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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

The Implications of the MH-17 Crash; One Victim of MH-17 Was American; FBI, NTSB To Send Investigators to Daunting Crash Site

Aired July 18, 2014 - 12:30   ET

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


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: In a situation like this, it is hard to find words to express our condolences to the families and friends of the people on board Malaysian Airlines Flight 17.

All most people can do right now is pray, light a candle, lay flowers, as we have seen people doing, people laying teddy bears for those kids who died.

One of the best ways we at CNN can honor them is tell you their names, tell you their stories, stories of the young and the young at heart, like Darrell Gonowan (ph). He was supposed to go on a backpacking trip to Asia with his family to visit family in Indonesia. He died on board the flight.

Another victim, a Dutch national, Karlijn Keijzer, a 25-year-old doctoral student at Indiana's University's chemistry department. She was a member of the women's rowing team during the 2011 season.

Of course we know there were three infants on board, and this morning, it was the thought of those babies especially that caused Samantha Power, U.N. ambassador to the U.N., to choke up.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SAMANTHA POWER, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS: Yesterday, we were all shocked by the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. All 298 people aboard, 283 passengers and 15 crew, were killed.

As we stared at the passenger list yesterday, we saw next to three of the passengers name a capital "I." As we now know, the letter "I" stands for "infant."

To the families and friends of the victim, it is impossible to find words to express our condolences. We can only commit to you that we will not rest until we find out what happened.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: Fifteen crew members were also on Flight 17, all of them Malaysian nationals. There's now a public Facebook forum collecting messages of condolences and grief, including those who say they were colleagues. Ryan Hardy posted this comment, "RIP, flight attendants don't die," he said. "They just fly higher.

The more we learn about the victims, the loss seems greater, President Obama saying there were nearly 100 HIV/AIDS researchers and advocates on board that flight.

Chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta looks at the global of packet of their loss.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: The health community around the world in utter shock, the International AIDS Society says a member of its members were on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

They were heading to the AIDS 2014 conference in Melbourne, Australia, scheduled to start this Sunday. Typically, attended by thousands from all over the world and among them, leading HIV experts, their loss likely to have an impact on research regarding diagnosing, treating and curing the disease.

Former president Bill Clinton is one of the keynote speakers of the conference. He says it's awful, sickening, what has happened to so many gifted people.

BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: They were doing so much good.

This gathering, we do this on a regular basis, have these international AIDS conferences, and I try to go to all of them because I'm always so inspired by what other people are doing and what we can learn from them.

And so, since I left office, it's been kind of a regular part of my life, thinking about those people being knocked out of the sky, it's pretty tough.

GUPTA: One of the victims, prominent Dutch scientist Joep Lange, I first met him in 2004 when he presided over the International AIDS conference in Bangkok.

Those who knew him say he was a hardcore scientist with the heart of an activist who worked tirelessly to get affordable AIDS drugs for HIV-positive patients living in poor countries.

One small example of his work, he was the one who argued if Coca-Cola could get refrigerated beverages to places all over Africa, then we should be able to do the same with refrigerated HIV medications.

DR. MARIA EKSTRAND, AIDS RESEARCHER: It's going to be a huge impact, both on people who worked closely with him, people in his lab and on the society as a whole. It's an incredible loss.

We're all just bracing ourselves to arrive and find out who else may have been on that flight. It's just -- it's unbelievable. It's not really real yet.

GUPTA: The World Health Organization tells CNN that their spokesman, Glenn Thomas, was on board that doomed flight. He most recently worked with us here at CNN during our coverage of the Ebola outbreak in Guinea.

A friend says he was a wonderful man doing great work in the world. He was also planning his 50th birthday celebration, his life and so many others cut tragically short.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, reporting.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COOPER: These were people who had dedicated their lives to save others and they were taken in a senseless act of violence as President Obama spoke about.

I'm joined now by Gregory Hartl, a World Health Organization spokesman and a colleague of Glenn Thomas.

