Budget Cuts Looming; Diamond Heist
WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: Thanks very much. Happening now: forced budget cuts just days away. We're going to show you three ways the across-the-board spending reductions could impact you. Also, a diamond heist right out of the movies, $50 million worth of stolen diamonds from an airplane, how they got away. It might surprise you. Plus, a horse meat scandal spreads to one of the world's largest food companies. I'm Wolf Blitzer. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM. Congress did it. Congress can undo it. President Obama is warning of dire consequences for all of us if lawmakers don't act quickly. We're talking about those forced budget cuts that take effect March 1, slashing $85 billion from spending across the board this year. But with just 10 days left, the consequences are become -- and more alarming. President Obama outlined some of them today, told Congress, let's make a deal while there is still some time.</s>BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: My door is open. I have put tough cuts and reforms on the table. I am willing to work with anybody to get this job done. None of us will get 100 percent of what we want. But nobody should want these cuts to go through, because the last thing our families can afford right now is pain imposed unnecessarily by partisan recklessness and ideological rigidity here in Washington.</s>BLITZER: Visually, the president tried to make that point by having dozens of law enforcement officers standing behind him. Many of them potentially could lose their jobs. Our crime and justice correspondent, Joe Johns, is covering that angle of the different ways the budget cuts could directly impact you. We also have Rene Marsh covering the air travel nightmare potentially in the making. And Erin McPike on how the food we eat could be affected as well. Let's start with Joe Johns over at the United States Supreme Court -- Joe.</s>JOE JOHNS, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, the courts have been looking at this issue for a long time. The federal bar association says a quarter of federal court employees might have to be furloughed as well. Jury trials might have to be suspended because there's no money to pay the members of the juries. The justice system is going to be affected across the board, especially the Justice Department. The president has said it's an issue of national security.</s>OBAMA: FBI agents will be furloughed. Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go.</s>JOHNS: For example, the FBI would have to cut something like 2,300 employees, hundreds of agents. Others would be affected as well, including border security agents. Also, correctional officers who work at federal prisons. However, one man I spoke to with the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., told me there is a silver lining.</s>DAN MITCHELL, CATO INSTITUTE: It's not asking too much for the government to take a tiny bit of trimming.</s>JOHNS: We do know there are places at the Justice Department to cut. For example, there was a report that came out just last year from the General Accountability Office that said that there's as much as $33 billion spent since the year 2005 on crime prevention programs that are often duplicative and counterproductive. So certainly some places to cut there. Now let's go to Rene Marsh at BWI Airport.</s>RENE MARSH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Joe. If you're flying out of airports like BWI, you are looking for a tough time if these forced budgets do actually go through. Let's talk about the FAA. They are expecting to see an 8.2 percent budget cut. That translates to $627 million this year. That could mean furloughs for some employees. Let's talk about the TSA. They could also see furloughs and they could also see cuts in overtime. I want to show you what that could mean for you, the travelers. That could very well mean that wait times at security lines will be more than an hour. We also know that wait times at customs could go up by 50 percent. Flight delays. That would be simply because there would be fewer air traffic controllers and it could also just a drag on the economy. You have business people who are traveling and instead of conducting business, they could be stuck in those long lines. So we spoke to the airport director here at BWI and he paints a very vivid picture of what travel could look like. Take a listen.</s>PAUL WIEDEFELD, BWI: If you think back to post-9/11, some of the issues that we had when you just didn't have the volume of people to handle all of the passengers, that's what you could be looking at.</s>MARSH: OK. Despite that, he sounds pretty confident that things will still remain safe as far as flying, but he made it very clear things will be slow moving. From here, let's go on over to Erin with more.</s>ERIN MCPIKE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Rene. These forced budget cuts would also lead to less money for public health problems as well as less research at the National Institutes of Health. Just this morning the president said "Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings." And the White House also estimates that cuts to mental health funding will leave 373,000 Americans left untreated. Now, that might mean scaling back on youth violence prevention programs that politicians on both sides of the aisle want to see more of after that shooting in Newtown. On top of that, the Agriculture Department also thinks our food supply might be at risk, that all of the food inspectors would have a 15-day furlough, and that would mean no safety check on meat, on poultry, or on eggs. Stores can't sell unchecked meat. And so for our viewers that would mean a lot less protein in the supermarket for a couple of weeks. