they are all boston strong and we salute them. i m anderson cooper. good night. i hope you were with us during the last hour and you were inspired as watching adrianne haslet-davis story. she is truly boston strong. one thing she wanted to get across to everyone watching is something her grandmother said to her as a kid it is okay to not be okay sometimes. but adrien is doing okay. and she has a long road ahead of her as do many of the survivors but we will root for her along the way. if you are just joining us, we expect a news conference any moment from australian authorities on the search for flight 370. it is 11:00 a.m. in the search area. the newly refined and somewhat smaller search area. you see it in the red near the top of the screen. the gray is former search areas. the question right now is will it change yet again when angus houston, who s coordinating the search effort, steps to the make phone in perth. will he make bigger news. we will find out shortly and we expect the press conference any moment now. you can you can see it live on the screen. they are preparing the podium and such. as we wait for him i want to go to aar erin mclaughlin. they refined the search area. what do we know about the search going on right now? that s right, anderson. they managed to reduce the search area by some 1300 square miles, which believe it or not, is a relatively minor adjustment, compared to the adjustment they made on sunday when they reduced the search area to roughly a third of what it used to be. still, we re talking about some 33,000 square miles. a very, very large area, which is why authorities have been stressing that it is critical they get more information to be able to reduce it even further. as you said, it will be interesting to see if mr. houston has any comments on that in the press conference that we re expecting just minutes from now. when i last talked to authorities in our 8:00 hour, people involved in the search, they were saying they were going to give it many more days, perhaps more than a week of continuing to try to just focus on hearing anymore pings that might occur. the assets that are now being used in the search, do we know how many ships and planes are out there looking? well, today, according to the joint agency coordination center, press statements this morning, there are some 15 planes and 14 aircraft out scouring those waters, but it has sob said in some 23 days of the operation we have had no reported findings of any kind of debris. as you mentioned, all eyes right now focused on the australian vessel, the ocean shield with the american ping locater on board scouring the waters in a ladder-like formation, trying to redetect that signal that gave so many people hope here on sunday. again, it will be interesting to see if mr. houston has any comments, any updates on that. the past few press conferences of this kind that we have experienced over the past few days there have been dramatic announcements. anderson. erin mclaughlin, we appreciate that. we will check in with erin and as i said if you are just joining us we are waiting to hear from authorities. we do not know what they will be announcing at this press conference. it is a little past 11:00 a.m. in australia and in the search area. obviously the search is already underway. we don t know if there are new developments, though, beyond the refining the search area. we anticipate some sort of announcement being made. we will bring it to you live. we want to bring in our panel. author of why planes crash, investigator fights for safe skies and doing calculations on the search. boeing trip 777 captain and miles o brien, former department of transportation inspector who represents accident victims and their families. richard, let s start with you. you were with me in the 8:00 hour. you heard from captain mark math thi mathies from the u.s. navy. he said the life of the pinger is 30 days and may go up to 45 days and may allow that much time to focus the search on trying to get another ping. yes. last night, angus houston said i m just keeping an eye forgive me, i m keeping an eye to see if he will stop me. he said they will go several more days. here s angus houston. okay. good morning. i m accompanied by the same team as on previous occasions. i m pleased to be here to brief you today. today i can report some further encouraging information regarding the search for missing flight mh-370. on monday, i advised the pinger locater deployed by the ocean shield had detected signals consistent with those emitted by aircraft black boxes on two separate occasions. i can now tell you that ocean shield has been able to reacquire the signals on two more occasions. like yesterday afternoon, and late last night perth time. the detection yesterday afternoon was held for approximately five minutes and 32 seconds. the detection late last night was held for approximately seven minutes. ocean shield has now detected four transmissions in the same broad area. yesterday s signals will assist in better defining a reduced and much more manageable search area on the ocean floor. i believe we are searching in the right area, but we need to visually identify aircraft wreckage before we can confirm with certainty that this is the final resting place of mh-370. for the sake of the 239 families, this is absolutely imperative. today