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CNN Saturday Morning News

British Terror Investigation Continues; War Report Released

Aired July 14, 2007 - 9:00   ET

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

T.J. HOLMES, CNN ANCHOR, CNN SATURDAY MORNING: Good morning to you, everybody. On this Saturday morning, I'm T.J. Holmes.
SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN CORRESPONDENT, CNN SATURDAY MORNING: And good morning. I'm Suzanne Malveaux.

HOLMES: We are going to begin with breaking news out of Britain. Another doctor has just been charged for his part in the attempted terror attacks in London and Glasgow. We want to get the latest right now from our Alfonso Van Marsh, who is at our London bureau. Hello to you. Update us on what's happening there.

ALFONSO VAN MARSH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The latest in this rapidly developing story stemming from those attacks on June 29th and June 30th. As you mentioned, Sabil Ahmed has been charged today under the Terrorism Act of 2000, which, T.J., in part reads, "Charged with having information, according to Metropolitan police, "having information which you know or believed may be of material assistance in preventing the commission by another an act of terrorism." Now, again, these developments happened very, very quickly. He is the third person charged again in connection with these failed car bomb attacks in London, and a car, which was driven and burst into flames at the Glasgow International Airport on the 30th. This investigation taking on not just dynamics here in this country but also internationally. One of those charged arrested in Australia and now two here in this country.

T.J.

HOLMES: Alphonso, what do we know is going to happen now? When do we expect him possibly to be in court again? What's the process like for him now?

VAN MARSH: Metropolitan police again say he was charged today and will appear in court at a later date. We do understand that could be as soon as Monday. Again, a lot of developments in this case. We'll have to wait and see when Mr. Ahmed does indeed appear in court. We do understand that could be as soon as Monday.

MALVEAUX: Do we know if he played a significant role? Do we have any sense of what his role was in this?

VAN MARSH: This is what's interesting about the accused, and it's important to stress the accused, Sabeel Ahmed. He went to the same, according to our sources, went to the same medical school and was trained as the suspect who has been arrested and charged in Brisbane, Australia. That is Dr. Mohammed Haneef. We both understand they trained at the same school. We understand that they both were working as doctors in this country.

Now, anything more than that, we don't know yet. We do expect to hear specifics on what Sabeel Ahmed is accused of doing or what role he may have played in these terror attacks when he does appear in court. Most likely as soon as Monday.

Suzanne.

MALVEAUX: OK. Thank you, Alphonso Van Marsh with the very latest. Ahmed as you said is the third person charged in this plot so far. Another doctor, Mohammed Haneef, appeared in an Australian court this morning. He is charged with providing support to a terrorist organization. Police are now collecting evidence at a home in western Australia as part of an ongoing investigation, and local reports say it is part of the London terror investigation. Haneef and Ahmed are cousins.

HOLMES: It's a classified document, just five pages long, prepared for the use of top U.S. policy makers. The conclusion, al Qaeda is the strongest it has been at any time since the 9/11 terror attacks. A senior government official tells CNN the analyses focuses on how al Qaeda is using remote areas of Pakistan as a safe haven. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff tells CNN the U.S. is working to counter al Qaeda's every move.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHAEL CHERTOFF, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: I think the real lesson here, and it's something we saw, for example, during the cold war is that we can never rest on our laurels. We have done a lot to secure this country over the last five years, and we've been fortunate, but also we've reaped the harvest of that in that we have not had a successful attack here. But the enemy is continuing to change and adapt, and we cannot be static. And that's why, as we go forward into this next year, I'm really urging people to take a close look at some of the additional security measures we're trying to put into place here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES: And the new al Qaeda report remains classified. Again, it was not issued in response to any specific threat.

MALVEAUX: New developments out of Iraq this morning. Iraq's prime minister publicly responds to the White House progress report on Iraq. Nouri al Maliki telling reporters that the Iraqi army and police are ready to take over security in the country if -- that is, if U.s. troops leave. But the prime minister admits the forces need more weapons and training. Al Maliki also said his government needs time to put in place the political benchmarks that Washington wants.

HOLMES: We've heard the Bush administration assessment of progress in Iraq and reaction from critics of the war. Our Jamie McIntyre has a fact check now from his position as senior correspondent at the Pentagon.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The Bush administration's interim review is an exercise in putting the best face on what the president himself admits is a bad situation.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE U.S.: I understand that. It's an ugly war.

MCINTYRE: Take the crucial benchmark of reducing the level of sectarian violence on which progress is judged "satisfactory." It's true sectarian violence is down if it's narrowly defined as Sunni versus Shia murders in Baghdad, but it's false that overall violence is lower. As a separate Pentagon report noted last month, violence across Iraq was unchanged. Especially when the number of Iraqis and U.S. troop deaths are factored in. Like most everything else in Iraq, it's a mixed picture.

