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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Women Trying to Join ISIS; Black Box Information; Averting Crashes; Kenyan University Targeted. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired April 03, 2015 - 12:00   ET

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

[12:00:00] KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Have a great weekend.

That's it for us AT THIS HOUR. "Legal View" with Ashleigh Banfield starts right now.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone. I'm Ashleigh Banfield. And welcome to LEGAL VIEW.

And, yes, we do begin this hour with breaking news. And it comes in the war against ISIS. Federal investigators charging yet another American with trying to join the terror group. This time, a woman from Philadelphia. Her arrest is coming on the heels of three terror arrests just yesterday, two women charged in New York for plotting a pressure cooker bomb-styled attack, and a 29-year-old American who was detained in Pakistan and secretly flown to New York to face a federal judge for, again, plotting to attack Americans abroad.

Joining me now to discuss these developments, our Alexandra Field, and also CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank will join us soon.

But, Alexandra, to you with the developments. I don't even remember half of the cases I've reported on just in the last few weeks that seem so similar. What's the story behind the Philadelphia woman?

ALEXANDRA FIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You're right, we've been talking about these almost it feels like by the dozen recently and it shows sort of this very wide net that's been cast to try and prevent attacks that could be imminent or even people who want to suggest that they might be capable of doing something, whether or not we know if they have these capabilities. So here -

BANFIELD: Did she do anything imminent?

FIELD: She tweeted. And then she took some steps like getting a passport and getting a visa to go to Turkey and making plans to fly to Spain. That coupled with the tweets that this woman had put out there was enough for authorities to decide to charge her. We're talking about a U.S. citizen again. A woman named Keonna Thomas. She went by "young lioness." This is a 30-year-old from Philadelphia. She had a history of these tweets on Twitter. They go back to 2013. She had voiced her support for ISIS. She had expressed her intention to want to join the fight. She had made contact with an ISIS fighter in Syria. They had talked about whether or not she was ready to join the martyrdom. And she wrote back something to the effect of, a girl can only dream. So those tweets that they had been watching -

BANFIELD: Oh, delightful.

FIELD: Yes.

BANFIELD: So let me get this straight, the girl who thinks she can only dream is doing so with an electronic digital trail?

FIELD: Right. She decides to - she does the research apparently, according to the complaint, about how she can get to Syria. She's obviously, you know, made some contact with a fighter over there. She decides that the best course of action, get the passport, get the Turkish visa, fly to Spain and then made her way across Turkey into Syria.

Could she have pulled this off, Ashleigh? We have no idea because, as you point out, we are hearing about these thoughts or these plots that - all the time it feels like right now. But authorities had been watching her. She took those steps and they decided, hey, go ahead and charge her.

BANFIELD: Any idea how long they had had an eye on her?

FIELD: The tweeting started in 2013. That appears to have been the red flag.

BANFIELD: Wow.

FIELD: They've got the tweets in the complaint stretching back as far as about May of 2013. So they've had eyes on her for some time it seems. She had planned to fly out on March 29th. Obviously they intercepted her before she could take those steps.

BANFIELD: So let me bring in Paul Cruickshank on this one.

Paul, look, this seems to be kind of classic blueprint dumb-dumb because a lot of the arrests that we're reporting on seem to have the same issues. They have their fantasies, for lack of a better word, and then they articulate them on the Internet or in e-mail or some other stupid form. And thank God they're as stupid as they are.

PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: You know, Ashleigh, that's absolutely right. I mean we've seen a string of cases now, not only in the United States, but also here in Europe where these wannabe jihadis are identified by security services, by law enforcement from their social media postings, by the sort of things they're putting on Twitter. And in the United States, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are increasingly using cyber informants, agents and informants who are trolling social media, looking for warning signs from these young radicals and then starting investigations. A lot of these investigations being triggered by what people are posting on social media.

BANFIELD: OK. So let's talk about the fact that, sure, these ones might have been dumb enough to do that, but there may be plenty others out there who are not so unsophisticated. What kind of tools exist in the arsenal of FBI officers who are trying to track the ones who are more surreptitious about their evil deeds?

