know who s shipping the material or know what s in it. today it s interesting they re calling it might be a trial run or a dry run. this is very important because the hijackers on september 11, 2001, did several dry runs before the attacks. so this is important to get a handle on this issue. if u.p.s. was using a subcontractor, yemen airline uz, to do their screening and parcels for thel, that s going to be a vulnerability that has to be closed. if they re using subcontractors, they must know them and the subcontractors must meet the security requirements. mary, one other point here. we re having a conversation about checking cargo. give us a sense from what was your vantage point of the kind of job we re doing in this country and internationally at screening cargo. well, we re doing a spot check job. we certainly have equipment in place at various seaports now where we can screen and x-ray cargo shipments coming in by sea. vulnerabilities are represented
suspicious packages that had circuits on them, wires coming from them. they are being test the right now. you re seeing pictures of them. they re being tested. we don t know if actually explosives were actually a part of this. some describing this as possibly a trial run, a test run, by terrorists to see if maybe they can could get these things in and maybe later the real deal would take place. but that is where we are right now. we are starting to get the all-clear at some places but still a security situation that spans right now the globe. yeah. what s interesting is we re talking about yemen where the planes originated from. yemen is of course a big cause of concern for the united states because in many ways it has a very weakened central government. it has many lawless areas where al qaeda elements have been able to organize themselves. we ve seen other plots in the past that were hatched there. other leaders of al qaeda units and cells in yemen organizing plots and talking abou
disguised as toner cartridges. we don t know at this point, even though some of testing is going on, whether or not any explosive devices were actually on board these particular cargo flights. you re seeing pictures right now of the devices themselves, again, disguised as toner cartridges but built to be some kind of you re seeing a circuit there, what they called a circuit card that was aboard this particular toner cartridge. it looked like an ied, again, testing is going on. we don t know if anything explosive was aboard. i need to reiterate these are cargo flights we re talking about, u.p.s. you flights. these were with not commercial airlines where passengers were on board. but still this has prompted many to speculate whether or not this was actually a test run or if this possibly could have been the real deal that was stopped ahead of time, the testing they say goes on out in the field to see if explosives were there. they say it s unreliable. i believe fran townsend told us th
in newark, new jersey, however, a security alert has now apparently been lifted. yeah. and in newark we ve gotten the all-clear. as for london, investigators are looking at a cargo plane there, a u.p.s. you cargo plane that came in from yemen, that was headed to chicago, illinois. but we understand we re getting conflicting reports, tony, on whether or not the device, a toner cartridge that was tested, was, in fact, free of explosive devices or was in fact dangerous. we re still in the process there of looking into that angle. fran townsend who s in new york joins us now with more on what her sources are telling her about this global security scare. fran? yeah. i mean, look, they are now looking at packages being shipped from yemen, whether it s by u.p.s. you, fedex, dhl. they re looking at all the international shippers and packages coming out of yemen. but this goes back now, we re learning, to the intelligence community. they had intelligence not
via london or a european country to the united states. let s take a look at what happened in the uk. why did the uk find that packable and yemen didn t? and then you compare the two processes and take yemen and increase it to match the uk. all right. john lucich, thanks very much. a former cargo pilot there giving us his take on today s developments. still, though, we need to be careful in terms of what was found. there s still no confirmation that this is indeed an explosive device or a dry run. but, tony, you have jeanne meserve joining us. jeanne is our national security correspondent, our homeland security correspond sent. jeanne, i know you have new information and maybe even a visual to help us here. yeah. we finally do have some pictures to show you of this device that we ve been talking about. in fact, we have two photographs. maybe we can take a look at those. here s one with of them. this is the circuit card as it s been described to me that was