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Computer Failure in London; Mastermind of Interrogation

Aired December 12, 2014 - 14:00   ET

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

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Here we go. I'm Brooke Baldwin. You're watching CNN on this Friday afternoon.

You know, we're following this new, developing story for you right now with a ripple effect that will likely be felt all across the world. Right now, flights are still restricted at the world's busiest airport. A computer failure - this is what they're calling it -- at an air traffic control management facility here bringing London Heathrow to a complete halt, and closing the air space over much of the city.

At the height of this chaos, you have flights at all five London airports affected. After two hours, that airspace has now partially reopened. But make no mistake here, the effects on flights across the world and right here in the United States will be felt for hours to come and quite possibly even days.

So, let's go to CNN's Karl Penhaul. He's live at London Heathrow Airport with a little bit more on this.

And, Karl, let me just point out that we know that the U.K. global air traffic control management company has just tweeted and this is what they have tweeted. Quote, "we are investigating the cause of this fault but can confirm that it was not due to a power outage." So, Karl, tell me what we do know.

KARL PENHAUL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brooke, what we do know, in the words of one female passenger, this is a mess. This is a disaster. What we do know is, as you say, an air traffic control center, run by the National Air Traffic Control Service, had what they are calling a technical glitch. Now, that came about four hours ago. They said that they wouldn't necessarily describe that as a computer problem, but more just in a technical problem and say it definitely was not a power outage.

That lasted for about an hour. And after that, the systems got back up and running. But it has had a huge knock on effect. In the first instance, planes coming from Europe into London and across the whole of southern England and Whales were grounded. They weren't allowed to head towards Britain. And any of the flights that were flying over U.K. airspace, transatlantic flights headed to the U.S., they were also grounded.

Now, the flights that were already airborne and headed toward the U.K. were allowed to come, but then stacked up in the air there in a holding pattern, flying around. The problem lasted for about an hour, and as the system started to recover, that is when, once again, air traffic control went into what is called recovery mode. And so what that means is they're now - right now, and you'll hear it and you'll see it behind me, they're trying to get as many aircraft out of that stacking position back on the ground as fast as possible. And they're also trying to get some of those delayed flights, the flights that should have been leaving over the last four hours, into the air and on their way.

Now, that is really going to be a long process because there is a knock on effect. It's not just a question of saying, right, you can leave now. It's a question of checking whether the aircraft are ready to leave, whether the flight crew are still able to fly at this time, whether their shifts are running out. And this is having a huge knock on effect. It's already affecting flights into tomorrow, both short haul flights and long haul flights.

And, of course, out there in the terminals, it is absolute chaos. British Airways, in terminal five, for instance, that's where we have a team on the ground there. They say there are passengers just strewn all around the place. There are not enough staff on hand to tell people where they should be going. They're trying to hand some of their bags back. It is very disorganized. They're standing there in queues trying to get tickets for meals, for hotels. They say nobody is giving them out information.

Some of our colleagues that were due to fly on transatlantic flights tomorrow have been told that their early flights are already canceled. More than 50 flights have been canceled BA is telling us. And then you put into this holding pattern on the telephone to get information and you're just not getting information. Absolute chaos, Brooke.

BALDWIN: What a total and complete mess, as you said off the top from that female passenger. Karl Penhaul, we'll stay in close contact with you as this clearly is affecting not just today's air traffic but tomorrow's and possibly days.

Let's talk a little bit more about this glitch with David Soucie, CNN's safety analyst, accident investigator and author of "Why Planes Crash."

And, David Soucie, you just heard sort of the who, why, when and hows from Karl Penhaul. And, again, I think it's important to put this tweet from the U.K. base global air traffic management company. "We're investigating the cause of this fault, but can confirm it was not due to a power outage." Why is that so important for them to point out?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: First of all, there's about four different power systems that power all air traffic control centers. It's beyond triple redundancy. So when that first came out, we were a little questioning it (ph). However --

BALDWIN: OK, we're going to get out of that. Speaking of glitches, obviously having some of our own, but hopefully we can get him up because I want to just try to understand why the fact that this wasn't due to a power outage and some of the other theories perhaps behind this, it's important to discuss. So, guys, let me know if we get David Soucie back. Meantime, coming up, the former head of the CIA and one of the so- called architects who designed the agency's enhanced interrogation technique program here, aka, according to the Senate, torture, you know, speaking out on CNN, defending their brutal tactics, including tactics like rectal rehydration.

