NTSB Investigates New York City Plane Crash; Authorities Search For Bomb in Southern California School
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone. I'm Kyra Phillips at CNN World Headquarters in Atlanta.</s>DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Don Lemon. The deadly Manhattan crash -- Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and flight instructor Tyler Stanger gone. What happened? And should pilots be allowed to fly that close to city life? We're investigating.</s>PHILLIPS: He was Mark Foley's chief of staff. This hour, Kirk Fordham testifies under oath. What did he know about the disgraced congressman and his passes at pages? You're live in the CNN NEWSROOM. It's the top of the hour. We start with Carol Lin, working a developing story for us from the newsroom -- Carol.</s>CAROL LIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, they're searching for some kind of bomb or explosive device on the Alhambra High School campus right now in Southern California. This is just east of Pasadena. Kyra, this tale is very bizarre, as you're watching the kids that are being cleared out of the area, evacuations under way at that high school. This actually started last night, about 8:00, in the city center, on Main Street. Somebody found a suspicious cylindrical device. That's what -- how it was described. And the bomb squad set out and disposed of it. And, then, later on in the evening, somebody found something on the school campus, this high school campus, that looked like a similar device -- so, once again, the bomb squad dispatched last night to dispose of that object; 8:00 this morning, which was about four hours ago, Eastern time, police learned that an employee at that school found, yet again, another suspicious cylindrical object in a trash can. So, they returned to the school for another search. Obviously, Kyra, they are concerned enough about this that they are starting this evacuation. The bomb squad is on the scene right now. We have been watching pictures of police patrolling the campus. They are, clearly, trying to make sure that there is nothing that is explosive or dangerous on that school campus last night -- but very bizarre that this started in a -- in a -- in a different part, not on campus, but somewhere on Main Street in downtown Alhambra.</s>PHILLIPS: So, it's various calls that's leading authorities to the placement of these various objects? Is that the deal?</s>LIN: Right. I mean, all three objects...</s>PHILLIPS: It's like a treasure hunt.</s>LIN: Exactly. All three objects sound very much the same. They are all being described as cylindrical objects, suspicious. And that is all they're saying right now, something similar found on the campus -- and, then, a school employee finding yet something else that matched that description in a trash can. So, the bomb squad was dispatched, returned to the campus. Now there's a full evacuation under way.</s>PHILLIPS: All right, we will continue to follow up. Thanks, Carol.</s>LEMON: New York City's Upper East Side crawling with aircraft crash experts today. They have got debris. They have got radar data and witnesses. And, sadly, they have got two victims, Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle and flight instructor Tyler Stanger. Here is what we know right now. Investigators say the small plane's engine and propeller are still inside an apartment on the 40th floor of the Belaire tower. The rest of the wreckage fell to the street. Well, that part of the building burned ferociously, until firefighters declared the fire out almost two hours later. Relatively few people were hurt, nobody in the apartment building. Eleven firefighters and five other people, all injuries are minor in that. Let's go back to the scene now. CNN's Carol Costello is there. And, Carol, just about this time yesterday is when we got word, and we started reporting this breaking news story.</s>CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Well, you're right about that. What is happening right now, though, there are temporary flight restrictions for the city of New York. If you're a private pilot, and you're flying under 1,500 feet, you are going to have to stay in contact with air traffic control. You know, life is trying to return to normal here. Take a look at the building, though. Isn't that stark? You can see there, on the 30th and 31st floor, just how fierce that fire was. Oddly enough, they're allowing residents to go back into the building and live as normally, below those floors, of course. But imagine sleeping there tonight and thinking about what happened. That has got to be eerie. And, as you said, Don, the NTSB, well, teams of investigators are on 74th Street, picking up bits and pieces of the wreckage. And they're trying to get that engine and the propeller out of the 40th floor, on top of that building. They're still trying to figure out what happened.