the ocean shield is continuing the slow, pain staking and methodical work to refine the location around the four acoustic detections. we are not yet at the point of deploying the autonomous underwater vehicle. the better ocean shield can define the area the easier it will be for the autonomous underwater vehicle to subsequently search for aircraft wreckage. it is important to note that ocean shield can search six times the amount of area with the towed pinger locater than can be done with the sonar on the autonomous underwater vehicle. searching underwater is an extremely laborious task. so the more work we can do on the surface with the towed ping er locater to affix the position of the transmission the less work we will have to do below the surface, scouring the sea floor. given the guaranteed shelf life hoe pinger batteries is 30 days and it s now 33 days since the aircraft went missing it s important that we gather as much information to fix the possible location of the aircraft while the pingers are still transmitting. in further promising information, we have received the results of the data analysis conducted on the signals detected by ocean shield on the first two occasions. this data analysis was conducted by the australia center based at albatross in new south wales. it is the australian defense forces center of excellence for acoustic analysis. the analysis determined that a very stable, distinct and clear signal was detected at 33.331 kilohertz and that it consistently pulsed at a 1.106 second interval. they, therefore, assess the transmission was not of natural origin and was likely sourced from specific electronic equipment. they believe the signals to be consistent with the specification and description of a flight data recorder. up to 11 military aircraft, four civil aircraft and up to 40 ships will assist in today s search. a modified apc-3 will coordinate with ocean shield in conducting a sonar search in the same vicinity. today a weak front is moving in from the southeast, and is expected to bring scattered showers. the planned search area is about 75,000 square kilometers. you may have noticed the size of the search area has significantly reduced over the last couple of days. based on ocean shield s detections we are now searching a much more concentrated area based on the drift pred cases made possible by ocean shields detections. a smaller area has allowed much tighter search patterns based entirely on visual search principles. in other words, we have intensified our search in the visual search area. just a bit of housekeeping, at my last press conference i said i could come back to you with the precise timing of when the signals were detected by the ocean shield. the first detection took place on saturday, the 5th of april at 4:45 p.m. perth time. the second detection took place on saturday, the 5th of april at 9:27 p.m. perth time. the third detection took place on tuesday the 8th of april at 4:27 p.m. perth time. the fourth detection took place on tuesday, 8th of april at 10:17 p.m. perth time. i m now happy to take your questions, but before i do that i would refer you to the diagram there which shows you where all of the detections were made. i would also highlight to you the satellite hand shake calculation number seven. that was the hand shake, which was a partial ping. where the experts in kuala lumpur access the plane s engines might have flamed out and it s probably significant in terms of the end of power flight. what does your data show? du it give you any indication of how far they have traveled? we have no idea at this stage. we are continuing the i have yul search, a intense visual search in the hope of picking something up because what we are dealing with with the visual search is an area of search which has been adapted consistent with the amount of oceanic drift that has been at play during the period. okay. so that s the first point. the second point is, the only thing we have got at the moment in terms of this location here is the detection of the transmissions. we have no idea at this stage what is under the water. of course, as soon as we finish the towed pinger locater work, hopefully we will get more transmissions to better refine the point on the ocean floor where the transmissions are emanating from. once we have that, and there s probably no more hope of picking up anymore transmissions, we will put the autonomous underwater vehicle down to have a look. now, hopefully with a lot of transmissions, we ll have a tight, small area, and hopefully in a matter of days we will be able to find something on the bottom that might confirm that this is the last resting place of mh-370. i stress and i can t stress enough the families have to be considered when you report on awl of this. because they want a bit of certainty. we don t get certainty until we have a visual sighting of the wreckage. that will probably come with the work the autonomous vehicle does. the other thing about the bottom there, i m informed by experts, that there s a lot of silt down there. that could complicate the search because the silt on the bottom of the ocean can be very thick and things disappear in to it and it makes a visual search underwater very difficult. on monday, you thought there was possibly two pingers. to you think you are dealing with two or one device at this