other neighborhoods into islands where the only way out is by chopper or boat. and some folks in some areas in vermont are frankly stranded and have been since the storm on sunday. here in patterson, new jersey on some streets the passaic river is 18 feet deep. they're been evacuating people from here all day. just down the river in walling ton borough evacuation orders went out two hours ago, 6:00 p.m. eastern time. rescuers have been busy pumming 34 people to safety in patterson, new jersey. 14 kids among them, three dogs. people stayed thinking the worst was over, not knowing the rivers were still rising. even in a place where you'd expect water they've never seen anything like this before. look at these images. this is little falls, new jersey. looks more like niagara falls there's so much storm water flowing through there right now. in vermont where getting around is always tough, it's now almost impossible. hundreds of stretches of roads have been washed away. the national guard is bringing in supplies in some of the hardest-hit areas. in addition nearly 3 million homes are still without power. coming up you're going to hear from a man who just got married on sunday. his entire wedding party is stranded right now in a small town in vermont. they can't get out because none of the roads are open. upwards of 43 fatalities and officials keep saying is it is not over yet. mary snow joins us from liver falls, new jersey. mary, these pictures of the amount of volume of water is just incredible. does it seem like it's getting worse in some parts of new jersey? >> reporter: you know, it really is incredible. we wanted to show you, too, this is what little falls, the passaic river, little falls looks like right now. this raging water, if you can believe it, this is an improvement from what it was. and we're told last night that as furious as thwart is right now that it was raging even more last night and that there was much more water. the passaic river crested earlier today in this town and others around it. so some water is receding. you wouldn't know to look at the passaic river tonight in little falls. i was talking to some county officials and they're saying the water is receding that it could take until the weekend in some of these towns before the water really clears out. >> and we've seen evacuations now. have folks been in real danger? >> you know, they have. and we witnessed a couple of evacuations today. we were in patterson, new jersey a few miles away from here. really the danger was that what looked like a few inches of water quickly turned to a few feet of water. and then add the river currents to it. we saw one man and his son having to be evacuated. basically what happened is they went back to their home to inspect the damage, and rescue workers say they were just swept away by the current. and they wound up clinging to a log until rescue workers could come in a boat to get them out of there. >> mandatory evacuations in some areas just announced tonight in the last couple hours. mary, thanks very much for the reporting. let's take you now to vermont where one of our producers was talking about taking her family to be out of irene's way. didn't work out that way. she stayed in new york and it's a good thing she did. parts of vermont were literally cut off from the rest world when roads collapsed and bridges were washed away. a couple were in vermont getting married. they are still in pitsfield. they and most of their wedding guests. i spoke with mark by phone a short time ago. >> mark, you went up to vermont for your wedding on saturday. everything was fine until irene hit. what happened? >> well, we had a beautiful wedding day. it was our dream wedding. we wanted a rustic wedding. we love vermont. we came up here to pittsfield and had such a great wedding. but sunday we were having brunch with our friends and family, and all of a sudden the storm hit. everyone that came to my wedding thought they were getting out of new york and avoiding the storms. and they were thinking before it, this is awesome. and then the storm barely touched new york and came to us. >> there's only a couple hundred people who live in pittsfield. obviously they a lot of their homes are gone, their businesses are gone. i mean, do you guys have enough food, water, medical supplies? are people in the town or your party okay? >> we're in need of medical supplies. we have food and we have drinkable water. there's no running water because there's no power. and all the water is run on electric pumps. but the only thing is that it depends on how long we're here. they have limited resources. and we have about 60 people here that are putting a little bit of a drain on their limited sources. >> i'm looking at pictures. it looks like one road is completely cut off. basically the roads are just impassable out of town? >> yeah. there's several bridges down on route 100. there's a road that just caved in. there's several houses in town that we watched floating. it's been scary. it's been equally amazing how supportive and cooperative people have been up here, though. everybody's getting together, everybody's working together, eating together, making sure that people are safe. we've been sending people up into the back housing areas where elderly folk live and make sure that they get water. >> what kind of medical supplies do people need? >> the stuff that i've heard that's most urgent is specific high blood pressure med since. there's a couple of people with heart conditions that are urgently looking for medicine and getting real nervous. >> well, let's hope the national guard or some folks are able to chopper in with those supplies. mark, i appreciate you being with us. give my best to your wife and all the wedding party and everybody in town. we wish you the best. we'll continue to check in. >> thanks so much, anderson. >> after being stuck there with your whole wedding party. between the national guard, national hurricane center, homeland security and fee marks the federal response to irene has been massive just as it is in every big natural disaster. what if it weren't that way? my next guest has some ideas on that and they've been causing talk and controversy. ron paul says if elected he'd do away with fema. >> fema is not a good friend of most people in texas because all they do is come in and tell you what to do and can't do. you can't get into your houses. they hinder