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American Morning

Scare on Capitol Hill; Alabama Fires

Aired February 09, 2006 - 07:00   ET

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

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Miles O'Brien.
ZAIN VERJEE, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Zain Verjee in for Soledad.

O'BRIEN: Millions of Muslims mark an important event in their history today, but will unrest over controversial cartoons ruin those celebrations?

Back to work on Capitol Hill. A scare, was it a nerve agent? Not really, but it still shut things down last night, and even after the all-clear, the testing still isn't over.

VERJEE: Special investigators hoping to break the case in Alabama, but can they find suspects in those church fires before more fires break out? We're live with the latest.

And firefighters hope less wind will help them control wildfires in Southern California. An update just ahead.

O'BRIEN: And Grammy gold handed out to the best in the music biz. U2 came out on top. We'll tell you about the winners and the losers, ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

Today is the most important religious festival for Islam's Shiite sect, a day often marred by sectarian violence. In Beirut, the celebrations turned into calls for more protests over those cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. That is unless Europe changes its laws dealing with religion and freedom of speech.

CNN's Brent Sadler is in the Lebanese capital.

And, Brent, the leader of Hezbollah, which of course holds tremendous sway there, is saying no compromise on these cartoons, right?

BRENT SADLER, CNN BEIRUT BUREAU CHIEF: That's absolutely right. Good morning, Miles. Hassan Naswalla (ph), the head of Hezbollah, told a massive crowd, up to 300,000 people in the southern suburbs, all of course Shiite Muslims, that really there should be no compromise as far as Hezbollah was concerned with the protests. He denounced violent protests, in fact denounced the burning of the embassy or the interests of the Danish embassy here in Beirut at the weekend. The said protests should continue in the Muslim world, there should be no compromise unless Denmark apologizes to the Muslim world for originally having a newspaper, or allowing a newspaper to publish those cartoons, and two, until the European Union, it says, revisits its laws as they pertain to blasphemy and religion -- Miles. O'BRIEN: Brent, yesterday, Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, pointed the figure to the governments of Syria and Iran in particular, saying they are fueling these protests, fanning the fires. What is your sense of this from your perspective?

SADLER: I think clearly, Miles, what we see today is Hezbollah, remember, supported by Iran, supported politically by Syria, a very close ally of those two nations, specified by U.S. Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, as being fomenting these incitements and this violence. Hezbollah bringing out this mass of people, well-controlled by Hezbollah, not the authorities here, self- policed by themselves. There was no trouble. Hezbollah says that's a lie. When U.S. officials say that people of Hezbollah, Islamists, are stirring up the violence. They say the violence was stirred up in the first place as a result of those cartoons. But violence, they say, should be stopped. Protests should be continuing.

O'BRIEN: Brent Sadler in Beirut, thank you very much -- Zain.

VERJEE: Miles, the CNN Security Watch now. A Senate office building still being checked for nerve gas, but police think it was a false alarm that forced an emergency evacuation last night.

CNN's Jeanne Meserve is live in Washington and she joins us now.

Jeanne, good morning.

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN HOMELAND SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Zain.

It was a night of high drama and fortunately nothing else for about 200 people in the Russell Senate Office Building, including some senators and staffers. They were hustled into a parking garage after a sensor in the building's attack alarmed on what appeared to be nerve gas. They were held underground for about four hours while hazardous materials teams conducted more tests, and one senator there were a few people who made creative use of the time.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. CHUCK HAGEL (R), NEBRASKA: There were some lobbyists down there, actually. It was very creative of them to get locked down there with us. No, there were. Yes. Well, I don't know, put a little furniture polish up there in the storm room and have the monitors go off, and then you spend two hours with your favorite senator.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MESERVE: Further testing of the building and air samples at a laboratory showed no presence of nerve agent and those who had been held protectively in the garage were allowed to go, but advised to monitor their health for the next several days. At no point did anyone show any symptoms of exposure -- Zain.