Thank you so much for being with us. I'm so sorry for your loss and all of our losses in this. You've known him for years. Tell us about him, the work he did, what kind of person he was.

GREGORY HARL, WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION SPOKESMAN: So, Glenn comes from a long journalistic background. He was a BBC journalist before coming to WHO.

He came to WHO initially to work on tuberculosis, a specific type of TB treatment that WHO was recommending. And his journalistic background and work with the BBC and perhaps just innately, he knew how to talk about a very complicated topic in a way which would appeal to journalists.

As a consequence, our work became much better diffused, much better known. Glenn was great at communicating. That's we he was a communicator. That's why he was a spokesman.

And thanks to him, our stories were picked up much more than they probably otherwise would have been, and that meant that important public health messages were widely diffused.

COOPER: Gregory, to have so many from the HIV/AIDS community working on finding a cure, working on finding treatment, working on prep, to have them killed like this, what kind of an impact do you think this has globally on the HIV/AIDS community?

HARTL: Well, it's a bit difficult to say unfortunately for me because I don't work in the AIDS area.

Certainly, though, such a loss of life, almost 300 people, is a tragic and terrible effect on anyone and everyone. And, I mean, even the one person that we knew on the flight, Glenn, has just been so hard for us to take. And something like this should never have happened, to lose 300 people in such a senseless and random act is, is very difficult for all of us here at WHO to come to terms with.

COOPER: Gregory, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us and tell us about Glenn. Thank you so much.

HARTL: Thank you. Thank you.

COOPER: The search of course continues for what happened to Flight MH- 17. We've seen videos of the crash and pictures of the debris that fell to the ground.

What clues can be gathered now from all that evidence? We'll talk about that, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COOPER: Both the FBI and the NTSB says they will send at least one investigator to Ukraine. They'll face a daunting task, though, trying to figure out what happened.

The wreckage of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 fell from the sky over a very wide area, breaking apart, raining down in pieces. Almost immediately, we saw disturbing images of people crawling all over the crash site. There were reports of looting in some cases and of the data recorders recovered and taken to Russia.

We haven't been able to verify that for sure, though. A senior official says Ukrainian authorities are being blocked from the site.

Freelance journalist Noah Sneider was allowed to see it. I spoke to him, and here's what he told us.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NOAH SNEIDER, FREELANCE JOURNALIST: As you walk through the fields, then you see the bodies. You see, you know, a man with his cracked iPhone sticking out of his pocket, sort of people's clothing everywhere. Most of it's kind of ripped off by the air. There's some suitcases and stuff in a pile along the road.

One fighter was telling us that they'd seen lots of headphones. That was the thing they noticed most. People had been flying, I guess, listening to music, watching movies, and so they've been finding lots and lots of pairs of headphones.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: I want to bring in CNN safety analyst David Soucie and CNN aviation analyst Les Abend.

David, let's start with you. Let's talk about this debris field. In terms of if, in fact, the black boxes are no longer there, if they've been taken away, if some items have been looted, what can still be discovered from a debris field like this? DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: A lot of things you can see right up

front. It's that there's some areas that are charred and fired and burnt down to the ground.

There's other areas that have absolutely none whatsoever on it, so that, in an in-flight separation, though, is typical because anything to do with the engines, the fuel, anything separate from that as the aircraft comes apart is just going to land as it is without that.

So that tells you a lot about what might have happened inside or how the missile may have hit the aircraft, causing the inside to explode from the inside out.

COOPER: We're also hearing and I don't want to get too gruesome here, but that many of the bodies are intact.

Does that to you indicate that the plane itself may have come down in significantly large-size pieces?

SOUCIE: Certain sections of it would. And, typically, the tail section is where that happens.

You saw that in the Sioux City accident and a few other accidents we've covered over the years, that the back of the aircraft tends to tumble and roll like an egg would and not crack the shell, so that would be an area in which people might be totally intact.

COOPER: And, Les, there's a lot that investigators can determine, even from autopsies of people, in terms of cause of death. That can give an indication of exactly what happened.