point? well, we have the evidence. the assessment was made that we thought there might be two pingers there. this has not been confirmed in further detections that we picked up. now, whether that s because, you know one ping er has run out of battery life and there s one running, or we just haven t got close to it, i don t know. but the fact of the matter is we haven t had any further evidence of two pingers going off in the same area or at the same time. isn t it curious that two pingers, the frequency to be 3.3 on both of them? well, i won t get in to that because basically the analysis on that i don t think has revealed anything unusual. i might ask mr. levy if he has any information on that. no. okay. do you plan to move more pinger locate canners in the area to cover more territory? no, we don t. because as i have said previously, one of the important things about this sort of search is the need for complete, completely noiseless environment. ocean shield is minimizing all of its systems and really the only thing that is operating are the two thrusters at the back of the vessel. everything else is turned off. so that we have the best search environment possible. if you have other ships there, you would end up with a very noisy environment and you wouldn t get the sort of search that we have at the moment. i mean, we are looking at this stage for transmissions that are probably weaker than they would have been early on because the batteries of both devices are past their use by date, and they were very shortly found. i think we are very fortunate, in fact, to get some transmissions on day 33. just one person. is it possible you could release a section of the audio recording so we can hear it? we ll look at that. i don t see why not. how many detections do you think the ocean shield needs to refine the location. you already have four detections and you say you need more detections to refine the location and second, do you have more information regarding the detection we received about the chinese ship and do you think it is a reliable one? in terms of ocean shield, the more detections we get, the better. the other thing that comes in to it is the quality of the transmission and the detection. what we are after is the best return that we can get. by triening a la triangulating data we will come up with a more sharply defined, much smaller search area underwater. bear in mind, that the time spent on the surface cover six times more area than any given time than we will be able to do when we go under water. with the batteries likely to fade or fail very shortly, we need to get as much positional data as we can so that we can define a very small search area. bear in mind, with the air france disaster several years ago, it took them 20 days. they had a very good they thought they had a good fix and it took the underwater vehicle 20 days to get to the wreckage. yes. . [ inaudible ] is it worthwhile to send a manned submarine to have a look at what s down there? have you considered that? well, i m not running the search. we ve got we ve got the australian maritime safety authority running and coordinating the operational search. of course the defense force providing a lot of the assets, along with many other nations. there s a lot of military assets out there at the moment. of course there is one submarine. i might just get commodore levy to comment on that particular aspect of your question. the short answer is, the utility of submarines has been evaluated and it was when we first started to commence the search. it you determined that they would not, the submarine would not be optimized for this particular search. what we do have today is royal australian aircraft p-3 aircraft deploying in the field. that provides more sensors in the vicinity of ocean shield without having a ship there to pro-reduce the background noise. some very good work that was only started after the mh-370 aircraft was lost, very good work by the australian defense work, in particular the air force have modified the acoustic processor to pick up the 37.5 kilohertz frequency. we expect anytime now the aircraft, the first aircraft, the ocean shield will coordinate to lay a sonar buoy. it is a package parachuted out of the aircraft, floats on the surface of the ocean and will deploy a hydrophone, 1,000 feet below the surface of the ocean and it has a radio that transmits the data back to the aircraft. hp-3 is capable of carrying 30 on each mission and that will provide a range of sensors, a number of sensors, 1,000 feet below the surface. the towed pinger locater is deeper than that. it provides a range of sensors 1,000 feet down. the other point i would make is the silt cover on the bottom as well as potentially hiding debris. now we have an analysis that shows there is silt down there. that is an absorbing material. so we are at risk of a lot of the sound energy being absorbed by the silt rather than if it was a rock seabed. a lot of that would be reflected to the surface or towards the surface. the fact there is silt there also hindered to a certain extent the sound provocation. have you analyzed the signal. [ inaudible ] i understand there s been no further detections in the area where the chinese vessel assisted by hms echo, which is an oceanographic vessel from the royal navy. i believe they haven t made any further