the local people. and they hinder volunteers from going in. so there's no magic about fema. and more people are starting to recognize that because they are a great contributor to deficit financing and quite frankly they don't have a penny in the bank. >> congressman ron paul, presidential candidate ron paul joins us. thanks for meeting with us, sir. you say we don't need fema. why? >> well, we've only had it since 1979. they don't have a very good record. i mean, these natural disasters are very, very dangerous. so i don't understand why we'd turn it over to a federal bureaucracy. as a whole they don't do a good job but fema has the worst reputation of almost any of them. and i live on the gulf coast and i've had the same position all the time. we've had hurricanes and disasters. and i get so many calls. i have had more calls on fema being upset with fema than all other agencies put together. when we had katrina going into new orleans, they needed ice. so fema ordered ice from the northeast. and they ordered 211 million pounds of ice. it traveled for two weeks. and they finally ended up in nebraska. and they never got it. but that's a typical way of how fema works. so if you want efficiency, why don't we look at how things were handled before we had fema. now it's the department of -- homeland security. they don't have a good record. go ahead. i do have another bigger gripe. >> let me just say, i reported extensively on the failings of fema during katrina, the trailers, the ice. but i mean, they also had body recovery teams on the ground very quickly before other people. and that was a fema response. i mean, they do have expertise in some areas that some states don't. i mean, if you'd left everything up to louisiana officials during katrina, probably more people would have died. >> well, that remains to be seen. there's no proof of that. >> louisiana officials certainly were not up to the task. >> well, the thing of it is, you create more hazard by the government by saying, you pay this and the government will be there. they'll always be there to take care of you and pay your bills. well, they're broke. they can't pay their bills. but the worst part is an economic consequence of saying, well, i can't afford my insurance. these are usually -- a lot of them are middle class people have their beach houses. and they don't -- they can't get their insurance because it's costly. so the government guarantees it. so they give a reason for people to do dumb things. they build in the places that the market says don't build here. it's too dangerous. then there's floods and all these problems. then when katrina hit, some of the guard units, you know, around the country that could have been helpful, they were over fighting wars in the middle east. so it's such a gross distortion. things weren't as bad as they pretended to be. before 1979 without fema, it wasn't a disaster. go and show me where there was a much worse care before fema. and i don't think you can give me any of those -- any of that indication. >> you talked about going back to the 1900s way before something like fema was around. but in gal vas ton, i think part of your district, it was fema who rebuilt it. they needed fema to -- i mean, i'm sorry. there wasn't a sea wall in galveston before the storm. and they needed to rebuild because locals there decided that it was just too extensive for them to cover all of that on their own using local funds. and because they didn't, 6,000 people died in that storm. i mean, if fema were abolished wouldn't you be setting a stage for life or death decisions or gambles in poor areas of the country? >> no. my point wasn't -- i pointed out in 1900 galveston which is in my district, they survived without fema and they did rebuild the city. and it was mostly local funds. there was probably some state funds in it and that's when the sea wall was built. >> there wasn't a sea wall because they decided to gamble because it was too expensive. if you had a federal government that was involved wouldn't that be -- >> anderson, wait a minute. the sea wall was built shortly thereafter. fema didn't build the sea wall in 1979. that's been around for a long, long time. you didn't need fema to build it. and just think of the management of all the levies in the country. now they're starting to study even the levees on the river are probably making the floods worse. >> so you're saying there should be no federal -- >> they were all built by the federal government and they failed so the federal government had a lot of responsibility for the creation of the mess in new orleans. >> so you don't think there's any role for the federal government in disaster response? or do you? >> rescue operations, i think so. and as a matter of fact, my approach, i think, was a very modest and reasonable approach when they came for funds, even today or back in when we got hit in galveston. i said, i'll vote for the funds, but you got to cut it. we're broke. the economic condition of this country is dire. so you cut $2 billion from overseas, put $1 billion against the deficit, put $1 billion into helping the people that we taught to be dependent on the federal government. so i think that's very reasonable. but to say, oh, it's analysts. the government will take care of us and we're broke and we're in the midst of this economic crisis which is going to get a lot worse and not be concerned about it and say, oh, well, the people need it. well, i mean, from the start of fema being involved and taking over land control and taking over these measures, they aren't very efficient. they're very inefficient. they give no-bid contracts. big corporations make a lot of money on this. they would have been better off in katrina if they had just written a check to everybody and not gotten involved in all the mess that they did. they handed out checks to people that didn't even live there. i don't know how anybody could defend the inefficiency of what went on with katrina. and that really hasn't changed. it's part of the department of homeland security. all you have to do is look at the t.s.a. that's another favori bureaucray that people don't like, either. >> just asaid the syrian government is denying that they're murdering their own people. they've denied they're killing children despited videos we've seen. they deny and deny and deny. they deny they're keeping the rest of the world from seeing the truth. new reporting on what a u.n. mission to syria saw, what they uncovered and what they have to say about their government hosts. remember, the syrian government promised us right here, the syrian ambassador to the u.n. said the u.n. can travel anywhere they want in syria. did they let that happen? we'll find out in a moment and later, crime and punishment, new developments out of aruba in the disappearance of the american woman robyn gardner. how her traveling companion looked and acted the day she disappeared. first let's check in with isha sesay. new information about the health of self-proclaimed polygamist leader warren jeffs. seen shockingly frail in this o picture. that and more when 360 continues. oh, thanks. keeps me young. hello there, handsome. your dinner's in the microwave, dear. ♪ where do you want to go? just drive. 