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American Morning

State Department Confirms at Least One American Still Missing, Presumed Dead in London Terror Attacks

Aired July 12, 2005 - 09:30   ET

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

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: It is just about half past the hour on this AMERICAN MORNING. Coming up, we're going to take a look at tomorrow's shuttle launch.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: We hope there'll be a shuttle launch, weather permitting, technicalities permitting, really important to a lot of folks at NASA, obviously to get this mission under way two-and- half years after they lost Columbia and her crew of seven.

Coming up, we'll talk with which a NASA flight surgeon who investigated the deaths of the Columbia crew, actually poured through the wreckage. Just so happens one of the Columbia crew members was his wife. Can you imagine? It's an amazing story.

S. O'BRIEN: Awful.

M. O'BRIEN: It's an amazing story. Jonathan Clark, an amazing man. We'll talk to him in just a little bit.

S. O'BRIEN: Wow. Oh, gosh, you can't even imagine someone doing that.

M. O'BRIEN: For him, it's how he's coping. It really is. It's just hard for -- obviously, that is not for everybody.

S. O'BRIEN: All right.

Wow, well, let's get another look at headlines first. Kelly Wallace has those.

Hey, Kelly.

KELLY WALLACE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Soledad.

Good morning to all of you. Here are some stories in the news. A developing story we've been following throughout the morning. Four explosions near a power plant in the Basque region of Spain. These are the first pictures from the scene just into CNN. As you can see, things appear pretty calm there. We understand the separatist group ETA placed a warning call ahead of the blast, and police say it gave them enough time to clear the area. The new thermal power plant not yet operational. It's not clear why it was targeted. No immediate word of any injuries or damage.

Tropical Storm Emily, I know hard to believe, it's already churning over the Atlantic, and it could hit the Caribbean in the next couple of days.

Meanwhile, still talking about Hurricane Dennis. Florida emergency officials say they are moving into the recovery phase in the aftermath of Dennis. People are cleaning up from the big mess left behind, including tremendous flooding in parts of Georgia.

In Aruba now, the Texas-based group helping in the search for Natalee Holloway could be calling it quits. Texas volunteers have spent the last three weeks in Aruba without turning up any solid leads. The group saying it will decide today whether to leave the island.

Meanwhile, judges are set to hear an appeal from suspect Joran Van Der Sloot, who remains in custody. He apparently wants a court order that extended his detention overruled.

And firefighters in southern Colorado hoping for calm weather today to help control a nearly 12,000-acre wildfire. The blaze is threatening hundreds of homes and more evacuations are possible. Some 5,000 people have fled since the fire started Wednesday. The blaze is one of at least six fires in the state.

(WEATHER REPORT)

S. O'BRIEN: The U.S. State Department confirms now that at least one American is still missing and presumed dead in London following last week's terror attacks. He's 37-year-old Michael Matsushita, from the Bronx. It's believed he was killed in the bombing near the King's Cross subway station.

David Golovner is a friend and is now acting as a spokesman for the Matsushita family. He's in London.

First and foremost, our condolences to you. I know this was your best friend, and you're now getting some really tough words from the London police. When you first heard about the bombings on Thursday, did you immediately think, Michael could be in danger?

DAVID GOLOVNER, MISSING MAN'S FRIEND: Honestly, when I first heard Thursday, I did not put two and two together for several hours, and I knew he was in London, but I mean, there weren't that many people affected in the sense. I mean, it wasn't a sort of citywide disaster. You know, the odds of something like this happening to anybody you know are so slim that you're worried. I was more worried about everything else. I wasn't going through sort of my checklist of everybody I knew who was in London that could be affected. It just didn't occur to me until much later in the day.

S. O'BRIEN: When did police notify not only you, but also the Matsushita family, that even though there is no body discovered yet, they believe Michael had been killed?

GOLOVNER: Yesterday morning, they came by the house where we're staying at, and told us that they had gone through a process of elimination using the identification that they had from us of him, and it matched that up with the people who were in critical condition and still alive in the hospital, and they could tell us definitively at that point that he was none of those people. So it was early yesterday.

S. O'BRIEN: It's believed that he was in the King's Cross station, I understand. Do you know where he was going, where he'd be headed, then?

GOLOVNER: Yes, he had just gotten a new job. He started at the beginning of the week. And he lived near a subway station that would have taken him to the King's Cross station where he would have been transferring to, I believe, the Piccadilly line. So he was right along -- his route to this new job would have been along the route that all of this happened, which is why when he didn't show up for work that morning and after it happened, the woman that he was living with started to get very concerned, and she started to try to figure out ways that she could find him.

