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New Info on TWA Flight 800; Obama Calls For Niclear Disarmament; Disabled Woman, Daughter Held Captive; New Drama in Whitey Bulger Case

Aired June 19, 2013 - 11:00   ET

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


ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. I'm Ashleigh Banfield. Nice to have you with us.

It's a very busy day, a big, big show ahead, all the days news plus as always, our take on "Daytime Justice."

Let's begin here. Back in Berlin, Barack Obama in the footsteps of Reagan and JFK, taking a stand against nuclear weapons, urging Russia to join us in slashing nuclear arsenals.

Another house of horrors in Ohio, prosecutors reveal details of a disabled mother and her daughter allegedly terrorized by pythons and pit bulls, locked away as slaves for more than a year.

And Michael Jackson's daughter, described as lost and devastated, hear what Paris Jackson has to say to the jury in taped testimony at the wrongful death trial involving her father.

And we begin with some pretty stunning allegations that one of the biggest air disasters in United States history was apparently no accident. It happened almost 17 years ago, but it is fresh in a lot of people's memories, TWA Flight 800 and the explosion in the sky over the waters of Long Island.

One minute, a mighty 747, the next minute, pieces falling into the ocean, pieces with people falling, every soul on board was lost.

The official cause of the disaster, an electrical short, but today, dramatic claims that the NTSB's conclusion may have been falsified, and a documentary out next month is attempting to prove just that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What would your analysis have been?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The primary conclusion was the explosive forces came from outside the airplane, not the center fuel tank.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Would that statement have been in your analysis?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If I got the write one.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The agenda was that this is an accident; make it so. (END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: Joining us now is Tom Stalcup. He co-produced the film.

Tom, these are pretty stunning allegations. What new evidence are you actually bringing forward that should lead anyone to take this seriously, these extraordinarily serious accusations that you make?

TOM STALCUP, CO-PRODUCER, "TWA FLIGHT 800": Well, the evidence that clearly shows what happened is the radar data. Now that confirms the eyewitness testimony that everybody has heard about.

Everybody has heard about eyewitnesses seeing something come up from the surface, and the Air National Guard pilot, Major Meyer, said it was an ordnance explosion in the area.

We have radar data that confirms this, radar data showing an asymmetric explosion coming out of the right side of the aircraft, consistent with the direction of the object that several, many, dozens of eyewitnesses saw, heading toward that plane, before it went down.

BANFIELD: But, Tom, we've heard about radar data before and it's been debunked.

Is this the same radar data that you're looking at or is this something entirely new that no one has seen up until now?

STALCUP: No, no, no. This is completely different.

The radar data that has been debunked, I completely agree with is basically people saying that they had the missile on radar going toward the plane. Well, missiles just aren't picked up by FAA radar. That's just not how they are. They're like stealth fighters. They don't reflect radar very well.

But once they explode, that's what's detected on radar and that's what we see. The minute this high-velocity explosion occurred, right on radar at exactly the same moment the plane loses electric power, there is debris exiting the aircraft.

Now that debris that exits the aircraft recorded on radar, that radar- recorded debris has never been analyzed by the NTSB. That's what's new. That's what we're trying to get the NTSB to reexamine to show the American public what really happened in this tragedy.

BANFIELD: But if that's really what you're trying to do, and I know that you have long sought, you know, a lot of answers from the NTSB, all you need to do is show the NTSB new evidence and they open up the case.

But they're saying, and I can quote this for you, "As required by NTSB regulation, a petition for reconsideration of board findings must be based on the discovery of new evidence. At this point the NTSB has not received a petition."

Why on Earth would you be doing a documentary and releasing it instead of going to the NTSB saying, look at this incredible radar data that we've got that hasn't been analyzed before, you need to get on it?

STALCUP: Well, actually, within about a half an hour of this show airing, that petition, that you described has been given to the NTSB. We have a receipt. They received that petition and you're quite right. If we give them the petition and there's new evidence, which there is, they have to reopen the investigation. They have to reanalyze it.

And we did follow that exact path. That's a legal remedy that is required by law that they follow and we are hoping that they do.