BRIG. GEN. DAVID GRANGE (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: I think it's a balanced report. I think that the positives and negatives both came out and those areas in between that maybe a little bit of progress.

MCINTYRE: Of the seven other benchmarks that got satisfactory grades, none is an unqualified success. For example, yes, a constitutional review is done, but only after the Sunnis withdrew from the Parliament. Yes, three trained Iraqi brigades reported for duty but at less than full strength and not capable of operating independently. Yes, Sunni insurgents have been pushed out of Baghdad, but extortion, intimidation, and crime are still rampant.

And, yes, Iraq is spending $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction, but the report concedes it won't all be spent this year. The Bush administration stresses this is an interim report, which the criteria were whether progress is being made. September's report will have to show that some of the benchmarks are actually being met in order to get that satisfactory stamp.

Jamie McIntyre, CNN, the Pentagon.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MALVEAUX: And new developments in John McCain's presidential campaign. You are now looking at live pictures from Claremont, New Hampshire, this morning. McCain is being dogged by questions about his campaign's long-run future. He is having well publicized money problems, down to only $250,000 on hand. It is a mere pittance in the world of politics.

And there's word that another campaign staff shake-up is on the way, perhaps as early as Monday. Two top staffers left earlier this week and will return to New Hampshire when McCain takes questions from the crowd. Should be very, very interesting.

HOLMES: Meanwhile, he's arrested for one murder and suspected in five others. An Illinois truck driver's problems mounting today. Police say they might have nabbed a serial killer. Bruce Mendenhall is being held in Nashville, Tennessee. He's been formally charged with killing 25- year-old Sarah Holbert and dumping her body at a truck stop. A detective noticed Mendenhall's yellow 18-wheeler matched one that was linked to the case. The officer says he stopped Mendenhall and then noticed dried blood in the truck's cab.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I asked if I could get up inside the cab to have a visual look around, and he said OK. At that point, we got consent to search. I got up inside the vehicle, and I saw some more evidence that I considered incriminating at that time. And then we stopped at that point, and we felt very strongly that we were probably in the right truck.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES: Nashville police say Mendenhall has implicated himself in Holbert's death as well as five other murders in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Indiana.

MALVEAUX: An Amber Alert is out this morning for three missing children in Arizona. Police say in Kingman say that Marcel, Krystal and Brittany Shaffer are believed to be with their mother. Police think she was headed to Oregon. The mom, Sandra Shaffer, was denied custody of the children last year by a court in Oregon. The sheriff's office believes Shaffer is driving a green Pontiac Grand Am with the Arizona license plate 915 xbp.

HOLMES: New wildfires are burning across parts of Washington State this morning. The new fires were started by strong lightning storms across eastern and central parts of the state. So far, one home has been destroyed, but up to 50 others are being threatened now. Hundreds of firefighters are spread out across the state fighting those wildfires.

MALVEAUX: And California now dealing with the fallout of a costly delay for firefighters there. Emergency officials say veteran 911 operators dismissed fearful calls slowing the response to last month's Lake Tahoe fire. That fire destroyed more than 250 homes. We get more from our affiliate Mark Hevlin (ph) of affliate KXTV.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We can see smoke coming off the mountain to the west of us.

MARK HEVLIN (ph), KXTV: The first 911 call comes Sunday at 2:02 p.m. Yet CHP dispatchers are nonchalant.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah. They're doing a control burn there.

HEVLIN (ph): But it was anything but controlled. Even nine minutes later at 2:11 in the afternoon, two CHP dispatchers blowing off reports of fire several times.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Up the hill. Yeah, that's a controlled burn.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We're coming down Echo Summit, and I'm seeing white smoke on the side of --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Uh-huh. Is that by the airport? That's a controlled burn.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It appears from our review that a total of five calls were dismissed initially by the CHP dispatcher as controlled burns.

HEVLIN (ph): And a gap of precious time. A gap of seven to nine minutes before CHP dispatchers in Truckee even decide to check it out.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We saw a lot of smoke.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a control burn, I'm pretty sure. We're checking on it now.

HEVLIN (ph): The highway patrol investigating and obviously upset at what appear to be serious mistakes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're always concerned when we find that our employees failed to handle something or apparently, at this point in time, failed to follow proper protocol and policy. The dispatchers are temporarily relieved of their dispatching duties.

HEVLIN (ph): Two experienced dispatchers on the hot seat. It's more than embarrassing. These delays coming to light now could have made a critical difference in this devastating wildfire.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A lot of those people are our friends, our neighbors, and we feel very badly for the individuals that may have lost property.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MALVEAUX: That report from our affiliate KXTV. The two dispatchers had a combined total of 44 years experience.