</s>DEBBIE HERSMAN, NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION SAFETY BOARD MEMBER: This accident is not unlike the hundreds of regional aviation accidents that the NTSB investigates every year. We're charged by Congress with investigating all civil aviation accidents. Our regional investigators do this from Alaska to Hawaii, all over the country. These aircraft are not required to have a cockpit voice recorder or a flight data recorder. This aircraft did not have one. We have to look at the physical evidence on scene. We're going to look at the radar data. We're going to look at air traffic control tapes. We're take -- taking few samples, looking at maintenance records, looking at the pilot's log book, anything that will give us a clue about what happened.</s>COSTELLO: They did find the pilot's log book on the ground in front of the building. A little bit more about Tyler Stanger, the flight instructor. He knew Cory Lidle a while now, owns a -- a company, a flight company, in California called Stang-AIR. He was an experienced pilot, by all intents and purposes. As I said, it's up to the NTSB to figure out exactly why he or Cory Lidle took that wrong turn into the building, and why that plane burst into flames -- back to you, Don.</s>LEMON: And, Carol, as you were talking there, we saw the pictures from yesterday. And you could see the weather in New York. It appeared to be overcast. Do we know if the weather was a factor in this crash?</s>COSTELLO: Well, we don't know that yet. But, you know, it could be, because a lot of pilots are wondering why they decided to go up that particular day. It was gray. There was a low cloud bank. It was raining on and off, not a great day to be learning anything new in the flying business. So, the NTSB will be taking that into account as well.</s>LEMON: All right, Carol Costello, in New York's Upper East Side, thank you for your report.</s>PHILLIPS: Now, the Mark Foley fallout -- testimony today from the former congressman's former chief of staff about Foley's interactions with teenage boys in the House page program, who knew what, and when. CNN's Dana Bash has more from Capitol Hill.</s>DANA BASH, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Kirk Fordham, Mark Foley's former chief of staff, plans to testify, under oath, that he warned more than one GOP congressional official several times about Foley's inappropriate behavior with pages much earlier than Republican leaders have stated. A source familiar with Fordham's account of events tells CNN, Fordham will take investigators back to a report he got about one alleged Foley incident some three or four years ago, something that made him so alarmed, he asked House Speaker Dennis Hastert's top aide to intervene and confront Foley. That alleged incident: His boss, Mark Foley, had shown up at the page's dorm, drunk. In the last week, two senior Republican lawmakers said they, too, heard about that incident, and wrote letters to the House clerk, asking for an investigation. Another GOP congresswoman, Ginny Brown- Waite, says she conducted her own -- quote -- "investigation" two weeks ago, and learned Congressman Foley showed up at the page dorm one night, inebriated. Brown-Waite will not release any details. The Capitol Police are looking through files for any record of the incident, a spokeswoman says. CNN is told Fordham arranged a meeting between the speaker's chief of staff and Foley about the alleged page dorm incident and other troubling Foley behavior towards pages, that according to two sources familiar with Fordham's account and a third independent source. And, CNN is told, Fordham intends to tell all of this to the House Ethics Committee. (on camera): Fordham says he told top GOP aides long ago about Foley's troubling behavior. The only response so from the speaker's chief of staff is -- quote -- "What Kirk Fordham said did not happen." It will be up to the Ethics Committee to determine what House leaders knew, and whether they could have, and should have, done more to stop Mark Foley. Dana Bash, CNN, Capitol Hill.</s>PHILLIPS: We expect to hear from ex-congressional aide Kirk Fordham and his attorney once they finish with the Ethics Committee. They are behind closed doors right now, testifying under oath. We will bring you their remarks live. And, for the latest on this story, check out CNN's new political ticker. Just go to CNN.com/ticker.</s>LEMON: More bullets, bombings and bloodshed on the streets of Baghdad today, just after dawn. An upstart Sunni TV station was attacked by gunman, who killed at least nine people. A few hours later, eight more people were killed in three bombings downtown. Twenty-five more were wounded. Yesterday, police found 40 more bullet-riddled bodies, sending the number that have turned up in Baghdad this month alone above 400. Most show signs of torture.</s>PHILLIPS: Well, it's not a hard count, just a hard-to-fathom estimate derived by a scientific method. And both the White House and Pentagon are discounting it. It's a staggering assessment of civilian deaths in the war in Iraq. CNN senior Pentagon correspondent Jamie McIntyre joins me now with the fallout. Jamie, quite a disparity in the various estimates that we have heard in the past couple of days.