Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Live Today

Wildfire Danger In Texas And Oklahoma; 9/11 Aid Probe; Doomsday Pentagon Shuffle; Mob Beating In Milwaukee; Waiting For Cleanup In Mississippi

Aired December 29, 2005 - 10:00   ET

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

DARYN KAGAN: And on the lines as they brace for another day of high danger. More than 150 grass fires have erupted in the two states. Five people have been killed and more than 75 homes have been lost. In just a few minutes we'll hear from some folks who say they have lost everything.
Earlier this morning, a suicide bomber struck in Baghdad at the main gate to the nation's ministry of interior. Four people were killed, including three police officers. Eight other policemen were wounded. Meanwhile, a U.S. soldier was killed in a roadside bombing in the capital. The soldier was with Task Force Baghdad and was on patrol.

If you hold tickets to fly on Independence Air, you're going to want to listen in closely. Its parent company is reportedly warning the carrier could be grounded as early as next week. "The Washington Post" says that Independence Air has sent its employees -- it reportedly warns of a January 7th closure if a major investor or buyer is not found. A spokesman for the airline says no definite decisions have been made.

And good morning to you on the last Thursday of 2005. I'm Daryn Kagan at CNN Center in Atlanta.

We're going to start with severe weather and two areas of the country we're looking at. First to drought-stricken Oklahoma and Texas where fire danger remains high. Higher humidity and calmer winds have helped firefighters control wildfires in the two states. Miles O'Brien reports on the hardest-hit areas.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's just like a war zone.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT, (voice over): The fires burned their ways through parts of Texas and Oklahoma, killing at least five people and destroying more than a hundred homes and businesses. Among the areas hardest hit, the tiny Texas town of Cross Plains.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We had a tornado back in '94, I believe, and I thought that was bad. But this is so much worse.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's (INAUDIBLE) all the memories. Memories of my grandkids. The antiques that we had in the house. Really, that's nothing. It was the sentimental value of the house. MILES O'BRIEN: Now much of the town looks like this, little more than embers and memories.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just to see all that we've worked for, all the years and pictures and things that they'll never have again.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Students of mine lost homes, friends, community members. It's just -- I don't know what we're going to do right now.

MILES O'BRIEN: Amid the devastation, some signs of hope. That simple red x means everyone in this house made it out alive. Down the road, this is all that's left of the old Methodist church. Shards of stained glass windows, a clues to what was here. The congregation celebrates its 120th anniversary on new year's day.

Firefighters in Texas have fought more than 75 fires in the past two days. There are dozens more in Oklahoma.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've got a huge fire out here.

MILES O'BRIEN: In the town of Mustang, homeowners took matter into their own hands when a small grass fire became a raging inferno.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Seeing it on TV, watching your house burn on TV, you're just glad you're not in it.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KAGAN: And that will Miles O'Brien reporting.

This is the fifth driest year on record for the north and central Texas area where most of those fires have broken out. You can watch Miles and Soledad O'Brien on CNN's AMERICAN MORNING weekdays. They begin at 6:00 a.m. Eastern. The best warm-up act in the business. Then we get started at 10:00 a.m. Eastern, 7 a.m. Pacific.

On to California, the rain in that state, and Texas, has what it needs, too much of it. There is a break right now in the storm express but more storms are lined up in the Pacific and will roll through the state in the coming days. Yesterday's storm triggered some flooding and mudslides in Northern California but the storm did not stick around long enough to cause widespread damage. Rivers in that area are at their highest level in seven years.

Which all means that there is a lot today for Jacqui Jeras to watch and tell us about in the west and across the country.

Jacqui, good morning.

(WEATHER REPORT)

KAGAN: There are questions this morning about a program to fund businesses that were impacted by 9/11. An investigation finds that a number of loan recipients really didn't qualify for the assistance. CNN's Gary Nurenberg is in Washington to tell us more about some of the companies and individuals that got a handout from the government.

Gary, good morning.

GARY NURENBERG, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you.

A new small business administration investigation gives new meaning this morning to the term disaster loans. We all remember those images after the 9/11 attacks, businesses decimated, insurance policies often not big enough to help businesses get back on their feet, and the government rushing to provide disaster help. Well now the SBA has a look at how one of those programs worked.

