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CNN NEWSROOM

View from Aboard a Search Ship; NYPD Officers Turn Backs to De Blasio Again; Boston Bombing Trial to Begin Today

Aired January 5, 2016 - 09:00   ET

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


ANA CABRERA, CNN ANCHOR: Good Monday morning. I'm Ana Cabrera in for Carol Costello. Thanks so much for spending your Monday with me.

More storms, more setbacks in the search for the all-important black boxes of AirAsia Flight 8501. Bad weather cut short today's search efforts. And danger also lurks beneath the rough seas. Divers facing zero visibility on the sea floor which are sure to be littered with sharp and tangled wreckage from the plane.

Now search officials are still hopeful that large shadowy objects are indeed the plane's fuselage. But one piece has already been dismissed. It turns out it was a ship wreck.

So electronics will play a huge role in the ongoing search effort. The USS Fort Worth is now the second U.S. Navy ship to take part in the search. The Fort Worth is equipped with side scan sonar and can help map this area.

The search area is vast. The weather vicious and unforgiving. And in monsoon season, these conditions aren't likely to loosen their stranglehold on the Java Sea any time soon.

CNN's Paul Hancocks braved those rough seas as one of the very few reporters to venture aboard a search vessel and she in fact traveled to the area labeled Sector IV as you're looking at this map.

Paula is joining us now.

What can you tell us?

PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Ana, certainly the adverse weather conditions are being talked about. A lot of officials tell me that this is the biggest obstacle in this search operation.

As you say on Sunday we did get the chance to see firsthand exactly how it is affecting those who are trying to find both bodies and debris.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HANCOCKS (voice-over): The deserted beaches of west Borneo, Indonesia, belie the horrors out at sea. More than 100 nautical miles to the search zone, calm waters and sunshine soon disappear. (On camera): Now we've been on the sea now for about four hours.

We've got another three or four hours to go. And as you can see, the weather has started to close in the closer we get to this crash location. But we're being told that even though these waves are fairly high, and you can see it's a lot choppier than it was, that this is still considered fairly good weather. This is better than it has been for some days.

(Voice-over): The crew look for debris and bodies. One of them spots something. He's unsure what exactly. The captain calls it in. A larger ship in the area will investigate.

This search and rescue boat has a specific mission, to deliver a pinger locater to help with the vital search for the so-called black boxes. But the captain is nervous about the weather.

"I feel a heavy moral burden," he says. "I have a responsibility to keep those on board safe. But it's so important to help find bodies and debris. Larger ships can cope with these conditions," he says. "But this is not a large ship."

Sector Four of the search zone, the contact boat is in sight. Time to hand over the equipment. Easier said than done.

(On camera): One of the men who's in charge of that equipment was going to jump across, but, quite frankly, he doesn't want to. Now he said it's simply too dangerous.

(Voice-over): Next job, transferring the boat from which to operate the equipment. A task the crew struggles with until dark. He will have to admit defeat, at least for today. An exhausted crew returns to land with only half a mission accomplished.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HANCOCKS: Now this really is a huge international effort at this point. Two U.S. ships are working in the area. Also assets from Australia, Russia, France, Singapore, Malaysia, just to name a few. But of course without improved weather conditions which aren't expected any time soon, there's a limit to what they can do -- Ana.

CABRERA: And of course time is of the essence. Just three weeks until those pingers go -- pingers go dead.

Paula Hancocks, thank you for that report.

Let's turn now to our experts. Tim Taylor is a specialist in underwater sea operations with an emphasis on imagery and unmanned vehicles which he's going to walk us through one of those that he has with him.

Also joining us is CNN safety analyst David Soucie.

Gentlemen, with the rough seas keeping those dive teams out of the water, much of the focus does turn on locating the plane's black boxes by chasing down those tiny signals from the pingers. And here's what the pings sound like in a perfect world with no

competing underwater sounds. Listen.