Plus, police have new leads into what happened the night a Mississippi teenager was set on fire and left to die. Those details are ahead.

Plus, the Sony e-mail hack just keeps getting worse. Are you reading this stuff? In one e-mail a Sony exec calls one of their top grossing actors a greedy whore. Now that actor is firing back. You're watching CNN. Stay with me.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: All right. We've got him back. David Soucie, let me pop you back up live, our CNN safety and aviation analyst, author of "Why Planes Crash."

I believe we were talking about how this, you know, U.K. traffic control company not saying power failure. We were exploring -- they are calling it a technical glitch. Is that it?

SOUCIE: Well, we know that it's not a power failure and that would be highly unlikely to have a power failure anyway. There's four or five different sources of power for each one of the air traffic control center. But this particular piece of software is something that's been added to infrastructure that's been around for years and years and years. So what it does is it schedules how many airplanes go into a particular area, or it also tells it which airplane go to which controllers within the control system.

So what's important now is that these airplanes that are in the air are landed. There are so many things that will be impacted over the next few days and even weeks possibly because everything is interdependent in the system, including how many hours a particular airplane pilot can fly, all the way down to when that airplane can land.

BALDWIN: Yes, I mean, walk me through, just be specific, when we're looking at these maps and we're try to, you know, wrap our heads around exactly how much is affected, not just today, but possibly coming days. What does that entail, David?

SOUCIE: Well, right now what it is, as I mentioned, we're trying to get the airplanes landed that are in the air right now because they only have a certain amount of reserve fuel, so they're working against a time clock on those.

The second is to try to get the airplanes that are at the airport out again, but I don't think there's going to be a lot of that going on until all these other airplanes have been cleared. They can't afford to let that runway sit empty while they're waiting for an airplane to land. Those airplanes only have a certain amount of fuel. That's step one. Step two now is rescheduling. The rescheduling, everything is interdependent in the system, meaning that every single thing that happens affects the next thing down the chain. And in that chain you've got the scheduling of the aircraft, the rescheduling of the aircraft. You may have a maintenance failure in addition to that. So the - all of these things will slow that chain down, which will then slow down the chain of the next stop. So as it spreads out, you will have Gatwick affected, you'll have other airports even as far as the United States will be affected. Certainly anybody that's traveling to Europe is going to be affected by this. I would expect delays of at least a day, if not more than that right now.

If you remember, in Chicago, we had that single point of failure, where there was a fire at that airport and it took literally months for the schedule to get back to normal. So there's quite a bit of work that needs to be done and these air traffic controllers, I'm very impressed with what they've been able to do without the scheduling software because this is basically back to pencil and paper to try to make sure which airplanes are going where.

BALDWIN: Can't imagine. David Soucie, thank you so much.

And now to this. This is something, obviously, we've been talking about the last couple of days. This is absolutely spellbinding. And I've got to say, it makes you wonder. In a brief moment, we'll talk about these two psychologists and how they hooked up with the CIA and sold them this unproven scheme to squeeze information out of terrorists. This is the scheme that led to the torture and it's a story that's hard to fathom. Stand by for that.

But this is a whole other part of this strange story. If you were with us on Tuesday, I was reading straight from the pages of the Senate report on CIA torture as it was just rolling out that afternoon. And I came to this part, and it says this. It says interrogation subjects were dressed in diapers and were subjected to rectal rehydration without documented medical necessity. It's not pretty to talk about, obviously, but this is part of the story, rectal rehydration. And it wasn't medically necessary, why? Why do this?

Well, now, the former head of the CIA, numero uno guy at the time, you know, is out there insisting the report got it wrong. Michael Hayden is saying rectal rehydration was a medical necessity for a handful of these detainees. You have to watch this exchange between my colleague, Jake Tapper, and Hayden. Yes, it's an odd discussion. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHAEL HAYDEN, CIA DIRECTOR (2006-2009): That was done because of detainee health. But the people responsible there for the health of these detainees saw that they were becoming dehydrated. They had limited options in which to go do this. It was intravenous with needles, which would be dangerous with a non-cooperative detainee. It was through the nasal passage --

TAPPER: Pureeing hummus and pine nuts and -

HAYDEN: Jake, I'm not a doctor and neither are you, but these were medical procedures. And to give you a sense --

TAPPER: Are you really defending rectal rehydration?