HOLMES: All right. Keeping an eye on the fire danger. Bonnie Schneider in the Weather Center for us. Hello to you. Good morning.

BONNIE SCHNEIDER, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Good morning.

HOLMES: Still under threat out there?

SCHNEIDER: Absolutely. T.J. and Suzanne, we are watching critical fire danger for parts of the northwest and very, very hot temperatures in the southwest once again. I don't think we'll see records being shattered today, but we are going to see temperatures that are above normal like 108, 109, areas into Nevada and Arizona. And the critical fire danger exists in areas towards Utah and Wyoming and even parts of Montana. That's due to low relative humidity, strong gusty winds, and, of course, hot dry temperatures. Unfortunately, that will definitely continue for a good portion of the day today.

We're also tracking moisture across the Gulf of Mexico, and that is kicking up some storms. We're seeing that right now over the Dallas area into parts of Louisiana. And just north of Houston, we're also monitoring real-time lightning strikes across much of this region. This is a serious situation. If you're driving, watch out for sudden heavy downpours, particularly towards Mississippi and Louisiana. Look at this. We've got some powerful storms working its way through much of the mid south.

Speaking of storms, in just a short while, I'm going to have an update on typhoon man-yi. Back to you.

MALVEAUX: Thank you, Bonnie. We want to take you live to Senator John McCain, one of the presidential candidates, taking some questions from the audience from Claremont, New Hampshire.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN MCCAIN, (R) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: One of the things that I think I'm going to have to start doing is having town hall meetings probably with AARP or other organizations that are just devoted to health care because we could -- there they are. Great Americans all, yes. Thank you. There's more. Thank you. Little blatant pandering to AARP there. So anyway --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MALVEAUX: Obviously, Senator McCain talking about health care, an important issue. The other issue that people look to Senator McCain for is Iraq, very controversial on that subject. We'll get back to him as he makes some news.

Taking it back to weather, strong winds, high waves, a powerful storm blows through Japan. You are sending us your I-reports, and we are showing them in just a few minutes.

HOLMES: Plus easy loans plus high risk equals a chance you could lose your home. Show you how to keep it that is coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK

HOLMES: Well a pretty big shock expected in the housing market. Watch for over 1 million sub prime adjustable rate mortgages to reset at much higher rates in the coming months. That means a spike in foreclosures. CNN's money saver Gerri Willis wants to explain what this means for homeowners.

Gerri, we're talking about we're going to see a spike in foreclosures. Just how many foreclosures are we talking about here?

GERRI WILLIS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's pretty impressive. By October, which is going to be the peak, there will be $50 billion in mortgage debt that is resetting. That means these are adjustable rate mortgages with which the interest rate is going higher. As a result over the next couple of years, you're going to see 2.5 million Americans losing their home to foreclosure. This is a very big change, very bad news for a lot of people.

I want to show you some numbers for just a second here to give you an idea of how big a deal this mortgage reset is. Let's say you took out a $200,000 adjustable rate mortgage three years ago with an interest rate of 4.25 percent. Your mortgage would have been $708 each and every month until the reset and then your mortgage would have doubled, to $1,408. You can see T.J. what a big burden this is for people.

HOLMES: That is a big deal, double your mortgage payment.

WILLIS: Really bad.

HOLMES: Is there any particular reason this year is going to be worse or a bigger year for foreclosures than we've seen in the past?

WILLIS: What you're seeing is the result of loose lending standards from the mortgage industry. They basically gave money to anybody who could fog a mirror is the way some critics describe this. They gave out a lot of money easily. A lot of people who were so-called sub prime borrowers, people who didn't meet the lending standards used a few years ago, and now all of this is coming home to roost.

T.J.

HOLMES: All right. It's about to come home to roost. You know it's coming. You know you're going to have a reset and you are going to have a new mortgage payment you maybe can't handle. What should a homeowner do?

WILLIS: First of all, if you can get a new loan, that's ideal. A lot of people won't be able to. If you think you're in trouble with your mortgage today or you're going to be in trouble with it in a couple of weeks, you need to contact your lender directly. Make sure you call the loss mitigation department. Those are the critical folks to contact. Not the fellow who sold you the loan in the first place. These are the people who can modify your loan, who can give you lower payments. Who can stretch out your payments over a longer period of time and help you cut your mortgage debt each and every month.

There's also another thing you can do. You can get a short sale. What that means, it sounds complicated. It's not. You find your own buyer for your house. Now, maybe they can't pay everything that you owe to the bank, but the bank may agree to accept less in order not to own the house themselves. T.J., people out there think the bank wants to own their home. That's not the case. They will negotiate with you.