Along with this documentary, which at the end of the documentary you will see family members, eyewitnesses and former crash investigators all sign that petition.

BANFIELD: So, Tom, the NTSB did exhaustive investigations on this. There was a parallel FBI investigation as well. I'm just having a really tough time understanding how you, this many years later, 17 years later, has evidence of radar that no one else has had or saw fit to look at up until now.

Doesn't this sound preposterous?

BANFIELD: Well, exhaustive, you say exhaustive investigation. Quite the contrary. In an exhaustive investigation, what you do is you call the witnesses to testify.

Not one eyewitness was ever called to testify. Not one. The FBI identified 670 eyewitnesses to this crash, and the FBI wrote a letter to the NTSB days before their hearing saying, please don't ask any eyewitnesses to testify and none did.

So the evidence was there.

BANFIELD: Well, Hank Hughes testified. I'm sorry. I've got -- I mean, he testified before a Senate committee in 1999. He had some pretty negative things to say about what FBI investigators did in that hangar.

I think at one point he said they hammered out some of the evidence and then at another point they said that the clothing that had been compiled had been thrown into a warehouse, wet, and mold had grown on it.

That's testimony right there.

STALCUP: Yes. That's not eyewitness testimony, though. He was an investigators inside the investigation.

Now he did say those things in the Senate, but nothing was done. Did the Senate hold subsequent hearings to follow up on his claims? No, that has not been done.

BANFIELD: So, you know, listen, conspiracy theories have abounded for years. It was destructive to the legacy of Pierre Salinger, the former press secretary to JFK, who died really having his reputation torn to smithereens by some of the conspiracy theories about a missile having perhaps hit TWA Flight 800.

What are you saying in your new allegations happened to that aircraft?

STALCUP: Well, Pierre Salinger was not an accident investigator. What's unique about this documentary is we have inside investigators who handled the wreckage directly that are saying this.

These aren't people just on the street. This isn't just me. I have investigators behind me backing up everything we say in this documentary. They're saying it themselves as you said in the lead up to the show.

It was an external detonation, external to the aircraft. The person who said that actually laid out the reconstruction of the aircraft and oversaw the entire reconstruction of the inside of that aircraft, senior NTSB investigator Hank Hughes, who, once he retired, came to join us in this documentary.

BANFIELD: Well, it will be fascinating to watch it. Tom Stalcup, thanks very much for joining me today and answering my very -- just a few questions. I'm sure it will bring forth a lot more.

I should remind people as well, that documentary, "TWA Flight 800," it premieres July 17th, and that would just happen to coincide with the 17th anniversary of that crash.

It has been a long time since the expression "nuclear holocaust" was part of our collective conscience. Those are the days of Reagan and Gorbachev and the Cold War that seethed between the United States and shadowy figures who lurked behind the Iron Curtain.

Today, though, it's kind of doubtful whether anybody really knows where the nearest fallout shelter is. Actually, they probably don't know what a fallout shelter is.

Just a short while ago, though, President Obama was speaking at Berlin's historic Brandenburg Gate and calling on Russia to join the United States in minimizing the chance of nuclear war from ever happening.

Big step in that direction, further reducing each country's nuclear arsenals by a third.

Famous place, famous faces, Jessica Yellin traveling with Mr. Obama, joins us live from Berlin.

The images are awesome. You can't be at the Brandenburg Gate without harkening back to so many moments in history.

But let's talk about the politics and the reaction to what the president has been saying and what the president has been doing, Jessica.

JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Ashleigh, it is a remarkable sight to see a U.S. president on the east side of the Brandenburg Gate, a place no president has been able to stand, no U.S. president, because the walls stood there for so many years.

When Reagan came and when John F. Kennedy came, they both stood on the west side and, now that the wall is down, President Obama was able to address a crowd on the -- where the Soviet bloc once took -- had total control.

President Obama made remarks that both touched on, as you say, the reduction of the nuclear arsenal. He called for a reduction by one third. But he -- by both U.S. and Russia.

