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At This Hour

Fire at Chicago Air Traffic Control Facility Causes Travel Chaos in U.S.; British Parliament Debates Joining Air Strikes; Boehner: Vote on War Will Wait; Breaking Coverage of ISIS Firefight on Turkey-Syria Border

Aired September 26, 2014 - 11:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, I'm John Berman. Michaela is off today.

Breaking news @THISHOUR, travel mayhem, flight delays across the country, there are delays in hundreds of flights, even canceled, after a fire broke out at an air traffic control facility near Chicago.

It was a ground stop at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, also Midway. You can just imagine what that means for those very busy airports there, also the ripple effects felt across the entire country.

And it all seems to have a strange and suspicious beginning. I want to go right now to our Ted Rowlands who's at O'Hare Airport, a buzzing, busy, probably frustrated O'Hare Airport.

So, Ted, how did this start?

TED ROWLANDS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: John, it started at an air traffic control facility about 40 miles away from Chicago in Aurora, Illinois. This is a facility that basically shepherds the planes in and out of both O'Hare and Midway Airport.

And this morning a contracts employee at that facility attempted to kill himself by cutting his wrist and apparently starting a fire inside the facility. That, of course, triggered the evacuation of the facility.

That individual did survive his self-inflicted wounds. They are questioning him, are the police, the FBI, and the ATF. And at this point there's no indication this was a terrorist act on any level.

In fact, there was just a news conference held a few minutes ago out in the Aurora area and the local police chief there said don't go there, this is not terrorism. At this point there's no indication.

Now, we don't know that individual's motives, but we do know the effect of what he did, apparently, and that is this. You can see literally thousands of people just here at O'Hare.

The same scenario is taking place at Midway and realistically at airports around the country because the planes here that have -- should have been coming and going have been stuck for hours now, and there's no indication from the FAA when flights will resume.

The -- right now there are a few flights coming in being handled by Indianapolis's control center and the hope is that other cities, Indianapolis and Minneapolis, Kansas city can help out O'Hare and Chicago and get flights moving.

But at this point these passengers are not being told when they can leave, and as you mentioned, a lot of frustrated and, quite frankly, sad people in line hoping to start their weekend.

BERMAN: So no information about when that ground stop might be lifted, people in line behind you, that line not moving, the planes on the ground not moving.

Ted Rowlands, appreciate you being there. Thanks so much.

So many flights -- if you travel, you know this -- so many flights go through Chicago. More than 800 flights have been canceled there today so far, and, really, this could have an impact throughout the entire country.

I want to check in with Jennifer Gray right now. Jennifer, give us a sense of the bigger picture, kind of the scene from above.

JENNIFER GRAY, AMS : Yeah, this is huge. This is impacting a lot of people across the entire country.

And one thing just to update you on, we just found out, John, the ground stop has been extended for one more hour, so best-case scenario, the ground stop could be lifted by noon Eastern time.

Of course, that could be updated closer to noon and extended farther out, so one thing to note it looks like for at least another hour the planes will be on the ground.

This is O'Hare and you can see major, major delays. This is FlightAware's Misery Map. Not only affecting O'Hare and Midway, you have these planes that can't get on the ground to turn around and go to other cities.

So you have places like Denver, San Francisco, LAX, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, D.C., and New York, among other cities, feeling the delays. So people sitting in airports across the country and cannot get out.

We have seen over a thousand delays with Midway and O'Hare with planes coming in and going out so far this morning -- a thousand cancellations, that is. And you can see from Flight Explorer, Chicago and all the areas surrounding it, this is the facility that controlled the entire region, so you not only have those two airports, you have regional airports, you have the smaller airports that are being affected by this, John, so folks all across the country affected in a huge way.

BERMAN: If we can keep that picture up for one second, you can see that area over Chicago where there are no planes flying, that blank area. You never see that over Chicago because it's one of the busiest flight areas, one of the busiest airports, two of them, Midway and O'Hare, in the country.

This will take some time to untangle this mess, several hours of ground stops. Jennifer Gray, thank you so much for that.

If you are flying today you must, must check with your airline to find out the status of your flight, particularly in Chicago but not just there, all around the country.

A lot of questions about how this could happen. Remember, it didn't happen at the airport, it happened at a facility about 45 miles away.

I want to bring our aviation expert Mary Schiavo in Charleston, South Carolina. Mary, first of all, let's just start with what this kind of place this is, an air traffic control facility. It's not a tower. It's not at the airport. It's about 45 miles away.

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: That's right, John. What this does is it controls traffic that's already up in the air. This doesn't give planes instructions to take off or land, but it brings traffic from all around the country to the Chicago area.

It controls traffic passing over the Chicago area, and then gets planes after they've taken off out of the Chicago area. It's what's called an en route center.