</s>JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SENIOR PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Kyra. The numbers are controversial. They are somewhat disputed. But they also are undeniably an indication that the U.S. strategy in Iraq is not working as well as the U.S. military had hoped.</s>MCINTYRE (voice-over): No one precisely how many Iraqis have died since the U.S. invasion in 2003, but data collected by a team of Iraqi doctors and analyzed by experts at Johns Hopkins University puts the number at a staggering 655,000. That's a big surprise to the top U.S. commander.</s>GENERAL GEORGE CASEY, COMMANDER, MULTINATIONAL FORCE IN IRAQ: The 650,000 number seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen. I have not seen a number higher than 50,000. And, so, I -- I don't give that much credibility at all.</s>MCINTYRE: The study, published in the British medical journal "Lancet," is based on a survey of more than 12,000 Iraqis at 47 sites across the country. It found the death rate, which was 5.5 per 1,000 Iraqis before the war, has jumped to 13.3 per 1,000 now. And, based on that, it projects between 400,000 and 900,000 have died, above what would have been expected, with the most probable total being 655,000. Critics question if the survey is skewed because the number is so much higher than previous estimates that relied on actual body counts.</s>MICHAEL O'HANLON, SENIOR FELLOW IN FOREIGN POLICY STUDIES, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: Their numbers are about one-tenth the kind of numbers you have gotten in this study. So, even if we were missing a lot of individual bodies, I don't think the numbers are going to grow by a factor of 10. I think the survey methodology is very suspect.</s>MCINTYRE: The report comes as Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker confirmed he's drawing up troop rotation plans to maintain the current number of troops in Iraq, roughly 150,000, for at least the next four years, even though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argues no one knows how many troops will be needed for how long.</s>DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: General Schoomaker and the Army does not set force levels in Iraq. They're not the ones who determine how many will be there and until what year they will be there.</s>MCINTYRE: That will, of course, be set by General Casey, who is the top commander in Iraq. General Casey says, at this point, he still insists he does not need more troops, even as he concedes that the level of violence is, in his words, as high as it has ever been. And, Kyra, today, the top general at the Pentagon, General Peter Pace, told CNN that the strategy in Iraq is under an informal review. CNN producer Laurie Ure caught up with him after a luncheon today. And he confirmed that he has not convened a formal review, but has been talking to many of the commanders coming back from Iraq to find out what is working and what's not. One of them, he told us, was Colonel H.R. McMaster, who is the author of this famous book "Dereliction of Duty," which was the -- one of the seminal works on how the military commanders during the Vietnam War didn't do enough to speak up when they believed the strategy in Vietnam wasn't working.</s>PHILLIPS: Well, it's interesting, because, Jamie, on that note, we have seen a lot of retired generals and admirals speaking up for the first time in a pretty big force about what they think about this war.</s>MCINTYRE: Well, that's right. We have seen a lot of the retired generals coming in, questioning the -- the strategy, and also the implementation of that strategy. Colonel McMaster, by the way, the last time we talked to him, was -- was a real believer in what they were doing. He was the one who was in charge of restoring order in Tal Afar, which President Bush pointed to at one point as a success story. But he is seen as a good critical thinker. And it's an indication that the Pentagon brass is really trying to take another look at -- at this strategy of having the Iraqi forces stand up as the main basis for -- for success, and -- and maybe there's another approach, now that there are some 300,000 Iraqis forces already in uniform, and the violence isn't getting any better.</s>PHILLIPS: Jamie, thanks.</s>LEMON: The New York City plane crash was frightening enough to watch on television, but imagine watching from just down the block, and the building on fire is your home.</s>CAROL HIGGINS CLARK, MYSTERY WRITER: And, all of a sudden, a police car went racing by. And then we saw black smoke just covering the whole view to the east on 72nd. And I said, I'm surprised there aren't more sirens. It must have just happened. And then I got out at First Avenue, because the cab had to stop. And I went running. I actually made it all the way to my building, but that's -- and I realized something had hit the building, and the fire trucks pulled up.</s>PHILLIPS: Author Carol Higgins Clark lived a thriller of her own yesterday. She will tell us what she saw and how she's dealing with the day after -- coming up.