But he also more broadly talked about U.S. values, the U.S. vision for his second term around the world, and spoke to a crowd that had a very different sense of the Obama that came here five years ago.

There was such high hopes, a crowd of 200,000 that turned out to see him then. This time a crowd of less than 10,000 people, probably closer to 6,000, and that's because President Obama is -- well, first of all, the hopes, you couldn't have met -- his reality couldn't have met those extraordinarily exuberant expectations.

But also, he's continued so many of the policies of George W. Bush from Gitmo to drones and now NSA surveillance. He addressed all of them in the speech, the loudest applause coming when he talked about still his dedication to shutting down Guantanamo Bay, Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: All right. Jessica Yellin, on the road for us and live from Germany, thank you for that.

By the way, this was the second time that the president delivered a major speech in Berlin. As we said, first time was back in 2008, presidential candidate Obama to hundreds of thousands as Jessica mentioned.

They all turned out to hear the man that many Europeans viewed as a much needed alternative to then President George W. Bush.

Here is part of what he said way back then.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SENATOR BARACK OBAMA (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: ... the importance of Europe's role in our security and our future. Both views miss the truth that Europeans today are bearing new burdens and taking more responsibility in critical parts of the world and that, just as Americans, we know that these walls have fallen before.

After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a union not in Berlin, but they've come down in Belfast where protestants and Catholics found a way to live together; in the Balkans, where our Atlantic alliance ended wars and brought savage war criminals to justice; and in South Africa, where the struggle a courageous people defeated apartheid.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: Joining us now is presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. He's a professor of history at Rice University.

I just want to get your take right off the bat since it's all fresh and it's all live and it's just wrapping up.

As you watch the remarks today, as you saw the backdrop, you saw the turnout, comparing it to what happened in '08, what are your thoughts?

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: My first thought listening to the speech was that it was Obama's second inaugural speech, except only for the world.

He hit on climate change, gay rights. It was, you know, many of the same themes, sort of reintroducing himself to a world community.

The headline of this is nuclear weapons reduction, and he used a great historic setting and backdrop to do it. He evoked John F. Kennedy 50 years ago, and as Jessica Yellin just said, he's speaking on the east side now, not the west.

So it's a major speech for Barack Obama. It's why people like him and he delivered it quite well. And it's clear that Guantanamo Bay is going to be closed now.

BANFIELD: You know, for a lot of us, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," is the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Clearly a lot of other bits and pieces in that puzzle as well, but that's a major, major part of who Reagan was and what his history is.

Is it -- is this the time in a president's career that he starts legacy crafting and did today do anything towards that?

BRINKLEY: There's -- somebody is going to do a nice and important book on the collected speeches of Barack Obama, but let's not confuse this with Kennedy's very important Cold War talk in Berlin, or Ronald Reagan's fighting words about tear down this wall.

This was a healing speech. It's not one that's going to be that memorable. It was exceedingly well written and delivered. It has a lot of news pulls to it, but this was not a moment that is going to be a gold star on history's calendar.

BANFIELD: No. I mean honestly, I think if you asked a lot of people under the age of 30 right now, they'd say really, nuclear proliferation is still an issue? You know, I think we have bigger fish to fry elsewhere.

So just to that discussion, in terms of legacy-crafting, do you think that the legacy will sort of orbit around the night Osama bin Laden died?

BRINKLEY: Oh, that's going to be, of course, a big one historians are going to be talking about, but he has many. What happens to ObamaCare, the bailing out of GM, getting us out of the Great Recession.

But this was a foreign policy speech. It was unique that he had gone as a candidate to Berlin and he came back.

And remember, this is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning president and this was a speech that had a Nobel aura to it. It was about citizenship and of peace and justice around the world.

People in Stockholm and Oslo will be applauding a speech like this, and particularly, he told people look, we're going to get our drones under control and who doesn't want to have nuclear weapons reduced in the world?

And there's been a lot of tension between Obama and Putin and particularly over Syria, and the fact that they're negotiating and we're getting rid of many stockpiles of nuclear weapons, it's a positive moment.

So it's a big speech, but just not a Day-Glo one.