Now, they can switch it off to other en route centers, but this was at a busy time in travel, and our facilities, our air traffic control facilities, are already operating not at capacity but pretty close.

So to transfer all of the Aurora center traffic to another en route center is a big job and it's difficult, and they have to ground the traffic, so there's no dangers of collisions.

BERMAN: You would think there would be backups for these system, backups for the backups, backups for the backups for the backups. Is that what's going on? It's just taking time to shift down the line?

SCHIAVO: You're absolutely right, John. They're supposed to be double backups. They're supposed to have a system that operates, a second backup system for maintenance at all times, and then a third kind of emergency system.

But they don't all function, and what we have found over the years is they don't operate in real time, so if one system has to be switched, it takes the other system time to catch up. You don't just flip a switch and at once someone else is controlling the traffic. It takes much more than that.

And now we have subsequently learned that there was some damage to the communications systems, to radio communications, because of the fire, so it's taking a little longer to sort it out. It wasn't just -- as initially reported it wasn't just a fire in the bathroom; it's much more serious than that. But the controllers have to be, first and foremost -- they're trained for their particular areas. They're trained for the Aurora center, et cetera, so when you hand the traffic off, sometimes they increase separations between the planes just to add a margin of safety, and that's going on as well, too, so that's adding to the delay.

But the delay on the ground stop is what's keeping everyone safe right now.

BERMAN: You want to be careful.

On the subject of being careful, you know, what about security concerns at these types of facilities? This wasn't an employee. That was contractor.

If a contractor can cause this much mayhem, does that raise concerns about security at facilities like this?

SCHIAVO: Well, it does, but it shouldn't. See, now, the FAA has many more contract employees than they have actual employees. For example, if you look at inspectors, we only have like 3,000 or 4,000 inspectors, but we have many times that in contract employees and others.

Same thing with air traffic control, we have persons who are on the payroll of the Federal Aviation doing air traffic control, and then we have contractors for a couple reasons. One, they're considered by the government to be less expensive, and, two, they hire what they need for the job and they're not on the permanent federal payroll.

But they are supposed to go through that background, not a full-field background check but a rudimentary background check. Just like everyone else, we're supposed to know who they are, that they're citizens, they're lawful green-card holders, and we're supposed to know who those employees are on facilities.

But as even with pilots, not everybody that works in Federal Aviation Administration has any kind of mental evaluation or evaluations to really see how stable one is. That just doesn't go on. People think it does, but those employees don't have to submit to that.

BERMAN: It does raise questions.

Mary Schiavo, thank you so much for helping us understand this.

Again, the breaking news, the headline @THISHOUR, a ground stop in Chicago because of this fire at an off-site facility there. No word yet on when that ground stop might be lifted, so there will be serious travel issues for thousands and thousands and thousands of people over a big part of the country today.

Stay with us, we'll bring you updates as they come in.

Ahead for us @THISHOUR, not necessarily ISIS but it's the al-Qaeda linked Khorasan Group that might be the main concern for the FBI right now, worrying that that terror cell filled with al-Qaeda veterans could attack the U.S. at any time.

So why did the Pentagon say U.S. air strikes against Khorasan were so successful?

Plus, the U.S. bombing its own equipment in Iraq, equipment it gave the Iraqi military but is now in the hands of ISIS fighters.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: New developments in the war against ISIS, U.S. Central Command says American fighter jets and drones have launched 10 new air strikes against the terror group in both Syria and Iraq, military vehicles in a bunker the latest target.

Meantime, Denmark today became the latest country to join the coalition to try to destroy ISIS. The Danish prime minister announced she will send seven F-16 fighter jets to take part in these air strikes.

Right now, British lawmakers are debating whether they, too, will join the offensive.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Does he accept that without the Iraqi army being able to take and hold ground, there is a real risk that air strikes alone will not just prove in effective but could become counterproductive, especially civilian casualties mount and especially if ISIL actually uses the fact that they've withstood the might of the West and still held its ground, spins that story, which it has so far managed to do?

DAVID CAMERON, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER: Well, I would disagree with my honorable friend on this basis, that the air action that's already taken place by the Americans and to a degree by the French, has already made a difference.

Lives have been saved. Christians, Yazidis and other minorities who otherwise would be butchered has been saved by that action.

Quite rightly, I'm not prepared to put our own combat troops on the ground. We should be working with the Iraqis, working with the Kurds, so they become more effective.

But we can't wait for that and allow minorities and others to be butchered and for the risk to our own country to increase without taking action.

GEORGE GALLOWAY, MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT: This will not be solved. Every matter will be made worse. Extremism will spread farther and deeper around the world just like happened as a result of the last Iraq War.

The people outside can see it, but the fools in here who draw a big salary and big expenses cannot or will not see it like the honorable lady with her asinine intervention.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: The passion of open debate.

