rate volcanic eruptions on a scale of zero to eight.

This is a four, which they call cataclysmic. Tell me what you're seeing. It's an explosive eruption, and explosions are producing big clouds of ash that are moving up, straight up into the atmosphere at a velocity of a few hundred feet per second and throwing out huge rocks. How big are these pieces that we see flying? Some of these are the size of cars. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.