BANFIELD: All right, Doug Brinkley, it's always good to talk to you. Thank you, Professor. Nice to see you.

BRINKLEY: Thank you.

BANFIELD: A story that should outrage us all, deprived of freedom, denied basic dignities, prosecutors say a mentally disabled woman and her daughter were held captive, and these three are being alleged to be the ones responsible.

The conditions, unthinkable. You will not believe what you're about to hear.

Also blockbuster testimony at the wrongful death trial for Michael Jackson. His only daughter Paris taking center stage on tape.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PARIS JACKSON, MICHAEL JACKSON'S DAUGHTER: My dad didn't like her, so he tried to like keep her away from us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: Does her testimony help or hurt the case against the concert promoter AEG and how has this young woman recovered just weeks after an apparent suicide attempt?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MORGAN SPURLOCK, FILMMAKER: So I'm locked in the back of a blacked out van somewhere in northern California being driven to an undisclosed location where they grow vast amounts of marijuana.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: And later, Morgan Spurlock, back at it with his clever storytelling. He's going to join us on CNN. Hear about a brand new show "INSIDE MAN" coming up a little later on.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: This is being called a case of modern day slavery. Three suspects arrested for allegedly holding a mentally disabled woman and her daughter captive in an Ohio apartment for more than a year, forcing them to perform manual labor, feeding them dog food, and threatening them with snakes and pitbulls, in conditions described as, quote, "simply subhuman."

Prosecutors say the suspects also collected the woman's government benefits and beat her, all in order to get painkillers for themselves. The mother of one suspect calls the allegations lies. A defense attorney calls it ludicrous.

Want to bring in CNN's legal analyst Paul Callan and defense attorney Midwin Charles. I don't even know where to begin here. I feel like we just started getting our heads around a house of horrors with three young women who had been kept as captives for ten years and then comes this. Let me start with this. Paul, the first set of charges that you see as a potential that these three could face?

PAUL CALLAN CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Well, what's unusual about it, I'm starting to wonder about Ohio, Ashleigh. Oh, my word. This is another Ohio city with forced labor and slavery charges floating around.

By the way, the forced labor charge here is a very unusual charge. You don't usually see that in criminal law. Usually it involves sex trafficking when you're bringing young women into the country for prostitution purposes. It's an unusual charge with high exposure, 5 to 15 years tends to be the range of sentencing I've seen in prior cases where it's been charged.

BANFIELD: And Midwin, there's a child involved here as a victim as well. What does that do in terms of trumping up the degree, the severity of what these allegations are suggesting?

MIDWIN CHARLES, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Well, I certainly think that it's an aggravator. You're talking about child abuse charges, kidnapping, false imprisonment and whenever you have a child involved, obviously I think the criminal justice system society at large is a lot more interested in making sure that whoever the defendant is, is really going to pay for what they've done or at least the charges are going to reflect the severity of the crime.

BANFIELD: Paul, if you're a prosecutor in this community and you know that this thing is coming down the pike and going to hit your desk, what are you hoping the police are doing right now as they comb through that house? What kind of evidence are you hoping they get and what kind of evidence are you hoping they don't destroy?

CALLAN: The biggest tip comes from the defense attorney who says the charges are ludicrous. He's saying we were renting rooms to them and they worked voluntarily for us, so you've got to counter that. You're going to need witnesses to show that they were held in servitude. I think the biggest problem the prosecutor is going to have with the case is, were they locked in, chained down, like the victims in the Cleveland case? There are some allegations here that they were allowed to leave voluntarily. Now that would sort of mitigate against, you know, a slavery or forced labor charge. That's what the prosecutor is looking to disprove. He's got to show sort of psychological domination that caused imprisonment.

BANFIELD: Good point. Because one of the suggestions in these three -- in the defense of these three is that the woman did come and go, ran errands, outside the home, but then the counter to that is that because they held the child as ransom so to speak, either get out, do the work we want you to do and keep your mouth shut or we've got your baby? Midwin, can you see where the conundrum is for both sides?

