Rescue Helicopter Crashes Near Mt. Hood; Al Qaeda May Be Able to Shoot Down U.S. Planes
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT.  THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. AARON BROWN, HOST: Good evening, again, everyone. We welcome to the world tonight Adam D. Pearl, the mother, Mariane Pearl of Paris, France, the father Daniel Pearl who is now deceased. Most of what the program has to say about the birth of this beautiful six-pound child will come at the end. It will be in the form of a song written for the boy by a colleague of Danny's at the "Wall Street Journal." It is beautiful, and while we always hope you'll stay to the end of the program, we especially hope you will tonight. It is a lovely and gentle song that says a lot about life and the man whose genes this newborn carries. It's not maudlin in the least, but it might make you cry. It will also make you smile, and it comes at the end. What we can say now is that mom and newborn boy are doing well and given what Mariane Pearl went through, her husband kidnapped, the search for him and the discovery that he had been unmercifully murdered, that is no small blessing. So welcome, Adam. Despite it all, this world is a wonderful place, better no doubt because you've joined it. We begin with the whip and the news of the day and it starts in a place we didn't expect to find much today, Mount Hood in Oregon. Those are live pictures you see in the corner. There was a terrible accident there today, but in truth it could have been much worse, when a rescue helicopter when down.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Look out. Look out guys. There we are talking about things going wrong. Hang on, fellows. Oh, my goodness. Oh, that is horrible.</s>BROWN: The helicopter had gone up to find nine climbers, three of whom are deceased. We'll have more on that coming up in a little bit. Also in the whip tonight another terror warning, vague, nonetheless alarming. Jamie McIntyre on that where he always is it seems at the Pentagon. Jamie, the headline from you.</s>JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SENIOR PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, Aaron, it started with a disturbing discovery in the remote desert near the Prince Sultan Air Base, a spent missile tube. The FBI now thinks it was an attempt to shoot down a U.S. plane by al Qaeda terrorists. Because of that, they have issued a warning to be on the lookout for the possible use of surface-to-air shoulder-fired missiles against U.S. commercial aircraft -- Aaron.</s>BROWN: We'll all consider how we were on the lookout for that. If that isn't enough to worry about, David Ensor has another troubling angle to this story, so David a headline from you tonight.</s>DAVID ENSOR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Aaron, though the CIA buy- back program bought back quite a few of the Stinger missiles that the U.S. gave to various people who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan and then subsequently in some cases been fighting us, that buy-back program went well but Soviet and Russian-made S-7s and SAM 16s are all over the world. They're cheap. They're light. They're easy to use.</s>BROWN: Doesn't make you feel good tonight. Thank you, David, we're back with you also shortly. And one more stop in the whip, some fascinating legal maneuvers today in the Michael Skakel trial. Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin in New York has that. Jeffrey, a headline.</s>JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Aaron, prosecutors sprung a surprise this morning. They said they wanted the jury to be able to consider a lesser charge, manslaughter. And in the afternoon, they sprung an even bigger surprise, they said never mind. We'll explain.</s>BROWN: Jeffrey, thank you. We're back with all of you as we go along. Also coming up in the program, words fail as they say but the pictures do not, so we will take you to ground zero as the closing up played out this morning. We'll also look at the end of what the recovery means for one very special church in Lower Manhattan, a community that was born on the September 11, a family now today. And just because we like him, Charles Grodin is here. Anyone who's ever seen him on TV that knows only a fool would predict what he's going to say when he actually sits down. I'm no fool, honest. I will not try and predict it, all of that in the hour ahead. We're glad you're with us. We begin on the slopes of Mount Hood in northern Oregon where a slip on an icy slope just below the 11,000-foot summit cost several climbers their lives today and led to a crash of a helicopter that sent rescue - that had been sent, rather, to rescue the survivors. The group of climbers was about 800 feet short of the summit of Mount Hood at about 9:00 a.m. local time, when two of them lost their footing, sliding down the slope and dragging others into a crevasse. Nine people fell in. Three have died. As rescue workers tried to rescue the injured and remove the dead, a helicopter bringing help lost altitude and hit the mountain. Here is how a local reporter from Portland described the scene.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There it is waving off, so I didn't see anybody go up -- look out. Look out, guys. There we are talking about things going wrong. Hang on, fellows. Oh, my goodness. Oh, that is horrible.</s>JEFF LIVICK, WITNESS: I watched one guy take two entire flips in the helicopter hanging outside of it until his last gunner's belt finally broke, at which point it just left him sitting in the snow, and each consecutive roll left one more person sitting in the snow. So the helicopter finally came to rest upside down with five people just sitting in the snow, kind of wondering what in the heck had just happened.