CRUICKSHANK: Well, it's very, very difficult indeed if they don't have those sort of online connections because then they're waiting for tips from the Muslim community perhaps, perhaps from parents that see worrying signs that their kids are being radicalized. But for a lot of these lone wolfs, it's very difficult because they don't have pre- existing ties to organized terrorist groups, so you don't have those communications overseas, you don't have necessarily that travel overseas. And there's a lot of growing concern in the United States just because of the sheer number of Americans getting involved in these cases. Almost 30 Americans now charged for material support for ISIS.

BANFIELD: Thirty.

CRUICKSHANK: The worry is that at a certain point some kind of attack is going to get through.

[12:04:56] BANFIELD: Oh, it's unbelievable. Well, maybe it isn't so unbelievable when you read what these people are talking about. And let me just remind our viewers that Ms. Keonna Thomas is facing a possible sentence if she's convicted of the crimes that she's facing of 15 years, up to 15 years in prison. And these are attempted - attempted provision of material support, which is pretty intriguing.

We're going to continue to watch this. Alexandra Field, thank you for your reporting. And, Paul Cruickshank, as always, appreciate your perspective.

Coming up next, it was battered, it was burned, it was buried but they found it. The second black box from that crash in the Alps. And what was on it confirms perhaps most people's worst fears and then some. We're going to tell you what they found.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: Just one day after a French policewoman was digging and found that flight data recorder in the earth, eight inches down, the data record from Germanwings Flight 9525, investigators say they now have more proof than ever that that co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, crashed this plane on purpose. And they got even more detail than just that fact.

These are commonly called black boxes and this one really this time was. It was burned to the point of being black. Originally it was orange. But that full-speed impact into the southern French Alps produced what you are seeing on your screen.

And speaking of speed, this really is the newest revelation because it appears from the data recovered from that black box that the depressed and desperate co-pilot not only programmed the autopilot to drop to 100 feet, did it himself, plotted it out, but several times he sped up the plane and made the descent faster.

[12:10:05] CNN's Karl Penhaul is in France. He's gathering facts on this and he's reporting on this. We're going to bring him in with new information in just a few moments.

Also want to bring in CNN aviation analysts Les Abend, who's here in New York, a 777 pilot as well, and Mary Schiavo is in Charleston, South Carolina. She's former inspector general at the Transportation Department.

All right, so, Les, I want to start with you. Each day I feel like I'm going to you for reaction to one more parade of horribles. And here we have it that it wasn't good enough just to take the plane down. That this co-pilot wanted it to happen even faster. Is that a fact that helps anything in the investigation, though, other than being terrible?

LES ABEND, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Listen, I - it's anybody's best guess what was going through this young man's mind. But what he essentially did - I know the terminology is being used as "sped up." But just to help our viewers, it means what he did was he increased the vertical speed. And there's a mode of the autopilot that you can dial in and basically make the this - make the airplane go down faster or make it go up faster also.

So he increased it. Maybe he was looking for a specific spot and was trying to increase the rate of descent so he could get to that spot. It's hard to say exactly the purpose.

BANFIELD: What you're saying to me - and I'm trying to envision what honestly was going on in that cockpit for those harrowing eight minutes. I've had visions of him sitting back and waiting for his demise without any regard for the 149 people behind him. And now I'm getting visions of him toiling away frantically to make it happen as though it's just another day on the job.

ABEND: Well, you know, once again, it's - the whole thing is just baffling and crazy. It seems to me from the data that we're being told that he maintained a heading or at least what we call LNAV (ph), in other words, it was staying on a navigation - a specific heading to maintain a specific course. So all he was doing was trying to expedite the process of getting the airplane into the terrain.

BANFIELD: Mary, I want to bring you in on this and this is not for the macabre at all, but so often after this story broke, I wanted to hear something that would make me feel less sad about how these people died. And knowing that the plane sped up on its descent, did it make their demise any quicker? Did it change this formula at all for the way these people died?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: No. I mean it might have shaved off a few seconds of the time that they had to endure the terror and the fear of the impending - their impending death. But, no, it doesn't for me lessen it in any way. And actually it makes it - I think it makes it worse in many ways. But there's just - you can't make this horrible thing any worse or better than it is.

BANFIELD: And just the motion that the descent became more rapid, would that have made them more aware sooner that there was this descent? That it wasn't just a, you know, a few more moments of flying before they started to see mountains?