detections. in terms of the analysis of the signals that it picked up, i ll come back to you on that. i m not sure where we are at with that. i haven t had any advice that the analysis is complete at this stage. when you began this search and looking at the odds, the size of the ocean, the size of the search area, what do you think the chances are that you would make an announcement like this today? well, i would say very quickly caution again what we are picking up is a great lead. we have to caution before we say this is the final resting place. there s still a ways to go. if you asked me when i arrived last sunday night, i would have been probably more pessimistic than i am now. i m now optimistic we will find the aircraft, or what is left of the aircraft in the not too distant future, but we haven t found it yet because this is a very challenging business. we re relying on transmissions that have come and gone. i just like to have that hard evidence, a photograph evidence that there s pieces of aircraft down there to know that actually this is the final resting place of mh-370. based on this diagram, will you can see the scale on the bottom. the scale on the bottom is on the left at 01020 kilometers. you can see it is a relatively small area. again, i narrowed it down to 25 kilometers. i m confident that we have an area there which provides a promising area to exploit. note the satellite hand shake calculation and ping seven. that s another source of evidence. so i think that we re looking in the right area. but i m not prepared to say, to confirm anything until such time as somebody lays eyes on the wreckage. are you being cautious for the families and the sake of precision, but we are looking at a case where we have frequencies, which are consistent with a black box. that s been verified by the black box. by acoustic analysis. they have been consistent, they have been sustain td and they are where the science suggests the plane is. yep. can you give a percentage, without holding you to it, 80%, 90%. i understand you have to express caution but how confident are you? i have confidence we re in the right area. but i m not going to give the final confirmation until somebody has seen wreckage. okay. i m not prepared to go this percentage or that percentage. you said you were to wait to get more transitions from ocean shield. for how many days do you want to keep the pinger locater working? the reason we want to do that is that there s no second chances. it looks like the signals we have picked up recently have been much weaker than the original signals we picked up. the batteries are starting to fade and as a consequence the signal is becoming weaker. we need to, as we say in australia, make hay while the sun shines. we need to get all of the data we can. by getting more data, we will be able to compress this area in to a much smaller area where we do the very difficult and challenging search with the autonomous underwater vehicle. bear in mind, we heard about the silt. the silt on the bottom will complicate that search. sometimes silt can be, you know, tens of meters thick. it s a very difficult environment. so, you know, the more effort we put in to location of where the transmission is coming from, the more certainty we will have that we will find something on the bottom of the ocean. what are they doing in the search area? what we are doing, we are not putting all of our eggs in one basket. we are continuing with all of the activities. we are continuing to look where 01 is and we are also doing a much more intense visual search. where the track spacing f you understand that. what an aircraft does. it s assigned to an area to search and then it will design a pattern with small spacing and it will cover the area very extensively and very intensively. that s what is happening now. that s what is happening in the wreckage in the area here would have moved with the ocean drift, the currents and waves and so on we are now searching the area where after 33 days the scientists, the analysts assess where the wreckage might be now. we hope we will ools also find something on the surface of the ocean that confirms that the aircraft basically entered the water at this location.submarin limitation in how deep they can dive. that s a classified area. all nations they don t declare how deep their submarines can go. the environment down here is around, we said previously 4500 meters. so what we re talking about, specialists underwater, autonomous vehicles and specialists other vehicles that could be used for recovery. so this is the domain in which you use those sorts of vehicles. so from here we will be looking further downstream for other vehicles that might be able to operate in the environment, if we find, if we find obviously the aircraft. mr. houston sorry. just one at a time. you first and then you. the difference between the points on the map is about 25 meters maximum. in the class we were told it could only pick up sounds a mile away from the black box. are you reassessing of how the sounds travel underwater at this point because you are detecting things that are much further apart. again, you heard the commodore say the bottom is a silt bottom. that absorbs sound. funny things happen depending on temperature, temperature layer answer so on and so forth. the characteristics of the water, the