S. O'BRIEN: Oh, gosh, just terrible, terrible timing really. No body has been recovered, and a lot of that, as you know, is because it's really dangerous still at King's Cross station there. They're having a hard time getting in there. That's got to be really difficult, not just for you, but of course as you mentioned his girlfriend, his family, too.

GOLOVNER: Yes. We -- I mean, we don't know -- we know less details about what happened probably than most people in the world at this point. We've just been really in a cave and tunnel vision, and our questions have all been focused, you know, poignantly on whether or not he was alive, and now at this point, we're just waiting to find out if he was identified. So we did hear that there was a lot of problems with getting bodies out, and we've heard, you know, reports of other, you know, rats, and other things that just it made it, you know, horrific. But the information that we've gotten has really all been from the police. None of us have really spent much time watching the news. So a lot of grisly details are things that we'll probably be hearing over the next couple of weeks, once we're better able to better process everything that's going on.

S. O'BRIEN: Michael is a guy you have known since the third grade. You know, it's interesting here, because we've seen his picture, but we don't know a lot about him. Tell me a little bit about Michael Matsushita.

GOLOVNER: Yes, I met him, as you said, when I was in the third grade, he was in the fourth grade, and we grew up together. We grew up in the Bronx. Both of us went to public schools. We hung out in the neighborhood. He was really well-known in the neighborhood. I mean, people -- anybody who grew up in the '80s in the northwest Bronx and hung out on the streets would have probably known him, and went to John F. Kennedy High School, which is one of the larger high schools in the city, and he was the kind of guy that was, you know, I mean, imaginative, adventurous; he was always trying to bring people together. He had like the kind of zeal for life that's unusual in most people. He could not be constrained. His father typifies him as a bronco. You could put him in a pen and he'd find a way out. You know, always sought out circumstances in life that were unusual, and that would sort of enrich him and enrich the people around him.

So you know, he did a ton of different jobs. He was always sort of looking for the next thing in life, the next thing he could move on to, and he did this adventure travel thing that's been talked up about a lot in Southeast Asia. He was born in Vietnam during the war in '68, and moved to the Bronx in around '72 or so. And up until his sort of early 30s, he'd never really left the United States again. And he decided at one point he just needed to see more of the world, so he went on a world tour, traveled around, went home to Vietnam for the first time in almost 30 years, and then ended up in Australia, lived there for a while, and then went back to Southeast Asia, and then landed in London, yes, just about a month ago.

S. O'BRIEN: Wow. Well, our condolences go out to the family and all of his friends, obviously you included. Thanks for sharing some thoughts about him with us. We appreciate it, David Golovner.

A short break, and we're back right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

M. O'BRIEN: This time tomorrow, the Space Shuttle Discovery should be fueled up and ready for launch, the start of the first manned space flight for NASA since the Columbia disaster. It's now been two-and-a-half years since the orbiter disintegrated as it re- entered the atmosphere, killing the crew of seven. As we continue our countdown to Discovery, we focus on the emotional aftermath of the accident, seen through some unique eyes, the eyes of Jon Clark, a man who lost a wife and yet, in a way, gained a son when Columbia broke apart.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JON CLARK, COLUMBIA WIDOWER: This is my peace and solace now, is going out sailing. This is what I do for comfort.

M. O'BRIEN (voice-over): Two-and-half years later, Jon and Ian Clark are still plying a turbulent, uncertain sea of emotion.

CLARK: I just get a lot of enjoyment out of being out here in the wind and feeling a part of her is with us.

M. O'BRIEN: Their lives changed forever on the morning of February 1, 2003. When Columbia disintegrated, the crew lost, in many respects, so were Jon and Ian.

CLARK: I would have traded for my wife in a heartbeat, even at last second when the vehicle finally broke up. I mean, I would have much rather had me lose my life than have her lose it. But sometimes we have to face our worst fears. Her worst fear would be to lose her -- you know, to not be there for her son. My worst fear would be to be a single parent and both of those fears were materialized.

M. O'BRIEN: Wife, mother, and astronaut, Captain Laurel Clark was living out her dream, on top of the world, literally and figuratively. But her first trip to space was Columbia's last, and before she left, Ian, then eight years old, seemed to know it.

CLARK: He foresaw his mom not coming back. I'm not sure if it was he knew it was going to be -- what part of the mission it would happen in. But he had a profound overwhelming premonition.

M. O'BRIEN: Jon Clark is a NASA flight surgeon and an expert on crew survival in a mishap. One week before Laurel and Columbia were to come home, he worked an overnight shift in mission control. He read about the foam striking Columbia's wing, saw there was little concern and thought that was odd.

CLARK: I look back on it and I regret not having made some mention of it. But by that time, all their options were rapidly diminishing. So all it would have done would have been to make matters worse.