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says forced cuts would result in loss production of two billion pounds of meat, about three billion pounds of poultry and about 200 million pounds of eggs. Vilsack is already worried that stores might try to sell some unchecked meat illegally. Don't be just wary of that, but also we will be watching for some higher prices at the supermarket. But one thing we need to make sure that we remember, Wolf, is that these cuts are just estimates. This morning I spoke to several top Senate officials who say there are some smarter cuts that the White House could be making as far as health care is concerned. There's a $7 billion slush fund in Obamacare. They could use that as opposed to some cuts to the National Institutes of Health -- Wolf.</s>BLITZER: Erin McPike, thanks very much. Joe Johns and Rene Marsh, thanks to you as well. Republican Senator Rand Paul, among others, says these forced budget cuts simply don't go far enough. I'm going to be speaking with him later about it later tonight. I'm filling in for Anderson Cooper on "</s>A.C. 360" 8: 00 p.m. Eastern right here on CNN. Much more on this story coming up later here in THE SITUATION ROOM as well. Meanwhile, a surprise announcement by President Obama. The man who led allied forces in Afghanistan is retiring from the United States military. The Marine Corps General John Allen was on track to become NATO's next supreme commander, but he's stepping down because of health issues in his family. The president calls General Allen one of America's finest military leaders. Now he will retire. Let's get to one of the most daring robberies we have seen in some time. Thieves dressed as police broke into an airport in Europe, got into a plane's cargo hold, and got away with some $50 million in diamonds. CNN's Tom Foreman has the details, which sound straight out of a film from Hollywood. What happened here, Tom?</s>TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You're right, Wolf. This is just like something from a James Bond movie. It's unbelievable. Here's France and Germany. Here's Belgium in the middle and this is what happened in this case. This airplane was getting ready to leave from the airport there for a short little flight over to Zurich. It was right here. What they didn't know at that time is that two vehicles with eight robbers, and here according to authorities, were cutting a fence down here and getting on to airport property. They came streaking up, driving right across the airport here, all the way up to the plane, and in three minutes' time with guns drawn, they managed to take away more than 100 packages from this plane and they came streaking back the same way they went and they were back outside. Now, there are huge questions here about when the alarm sounded and why it wasn't sounded further. We do know this. None of the passengers on the plane -- there were a couple dozen there -- even realized this was happening because it happened very quickly without a single shot fired. But we know what happened next. After that, out into the city they went. This is where it really gets quite fascinating. Out in the city, if you look at it, once they came out of the airport, somewhere down around here, look at all of the different arteries that they were immediately connected to. They could have gone any one of these directions in a very, very short order from the dump out point. If you think about it, just driving 30 miles per hour in five minutes they could have been beyond that radius in almost any direction, Wolf. So, it's just been an extraordinary story of how they were organized, and the whole thing from beginning to end took about 11 minutes and then they were gone without a trace. They found a burned- out vehicle that they think is connected to this, but they don't know if it was the direction they went or anything else. The bottom line is, the diamonds are gone right now. And if you want a sense of what $50 million in diamonds looks like, just take a look at this, because this is worthwhile. This is a bag that has about half a million small diamonds in it. If you want to have $50 million worth of diamonds, what you have to have is that many bags full of diamonds like that. So it's an extraordinary robbery but getting rid of it, though, Wolf, will be the real challenge here because the simple truth is, selling diamonds is incredibly difficult when they are stolen, especially in this volume. That may be the bigger challenge for these diamond thieves as they try not to get caught in this large, daring robbery.</s>BLITZER: Very daring indeed. We're going to go to Brussels later here in THE SITUATION ROOM and speak with our own Dan Rivers. He's on the scene at that airport right now. Other news we're following, including an Olympic star appearing in court today facing murder charges. Oscar Pistorius tells his version of how his girlfriend was killed. And the Newtown school shooter said, and I'm quoting now, said to be obsessed with mass murders. Up next, we have chilling new details in this very tragic case.