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Yes, if there's smoke inhalation, David will agree with me, that will be discovered in the lungs. If there's a hypoxia situation, that's something that I believe is easily discovered in an autopsy.

And whether this was, you know, an internal explosion versus an external explosion, all those kinds of things can certainly be determined.

COOPER: Also, the speed at which the aircraft was moving as it hit the ground, that can be determined by the depth of -- that the ground itself has been sort of moved, correct?

ABEND: Correct. I mean, the altitude that this -- if, indeed, this was a missile impact, that the altitude can be determined just by how large the debris field is and, you know, approximately how serious the impact was, you know, if indeed this was an external, missile-type situation, which none of us really have any reason to doubt the intelligence at this point.

COOPER: There is a lot of concern about an attempt at scrubbing some of the debris by pro-Russian rebels trying to remove any kind of evidence. How easy is it to do that? Can -- I remember us talking about other crashes where just by the way metal is bent you can tell maybe what happened. SOUCIE: Yes. Yes, exactly, you can. And in this you have basically

hundreds of different accident locations. Hundreds of different points of impact. We've talked about point of impact before at which the first point of impact and the spread field or debris field. In this case you have several of those. So you can, as Les was saying, you can take those pieces and figure out how -- what altitude it was at and what kind of explosion --

COOPER: Do you have to reconstruction the entire place like they did in TWA 800?

SOUCIE: Not in this case, no.

COOPER: No.

SOUCIE: Not -- because each one of those is its own individual accident site in essence.

COOPER: David Soucie, Les Abend, appreciate your expertise. We'll be talking to you throughout the day.

There are all sorts of accusations and innuendoes about who might be responsible for bringing this plane down. Was it pro-Russian rebels? Was it some other group in Ukraine? The answer to that question will have a big impact, obviously, on how the world reacts to the situation. We'll talk about that with some military experts coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COOPER: Welcome back.

We want to talk about the investigation into this tragedy. I'm joined now by CNN military analysts Colonel Rick Francona, Pentagon consultant and syndicated columnist Colonel Bob Maginnis, and bestselling author Colonel Dan Hampton.

Appreciate all of you being with us.

Colonel Francona, let's start with you. In terms of trying to determine exactly where this was launched from and would did it, how do they go about that at this stage?

LT. COL. RICK FRANCONA (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Well, there will be enough information based on the intelligence assets that were in the area. We're already learning some of the information already. They're telling us they know what kind of radar system was used. They know where it was launched from. They have a heat signature. You take all these different signatures together, you'll be able to put together where it happened and when it happened. A pretty good time line. There's enough information out there to get a pretty good picture.

COOPER: And, Bob, do you have a sense this is going to -- this intelligence, this information, I mean we're going to know sooner rather than later on this? LT. COL. BOB MAGINNIS, U.S. ARMY (RET.): No, I think it will take a

while, just like it did with the KLAO 7 (ph). These are tough investigations. And, unfortunately, I think that the wreckage has been spoiled by the pro-Russian separatists who haven't, really, a reason to do that, a motivation. You know, they've already claimed that they've got the black boxes and, of course, trying to find some of the pieces that are going to be very telling about -- maybe ball bearings and the like from a missile. This is going to be a tough investigation and it could take a while.

COOPER: And, Dan, we've seen this video that was put on the FaceBook page of Ukraine's interior minister of a Buk system they say being moved to the Russian border. And in the video you can see one missile missing. In your mind, how important is it to be able to get access to that piece of equipment?

LT. COL. DAN HAMPTON, U.S. AIR FORCE (RET.): Well, I don't think it's going to really matter. We know, as your previous guest said, what the intelligence says what the system was. They can't really hide it, OK. The crash site's completely contaminated. It's not like anything our NTSB would investigate, all right. So anything that's incriminating that can be taken away, is. But they can't hide everything. And you're going to see charred pieces of metal, frag patterns from the warhead. They would be able to tell exactly what kind of missile did it. So what you're going to see now is a lot of finger-pointing back and forth as they try to blame each other for it because nobody's going to take responsibility.