M. O'BRIEN: Jon Clark has thought long and hard about the options NASA would have had if mission managers had taken their heads out of the sand and been true to their can-do lore.

CLARK: I think if NASA had set its mind that there's something that could be done, then something could have been done.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Three, two, one.

M. O'BRIEN: Following the report on the Columbia disaster, NASA admitted it needs to change, but Clark is skeptical that things have changed enough.

CLARK: We have not -- we didn't learn from Challenger. I mean, virtually the same management flaws were evident in Challenger that were evident in Columbia. And so I find it hard to say, well, we should be getting back the return to flight when we haven't addressed those fundamental cultural issues.

M. O'BRIEN: But that cannot happen without a brutal confrontation with the facts. And this is where Jon Clark's personal loss and his professional expertise have intersected, right here on the floor of his hangar. He was part of the team that sifted through the wreckage of Columbia's crew compartment to see how and when it failed, how the crew responded, how they worked to solve the problems, right up until the end.

CLARK: As I envisioned it, it wasn't horror. It was work the problem, work the problem, work the problem. And maybe at the end there would be that sense that, well, you know, we're not going to make it, but we're here with each other. And I had always envisioned that Laurel grabbed Casey's hand.

M. O'BRIEN: Jon Clark freely admits he was not a great father to Ian when Laurel was alive, despite her urging. A workaholic, he was largely unavailable to his son.

CLARK: I was never a very good parent with a wife. And I've had to fill a role as a single parent. I can tell you, this is the hardest job I've ever had. Every day, you've got to be there and put on, you know, your best front and get him through the tough times.

I've got the A.C. on. Don't you want that? You'd rather have the windows open? Are you sure?

M. O'BRIEN:; Now, he says, he is the father Laurel wanted him to be, for all of the wrong reasons. And Ian is a boy who has no recollection of crying the day his mother launched into space. The other day, he came home with a questionnaire.

CLARK: Just a standard school questionnaire, not meant to be of any significance. It said, what do you want to do with your life? And he said I want to go to space. I would say, go, live your dream.

M. O'BRIEN: Laurel Clark realized her dream and never got to share the wonder with the crew she left behind. But lately, they've been making headway without her, her spirit in the wind that fills their sails.

(on camera): It's not smooth sailing?

CLARK: No, no. It never is. You just have to understand that the pain is there and you're not going to be pain-free. All you can be is -- you can have a lessening of it and a better tolerance of it, but it will still be there. And that's OK.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

M. O'BRIEN: Jon Clark, an amazing man. An amazing story.

S. O'BRIEN: Oh, my God, and to hear him describe how his son wants to be an astronaut. Oh, it breaks your heart.

M. O'BRIEN: Yes, yes.

S. O'BRIEN: Wow.

M. O'BRIEN: You know, it's interesting how everybody has their own way of dealing with grief and coping. And it is his way to go just head on and confront it and really -- and talk about it in a way that's so frank that, in a way, you walk away feeling what they go through in a way that you really don't in just reading about it in the newspaper.

S. O'BRIEN: That is tough. So what changes did they make? I mean, what makes it safer now? You're going to go, obviously -- after the show, you'll head down to Florida...

M. O'BRIEN: Yes.

S. O'BRIEN: So we can cover this launch tomorrow, weather permitting. So, obviously, they've got to make it safer.

M. O'BRIEN: Well, they started with this fuel tank, of course, because that's where the foam that fell off and hit the wing came from. So they've done a bunch of redesign, modifications on it, to try to minimize the amount of foam which will come off of it in the first place. Can't make that 100 percent, though. It's a possibility that something will hit it on the way up to launch. It's happened every since day one.

So what they did, in addition, they kind of reinforced this leading edge panel with some material that goes inside it. Also, put a bunch of sensors in there, so they'll know specifically if it gets hit or if there's any temperature changes. And then once they get into orbit, they're going to do a very comprehensive photo survey of the whole thing. So if there is a breach in that heat field, they'll be able to see it. And if it happens, if they do have that breach, they might end up staying at the space station for a period of time, in time to have a rescue mission and have Atlantis come.

S. O'BRIEN: Well, I was going ask what the options would be. Well, you know, hopefully, again, the weather will permit it to happen. It will go off without a hitch. You're going to be covering on our show, but also live tomorrow when it happens.

M. O'BRIEN: All day long, but we'll begin of course with AMERICAN MORNING tomorrow with special coverage, and we'll hope you'll be with us all day long.

Back in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

S. O'BRIEN: Ford's got a new hybrid, won't find it in the stores, though, or the showrooms.

Andy's got that. Good morning.

ANDY SERWER, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: Good morning.