</s>BROWN: None of the crew members of the helicopter were killed, though several were seriously hurt. Other helicopters then came in to rescue everyone, the climbers and the crew members from the helicopter team. After leaving the mountain, one member of the original climbing team talked about what happened and one person he saw at all was Pat Dooris of KGW TV and he is with us now. Pat, just go back a few hours now. This was, I suppose a fairly routine assignment for you up there in KGW's helicopter. As it started to play out, what were you thinking?</s>PAT DOORIS, KGW TV REPORTER: Well, I know that you've spent time here in the Northwest and there are mountain rescues that go on either on Ranier or here on Mount Hood and we've got the 939 Rescue Wing stationed out of Portland and we routinely see these guys go in and pluck people off mountains, off the back country wilderness area and you always know that there is a bit of danger there, but it always comes off really without a hitch and you always say, gee I wonder how they do that. But as it was unfolding, you know because I've been up in the helicopter a few times with our pilot here, you know you could just sort of tell that it was a tense situation because there was no place to go and it just started to unravel, we were just talking about it right before that. If anything goes wrong, they can't slide out on the mountainside because the mountain's there. They're not very high above the ground and they're at over 10,000 feet, so the air is thin and it was just like watching, no kidding, a movie as it started to come apart.</s>BROWN: Did it seem to play out in slow motion?</s>DOORIS: It really did, yes. You know I've interviewed trauma people and I know you have too and you always ask, does it seem like time stands still, and it really did. I mean as I was talking about how these guys live on the edge and how professional they are and how it's great that they have excellent training, we saw the tail dip down. And that's when I was saying something like, whoops hang on there guys and then they started to slide down the mountain and bring the nose down and it was just, you know, instant to instant to instant just feeling like hours saying gee, this is just really unbelievable.</s>BROWN: It is remarkable and great news that the people in the helicopter are banged up some but apparently they're going to be all right. What is the status now of the people they went up to rescue?</s>DOORIS: Well it's my understanding, we're just on our way back now from the mountain, but there are three people that have died, slid down for about 600 feet. They were 600 feet from the summit, slid down into this crevasse. At one point there were a total of about 11 people hanging in the crevasse. Three of those folks are dead. All the other injured people have been brought down off the mountain now, including the three people that were inside the military helicopter that were brought down on sleds and toboggans. One of them was airlifted directly into a Portland hospital. So the helicopter crew, one in critical condition, three are pretty seriously banged up. Of the climbing group, there are three dead and I believe nine or ten that have varying degrees of injuries.</s>BROWN: Just, I'm not sure if you can explain this or not. Do you know what happened? Why that -- I mean obviously the helicopter is flying at almost 11,000 feet, do we know what happened, why it went out of control?</s>DOORIS: No, not really, because we have seen other helicopters come into that same area and get away OK, and in fact, we saw other helicopters coming after that and I believe picked a person up out of there. You know we heard from eyewitnesses that they had lowered one of their steel cables with a gurney, that the folks on the ground had put the person into the gurney. They were all packaged up, they call it, and ready to go and they came and attacked the line again because the helicopter had gone out and rode around, which is their usual thing they do. They came back, hovered, lowered the cable. They hooked it up and one of the guys on the ground said, right as he hooked it up and was covering this person from the downwash, the person in the basket, all of a sudden he felt the line go slack and looked up and the helicopter was sliding away. And one of the guys inside the helicopter, also noticing what was going on, instantly disconnected that steel cable or else they would have dragged that poor person down the mountain with them.</s>BROWN: Dan, I hat to fall on a cliche, but you're talking about something that could have been a whole lot worse.</s>DOORIS: Oh, incredible.</s>BROWN: Pat, thank you for your work for us tonight, and thank all your colleagues from KGW for their help and their extraordinary pictures of all of this. It's good to talk to you, thanks.</s>DOORIS: Thank you.</s>BROWN: Pat Dooris of KGW TV in Portland. You might recall that, I think it was last week, there was an accident on Mount Ranier, which is about 100 miles to the north. Three climbers died that day. This is the time of the year when people climb mountains. It's warm enough to do it. It's not too warm, so that theoretically at least it's not dangerous, and these accidents do sometimes happen. On we go to another warning this time from the FBI like the others and there have been a lot. This one is unconfirmed, uncorroborated. It was issued out of an abundance of caution, all the standard boilerplate words apply, and yet this one like the rest, brings a new chill. So in addition to watching out for scuba divers and bridge bombers and dirty bombs and loose nukes, we can now add anti-aircraft missiles to the list. Good luck. Here again, CNN's Jamie McIntyre.</s>MCINTYRE (voice-over): The nationwide warning followed a disturbing discovery earlier this month at the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, first reported by CNN. An empty, expended SA-7 shoulder-fired missile tube was found by a Saudi patrol inside a perimeter fence approximately two miles from where U.S. planes routinely take off and land.</s>GENERAL PETER PACE, JOINT CHIEFS VICE CHAIRMAN: There are no reports by any U.S. aircraft or any aircraft that we've been able to identify, of any sightings of surface-to-air missile firings. That does not mean it was not fired. It simply means we do not know if that particular weapon was fired at that location or simply dropped off there.