characteristics of the ocean floor all come in to play here. the other thing is that in terms of this area the ocean shield went there on the 5th of april. it is pulling the towed pinger locater since then. that s four or five days. it has searched that area continuously through that period of time. this is what we picked up at the moment. you ll note that the most recent detections are all down in the southern part of the area. on tuesday, the two signal were acquired. okay. it was around 1,000 matters above the seabed, 3,500 deployed. is that experts say that is consistent with what happened [ inaudible ] it is quite possible that there s currents down there which could have disturbed the debre and also as it was falling from the surface it would have dispersed over a large area, as well. it has been said we know more about the surface of the moon than the seabed of the ocean floor. that s probably right. we don t have accurate sampling of the currents in that particular area. the indication we have that silt is on the seabed is taken from samples taken some years ago and 130 miles away from the current position. they are in a database that we can access but gives an understanding of how little topography we have of the seabed. the concept of water movements an flows down there is one we have to take in to account. the families must take encouragement from what you have announced today. but as you said that confirmation must be visual from the autonomous sub. when is your understanding of when the sub could go down? do you have a time frame in mind, five to ten, 20 days. you mean the autonomous underwater vehicle? yes. we will send it down when we have exhaust ed the possibilities in terms of the surface search. this is a personal opinion. i don t think that time is very far away at all because i think the last signal we got was a very weak signal. if we continue to get signals, though, we will continue to search. for the simple reason that the underwater vehicle it operates at walking pace. okay. it has a relatively narrow swath and it takes days and days and days to cover even an area like this. in fact, this area you see here would take it we d be talking in terms of weeks, not just days. so the more time we spend getting the locational data the better off we will be when we come to the underwater search. remember what i said in my brief. essentially, it takes six times longer to cover the same area with the underwater submersible as it does with towed pinger on the surface. how long will you wait from the last ping you receive, or the last signal you receive, which as you said you last night, if you hear nothing more how many hours or days will you wait before deploying the autonomous vehicle? well with, i think those judgments have yet to be made. this is a very dynamic process. judgments are made on the basis of a lot of factors. and clearly we are not at that point yet. i can t give you any information at this time. i would imagine, though, it s not far away before we deploy something to go down and have a look. today? [ inaudible ] none of the debris we with found, thus far, has had a connection to mh-370. but we are now in a search area, and we are working very intensely and we are hopeful, we are hopeful that we might find something that has a connection to the aircraft. so we ll just have to wait and see how that goes. if we find anything of significance, we ll obviously let the media know. have you already been over that before in a broader pattern? i think we have probably been over on a broader pattern, but we haven t done it the way we are doing it now. you may remember over the last week we have been covering areas of 220,000 kilometers, areas the size of island or one of the largest provinces in china. we re now sending the same number of aircraft out to a search area which is much smaller. consequently we can do a much more intense, thorough search, visual search. before we were doing, if you like, an all sensor-type search, using radar and eyes, but what we are focus canned on right now is a i have yul search. visual range. i think the the range is two miles an i think that is visual search 101. we are searching 75,000 square kilometer cans. we keep going from nautical miles to kilometers. given the debris that was previous you believe has nothing to do with mh-370. is there any chance the frequencies have nothing to do with the transmission devices you were looking for? you said they match up to the frequencies and you don t believe them to be anything natural but could they be something unrelated? we think well, we have had the analysis done. it s nothing natural. it comes from a manmade device. and it s consistent with the locater on a black box. that s why we are more confident than we were before, but we have to lay eyes on it. one more question we are working. that s one of my roles to coordinate that. this week is very busy in perth because there s a big conference. that is true right now. we have thousands of people here at the moment. thousands of visitors. from the end of this week, we will have adequate accommodation to cater to the families and we will be keeping a very close eye on that. we are working very closely with the chinese ambassador and his staff, the malaysian high commissioner and hi staff, malaysian airlines and the west australian