CHARLES: Of course. They probably used the child as a sort of, I guess, bait or what have you, in order to get her to come back. But also it's my understanding that she was mentally disabled or challenged, so I think that they preyed on her. She was vulnerable. So that's something that I think law enforcement, as well as the criminal justice system, is going to be looking into.

BANFIELD: If she's mentally challenged, what kind of a witness does she make? Notwithstanding whatever evidence they can find in that home, if she says, the child says, and the three of them say, and you have mental, you know, challenges, how does that craft the case?

CHARLES: Well, it depends on the level of mental disability that she has or of physical disability or what have you. I'm sure that the prosecutors, defense attorneys are all going to try to decide whether or not she's someone who could stand trial or give proper evidence.

BANFIELD: It's so disquieting on every level. Can you both stick around, I want you to touch on the Michael Jackson case coming up in a bit. Got time?

CALLAN: Okay.

BANFIELD: Okay. Don't go anywhere, Paul Callan, Midwin Charles. More riveting testimony in the trial of a reputed former mob boss. A hit man, John Martarono is back on the stand tout and his details pretty chilling. If you're the executioner, at least that's what people call you, I bet everything that comes out of your mouth is chilling. A live report from the Whitey Bulger trial in Boston just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: In Boston a killer nicknamed "The Executioner," you know, I couldn't write this better than the facts are giving me, The Executioner stares down another alleged killer in court. Can you imagine the tension? The details sound like they're right out of a movie but John Martorano has been taking the stand three days in a row now, testifying against reputed mobster Whitey Bulger. Imagine the eye contact.

He's calling Bulger his partner in crime. It's his best friend, but he's trying to put him away right now. Bulger's 83 years old, charged with a litany of bloody crimes including 19 different murders. Doesn't get more serious than this. The guy on the stand is what I think you officially call someone in the business, a rat. Deborah Feyerick is covering the case and joins me now from Boston. I don't even know where to begin. I would ask you the typical, you know, legal questions, how is the case, what's the testimony like? What I want to know is, are there like movie producers in there trying to write this thing as it develops? I can't believe some of this stuff that I'm seeing actually play out in real time.

DEB FEYERICK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's really incredible. You know, John Martorano, in fact, has sold the rights to his life story and the movie rights to somebody already. He's just waiting to see whether it gets done. We can tell you Whitey Bulger's defense lawyers spent two days cross examining Bulger's hitman and they suggested to the jury this was a mass murderer, a serial killer. Martorano objected to the word serial killer. He said no, serial killers kill because they like it. I didn't like it, he said. He basically suggested he was doing it because that was his business, that he was doing it to protect his partners, Whitey Bulger and Steve Fleming. He said the term he liked to use was vigilante. But when Bulger's lawyers asked him about that, he said, "but you aren't a vigilante because you didn't just kill crime associates you killed innocent people, you killed strangers, you even killed friends."

The word Judas came up because being a rat, being an informant as you mentioned, is central to this case and Martorano looked at Whitey Bulger and said, you know, the worst thing you could be, my father, the nuns, the priests taught me was to be a Judas, and when asked to define it he said yeah, a rat, the worst of the worst.

It was interesting because the defense lawyers tried to make him out to be a lawyer and Ashleigh, this is one of those things, they said, you lied to your good friend before killing him, didn't you? And basically John Martorano said, well, yes, I lied to him, that was a necessity. I told John I wanted to see him. I couldn't tell him I wanted to shoot him.

BANFIELD: Oh, good lord.

FEYERICK: Prosecutors were able to get Martorano to say there were 11 people that Whitey Bulger and Martorano both killed together. So, they did score a big points on that. The defense was strong, they came out firing, and they got in a lot of information and really I think made the jury think about what was going on, Ashleigh?

BANFIELD: Who needs "The Sopranos" when you have something like this. It's unbelievable we're talking about crimes of this severity when you have these characters at play. Keep us posted. It will be out on Netflix I'm sure very soon. Deb Feyerick reporting live for us in Boston.

Speaking of mobsters, mob day here at CNN, I have this breaking news for you. Rats, no luck in finding the remains of Jimmy Hoffa. There was a big dig going down in Michigan.