Pretty clear, right? But as you can see, not all that loud. Now add in other sounds like echo, engine noise, even schools of fish. And listen to this.

Just sounds like static, right? Well, Tim, how difficult is it to hear the pinger when searchers are dealing with a churning ocean and lots of other noise?

TIM TAYLOR, SEA OPERATION AND SUBMERSIBLE SPECIALIST: It requires some post processing. You can record it and then bring it back and filter out a lot of that noise. And professionals can pick it up. But you might not pick it up in real time which is a problem because you don't know -- you want to triangulate on this item and you have to kind of analyze that data so.

CABRERA: I want you to show us what you have there in front of you because I know that's one of the tools searchers can use, maybe not necessarily to pick up the pingers but in looking for the objects that may be on the ocean floor there.

TAYLOR: Well, this payload right now on this AUV is sonar. But a pinger locater payload can be adapted to this system. And these can be launched to locate pingers as well. It would come up and then let -- you can download the data off the radium antenna or Wi-Fi, believe it or not, and look for pingers as well. So this can be employed for different things for different payloads. This particular payload is a sonar payload.

CABRERA: How interesting.

And, David, obviously there was a lot of hope over the weekend that more debris had been found perhaps, some bigger chunks that could have been the fuselage. And now we know that it was in fact, at least one of those pieces was that of a ship wreck. How big of a setback is that?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, it's a huge set back. If all of those pieces that they had in that area are from that shipwreck which is possible, Dave Gallo with the Woods Hole Institute have warned us early on that this area is just riddled with shipwrecks and aircraft crashes. And there's been wars fought in this area. So it's going to be difficult sorting through those things especially in these weather conditions.

CABRERA: Tim, one of the big issues involving the weather is the very poor visibility underwater for divers because of these rough seas. I mean, in some places it's zero visibility. Can special technology then be more effective in those types of conditions?

TAYLOR: Yes, it's getting that technology down there. Sonar can look through all that turbid water or dirty water, and can see what's there. And you can actually get real close-up pictures of it with these tools. But it's getting them there. With this autonomous vehicle, you can get in and under the waves and not have that effect of the up-and-down motion that you would with any towed sonar.

So these things you can launch multiple AUVs like this and cover -- you know, I've got a remote right here in my hand and it's -- and it can run six of these vehicles. So you can launch missions, download data through your laptops. So one vehicle or one person can do the work of six people that's being done right now with the towed away.

CABRERA: Wow. What are the limitations?

TAYLOR: Well, obviously like anything, launching and recovering these things, getting them on and off the boat tend to have some limitations. But because these are autonomous, we're finding we can up that threshold of launching these things in a little bit rougher sea and bringing them on the boat with some techniques or even helicopters can drop these things and pick them up with divers.

So they can start in rough seas start getting the search underway which, again, this is the future. There's very few of these in the field right now. And five or six years from now, they'll be everywhere.

CABRERA: I want to pivot just a little bit to the crash investigation. There's a new meteorological analysis of the accident that has been just released. Indonesian meteorological experts now say an engine problem that was related to icing was the most likely weather related factor in this crash versus turbulence, for example.

And I want to bring in our Chad Myers to explain a little bit more about this.

Chad, help us understand.

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Well, we have to think about having a glass of iced tea on a southern front porch in the summer. What happens to that glass of iced tea? You get condensation on the outside. Well, at 30 degrees below zero, it's condensation that's liquid. It's condensation that's ice. It literally will freeze right to the airplane itself.

And here's how it happens. I've showed you this graphic now for days. Plane flying at 32,000 feet, the sounding says that was about 30 degrees below zero. Flying through a wall of weather likely trying to find a hole between two big storms. But two big storms can actually make another storm in between grow rather rapidly. This rapidly uprising air has a dew point that is higher than the temperature of the plane.