COOPER: Once, though, as you said earlier, once this piece of equipment goes into Russia or the black boxes go into Russia, I mean they could just very easily disappear.

FRANCONA: Right. We'll probably never see the piece of equipment again. I mean it would be handy to have that radar if we could -- so we could compare the signals. But, you know, as Dan said, it - you know, we know what happened.

COOPER: Right.

FRANCONA: And we know what kind - we probably know what kind of missile it was. So I don't really see that it's that important unless we want to have that -- that smoking gun. But then we know that what missile did it, we know what system did it, but we really don't know who ordered it, who fired it, what were the actual circumstances behind it.

COOPER: Because it is very possible that there was - I mean, there are plenty of people who, among the pro-Russian rebels, who may have experience on a system like this who have been in the military before, even if they're not active duty Russian forces now.

FRANCONA: Yes, that could be. We -- and we don't know, but there could be people that are -- were trained on this system, because it is in the Ukrainian inventory. So you could have pro-Russian separatists that were in the Ukrainian military that know how to use this system. Not a high likelihood, but you could. COOPER: Bob, for you, what are the other questions you are -- would

want answered now?

MAGINNIS: Well, we've heard the reports of all this equipment going in there. It's not only the SA-11s that they, quite frankly, could have got from the Ukrainian facility they captured weeks ago, but what else. You know, we've seen tanks that have rolled in. We've seen other equipment. All I can see is that we are really ginning up to a much larger confrontation.

You know, I agree with the president, we have to report on the facts. We have to wait until we have those. But at the same time, I see Vladimir Putin, you know, former KGB guy, really, you know - I think he will escape blame here because he can say, no, it was those separatists that did this. It wasn't any of our people. But, of course, you know, I believe Russian fingerprints ultimately will be found in this whole affair. And, tragically, we've lost 298 innocent lives and yet more will likely follow given what's going on today.

COOPER: Bob Maginnis, Dan Hampton, Rick Francona, appreciate it. We'll talk to you throughout the day.

The downing of the plane has affected airline traffic across the globe right now. Many airlines have been - they have been avoiding Ukrainian airspace since this conflict heated up. The question is, why was this plane flying there? We'll talk about that ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COOPER: Welcome back.

A lot of questions about the route that was taken by Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. A lot of airlines have been avoiding the airspace over eastern Ukraine since the fighting broke out. As of right now, Ukraine has closed it indefinitely. I want to bring in CNN aviation analyst Miles O'Brien.

Miles, obviously, you know, there were a lot of airliners avoiding this airspace. Do we know Malaysia Airlines reasons for taking this flight path? I mean, it was a very high altitude, 33,000 feet.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Technically, it was free and open airspace because the airspace was blocked - it considered no-fly zone from 32,000 feet down. But what's technically right and what is prudent in the world of common sense are often two different things. Now, typically, this flight, this Flight 17, from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, took a route direct - well, you know, shortest point between -- shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Went right across Ukraine. If you look at their previous flight plans, almost every time they took this track pretty much across Ukraine.

Today, there is a Flight 17 flying even as we speak. They didn't even change the flight number, which is unusual. It is underway as we speak and they flew way to the south over the Black Sea. Airlines like British Airways, Air France, had been avoiding the Ukraine region for quite some time now. The FAA had a big prohibition zone to the south. So did the Europeans.

The question is, why would they continue flying over a known war zone where, in fact, there have been three shoot downs in the past week. It's a very simple answer, I'm afraid. Little bit of lackadaisical behavior. And, secondly, it's less fuel cost. So when the airlines say that it's all about safety, there is a question of whether they're looking at the bottom line as well.

COOPER: Wow. And no doubt a lot of -- more people will be looking into that in the coming days. Miles O'Brien, appreciate you being on.

Let's reset now at the top of the hour.