government, the city of perth and the city of free mantle to ensure that we can do everything possible to ensure the families are looked after and taken care of when they come to australia. we want them to we know it s a very sad time for them. but when they come, they will be looked after. we are very know cussed on that. and i must say the west australian government, the federal government both see this as a very, very high priority. thank you very much. thank you. perhaps the most significant information we have heard in a very long time. air chief marshall angus houston saying a number of important things. he described the new confirmation of pings as a great lead. he said heed quote now optimistic we will find what s left of the aircraft in the not too distant future. he s not confirming the aircraft has been found, but they have the sounds they have now heard again are consistent with flight data recorders. he says, quote, they are stable, distinct, clear signals that have been detected. the transmission is not of natural origin, which eliminates that it could be a whale or something natural on the seabed. they said it is a silty bottom of the ocean here in this area which has been complicating the sound, the transmission of sound. this is truly a significant evening. we are back with our panel. he didn t say they found the plane without saying it. it is as close as he will say without physical evidence. when he says i m optimistic we will find the aircraft in the not too distant future. i believe we re searching in the right area, not of natural origin, electrical equipment, equipment with an being a military man he s not going to go that final step until he has physical evidence. this is pretty much telling us he s got it. i agree. when the families are in consideration and that s what he is considering you can t give anything other than facts. they are handling this like a professional investigation now opposed to earlier on when announcements were coming out all over the place. this guy knows what he is doing and taking control of the investigation and being considerate of the families and very well done. the fact that new pings were heard is clearly a huge, huge step forward. i you confident they were going to reacquire it. i kept that to to myself. you could see the marshall had a more relaxed demeanor than i have seen him before. that would be confidence as far as i m concerned. the interesting thing, earlier in his conversation, he indicated not only did they have the pings from the flight data recorder opposed to the cockpit voice recorder. interesting. mary? same thing. i think that angus houston and the team there, they certainly expressed that they thought they had the pingers, they had the black box, they had the right site. it was all right there. they didn t put the crowning achievement on it. they didn t say we have the plane but i think everybody reads between the lines that they are saying that and so very important. i concur that they should use those black boxes and pingers, as long as they last. they might be in their final dying pulses, but it would simplify the length of the search because this is the first step in a long process. miles o brien, angus houston also saying the autonomous underwater vehicles will not be sent down until they have exhausted all possibilities in the search on the surface both for debris on the surface and for the pingers. houston also said that he did not anticipate that would be very far off. because of the weakening what he believes is the weakening of the signal that they are likely to go to those autonomous underwater vehicles relatively shortly. i think as the confident dense grows that this is grows that this is the location and more returns from the pingers, you can say with certainty when you stop hearing them what happened. where s we didn t know if it you a fluke before or not. with four or five and if we get to six and seven and they get less and less you can say with certainty the batteries are died. let s get the auv in the water and get busy with that. i m flabbergasted, not a single shred of debris has been found and they are on the pingers quite evidently. i d like to know what assets in the nonpublic realm, the secret realm were used to pinpoint this location. this can t be just luck. do you believe there s more information they are not giving out? i think they have a higher level of credibility on the information. i think they have one level deeper. they have got the experts who know this backwards basically. this is my supposition, but the experts are saying this is it but he s the last level of caution. you don t come out and do a press conference and make the sort of comments you quoted it, anderson. we will find the aircraft in the not too distant future. they know where that plane is now. david gallo, you coled the search for air france flight 447. so much has been made that it took two years to get the black box up but as you and i have talked the last several weeks a lot of time was eaten up by red tape, getting approvals to get to the site. once you are out there and have an idea where the wreckage is, i mean, when you look at the conditions under the water even with the silt, how confident are you they will be able to find the black boxes and in a relatively short order? i m confident they can find the black