In the United States, the FBI saying they are not convinced air strikes have wiped out the al Qaeda-linked Khorasan Group. That's the terror cell that's been trying to perfect a non-metallic bomb that could evade airport security. FBI director James Comey warning that Khorasan could attack the U.S. at any time. He said tomorrow, the coming weeks or months.

We'll talk about that in a second, but first just a moment ago we showed you sound and pictures of the debate in Britain going on about the war. There's no small irony that a nation that still has a queen is actually having a legislative debate about war while a Congress of the United States took a pass and went home to campaign. But not only that, the Speaker of the House now says a vote will not come right after the election. No, John Boehner wants to wait until January because what's the rush?

Joining us, our political commentators, Republican strategist Margaret Hoover and Daily Beast editor and chief John Avlon. Margaret, look at what they managed to do in Britain. A debate in the house of commons.

MARGARET HOOVER, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, there's a difference between a parliamentary system and the kind of representative democracy we have here. I mean, they don't have elections right around the corner, and this is - there's the rub. So what we're going to see is -- I don't think we are going to see -- we were talking about this, there is a deficit of interest in paying proper attention to Syria and making sure we beat ISIS in our Congress. I think there is a massive difference of opinion about how to go after them. Even members of the House of Representatives who voted not to arm the Syrian rebels, many of them believed the reason we shouldn't arm Syrian rebels is that our forces should go in and do it ourselves. Nobody can do I better than the United States military.

So I don't think we're seeing a retreat to isolationism in the United States in the face of serious national security threats. But I do think, because of our system we're not primed to have an open and honest debate eight weeks before our election, or 45 days.

BERMAN: You said there's a difference in the system, so one of the differences is we have a Constitution and in that constitution, John, it says that Congress shall declare war. I agree with Margaret here, this isn't a retreat to isolationism. This is just fear of facing the political consequences of saying what you think out loud.

JOHN AVLON, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: That's exactly right. So they punt a provision of the constitution until after the election. I mean, the problem with what John Boehner is saying, of course, is that you don't get to take on issues of war and peace and constitutional responsibility at a time when it's politically convenient and that's transparently what's occurring here. A lack of desire to take a tough vote before a tough midterm election. A lack of desire to put it in the front of a lame duck session and see where things are come the 114th Congress. It just -- it strains credibility. It actually probably adds a little

bit of insult to the injury that's been done to the constitution on this issue. And, frankly, lame duck is the only time this divided dysfunctional Congress has been able to get anything done the last couple years. So it's not a profile encourage moment.

HOOVER: John, let's be clear, though. The President isn't going to Congress saying you guys have to vote because guess what? The President actually believes he has constitutional authority from the 2002 authorization for military force in Iraq. And what's the most ironic about that is that specific provision is a provision that two months ago Susan Rice sent a letter to the Congress encouraging Congress to repeal that provision. The provision now that they're relying on in case they need to go to Iraq, which speaks to what is really a bungling of a strategy in foreign policy by this President which I think what his 38 percent approval ratings in foreign policy are about. and that it means, frankly, he's lost credibility and faith in the American people and being able to handle this situation strategically and effectively.

BERMAN: Well, if you think he's bungled it so badly, Congress, then vote on it. Let's move that aside for one second, John, because there's something interesting going on in the world right now. You have Britain voting to get in on these air strikes, and they almost certainly will. You have Denmark saying they will join the airstrikes. Belgium, the Netherlands, you have this coalition of five Arab nations. It almost seems like countries are lining up now to take part, at least in the battle in Iraq. That's a phenomenon the United States hasn't seen too much of over the years as it engaged in these types of operations.

AVLON: No. And while the Bush administration cobbled together a quote/unquote "coalition of the willing", it involved not a lot of major powers or major Arab powers at that particular time in contrast to the first Gulf War. So this is significant and it's a test of the President's attempt to create a muscular multilateral alternative to the unilateralist rhetoric and philosophy of the first Bush administration. And the fact that five Arab nations are involved in these strikes is so significant in terms of creating a broader coalition against ISIS so that it's not simply dismissed as the West versus the Arab world. It's a really significant step and a hopeful sign, frankly, when you see Arab countries standing up to ISIS, to terrorist organizations, that's a major step forward for stability and civilization.

HOOVER: John, you and I both know this is not just good will. They're not doing it because it's the right thing to do, it's because it's in their country's national security interest. Guess who's also is vulnerable in this fight? Denmark, the UK, all the countries in Europe. This should be a huge wake up call to Americans that this is seriously in America's national security interest --

BERMAN: I want you guys to stand by for a second. Margaret Hoover, John Avlon, I have a remarkable picture I want to show you both and everyone out there right now. I believe we have pictures right now from inside Syria. What you're looking at right there, live pictures of ISIS engaged in fighting right now. We are going to take you to this battle which is going on at this moment, just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: There's something remarkable happening right now, something I have not seen before, I don't think any of us have seen before. Breaking news from the Syrian-Turkish border where our CNN crew is actually seeing ISIS fighters engaged in a battle right now. I want to go to Phil Black who is on the Turkish side of that border. Phil, set the stage for me, what are you seeing?