HOLMES: You've got some options. Got to go through a little bit. Still, you've got some options at least. "Open House" we've got coming up. What do we have to look forward to this morning?

WILLIS: We're going to talk about auctioning homes. The market is so tough out there that more and more buildings are auctioning apartments and homes as an opportunity for people out there who want to buy. We're going to talk about infomercial products and pool safety. We've got a nice segment on that. How to keep your kids safe and not spend a ton of dough.

T.J. HOLMES: All right. Our money saver as well, safety tips in there as well. Gerri Willis, always a pleasure. Thank you so much. We'll see you on "Open House."

WILLIS: Great to see you, T.J.

HOLMES: A reminder to you "Open House" hosted by the lovely Gerri Willis airs every Saturday morning at 9:30 Eastern. That's right here on CNN.

VERONICA DE LA CRUZ, DOT COM DESK: As typhoon man-yi continues to rock Japan. You've been sending us pictures and video. We are going to have some of your i-reports next on CNN SATURDAY MORNING

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MALVEAUX: We've been telling you about typhoon man-yi hitting Japan. Many of you have sent us your videos of the storm. Veronica De La Cruz at the dot com desk has been sorting through them. This is a very popular story. What do the i-reports tell you?

DE LA CRUZ: We're seeing it all over the Web. We're getting a lot of i-reports from Japan. We're going to start with this one from Zach Jump. He captured the storm as it punched its way across its way the southern island of Okinawa. It was powerful but homes in this part of the world are built to withstand this sort of weather.

Take a look at this video, this is also from Okinawa it was sent to us by Julianne Miles. The good news, here looking through all the pictures and the videos, that besides all the heavy rain and high winds we've been seeing, we haven't really seen a lot of damage. Probably the worst has been downed branches, some power lines. I do know that people have been injured as a result of this storm.

Japan is peppered with live Web cams as well. They're up and running 24/7. We're looking at one right now. This is downtown Osaka. The typhoon is headed in that direction. Even though it looks quiet right now, the situation will probably get worse in the next several hours. We're going to head over to CNN meteorologist Bonnie Schneider. She's been monitoring the storm. We're looking at that live shot there and pretty clear picture. But things are going to get worse.

SCHNEIDER: Unfortunately, they are. As we take a look at this satellite perspective. Some of the moisture of the storm working its way towards areas like Tokyo. Something we're watching.

DE LA CRUZ: This is just like a hurricane. A typhoon really is just a hurricane. Right, Bonnie?

SCHNEIDER: That's right. It can be confusing. These storms have different names depending on where you are in the world. In the North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific, this is called a hurricane. That's a term we're familiar with here in the United States. However, in the Northwest Pacific Ocean, the storm is called a typhoon. Finally in the Indian Ocean, there's yet another classification, a tropical cyclone. Really all of these storms, Veronica, are tropical cyclones. DE LA CRUZ: I wanted to ask you about their season, their typhoon season. Is it just like our hurricane season?

SCHNEIDER: It's similar but not quite. You can have a typhoon at any time during the year. Our season is more defined. It begins June 1st and goes through November 30th. They tend to have the same type of storms the same time of year because the ocean temperatures are warmer.

VERONICA DE LA CRUZ: What does it look like now? I'm going to go ahead and step out of the way and bring us up to date.

SCHNEIDER: Let's take a look at our graphics. What we can show you is we are looking at major improvements so far for the storm. In fact, what we are expecting is conditions to definitely get a little bit better as this storm works its way through. At one point, it was a category 4 storm, but now it's a category 1, which is some good news. As we take a look at our graphics. We're going to come back to that in just a moment. In the meantime, it's important to note the storm is still pounding the coast of Japan. We'll have another update shortly. Back to you.

HOLMES: All right, Bonnie. We appreciate you. Thanks so much, you and Veronica.

Meanwhile, got some video to take a peek at. You might not believe what you see. SUVs get bigger and bigger all the time, don't they? Actually, that's a tank. We'll tell but police who chased that through the suburbs. That story is ahead on this CNN SATURDAY MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MALVEAUX: Talk about a rampage. And it comes from down under.

HOLMES: While you were sleeping -- what's going on here? While you were sleeping an Australian man was waking folks up. He got a hold of a restored army personnel carrier, an ATC, or you might want to call it a tank. Police watched helplessly as the ATC rammed a power substation in a Sydney suburb and gave chase. Certainly not an easy takedown as you can image.

MALVEAUX: Police pursued the rampaging tank for about ninety minutes before it stalled and then the driver was arrested.

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