Let's do the markets first, first of all, Soledad. Stocks slipping a little bit at the open. We're looking for four days up in a row. The Dow is down eight.

Want to talk about the new Ford vehicle, Soledad. It's the Mercury Mariner. And it's a new hybrid, along with Ford Escape, the second one they're making it. You won't find it in showrooms. They're only selling it online. Interesting sales tactic. And also, Soledad, guess who's endorsing the car? The Sierra Club, a longtime foe of Ford. So starting to see some coming together there.

S. O'BRIEN: Strange bedfellows. All right, let's go back to Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: All right, and let's talk about that CIA probe leak. Of course, we've been talking about the political implications on the tense exchanges that occurred in the White House press room the other day. As you saw, the press grilling the White House spokesman over the whole issue of Karl Rove and what his role might or might not have been in the release, in the outing, if you will, of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Jeanne Moos takes a look at Scott McClellan's hard day at the office.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEANNE MOOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Talk about getting grilled. Nothing got pressed and prodded more than the White House press secretary.

QUESTION: You're in a bad spot here, Scott, because...

QUESTION: When did you change your mind?

SCOTT MCLELLAN, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECY.: If you'll let me finish.

QUESTION: No, you're not finished, because you're not saying anything.

MOOS: Not saying anything except...

MCCLELLAN: While that investigation is ongoing, the White House is not going to comment on it. Our policy continues to be that we're not going to get into comment. You can keep asking them, but you have my response.

MOOS: The left has accused the press of not asking, of barely uttering the 'R' word, as in Karl Rove, White House deputy chief of staff. But now...

QUESTION: I want to ask you this: Did Karl Rove commit a crime?

MOOS: That's practically all they were asking, 23 questions.

MCCLELLAN: Do you have questions on another topic?

QUESTION: No, no, no.

MOOS: And though Press Secretary Scott McClellan showered reporters with appreciation for their efforts.

MCCLELLAN: I appreciate your question.

I appreciate your questions.

I appreciate the question.

MOOS: He didn't appreciate it enough to answer, not until the investigation into who leaked the name of a CIA operative is over.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.

MOOS: Now that "Newsweek" reports Karl Rove's name has surfaced in an e-mail "Time" magazine was forced by the court to turn over, reporters are attacking the subject as if it's red meat.

QUESTION: So you're not going to respond as to whether or not the president has confidence in his deputy chief of staff?

QUESTION: When did the press learn that Karl Rove...

QUESTION: Are you standing by what you said previously?

MCCLELLAN: You've heard me response.

MOOS: It was enough to leave reporters twiddling their pens, looking for answers, perhaps from a higher source.

QUESTION: Scott, I mean, this is ridiculous.

MOOS: As anyone who does it know, s, grilling can make you thirsty.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What would you like? We've got fresh lemonade.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A beer.

MOOS: I bet the White House press secretary could use a drink after a briefing that must have seemed anything but brief. Still he managed to smile when it was all over, emitting no visible smoke.

Jeanne Moos, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

S. O'BRIEN: Welcome back, everybody. Guess what? We're almost out of time.

M. O'BRIEN: Well, no, we're going to do one more story, one more story for you.

S. O'BRIEN: And what is it?

Oh, I love this story! This is actually my favorite story.

M. O'BRIEN: Can we just talk about it, or should we share it?

S. O'BRIEN: Go ahead. This is a good story.

M. O'BRIEN: All right, you know, do ever waste time at work? Do you ever waste time at work.

SERWER: Never.

S. O'BRIEN: I want to reiterate that, never.

M. O'BRIEN: Here's new survey, the average worker wastes more than two hours -- that's two -- two, hours a day, new math.

S. O'BRIEN: Two.

M. O'BRIEN: That's actually a Roman ordering five beers.

(CROSSTALK)

M. O'BRIEN: That's not including lunch. According to the survey by America Online, affiliated with our corporate parent and all, and salary.com, we don't know them, workers in Missouri waste the most time, 3.2 hours a day.

SERWER: Show me.

M. O'BRIEN: Yes, show them is right, followed by workers in Indiana, Kentucky, Wisconsin and Nevada. More than 33 percent of those surveyed say it's because they don't have enough work to do. We can arrange something for them.

SERWER: Yes, give them some of ours.

M. O'BRIEN: And more than 23 percent say they waste time because they're underpaid, and the rest of them...

S. O'BRIEN: And how about you, Miles? What's your excuse?

M. O'BRIEN: I waste time for a living. Are you kidding? That's what anchors do, right?

WALLACE: I heard some of the things other people do, looking online, going on the Internet, but also just staring.

(CROSSTALK)

S. O'BRIEN: So we will take this opportunity to stare and head down to Atlanta for the rest of our coverage.

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