SCHIAVO: Yes. And I can't help but remember the parallels between this and United Flight 93 and the family members who opted - were able to hear that cockpit voice recording. And the hijackers there, with the banging of the food cart on the cockpit door, they were afraid that eventually, and they did, the passengers got through and banged through. And maybe he was speeding up because the pilot in command was banging on the door and the metal sound might have been the foot cart and perhaps he thought that he would actually make it through the door.

BANFIELD: Wow.

SCHIAVO: Not likely with the reinforced doors. But I couldn't help but draw the parallels between that and Flight 93.

BANFIELD: Yes. You know, I hadn't thought of that, but it makes perfect sense when you say that. And he'd been doing the research on cockpit door safety prior to this crash, just within the week prior.

I want to bring in Karl Penhaul, who is live on this story right now.

Karl, one of the issues with this story is just the sensitive nature with which the family members, the surviving family members, have been treated as they go to that mountain meadow, the closest spot they can be to where their loved ones died. They have been kept far away from the press and they have stayed away from the press, until now. And you've had a chance to speak to some of those family members.

KARL PENHAUL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, absolutely, Ashleigh. I mean the other day at one of the memorial sites, we did speak to the sister of one of the Iranian families. And she, first of all, was describing the good things about her brother's life. But now I get the sense that the families are in a different emotional phase. A lot of them are saying here in the city of Marseilles and traveling each day to the memorial site.

And I was talking to the brother of one of the men who died in that crash. And he says that he gets up in the morning and his emotions range between sadness and then very deep rage. He said that it is Lufthansa that has invaded his privacy. He says that he never wanted Lufthansa in his life, but now Lufthansa will be there deeply ingrained on every feeling that he has for the rest of his life.

[12:14:58] He says, yes, it's OK that we have to go through the phases of compensation. That is the right and responsibility of each family. But he also says that what he wants is a criminal investigation to get to the bottom of this. He said that he wants to see in jail the airline executives that allowed Andreas Lubitz to fly even though years ago they had the first hints that he had a mental issue. And he says that that should have been monitored and now he wants, as I say, the executives to be put in jail for their responsibility in this crash, Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: Wow. Completely understandable that rage, Karl, that you're speaking of that is enveloped in sadness and terror and mourning and loss. But that is a tough row to hoe without question.

Karl Penhaul, excellent reporting from Marseilles. And may thanks to Mary Schiavo and Les Abend as well.

Les, I want you to stick around, though, because we have new cars that have technology that automatically apply brakes to steer away from crashes, regardless of what you, the driver, are doing. So what about applying that same simple technology to planes? Can autopilot save the day as well as save lives? What could possibly be an argument against that? Might be surprised, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: You know you could buy a car that slows itself down when it gets too close to another car. You can even buy cars that park themselves if you're not so good at parallel parking. So why on earth can't we do this same thing for airliners and get a plane to pull itself out of a crash if the cockpit isn't capable of doing so? CNN's Rene Marsh found out it probably could do this theoretically, but it really probably won't happen.

[12:20:09] (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sink (ph) rate (ph) pull up.

RENE MARSH, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Despite blaring cockpit alarms like these, Andreas Lubitz continued Germanwings Flight 9525's deadly descent, the plane in his control alone. More than 10 years ago, Airbus, the plane's manufacturer, helped develop software to potentially allow a plane's computers to take over a flight if it got close to crashing. But the project was scrapped before it was put to use.

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: In the case of the Germanwings passenger murders, this technology would, I believe, have saved the flight.

MARSH: Here's how it would work if the pilot does not respond to current audible warnings in the cockpit, an autopilot function would kick in, steering the plane out of danger and onto a safe course. Many commercial pilots say a plane should never be taken out of a pilot's control. The crash landing of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in New York, an example. After a flock of geese knocked out both engines, the heroic efforts of Captain Sully Sullenberger saved all 155 people on board. Some pilots also warn technology like enhanced crash avoidance could make jetliners vulnerable to hackers.

JOHN BARTON, COMMERCIAL PILOT: More and more people will come to know the technology. They'll work on the technology and, therefore, there will be bad people that will be able to exploit that technology. That's not a good thing.