So as soon as that plane gets into these bumps. And you've seen it, you've been flying enough that when you kind of come down for a landing and you see these cumulus clouds that's when the plane starts to bump. Well, these cumulus clouds were rapidly rising in the air and taking that plane and maybe even pushing it up. There's no way we know that this plane could by itself go to 6,000, 9,000 feet of climb per minute. So something else had to be pushing it up.

When that pushing up happens, you also get the dew point to rise. An instant rhyme ice situation can occur on that airplane. I've seen it happen myself where the entire plane has been iced over. And I'm looking out two little spots in the window where I flew through a cumulus cloud and I shouldn't have. It can happen. And certainly I think this is what they're talk about. Rapidly ice accumulation on either the -- on the fitting edge or of course they're talking about the engine itself.

But we'll have to see. It's very, very early without even -- without the black boxes. This is way too early to be thinking that this is the cause for sure.

CABRERA: Right. But there have been a lot of theories that have floated around.

David, what do you think about this icing theory?

SOUCIE: Well, I think that the only way that this would have happened to the engines is if the engine deiced or anti-ice system had not been armed or turned on. But typically it would have been in this scenario. There are cases before of aircraft that have not turned that on and it suffered the consequences. But in this case, as Chad said, it's far, far too early to start looking for causal factors.

Right now we're just looking at what might have contributed and then later once we get those black boxes we'll be able to determine if indeed it was icing on the engines.

CABRERA: Was icing on the engines the cause of any other plane crash that you can remember?

SOUCIE: There is one. I'm sorry, I can't recall it specifically right now. There's one accident that was caused because of the icing. But it was -- again it was only because the engine icing, the systems that are designed to prevent it weren't armed.

CABRERA: OK, so different circumstances perhaps.

Tim Taylor, David Soucie, Chad Myers, thanks to all of you.

And still to come. A silent protest as thousands of family, friends, and fellow police officers gather to remember a fallen NYPD officer. Some use this opportunity to voice silently their displeasure with Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Miguel Marquez is following this for us -- Miguel.

MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Is it getting worse or better between the NYPD and the mayor's office? We'll have that coming right up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CABRERA: Welcome back. For the second time, police officers are from across the country used the fallen officer's funeral to hold a silent protest against New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. Thousands of officers lined the streets outside a Brooklyn funeral home yesterday to honor Officer Wenjian Liu. And when de Blasio spoke, some of these police officers turned their backs to the screens, just like they did when de Blasio spoke at the funeral for Liu's partner, Rafael Ramos.

Miguel Marquez is joining me now. Miguel, this gesture is the second time we saw this happen in as many weeks. I mean obviously it looks like the relationship really is still strained between the mayor and this police department.

MARQUEZ: If you had asked me yesterday during the funeral -- because we did not see them turn their backs in front of the funeral home, we didn't see the "Dump de Blasio" signs right in front of the press like they did the previous week. It was more subtle. They did it farther down, farther away from where the press was. As it turns out, hundreds if not thousands of police officers turned their backs on the mayor. All of this after Bill Bratton, the police commissioner here, asked, didn't command, asked in a memo that the police officers not do it, that it was a sign of disrespect to the fallen officer.

We spoke to one New York City detective that was previously with the New York City Police. Here's what he says has officers so frustrated at city hall.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PATRICK BROSNAN, RETIRED NYPD DETECTIVE: I do not blame the mayor. What I stated, and what I have stated in the past and continue to state, is that the mayor, through his irresponsible rhetoric, he has responsibility to know that rhetoric has consequences. In this case, the consequences were deadly. His rhetoric, his tacit approval, of the anti-police brigade emboldened a coward, empowered a coward like Ismaaiyl Brinsley, to get on a bus, drive up here and assassinate two of New York's finest sitting in a radio car on a sunny afternoon.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MARQUEZ: This is where the anger stems from. They not only believe that the mayor and the rhetoric he used caused these two officer's deaths or at least contributed to it, they also feel that the city hall doesn't have their backs if they get into trouble, if they get into a sticky situation, that the city hall does not have their backs. And even some officers yesterday insisting that city hall was coordinating with protesters in order to allow these protests to happen in New York.