VERJEE: Jeanne, any idea what set these sensors off in the first place?

MESERVE: No, and that's one of the first things authorities will be trying to determine, exactly why it went off, whether there was a benign chemical, shoe polish was mentioned by the senator there, present in the attic that might have triggered the sensor, or whether the sensor itself might have malfunctioned.

But according to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist it will be business as usual today in the U.S. Senate.

VERJEE: Jeanne Meserve in Washington. Thanks, Jeanne.

We're going to be talking to the Capitol Hill police chief live about the risks and the response. That's in about 15 minutes from now. Make sure You Stay tuned to CNN day and night for the most reliable news about your security.

O'BRIEN: So who would feel compelled to burn down Baptist churches? In Alabama, investigators are hoping to put some light on the shadows, turning to professional profilers to try to determine who is behind those church arsons. Nine churches in all have been burned, and police feel more may be to come.

David Mattingly live now in Boligee, Alabama with more.

David, do they have much to go on?

DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Miles, the collection of evidence has been very painstaking, and they have collected a lot of it. That is expected to be wrapping up at a lot of -- at all of these most recent church burning sites, like the one you see behind me.

But for the church congregations affected by this, they say the shock of it all is still very much a part of their lives.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATTINGLY (voice-over): The Dancy Baptist Church has been a part of the landscape since the days of slavery. But no one can life at the time could ever think of something disturbing as this.

REV. WALTER HAWKINS, PASTOR, DANCY BAPTIST CHURCH: You never think it will happen to you, but I was in shock.

MATTINGLY: Members of the 100-plus congregation spend the day watching from outside crime scene tape, wondering why someone set their church on fire, burning almost everything inside the sanctuary.

A full day after the initial shock, tears still come easily.

Annie-Hedges Garner has been a member since 1946.

ANNIE HEDGES-GARNER, CHURCH MEMBER: I told my kids somebody treat you wrong, you supposed to treat them right. Because if they do you wrong, you do them wrong, you're no better than they are. So I don't want to say punish them. But I hope they can be caught, and maybe somebody can talk to them and find out what's their problem and help them, because they need some help.

MATTINGLY: Tommy Lee Simmons has arthritis so bad it hurts to stand, but he says he couldn't stay away. A fourth generation member of Dancy, he sits in his car a lone with his thoughts.

TOMMY LEE SIMMONS, CHURCH MEMBER: I constantly think why would whoever done this would do such a thing.

MATTINGLY: And yet there is far more hope than despair. Built just five years ago, the brick walls are intact. The new roof, courtesy of Hurricane Katrina, remains. And the church where everybody is somebody will not be fading into history any time soon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MATTINGLY: Members of that congregation tell me that they will be offering prayers of thanks, because of all the churches targeted in this most recent round of burnings, that church had a security system that allowed them to get to the fire quickly -- Miles.

O'BRIEN: David, let's go through a couple of things. First of all, the dark SUV, that's still in play, I hear. And there's also a possibility that there's at least the broadest of descriptions, two white males perhaps, and then finally one of the things I wanted you to run down for us as well, the possibility that all these fires were started in the sanctuary or pulpit area.

MATTINGLY: That's what we're being told according to witnesses who were out here at the scene. The investigators aren't saying exactly where the fire was starting, but people who were out here at the scenes of the fires when they were just getting going tell us that that's where the fire started, and that is matching what happened last week at the five church fires that were set in another county here in Alabama.

As far as the two white males and the dark SUV, that is just one of many leads that investigators have that they're going on. That is also a very similar report that we had earlier at the earlier church fires last Friday.

O'BRIEN: All right, David Mattingly, thank you very much, David, in Alabama for us for us this morning.

All right. In about 30 minutes' time, we're going to talk to a forensic psychologist and we'll ask about potential motives. We'll kind of do our own profiling, I guess, if you will, and in our 9:00 Eastern hour, a couple hours from now, we will talk to the pastor of one of the burned churches, and we'll just ask him how his congregation is doing in the wake of this devastating thing -- Zain.