HAYDEN: What I'm defending is history. To give you a sense as to how this report was put together, this activity, which was done five times, and each time for the health of the detainee, not part of the interrogation program, not designed to soften him up for any questioning. The committee, the Democrats on the committee, have used one half-ass, unwarranted comment in one e-mail to justify the story that you have now bought hook, line and sinker that we used this to abuse other human beings.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: So Hayden says medically necessary, which, if true, would solve that particular mystery.

Moving on. Before the torture report was released, few people realized enhanced interrogation, as practiced by CIA, was actually the brain child of these two United States Air Force veterans, both of whom have psychology degrees and next to zero expertise in questioning subjects. We here at CNN have tracked them down. So here we go. James Mitchell. This is the guy, this is the co-architect of the whole thing, enhanced interrogation. Here he is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMES MITCHELL, DEVELOPED "ENHANCED INTERROGATION": The point of that was to get the detainee to be willing to engage with a targeter or a debriefer. So it's a little bit like I - and I would appreciate it, if you're going to use this, that you use the whole thing. It's a little bit like a good cop/bad cop argument. You've got a bad cop and a good cop. The point of the bad cop is to get the bad guy to talk to the good cop. And so it's not surprising to me that there's a food fight now because what's happened is, the Democrats in that committee have gone back and said, look, it doesn't look like a lot of stuff was gotten by the bad cop, and the other people are saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we think the bad cop was necessary to get him to talk to the good cop. That's the explanation, as clear as I can -- as I understand it as a U.S. citizen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: And again, this is the architect of the program, enhanced interrogation, private citizen, doesn't work for the government. Chris Frates is the one who sat down with James Mitchell. Chris Frates joins me again.

And I want to go back to the qualifications, because we know James Mitchell and his partner, they both have degrees in psychology, apparently, in the military. But beyond that, what did they know about interrogations of high level terrorists?

CHRIS FRATES, CNN INVESTIGATIONS CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brooke, if you believe the Senate intelligence report, they didn't know a whole heck of a lot. That report says that they didn't have actual training interrogating detainees or terrorists of any kind. They didn't have any expertise about al Qaeda. They didn't understand the culture or the linguistics at a high level either. So the report really goes after James Mitchell and the other psychologist who started this program by saying that they really weren't qualified.

Now, when you talk to the CIA, you know, they point to a report that they put out and they said, in rebuttal, that they felt that Mitchell and his partner were so qualified that they would have been derelict in their duty if they didn't employ them. And, you know, part of what their training was before they came to the CIA was, they trained uniformed men and women in evasion, in how to survive an attack by an enemy, how to survive an enemy interrogation. So, essentially, they were reverse engineering that training to use on detainees who had been suspected of plotting against America.

BALDWIN: All right. Chris Frates, thanks for tracking him down for us just to get their side, CIA side, the Senate side, and their side.

Now to this. The trillion dollar spending bill slapped together and approved by the House after we left the air yesterday. If approved by the Senate by midnight tomorrow, it will avert a government shutdown. So, hurrah for that part.

But there are a lot of folks in Washington who believe the thing, this bill, is flat out fatally flawed. Just moments ago, President Obama spoke about the spending bill from the Roosevelt Room of the White House and here is what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: But let me start by saying a few words about the bill that was passed last night to keep the government open and to make sure that our agencies are funded until the fall of next year.

This, by definition, was a compromised bill. This is what's produced when you have a divided government that the American people voted for. There are a bunch of provisions in this bill that I really do not like. On the other hand, there are provisions in this bill and the basic funding within this bill that allows us to make sure that we continue on the progress in providing health insurance to all Americans, to make sure that we continue with our efforts to combat climate change, that we're able to expand early childhood education that is making a meaningful difference in communities all across the country, that allows us to expand our manufacturing hubs that are contributing to the growth of jobs and the progress that we've seen in our economy over the last couple of years.

And so, overall, this legislation allows us to build on the economic progress and the national security progress that is important. Had I been able to draft my own legislation and get it passed without any Republican votes, I suspect it would be slightly different. That is not the circumstance we find ourselves in and I think what the American people very much are looking for is some practical governance and the willingness to compromise. And that's what this bill requests.

So I'm glad it passed the House and I'm hopeful that it will pass the Senate.

One of the things that was very important in this legislation was it allowed us the funding that's necessary to battle ISIL, to continue to support our men and women in uniform. We've put a lot of burdens on our Defense Department and our armed services over the last year, some of which were anticipated, some of which were not. And this gives our military, as well as our other agencies, the ability to plan over the next year with some stability.

Which brings me to the topic of this meeting here today. This bill also contains the necessary funding to continue to make progress on our fight against Ebola, both at home and abroad.

