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CNN Saturday Morning News
Should Restricted Airspace Around White House Be Expanded?
Aired June 22, 2002 - 08:09 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Let's talk more about more serious matters.
Mike Brooks is a veteran of the D.C. Police assigned to the FBI's Joint Terrorist Task Force. He now covers matters of law enforcement and terrorism for us.
Good to see you again, sir.
MIKE BROOKS, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Good to be here, Miles.
O'BRIEN: Let's talk, the plane story was one that I did a little bit of research on, and being a pilot I had some interest in that. You were involved in the case in '94. Interesting date on that, September 12, '94.
BROOKS: Yes, it was a weird thing.
O'BRIEN: That's kind of interesting. But anyway, 172, the guy flies right into the White House, crashes, bounces off. What lessons were learned then and were they or were they not employed in this latest case with the 182 that strayed over that prohibited space right near the White House?
BROOKS: Well, back in '94, you had Frank Quarter (ph). He took off, came in from basically the same direction as this plane did, from the northeast, came down. But he followed landmarks. After smoking some crack and drinking about a 12 pack of beer, he jumped in a plane, because he had taken flight lessons for almost 15 years, but had never got his pilot's license.
O'BRIEN: Wow.
BROOKS: But he did a pretty good job anyway, followed the Beltway around, right down Connecticut Avenue, 17th Street, right alongside the Treasury Department, the old executive office building, around the monument, came into his final approach, if you will, on the south grounds of the White House, hit the jogging track that President Clinton had put in and -- because you see where the, his prop actually hit the ground, stirred up the dirt and then went in, broke both his wings off when he hit the magnolia trees and finally impacted right against the wall of the White House. O'BRIEN: All right, now, I think the perception among the public would be, and among this reporter, that there has got to be at least one Stinger missile on the roof of that White House, some kind of surface to air capability. Am I wrong? And what is the capability for the White House to defend itself should the F-16s fail, as apparently they would have in this case?
BROOKS: Well, let's just say there's safeguards in place. I still really can't talk about what kind of protection that the White House does have. After September 11, they did increase the restricted air space out about 14 miles, because there are restricted air spaces in Washington, D.C. around the U.S. Capitol Building and also around the White House.
O'BRIEN: Well, but now the restricted air space was in place. He strayed right into it. The F-16s scrambled and he still probably could have gotten to the White House if he wanted to. The fact is I think that without giving us some trade secrets, can we rest assured that if the scramble doesn't work, somehow, some way they'd be able to knock that thing out of the sky?
BROOKS: Well, I can't say we can rest assured.
O'BRIEN: OK.
BROOKS: The combat air patrols, that's a great topic. They were 24 hours a day seven days a week in New York and Washington, D.C. after September 11. They've done away with them. They said now they're on ground alert. It is proved, I think, this week that the ground alert didn't work and the White -- and the Pentagon readily admitted that it probably didn't, that they weren't able to scramble in time.
And we're talking only about a 182 here. What if we had, you know, some other general aviation aircraft that had, you know, a faster speed capability? It could have posed a problem.
Now, we had another case back about a year and a half, two years ago where a private plane strayed near the White House while Marine One, the president's helicopter, was getting ready to land. The counter snipers from the U.S. Secret Service uniform division who are on top for all the arrivals and departures, they actually shot a flare gun at that particular aircraft to just let him know that he was way too close and it got him out of the air before the president landed.
O'BRIEN: All right, this past week, just quickly, we've had so much to digest -- tanker trucks, ambulances -- I'm surprised the administration didn't talk about that asteroid that whizzed by earth to say that was an al Qaeda plot. It's hard for people to process all this. It gets to the point where it's almost background noise.
What are we to, how do you discern what to be worried about and what to do about it?
BROOKS: Well, I think the ambulance, we can go back to the ambulance story in New York City where some Middle Eastern men were online trying to buy this from a prop company. Now, I think that's great vigilance, now, and that's why they do these. I think this coming out again about the tankers is a good visions alert as we move toward the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
There have been polls that have been done over the last week that said there are some people that believe that something may happen on the Fourth of July. So what does that mean? That means that our vigilance, again, is coming up.
Some people say well, I don't want to know everything that's going on. But as we've talked about in the past, a lot of Americans, when something doesn't happen, they get lulled back into a false sense of security, become complacent. Sometimes I think we need to be poked with a stick just to say hey, remember, we are in a war in Afghanistan and there are people here in the United States and abroad that want to do bad things to us and want to hurt us.
O'BRIEN: All right, hopefully people are listening then.
Mike Brooks, our law enforcement and terrorism expert, we're still not done with you. We're going to buy you one more cup of coffee and then he'll be back in our next hour -- all right, we'll give him two cups -- four our reporter's notebook segment. He'll be taking your calls on homeland security. I'm interested in what you think about all these warnings -- tankers, the possibility of an attack on Las Vegas, now discredited, ambulances being purchased, who knows?
These are questions you can pose to Mike Brooks. He'll do his best to answer them for you. 9:30 a.m. Eastern time is the location on your clock. That's an hour and 15 minutes from now. The address, as always, is wam@cnn.com. Send us your e-mails now, please.
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