The agency's inspector general investigated its star program, supplementary terrorist activity relief loans, and found that most companies questioned about getting those post-9/11 loans were not hurt by the attacks and didn't know they were getting money from the terrorism relief program. The report says that lenders who made the loans failed 85 percent of the time to prove that recipients were eligible for the loans in the first place.

The program made 8,200 loans totaling $3.7 billion. Among loans investigated by the Associated Press, a dog boutique in Utah, a perfume shop in the Virgin Islands, more than a hundred Dunkin' Donut and Subway sandwich shops. The Associated Press reports that while these loans were being made, some small businesses near ground zero in New York were unable to get the financial help.

Other findings. Only two of 42 recipients interviewed were aware they'd received money from the terrorism recovery program. Thirty-six of the 42 interviewed said they were not asked or couldn't remember if they were asked if they had been adversely affected by the terrorist attacks. And in 34 cases where the eligibility could not be established in this survey, 25 said they had not been adversely affected by the attacks.

The SBA administrator put out a statement saying the report doesn't prove that recipients were unqualified, but the report did say that only nine of the 59 loans sampled appeared to be qualified. The senator in charge of the SBA oversight in the Senate promises a congressional followup. And, Daryn, when that happens, we'll let you know.

KAGAN: Well, and maybe then, or before then, do you expect to hear any good news out of this report?

NURENBERG: Well, in that statement put out by the administrator, this one fact, the default rate for these star loans is apparently less than other loans in the SBA's portfolio.

KAGAN: Well, we'll take that on this Thursday morning.

NURENBERG: OK.

KAGAN: Gary, thank you.

NURENBERG: All right. KAGAN: Talking privacy activists now. They have another bone to pick with the NSA. The spy agency has been placing cookies on the computers of visitors to its Web site. The story was first reported by the Associated Press. As you probably know, cookies are files that can track web surfing activity. Federal rules ban those such files. The files vanished from the NSA system this week after a complaint and an AP inquiry. The agency spokesman blames the cookies on a software upgrade. A recently-reported NCA domestic spying program has come under fire from privacy rights groups.

We are standing by for an emergency ruling from the Supreme Court on the case of Jose Padilla. The Justice Department is asking the high court to order the terror suspect's immediate transfer from military to civilian custody. An appeals court denied the government's request last week. The Supreme Court is already deciding whether to review a separate Padilla ruling. That concerns the constitutionality of Padilla's detention as an enemy combatant.

There has been a shuffling of some of the top Pentagon positions in a doomsday plan. The new order reflects the Bush administration's focus on intelligence gathering in the war on terror. Our senior pentagon correspondent, Jamie McIntyre is here to explain the new order to us.

Jamie, good morning.

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning.

Well, first of all, this is a doomsday scenario, so it -- the likelihood that this would actually take place is pretty slim. It would require both the defense secretary and the deputy defense secretary to be either killed or incapacitated or somehow out of pocket for an extended period of time.

But what the Bush administration has done, is they've looked at the line of succession which goes from those two top officials and then through the civilian service secretaries, the political appointees who run the individual services, and said that maybe it makes more sense to move some of the senior policymakers into that chain of command. People who work closely with the defense secretary who are familiar with the overall policy rather than the civilian appointees who have a narrow focus training and equipping an individual service.

This is probably something that never would have come up had it not been for the September 11th attacks which, of course, hit the Pentagon -- when a plane hit the Pentagon. If that plane, for instance, had hit the other side of the Pentagon where the offices of many of these senior officials are, it's possible that you could have the defense secretary and the deputy both either killed or incapacitated and need to go down that chain of command. And the other thing that's really made this an issue now is that the Bush administration has had such trouble getting people confirmed, the money, the service secretaries are brand new. They don't have much experience, whereas the people who are under -- working under Rumsfeld have much more experience with the overall policy. And, in fact, just today it was announced that the new navy secretary will take office next month. That position has been held by one person, Gordon England, who's been both the acting deputy defense secretary and the navy secretary at the same time and he's still the acting deputy defense secretary. And so because he can't get confirmed, the White House is also designated that even though he's acting, he'd be second in the line of succession and they're hoping to get a confirmation there as well.

But they say this is all just a common-sense move. And the one thing it doesn't do is take any of the military expertise out of the chain of command. In fact, it puts more expertise in that line of succession in the unlikely event of a doomsday scenario.