PHIL BLACK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: John, we are just on the Turkish side of a border on a hill top surrounded by a crowd, and understandably so. What we are seeing, as you say, it is pretty extraordinary. We're zooming in slowly and steadily to a ridge line just across on the Syrian side of the border and you should start to make out some figures on the top of that ridge line. They are, we're pretty confident, ISIS fighters in action.

What those fighters are doing has been part of a broader offensive in this region for the last week or so, moving through this northern region of Syria through what is largely ethnically Kurdish territory towards the town of Kobani, which is just south of here. The reason why this is important is because it's triggered an enormous exodus. Hundreds of thousands of refugees heading across the board in to Turkey in the last week. Also because of fighting like this.

These fighters have been on that ridge line for the better part of the afternoon trading small arms fire with their Kurdish opponents on an opposing ridge line. It appears they have been driven back slightly. Earlier in the afternoon they were making their way down the hill.

They received incoming fire and were driven up that hill and a CNN photojournalist saw some of those ISIS spotters take casualties on the top of the hill. Still seeking shelter, they are trying to use that territory to their advantage and protect themselves from incoming fire from their Kurdish opponents.

As I speak there is small arms fire being traded. I'm not sure if you can hear it over our microphones. But that's what has been going on really for the last few hours. And in addition to that we're hearing a lot of heavy artillery fire as well. Mortars, one not far from that ISIS position only about ten minutes ago or so.

Dusk is falling now. It's getting a little bit harder to make out what's going on at that distance so I apologize for that. And the fighting itself appears to be slowing as well. As it stands at the moment, those ISIS fighters appear to have been stopped or at the very least their advanced slowed down at that location by the fighting of their Kurdish opponents. The thing I think is quite striking, watching those ISIS fighters.

I'm just being told, sorry John, that one of those fighters at the top of the hill was just injured. They've just taken casualties at the top of that hill. That information from CNN photojournalist Claria, operating the camera. I think you can see it as well. The fighting is ongoing even as dusk falls right now. And this is the fighting going on throughout this region here of northern Syria. As I mentioned the town of Kobani earlier, it's the major town here.

That's what they're trying to advance towards. Those Kurdish fighters on the ground are telling us ISIS is not just advancing from the east, where we are, but also from the south and the west as well. The local fighters have been able to slow that advance somewhat, but over the last couple days ISIS has still made progress.

What I started to touch on earlier, what I think is quite striking is you see those fighters out in the open, on the top of that ridge there is that they are being -- they are not being interfered with at all by any form of air power and that's really a crucial point that the fighters on the ground have made to us and the many refugees we've been talking to crossing into Turkey in recent days.

They've all been asking the question, where is the coalition air fire that is striking positions elsewhere in Syria, elsewhere in Iraq but not here on the ground where ISIS is still advancing? Still trying to claim new territory. Where refugees tell us they have still been killing innocent civilians. That is the scene here. An extraordinary scene as dusk is falling here on the Syrian border. ISIS fighters in action. We saw tracer fire move across the skyline there. Something of an ooh and aah from the crowd here. This crowd of Turkish Kurds. When they have seen a lot of incoming fire, they've been cheering their Kurdish brothers on the other side. So what is clear is dusk is falling but the fight is very much continuing.

BERMAN: Phil, stick with me if you can, please be as careful as you need to be in this situation because we have seen, what I believe to be tracers or some kind of fire going by on the pictures as well as the gunfire we can hear the gun fire. This really raises several important issues all at once. As you say it shows the enormous range these ISIS fighters are operating in across Syria and Iraq as well.

(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

I believe we are now hearing cheering as the battle is being taken to ISIS right now. I think the people where Phil is, these refugees who have been driven out by ISIS, the human toll from these ISIS fighters right now. And the other thing it illustrates, Phil, as you say is the failure of Turkey to act, Turkey not part of this coalition now battling ISIS. And the coalition partners with the United States not willing, I think, to go after these ISIS fighters perhaps near the Turkish border.

Phil, if you're still there, tell me a little bit more of what you're seeing right now.

BLACK: Sure, John. You make the point about the Turkish military. They are here patrolling this heavily fortified border. They have checkpoints here, armored vehicles patrols. What you were hearing was, yes, the crowd cheering as they have been through the afternoon as their Kurdish brothers, as the ethnic Kurdish population stretches across the border between Turkey and Syria. These are largely Turkish Kurds but they are here watching their Kurdish brothers fight ISIS in the distance.