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[ male announcer ] with interactive learning solutions from dell, mrs. davis can make every student feel like her only student. dell. the power to do more. with vitamins and minerals balanced to support your energy... ♪ ...and healthy skin. everyday benefits from advanced formulas. discover the complete benefits of centrum. 2200 men, women and children is how many people human rights watchers estimate have been killed in the last several months by syria's dictatorship. officials in syria blame muslim extremists, roving criminals and outsiders. they die my killing children. what you're about to see we need to warn you is revotering. even after we blurt out portions of it. shows you a young boy shot in the head. claims to be from the city of dara just today. human rights advocates say at least seven people were kill today on the streets of syria, most of them in dara where the upadvising began. at least two dozen killed since the week began. today is the end of ramadan. instead of celebrating, though, syrians are standing up in mass demonstrations. look at the size of this one today in hams. you can see a wave of humanity. people making themselves heard, protesting peacefully. sadly here and other cities across syria, their cries for freedom are being met with gunfire. [ gunfire ] >> this is how syrian security forces handle dissent, protests. we've seen it again and again. you've seen children gunned down. some like this child, barely a toddler just two years old. you've seen rescuers shot at and ambulances fired upon. and over and over and over again you've also seen syrian officials deny responsibility. watch what the syrian ambassador to the united nations said on this program when i asked him about it just a week and a half ago. >> i mean, how can children be targeted and then returned to their parents? or do you deny that's happening? >> absolutely. children are not targeted by the police, neither by the army. but let me comment on what you have just said. the report of the high commissioner is unfounded and biassed. she didn't reflect any of my government's points of view in her report. she didn't even go to syria. she just relied on reports coming from syrian refugees in south turkey. >> sir, you yourself said no international commission needed to come to syria or was allowed to come to syria because your government was perfectly capable of being transparent and doing your own investigations. that does not seem to be true. >> absolutely. i'm sticking to my words. we are not talking about the commission coming from geneva. we have aloud after the presidential statement adopted by security council we have allowed mission, humanitarian mission from ocha. >> syria's ambassador to the united nations on this program. after not allowing human rights delegation into syria. despite whatever he says and whatever his fancy suit and all his talk, he did not allow -- they did not allow -- the government there did not allow a delegation back into syria. then the assad regime reluctantly allowed a humanitarian russell missi humanitarian mission to visit. we got a statement" while there's no country-wide humanitarian crisis, basically there's enough food and water for syrians "officials limited the mission's ability to fully and independently assess the situation. however, the people it was able to talk to in areas of previous and ongoing unrest said they felt extremely intimidated and under constant threat. this is what happened in hams just moments after they left. [ gunfire ] >> so what happened predictably is government forces opened fire and people died. right after the u.n. left. now, as always these videos come via the internet. they're posted by human rights groups and syrian dissidents. we can't independently verify them. we should point out we're not permitted into syria to see for ourselves. the ambassador lied again saying of course journalists are welcome in and you can go anywhere, you can travel freely. that's not the case. we've had people there and they're not able to travel freely. they're not able to go around without government minders. syrian officials deny responsibility for what seeing even as they deny they're stifling access to outside reporters and observers. >> you don't know all the faces of the story, anderson. >> because you're not allowing us in. you're not allowing reporter toss actually go to the front lines and see. this you're restricting reporters. so it's a little disingenuous to say you don't know the truth when you're not allowing the international community to seat truth. >> anderson, this is wrong, too. because we have aloud three delegations, big delegations of tourists and journalists and reporters to enter the country. >> oh, come on. you keep them in damascus or control them very carefully. >> we don't control anybody. we are there to protect them from armed groups. >> i went on to tell him i reported in syria years ago in damascus, five years ago, and i had a government minder who followed my every move and observed what i talked to. that was in a time when there wasn't allegedly these armed gangs as they keep saying. yet again that claim is contradicted by the u.n. mission. take a look at the q and a they published with their statement. was the mission given free and independent access in answer, although the mission was permitted to visit any location requested it is doubtful that syria has fully complied with its assurances of providing free and unimpeded access". remember ambassador's claim that government minders are only there for protection