</s>MCINTYRE: But the FBI now believes terrorists linked to al Qaeda may have tried to shoot down a plane. A May 22 advisory says: "Subsequent investigations suggest that the discovery is likely related to al Qaeda targeting efforts against U.S. led forces on the Arabian Peninsula. Two days after the FBI alert, airlines and domestic law enforcement agencies were advised of the information but weren't asked to take any specific precautions. In fact, the FBI warning says: "The FBI possesses no information indicating that al Qaeda is planning to use Stinger missiles or any type of portable anti-aircraft weapons against commercial aircraft."</s>PACE: Regardless, we take very seriously the fact that our opponents to have surface-to-air missiles, shoulder-fired surface-to- air missiles, and we take precautions on the ground and in the air anytime we have our aircraft arriving and departing.</s>MCINTYRE: Now despite the fact that this warning went out to just about every government agency and law enforcement agency in the country, administration officials today were downplaying somewhat the threat of a firing of a surface-to-air missile at an airliner, saying that this warning was meant primarily to educate police and law enforcement officials around the country, not necessarily to sound a big alarm. But in these days, nobody wants to be accused of failing to share information that might have made a difference in some unknown way. Aaron.</s>BROWN: I think -- this is a tough one because in all of these warnings, people always say well, you know, what can I do about it, but realistically, what can the commercial airline business do about the fact that bad guys may be out there with this sort of weapon?</s>MCINTYRE: Well, remember this went to a lot of local police and law enforcement. So, for instance, here in Washington, D.C., Reagan National Airport, there are several parks around here that are certainly within shoulder-fired missile range of airplanes taking off and landing. If you were a police officer and you get one of these warnings, you might ask yourself are we patrolling those areas enough? Is the access good enough? Have we cleared away shrubs or places where people might hide? And that's the whole intention of this is to just get people thinking that something could happen. And you know this one, it's not based on a specific threat but it is based on a specific incident. They did find a spent missile tube in Saudi Arabia, and they do think that that was an attempt to shoot down a plane there.</s>BROWN: Jamie, thank you. We'll all sleep well tonight. Thank you, Jamie McIntyre at the Pentagon. There is, we've been told at least, one piece of good news in all of this, but reporting it calls for a sentence about as absurd and terrifying as any we've uttered recently. Here it goes. We understand the CIA Stinger buy-back program has gone quite well, but then Stingers aren't the only weapons to worry about, are they? Back to CNN's David Ensor who's in Washington tonight. David, good evening to you.</s>ENSOR: Yes, good evening, Aaron. As you say, the buy-back program went well. The Stingers that were taken by the CIA into Afghanistan to get the Soviets out and did a very effective job there, many of them were bought back at $100,000 or more a pop. Some of them are still thought to be there. They're pretty old at this point. The problem is there are all these other missiles. The one in Saudi Arabia was a S-7. That's a Soviet or Russian-made shoulder held weapon. It's simpler. It's less expensive than the American model, but it's extremely effective. About 30 pounds in weight, can be hand carried. It's pretty cheap. It's about five feet long and it works on the same principle, point it at an aircraft and it has a heat- seeking device in it. It will try to hit that aircraft. There are thousands of them around the world. Now this is not a new threat and American air bases and airports even have been long aware of this possibility and have taken a number of measures against it. Still, there's nothing that's foolproof, and the fact is it is something that security officials around the country do need to start worrying about, thus the warning. I should point out though that there are -- the weapon has its drawbacks too. It doesn't work that well at night, doesn't go well against high speed aircraft. It's easily deflected by heat-seeking flares. I used to fly with the Russians over Afghanistan when they occupied the place and they used to throw flares out the back every time we went into Kabul. That was a pretty effective deterrent.</s>BROWN: I suspect if you're a military pilot, that's a good way to go and if you're a commercial pilot, it probably doesn't help at all. On the subject of this is not new, I remember when the war started, talking about these are the kinds of weapons we believe these guys have in Afghanistan. But during the course of the fighting of the war and the heavy air campaign, we didn't really see these sorts of weapons very much, did we?</s>ENSOR: We did not. They're effective against helicopters if the helicopters hover at the right height for long enough. The U.S. has gotten pretty good with its tactics against this sort of weapon. They aren't good at night, as I said. They don't reach high-flying or fast aircraft and military aircraft have many ways of defending themselves, such as flares.</s>BROWN: Yes.</s>ENSOR: It is commercial airlines that need to worry, but as I say, they've taken quite a few measures, higher fences and various surveillance equipment around airports. So it's not as easy as it used to be.</s>BROWN: David, thank you, David Ensor, national security correspondent in Washington with more on the missile threat. Ahead on NEWSNIGHT tonight, new and greatly expanded powers for the FBI as the tradeoff for more security in the country, less liberty perhaps. Some see it that way. We'll have that story and more as NEWSNIGHT continues on a Thursday night in New York City.