There is -- when we began the day yesterday, I thought the things were getting better between the police and city hall because you had the meetings, you had --

CABRERA: Right, the mayor met with five different police unions before this.

MARQUEZ: Met with the unions, there seemed to be movement. Now after talking to a lot of police officers yesterday, I'm not sure that anything is any better. It may be worse. It feels --

CABRERA: Are people just digging in their heels? MARQUEZ: It feels like both sides have now dug in and I don't see

where we go from here. I think the ball is clearly in the mayor's court.

CABRERA: We'll see what happens next. Miguel Marquez, thank you so much.

Let's talk a little bit more about this situation, the dynamics between law enforcement and Mayor Bill de Blasio, that silent police protest. It came even after the New York Police Commissioner, William Bratton, urged his department to show respect at Liu's funeral, as Miguel mentioned.

I want to read part of a memo he issued on Friday to the NYPD. In it, Bratton said, quote, "I understand that emotions are high. I issue no mandates and I make no threats of discipline. But I remind you that when you don the uniform of this department, you are bound by the tradition, honor and decency that go with it."

Joining me now, Errol Louis, a CNN political commentator and the political anchor at NY One. Errol, what message did these officers send when they turned their backs for a second time despite the commissioner's message?

ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, they sent the message that, although they are a paramilitary organization, they have First Amendment rights, that they don't like what some of what the mayor has said and, more importantly, done. And they were determined to show it in whatever way they could while the world's press was focused on them. You have to keep in mind that here are very few opportunities where you'll see tens of thousands of New York City officers all amassed in one place. I mean, it just doesn't happen very often. And God forbid there should be another funeral, but that's about the one in a million chance that they would be able to do that.. So they wanted to make the most of that opportunity I think.

CABRERA: Is it a sign of disrespect in some way?

LOUIS: Oh yes, no question about it. And intentionally so. Or displeasure I think is probably the better word. It's not so much they don't respect the office of the mayor, I hope. I think what they're really saying is they don't like the fact that this mayor is bringing about reforms.

Now, on his side, he has said -- he hasn't it very loudly and certainly not at the funeral -- but he has a mandate to do exactly that, to bring reform to the department. There's been a string of lawsuits, there's been city council action, laws that have been passed over the veto of the previous mayor. And this mayor ran on a promise to reform the department. So he's on very firm ground in saying that I've got to bring change to this department. It's what I promised. It's what the voters of the city asked for.

CABRERA: And I want to remind our viewers that this really all goes back to the Eric Garner grand jury decision, maybe even before that with what happened in Ferguson. Protesters took to the streets for their voices to be heard. Now kind of seems like officers, in their silent protest, may feel like their voices aren't being heard. Do you think that a Mayor de Blasio made a mistake in how he has handled this situation?

LOUIS: Well, I think both sides could have handled this much better. We have institutions and we have processes that are intended to sort of bring people together, not drive them apart. Could the mayor have chosen words a little more carefully? I think even he, in a quiet moment, might acknowledge he didn't handle the optics as well as he could.

On the other hand, this was a division and this was a clash that was just bound to happen. There are members of the department who are not at all happy that all of the different decisions that I listed have kind of gone in the direction of saying the NYPD needs to change its behavior, whether it's training, whether it's a new inspector general, which is now in place, whether it's court supervision, which is not out of the question, or whether it's the mayor changing the way patrols are done. It's something that people are unhappy about and they have the right to organize and push back, and that's just what they're doing.

CABRERA: Some new statistics are catching the eyes of many this morning. We now know, in the week after Office Ramos and Officer Liu were killed, arrests were way down for a lot of crimes, big and small, compared year to year. And I want to give you this example.

In the two precincts where those two officers worked, there no parking, no traffic tickets. There was in fact just one criminal summons. This is according to "The New York Times". That compared to 130 criminal summonses issued that same week last year. Is that just a coincidence or do you think the police really were intentionally slacking on the job seemingly?