VERJEE: Miles, fire crews battling California wildfires are making some progress this morning thanks to the diminishing winds. In the mountains year Calabasas, northwest of downtown L.A., firefighters have contained 95 percent of a blaze that threatened schools and homes nearby. The fire was sparked early on Wednesday by a burning SUV.

(WEATHER REPORT)

O'BRIEN: Investigators would like to know what caused a couple of small planes to collide in midair near San Diego yesterday. Take a look at this picture. That's the, obviously, the collision,or the fiery aftermath anyhow. Three died in the crash. Flaming debris from the planes came crashing down in a public park. No one was injured on the ground, however. Luckily no one was home when one of the planes ended up crashing into a house.

Coming up, more on that NHL gambling scandal reportedly linked to Wayne Gretzky's wife. There's some big fallout from Operation Slapshot.

VERJEE: Also, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay gets a new job in Congress. Find out why one of his critics say, it's like putting Mike Brown back in charge of FEMA.

O'BRIEN: Plus U2 cleaning up at last night's Grammys, but they weren't the only big winners. We have a Grammy recap for those of you who can't stay up that late. That's ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: A little U2. The music industry's big night turned out to be just that for U2. The group won five Grammys, in addition to the, what, 40 they've already won or something, including best song and best album.

Brooke Anderson was there.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And the Grammy...

BEYONCE KNOWLES, ENTERTAINER: And the Grammy.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And the Grammy for album of the year goes to...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" -- U2!

BROOKE ANDERSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Irish rockers U2 won five awards last night, brick bringing their total career Grammy wins to 21. Among last night's prizes, song of the year for "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own."

BONO, ENTERTAINER: Well if you think this is going to go to our head, it's too late!

ANDERSON: But Bono and the gang were quick to acknowledge their competition.

BONO: Kanye, you're next. He's a great artist.

Mariah, you sing like an angel.

ANDERSON: Mariah Carey, rapper Kanye West and newcomer John Legend each had eight Grammy nominations, but none came close to winning that many. However, west did pick up three awards, including one for best rap album.

KANYE WEST, ENTERTAINER: I have no, no, no idea. I'd like to thank...

ANDERSON: Soulful singer Legend also won three Grammys, including best new artist.

JOHN LEGEND, ENTERTAINER: Anybody who wins best new artist is only new to the general public.

ANDERSON: Pop diva Carey ended a 16-year Grammy drought with three wins as well.

Another winning lady with a powerful voice, Kelly Clarkson. The original "American Idol" picks up two Grammys, including best female pop vocal performance.

KELLY CLARKSON, ENTERTAINER: You have no idea what this means to me.

ANDERSON: Record of the year went to edgy group Greenday for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams."

BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG, ENTERTAINER: Pop radio playing rock music is a very big deal to me.

ANDERSON: Star performances included Madonna, McCartney, Mary J. Blige.

And perhaps the most elaborate act of the evening, Jamie Foxx and Kanye West. Top talent honored the '60s funk group Sly and the Family Stone. And the show closed with a moving tribute to the musical city of New Orleans.

Brooke Anderson, CNN, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: Looks like we missed a good show.

VERJEE: It's looks like we did, but Andy's been giving us some sort of renditions here doing the head bob and the sort of...

(CROSSTALK)

O'BRIEN: World champion air guitar player, Andy Serwer.

ANDY SERWER, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: Thank you. Thank you.

O'BRIEN: Another tribute to open the show, Alicia Keys and Stevie Wonder sang an acapella version of "Higher Ground," and that was in honor of Coretta Scott King. So it really had a little bit of everything.

VERJEE: Wall Street hitting different kinds of notes. Let's get more from you.

SERWER: Thank you, Zain.