I know that after a frenzy of news reports for several weeks, Ebola has faded from the headlines. On the other hand, although we have not seen an additional case here in the United States, I have always said that we have to make sure we're prepared here at home and we will not have defeated this disease until we have defeated it where it is most prevalent, and that is in West Africa.

And so I'm going to be hearing about the progress that's been made here in the United States in making sure that our hospitals are properly prepared, that our outstanding health workers are properly trained, that we have facilities that are regionally dispersed to accommodate the periodic Ebola cases that we may continue to see in the United States until we've eradicated the disease in West Africa. It also allows us to make some progress on our efforts to develop a vaccine. I was at the NIH a while back, some of you were with me, to see the significant progress and some promising pathways that were taken with respect to vaccine development and this legislation allows us to continue with that progress.

It also allows us to continue to do the work that is necessary in West Africa. Because of the remarkable response of our agencies, our military, our health workers, we have been able to take the lead in Liberia and to start bending the curve so that we're on a pathway to defeating the disease in Liberia. But we've -

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: All right, so the president, we wanted to turn that around for you real quickly. Obviously the last point he was making there about the funding and fighting of Ebola and the successes that they have seen, most important and most germane, if you will, as we're talking about the passing of the spending bill through the House, and the president saying he's essentially not entirely thrilled with everything that's in there, but I believe I heard the compromise word. He believe this is a compromise.

Let's go to our chief congressional correspondent, Dana Bash.

And, you know, hip, hip hurrah, I suppose, that this thing passed, you know, yesterday, but will the Senate - will this thing be like an 11:59 p.m. thing for tomorrow or what?

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: You know, it could be more like the sun is rising tomorrow morning and we're still trying to figure out what's happening. Unfortunately, that is - that is the way things are going now because here is where things stand.

BALDWIN: OK.

BASH: You heard the president talking about compromise and the art of compromise, which means he didn't get everything he wanted, Republicans didn't get everything that they wanted, et cetera. And what you have here though is the sort of wings on both parties. You have the most liberal and the most conservative and the Democratic and Republican parties, now in the Senate, thinking about whether they will use their tools as any one senator has to slow this train down. They probably won't have enough votes to completely stop and derail this big $1.1 trillion spending bill that the president was just talking about, but they certainly can slow it.

So, on the left, we have Elizabeth Warren, who has made it very clear, we've been reporting it on this show and others for a couple of days, she does not like this because she's of the provision in here that she says rolls back some reforms from Wall Street and it could ultimately hurt consumers. We are in a holding pattern right now, waiting to see whether or not she feels so strongly that she's going to slow things down. That's on the left.

Same goes for the right. You have Ted Cruz, Jeff Sessions, Republican senators who are not happy with their leadership, that they didn't include in here a way to try to stop the president's executive action on immigration.

So that's where we are. We're waiting to see if compromise is going to prevail or at least rule the day, or if these two wings of the party are so emboldened, that they want to make a point, that they are going to keep us here overnight and tomorrow and Monday.

BALDWIN: Hope your little one let you have a nice sleep last night because you may need it. Hardest working woman in TV right there on Capitol Hill. Dana Bash, thank you very much.

BASH: I got that (ph). Thank you.

BALDWIN: Hundreds of thousands of people without power and homes just absolutely covered in mud. The West Coast cleaning up after one of the worst storms they have seen in years. Paul Vercammen is there.

Paul.

PAUL VERCAMMEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Brooke, I'm here in Camarillo Springs where the fierce storm loosened up the rocks on a hillside. Tons and tons of rocks coming down here, swallowing up homes in Camarillo. We're going to show you a lot more when we come back from the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Just about the bottom of the hour. You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin. Have to talk about this water rescue that's been unfolding in Los Angeles just this afternoon on the heals of this massive storm which has hit the West Coast. Less than an hour ago, rescue crews responded to a call to save two different people clinging - you see these trees here -- clinging to these trees in the L.A. River in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Live pictures now. Gosh, look how fast that water is moving. We understand at least one person has been rescued. Crews are still looking along the riverbank and probably sill in the river. And in those branches of those trees to try to find that second individual. So, stay tuned for that. Hopefully they find him a-ok.

Meantime, we are also seeing flooding and mudslides and heavy snow and trees down, power out to hundreds of thousands of people here. And at least two people are dead from storm related injuries. This is actually being called the biggest storm to hit the area in years and years and, unfortunately -- look at that parking lot. Wow, it is not over yet.