LOUIS: You know what, what 's fascinating about this is it does appear to be something akin to job action. I mean, I've heard through a number of different sources that new cops, a new class just graduated, and they're being told, oh, you're not going to need summons book. We're not writing any summonses these days. So I could certainly believe that.

But ironically this is exactly what the reformers were calling for. They were saying you don't need to go around handing out tickets on every other corner constantly because it amounts to a form of a harassment. And the fact that we've just completed a record low year for crime in this city, even with that job action in place, suggests that, yes, maybe some of the policing needs to change. I mean, ironically, they are sort of making the point that the mayor has been arguing for, and that a number of reformers have been arguing for.

CABRERA: All right, Errol Louis, we appreciate your insight and expertise. Thanks.

Still to come, the trial of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is just getting underway as the defense and the prosecution try to identify the 12 members of the jury that will hear this case. But critics say it will be hard for Tsarnaev to get a fair trial in Boston. We'll discuss next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CABRERA: Today the trial of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is getting underway more than a year after the attack that killed three and injured more than 200 others. Some 1,200 people have been summoned to potentially serve on the panel of 12 jurors and six alternates in a trial prosecutors say could last up to four months. And it comes as CNN has learned that Tsarnaev's attorneys, one of whom avoided the death penalty for both the Unabomber and Jared Loughner, the gunman who wounded Gabrielle Giffords, failed to reach a plea deal with the government.

Here to discuss more, CNN legal analyst and criminal defense attorney, Paul Callan. And also with us, federal defense attorney for the city of Atlanta, Page Pate.

Paul, I want to begin with you. We know prosecutors have surveillance video, they have messages that Tsarnaev reportedly wrote in the boat where he was found. They have evidence they seized from his apartment. How do you go about, as a defense attorney, helping your client's case with seemingly such strong evidence against him?

PAUL CALLAN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: I think this case is all about avoiding the death penalty. I don't think it's about contesting his actual guilt of the bombing. The evidence against him is overwhelming and it really would be foolish for defense attorneys, I think, to try to claim that he had nothing to do with the bombing. I think what they're doing though is, during the guilt phase, you'll see them setting up sort of a sympathy case for the younger brother to try to argue to the jury later on he was dominated by his older brother and doesn't deserve the death penalty.

CABRERA: That was a pawn?

CALLAN: Yes, he was a pawn in this big scheme, and he was young and he was influenced and he doesn't deserve to be put to death.

CABRERA: Page, so much has been said about this trial happening in Boston. Why do you think the defense request, their numerous requests time and again, to move this elsewhere have been denied?

PAGE PATE, FEDERAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY, CITY OF ATLANTA: Well, it seems to me that the judge in this case has been completely hostile to the argument that they can't get a fair jury in Boston. The judge refused to consider an expert affidavit that the defense put forward recently. And the judge is clearly committed this trial will go forward, it will start today, and it will be in Boston.

Now, the problem is the government has already claimed that the entire City of Boston is a victim in this case. And so even though you may get potential jurors in there and you may ask them have you heard about the case, have you made up your mind, do you have any opinion, they are not always truthful. And I just don't understand why you would create the possibility for an appeal issue when you can simply move the trial just like they did with Timothy McVeigh. CABRERA: Paul, I see you shaking your head.

CALLAN: Well, yes, because on that question, I think it's interesting and Page makes some very legitimate points. I mean, this case is an open wound in Boston and particularly in Massachusetts. This is almost Boston's World Trade Center case, the way it resonates throughout Boston and New England.

However, a case -- they can make a determination during the jury selection process that a jury can't be picked in Boston. So it's not over yet. If all of these hundreds and hundreds of jurors are questioned and many of them indicate they can't be fair, we still could see a change of venue in this case. I'm not saying it's going to happen. But from a legal standpoint, it has happened in other similar cases.