Daryn.

KAGAN: And the way the rule are written, the Bush administration can just decide to do this. It doesn't need anybody else to approve the change.

MCINTYRE: It's basically an executive order in the line of succession. Again, very unlikely event. But if it happened, you'd want the people who have the most experience to be in the positions of making those decisions.

KAGAN: Jamie McIntyre at the Pentagon. Jamie, thank you.

Very disturbing story out of Wisconsin is next. A motorist was beaten nearly to death all because he asked a group of teenagers to get out of his way. He is struggling to recover and his wife is speaking out.

Also, he looks fine now, but don't let that fool you. This toddler was legally drunk. The circumstances behind that bizarre story coming up.

And a truly heartbreaking story. A deadly illness has hit the same family twice. Two young children who spent Christmas in the hospital struggling for their lives after getting an infection. One family's pain ahead this hour on CNN LIVE TODAY.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KAGAN: To Milwaukee now. A motorist who was dragged from his car and nearly beaten to death by a mob is now showing signs of recovery. His offense that enraged the group? Samuel McClain apparently honked because some youngsters were blocking the road. Now his wife is asking for an end to this senseless violence. CNN's Keith Oppenheim is in Milwaukee with the latest.

Keith, hello.

KEITH OPPENHEIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Milwaukee investigators say on Monday evening Samuel McClain, a 50-year-old man from Milwaukee, was driving on a residential street in the city and he honked his horn trying to get some young people who were standing in the middle of the street to allow him to go through. Instead what happened, he was attacked and hospital officials, from the hospital that he was taken to said, that when he arrived he was not able to breathe on his own and he had multiple injuries to his head.

Now police are investigating what Samuel McClain was doing in that neighborhood. But at the same time they say he is clearly a victim in this case. And his son, Shavonta, told us there's no way this attack could have been justified.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHAVONTA JOHNSON, VICTIM'S SON: What could have really made somebody this mad to do something like this to an old man, you know? And especially for them to continue to do what they did, you know? It just wasn't right.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OPPENHEIM: Milwaukee police say they are trying to find as many as 15 suspects in this case. Some are in custody, but there have been no arrests yet. And the mayor of Milwaukee, Tom Barrett, is quite concerned about this case. He is particularly concerned about the fact that residents don't seem to be willing to talk too much about this and he believes there could be a mob mentality. That neighbors, possible witnesses, are intimidated.

Keith Oppenheim, CNN, Milwaukee.

KAGAN: And now to New Jersey where a man is outraged at the police handling of a traffic crash that killed his son. The family reported the 19-year-old missing after he vanished while returning home from an overnight shift. But it took five days for police to tell them that their minivan was found smashed into a concrete barrier along the interstate and that the teen was nowhere to be found. The father says he went to the scene and within a minute found his son where he had died of his injuries. The family believes a more thorough search may have saved their son's life.

In Suffolk County, New York, a babysitter charged with child endangerment after the two-year-old that he was watching was found drunk. The little boy is OK today after deputies found him and a three-year-old toddler wandering inside their home. The man who was supposed to be watching them, 37-year-old Juan Reyes, was said to be passed out nearby. At the time, the boy's parents were at the hospital where his mother was giving birth.

Well, there's been a lot of frustration directed at the federal government over its handling of Hurricane Katrina. Now there's anger over how it's dealing with the cleanup. Ahead on CNN LIVE TODAY, one Gulf Coast county looked to Washington for help picking up the pieces. Four month later, most of those pieces are still laying on the ground.

And out of prison and back on her feet, Martha Stewart is a legal winner for 2005. Who are some of the other winners and the losers? You'll want to hear and we have them ahead for you on CNN LIVE TODAY. And let's go ahead and check out the markets. They've been open about 50 minutes. You can see the Dow is up about 23 points and the Nasdaq, well, the Nasdaq's kind of flat. It is down just about a point. More business news just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KAGAN: So here we are, months after the federal government promised to clean up the mess left behind by Hurricane Katrina. But some areas along the Gulf Coast look no better today than they did the day after the storm. A little bit late. Some communities have come to the conclusion that if you want something done right, you're going to have to do it yourself. Sean Callebs reports from Jackson County, Mississippi, and a story you saw first on CNN's "Paula Zahn Now."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOSH RIMES, HOMEOWNER: I've got some stuff you all can put in here that we can just get (ph).