A big rally yesterday on Wall Street, the Dow up over 100 points. Some good earnings from the likes of Cisco and Pepsico sending stocks higher, biggest one-day gain since the first session of the year. The futures are up this morning, one stock not do so long well, sputtering in fact could be general motors, didn't do well yesterday, may not do well today either. "Wall Street Journal" reporting that talks between the unions and Delphi, which is the parts company that joined at the hip with GM, have stalled, and that's bad news.

Some other market news as well, Zain, Alan Greenspan left the Federal Reserve 10 days ago, and already he's hitting the rubber chicken circuit. Speaking this week at a dinner to clients of Lehman Brothers, he talked about interest rates a little bit, and that upset some market watchers and critics saying that it's really improper for him to be doing so, suggesting that he may be moving markets, and he should actually give his successor, Ben Bernanke, some time. Didn't violate any laws. And some people say stop whining.

O'BRIEN: But when he talks people listen, or at least try to understand anyhow.

SERWER: That's right.

O'BRIEN: And perhaps people still he is carrying some sort of weight behind him.

SERWER: Absolutely. And certainly insight. He said that he thought the Fed would continue to raise interest rates.

VERJEE: What about payola problems? You got something on that?

SERWER: I do as well, Zain.

And you know Payola is as old as old as the 78 rpm in the music business. Eliot Spitzer going after the large radio companies and discovering, he says, that payola, guess what, continues to exist.

O'BRIEN: What?

SERWER: News flash, I'm shocked, there's gambling in the casino. This would be record companies paying radio stations to get their acts on the air. The reports say that a couple of them, J.Lo's "I'm Real" song involved this, and you're not real. And then also John Mumbles Mayer's daughter's.

O'BRIEN: Mumbles?

SERWER: Yes, he mumbles.

O'BRIEN: But he's good. SERWER: No, I think he's kind of...

VERJEE: He's great.

O'BRIEN: You're not a Mayer fan.

VERJEE: You know what payola is? Pay and Victrola combined.

O'BRIEN: Excellent, excellent piece of trivia. Thank you very much. We know the three t's and we know the origins of payola.

SERWER: Mumbling.

VERJEE: What's next?

SERWER: Nothing's next. You're next.

VERJEE: Oh, yes, that's right.

O'BRIEN: We're next, with more on Capitol Hill security and the scare there, turned out to be another false alarm. But what happens if folks start tuning them out? We'll talk to the chief of the Capitol Police about that.

And later, supermodel, she had it all, a great career, a beautiful family, but then her husband fell into a deep depression. We'll talk about the controversial treatment that saved his life ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: Well, things should be getting back to normal on Capitol Hill this morning, as normal as Capitol Hill could be, but there was quite a scare last night. An alarm sounded at one of the Senate office buildings, the Russell Building. It is attached to some sensors that sniff for nerve agents, among other things. The tests ultimately were negative. Capitol Police gave the all-clear some three hours after the evacuation began. And there's a bit of a quarantine in the midst of all of that, involving nine senators and about 200 staffers. Quite a scene.

Terrance Gainer is the Capitol Police Chief. He joins us from Washington. Chief, good to have you with us.

CHIEF TERRANCE GAINER, CAPITOL POLICE: Good morning.

O'BRIEN: First of all, do we know what triggered these alarms?

GAINER: Good morning.

Well, we know that our reading indicated it was a possibility of a nerve gas. It had a nerve agent, excuse me, that had the signature of that. Further testing revealed that it was in fact a false positive.

O'BRIEN: And false positives are a problem, right? GAINER: Well, I think it's part of the system. So we detect what's there and do further analysis and take appropriate action, so I think the way it unfolded was nearly perfect.

O'BRIEN: How does the system get confused, though? What is in the air that makes it think there's a nerve agent there?