MARSH: But in incidents like the Germanwings tragedy where a pilot is being blamed for the crash, former Department of Transportation Inspector General Mary Schiavo says there must be additional safeguards. SCHIAVO: Most of the major commercial jetliner crashes in the last two

or three years could have been saved by an override.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BANFIELD: Our thanks to Rene Marsh for that report.

I want to bring back in CNN aviation analyst Les Abend, who, again, as I have mentioned before, is a pilot of a 777. A captain.

It sounds like a great idea. And you don't agree.

ABEND: I don't agree. Are we changing an entire system based on this anomaly, based on this poor mentally disturbed individual? It doesn't make sense. The - if you start taking airplanes away from pilots that are - we already have warnings. You've already heard them in the piece that Rene Marsh gave. The sink rate, the terrain, that's already there. That's there for us to respond. I mean are we going to develop this system and have it put in airplanes because we have a situation like we had with Germanwings?

BANFIELD: Granted, this is rare, Les. Granted. However, we're not taking the control away from pilots. We're taking the control away from bad pilots, murderous pilots. And, you know, who knows if this will be the new terror trend?

ABEND: But you're -

BANFIELD: Breeding pilots and getting them in the cockpit.

ABEND: But now you have a - now you have a system that could possibly malfunction. If you take it away from pilots, you don't have instances like Sioux City, Iowa, where the captain used total cockpit resource management, landed an aircraft that never should have had the mechanical issue that it had and used four crew members to get it on the ground, enough that there was limited amount of fatalities.

BANFIELD: Understood. That makes perfect sense. What if ground control could play a part? We have plenty of - we have plenty of technology available for that.

ABEND: Good question. Good -

BANFIELD: If ground control could override that and allow a good captain to actually override the system and land in a dangerous spot, wouldn't that remedy it?

ABEND: It's a good question. But it brings up, who's going to monitor that? Ground control or air traffic control already has a system in place where they will see an airplane at a low altitude that possibly could impact terrain or an obstacle. So they get a warnings too. All those warnings are in - we have - we have warnings for collision avoidance also. All these things are in place for us to get the airplane out of danger.

BANFIELD: But you're a good man, captain. That other man was not. He was listening to those bells and whistles and probably relishing in them.

ABEND: Well, then we have 99.8 percent good pilots out there. And I don't see changing a system and potentially designing an airplane to protect it from the pilot as opposed to working in harmony to make this technology work.

BANFIELD: You make some great points, as always. Thank you, Les Abend. It's always good to have you. Happy Easter.

ABEND: Happy Passover.

BANFIELD: We've got a couple of breaking pictures that are coming in to CNN. You've probably heard about these terrorists who gunned down nearly 150 students at a Kenyan college yesterday. Four of them were caught. Let me rephrase that. They're dead. But the search is on right now for their leader and there is a big, heavy ticket that's been hung around his neck. It's what you call a bounty, folks. When we come back after the break, I'm going to show you some of the newest pictures from inside that horrible attack.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:28:33] BANFIELD: Breaking news here at CNN. In just the past few minutes, we've received the first photographs from inside yesterday's massacre at that University in Kenya. And on these photos you can see broken glass, damaged buildings, students' personal belongings thrown about. Witnesses saying that a number of armed men just stormed into that college campus, set off an explosion and then began shooting and taking hostages. And when it was all over, the damage was brutal, 147 people, most of them students, were dead. And most of them, as we're now learning, shot in the head.

Also we're learning more about horrible and frightening details as to what happened as that siege actually played out. The Islamic extreme group al Shabaab has claimed responsibility. Other witnesses say the gunmen went door to door through the dorms, actually, and separated people by religion. They killed anyone who was not a Muslim. As we reported earlier, four of the attackers that were sought after, they're now dead. But that's not all of them.

Straight to that small college town in rural Kenya now, our Christian Purefoy is there and he joins us live on the telephone now.

So, Christian, in terms of just trying to deal with the aftermath, I mean there are still probably investigative issues inside that university that the police and authorities are having to comb through. But what about finding the rest of the perpetrators and, in particular, the ringleader?

[12:30:07] CHRISTIAN PUREFOY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (via telephone): Yes, Ashleigh. Well, as you said, the (INAUDIBLE) Kenyan authorities say that they have killed four main perpetrators of this crime.