SEAN CALLEBS, CNN CORRESPONDENT, (voice over): It's become a sad routine for Josh Rimes and his father Dwight. About once a week, they pick through the splintered ruins of Josh's house looking for anything that can be salvaged. Today, it's a bit of fence.

Are you frustrated that four months after the disaster it's just a mess?

JOSH RIMES: Oh, absolutely. It's, you know, it's like we can't do anything until, you know, whether we build or whether we sell, this has to be cleared.

CALLEBS: The Rimes thought Jackson County, Mississippi, would be cleared of trees and ruble by now. County Supervisor Frank Leach says the county had a contract to have the Army Corp of Engineers remove debris from public and private land.

FRANK LEACH, JACKSON COUNTY SUPERVISOR: One of their representatives made a statement. I've got the checkbook and if you do what I tell you, you won't pay any money whatsoever.

CALLEBS: Leach says the county took that advice, but the Corps of Engineers never took any debris from homeowners' property.

LEACH: I got tired of waiting for, it's on the way or it's going happen or we're going get there, because every time we begin to communicate, guess what? It was another red tape. It was another issue.

SAM HORTON, U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS: I understand, the frustration.

CALLEBS: Sam Horton is with the Army Corps of Engineers.

HORTON: It has been four months since Katrina hit, but the magnitude and the scope of this recovery effort and the hurricane itself is just unprecedented.

CALLEBS: Just how much debris remains from devastated homes is anyone's guess. But Jackson County, Mississippi, officials are convinced that federal authorities simply didn't live up to their repeated promises. So fed up with the clean up, Jackson County recently fired the Army Corps of Engineers.

But surprisingly, it didn't have to be this way. The county was given a choice. So now all it can do is look longingly at a neighboring county that made a different decision.

LEACH: You know, it's really exciting when you stop and look just across the bay and we can see that here, even as we're looking across that way, they went about doing this on their own.

CALLEBS: Biloxi and Harrison County turned its back on the Corps of Engineer's offer to remove the debris and still, using federal money, hired their own clean-up crews. And, look, many residential areas here are cleared of tree limbs and remnants of wrecked homes.

The Corp of Engineers says it did remove 90 percent of the debris from public areas in Jackson County, but says the hold-up in cleaning private property results from the need to get permission before working on homeowner's land. More red tape, according to county officials, and more disappointment for debris fatigued homeowners. The county says it's hired private contractors to begin the cleanup work after the first of the year.

DWIGHT RIMES, HOMEOWNER I don't anticipate it being cleaned up any time soon. Not the way it's gone the first four months, no.

CALLEBS: And what do you think of that?

DWIGHT RIMES: Well, again, it stinks, but it's reality.

CALLEBS: Sean Callebs, CNN, Jackson County, Mississippi.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KAGAN: Be sure to tune in each weeknight at 8:00 p.m. Eastern for "Paula Zahn Now." Tonight's program highlights Kleine-Levin Syndrome (ph). A rare disorder that literally causes people to sleep their lives away.

Last year's natural disasters, including the devastating earthquake in Pakistan, for survivors, their lives will never be the same. Most have nowhere to go. Ahead on CNN LIVE TODAY, meet one man who is doing everything he can to help those who have lost everything.

And a family's pain. Two children critically ill after contracting a deadly infection. We're back after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KAGAN: We are coming up on the half hour. I'm Daryn Kagan. Here's a look at what's happening "Now in the News." Three people were killed and nine wounded today in the suicide bombing at a West Bank checkpoint. Israeli soldier had stopped a taxi for a security check. After getting out of the taxi, the suicide bomber detonated his explosives belt. Israel is blaming the militant group Islamic Jihad for the attack.

China today reported its third human death if Avian Flu. A 41- year-old factory worker died last week. Tests have now confirmed the woman was infected with the deadly H5N1 strain of the bird flu. China's state-run media did not say how the woman caught the virus.

And loans to help businesses recover from 9/11 did not always go to needy candidates. That is the finding of a Small Business Administration's internal probe. Investigators discovered lenders failed to document that recipients were actually hurt by these terrorist attacks. Some loans went to a perfume store, a dog boutique and doughnut shops far from New York City.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com