GAINER: Well, there's a variety of things in our environment that when the different agents react with the air they can produce these different signatures. So whether there's cleaning solvent or new wood, almost anything we're dealing with, plastic, furniture, it gives off chemicals that we read and match up against signatures of things that we know and things that we know we don't want up there.

O'BRIEN: Now I hear this happens fairly frequently, that you get these false positives. Do you need some better sensors?

GAINER: No, I think the sensors are accurate. And I think that's what we need.

O'BRIEN: Well, they weren't in this case. They obviously weren't accurate in this case.

GAINER: To the contrary. They read and produced a signature that caused some alarm. If they were less sensitive, then we might not detect what we want to detect soon enough.

O'BRIEN: Well, but of course, has you know, the tricky part here is coming one a system that is believable and reliable, and if you have too many false alarms, you're concerned that people are going to start not paying so much attention.

GAINER: That is a concern, but I think we have a well-educated community up on Capitol Hill, and they're aware we're very professional. We have scientists monitoring and looking at what we do, so I think we're right on track. It's not much different than if you went to your doctor and they have an initial reading and have some sense that there's a problem and there's further testing. I think America's quite used to that.

O'BRIEN: Have you figured out how many false alarms you have hey to deal with? Do you count them up?

GAINER: We do have the total. I don't have it off the top of my head, but we're well-versed in this. And again, I think we err on the side of caution. I'm impressed with the way the community and the senators responded to this.

O'BRIEN: About false alarms, just ballpark?

GAINER: I think we have alarms of six a month or so.

O'BRIEN: Six a month, all right.

You quarantined, I think, the total was nine senators and some family members, and staffers and so forth. The quarantine decision, do you think that was a good one?

GAINER: Absolutely I do. Because we don't know what we have until we do that further testing. So the sensors give us some initial technology, then we suit up people in the proper gear and send them into the building to take further samples. So while all that's going on, you have to protect those who may have been exposed to something and monitor them with the medical folks that we have on the Hill, to make sure there's no danger to them. It's all very, very prudent.

During this time, we were giving good information to the people in that garage, and that's key to getting the support of the members, the staff, and the visitors.

O'BRIEN: So you feel that the response has been appropriate? I mean, I'm hearkening back to the evacuation of the Capitol Hill, for example, when it turned out it was general aviation aircraft. The risk is, not only that people ignore it, but that people get hurt actually in the process of evacuation. You must weigh those considerations back and forth.

GAINER: I do, but I think the risk to doing nothing, or sitting and being complacent is much greater. If a plane hit the building, or if there is a gas release, or if there's an attack of people on the ground, so I think it's incumbent upon us as we do work with the other federal agencies to have good intelligence, leverage technology and well-trained peel and well-educated public, whether they're visitors to the Capitol or people work up there. I think we have a good combination.

O'BRIEN: Do you think you'll find out what triggered and perhaps change cleaning solvents or whatever it is?

GAINER: Well, what we'll do, is the scientists will look at that, and we do put into our bank of knowledge the usual suspects of cleaning materials, for instance, or painting materials or turpentine. But again, I think that people forget that almost anything that we're involved in, whether it's the cameras, the microphones, the uniforms give off certain chemicals, and when those chemicals react with each other, they further complicate things. And so as we learn more about what's newly introduced to the Capitol, then we can get those signatures into our analysis and make quicker decisions.

O'BRIEN: OK, thanks for your time, sir. The capitol police chief is Terrance Gainer. Thanks for being with us.

Stay tuned to CNN day and night for the most reliable news about your security -- Zain.

VERJEE: Miles, coming up, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's is down but not out.

O'BRIEN: You know, I'm going to pick it up from there, Zain, because we have a little microphone problem.

Tom DeLay with a new job in Congress. Some people are quite a bit upset about it, however. We'll tell you exactly why. VERJEE: Plus, authorities think those church fires in Alabama are linked, all nine of them. Why would somebody burn down those churches? A forensic expert will check in with us and try to take us inside some sick minds. That's ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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