boxes. i have no doubt about that. i m not saying it is easy. that s a fairly tricky topographic area, on the north side of an undersea plateau that is about two miles high off the sea floor and the north side might have canyons, gullies and all sorts of stuff. it won t be easy but can still help on a survey. last thing you want are boulder and rocks scattered around on the sea floor. if silt is covering the sea floor it may help the sonar source. if you are just joining us a significant press conference from angus houston. coming as close as possible to saying they have, with a lot of confidence very close to finding this aircraft underneath the water. they said they will not confirm anything until they have a visual on wreckage. they obviously want to continue to search for debris, as well, on the surface of the water. none of which they have found thus far. they point out again, this is the significant part. the transmissions they have heard are not of natural origin. they are consistent with they are from man made objects and consistent with the flight data recorders. a lot more to talk about. we ll be right back. aflac. aflac, aflac, aflac! 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[ meows ] the internet of everything is changing everything. cisco. tomorrow starts here. the internet of everything is changing everything. disturbing the pantry. ortho crime files. a house, under siege. say helto home defense max. kills bugs inside and prevents new ones for up to a year. ortho home defense max. get order. get ortho®. meet your biggest competitor: philips slimstyle led bulb. beautiful quality light with a slim design, at a slim price. anybody have occasional constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloating? one phillips colon health probiotic cap each day helps defend against these digestive issues with three types of good bacteria. i should probably take this. live the regular life. phillips . good evening, everyone. major development in the flight 370 investigation. today i can report further encouraging information regarding the search for missing flight mh-370. on monday, ied a vied the towed pinger locater deployed by the ocean shield had detected signals consistent with those emitted by aircraft black boxes on two separate occasions. i can now tell you that ocean shield has been able to reacquire the signals on two more occasions. late yesterday afternoon and late last night perth time. confirming based on their analysis that those are not of natural origin, the sounds are not of natural origin. they are consistent with a flight data recorder. a great lead angus houston has called it. he said he is optimistic we will find what is left of the aircraft in the not too distant fuchlt saying a week ago he was not that optimistic but now he is saying this is a great lead. i believe we have searching in the right area, he went on to say a short time ago. i want to bring back our panel. david gallo, angus houston is saying now it s just probably not far off before they actually deploy the autonomous underwater vehicle to go down once they have exhausted the possibilities of finding more sound on the surface of the water. how will that work? what is that process? can you tell us? well, they are going to have to well, you have to retrieve the ppl on the end of the cable and then launch and recover using a crane. a torpedo-shaped object and means setting up a navigational grid on the bottom but a you can t use gps. the rhythm of the ship will change to the op-sec to allow them to launch and recover the vehicle. so a totally different ball game for the vessel. how does the autonomous vehicle work? is it like mowing the lawn, it just goes along a grid back and forth? yeah. they will tell it what grid they want it to run and then they will launch it off. it will go to the bottom and take an hour or two to get down to the bottom and then it will start to move along its path. every time it runs from north to south, the next time it comes back, it will move over 100 yards or something like that and come back on the next track. like cutting the grass, you want to overlap every path so you don t miss any spots. is it sending imagery back in realtime? sadly, no. that s world of sonar discover what sort of data is it? it is images? is it sonar? what is it? it is images made with sound and like an ultrasound looking at a baby s ultrasound. it is made with sound on the sea floor. anything on or above the sea floor that contrasts with the background will show up on that. a lot of this will depend not just on the technology but on the operators of the system. if you have a very good sonar operator they will be able to pick out something natural against something man made against natural background, like this is a plane against a land slope. they talked in the press conference about the silt on the sea floor kauing a problem in terms of the transmission of problem. would this cause problem in terms of getting sonar images. nothing sonar discovergraph. any kind of coding, volcanic rock is tough, reflectings sound easily. it is cy to get lost in the rubble. a little sediment would be good. i don t think it will affect the sound much at all. everyone stay with us. we want the take another break. we will return at the top of the hour. if you missed the press conference we will replay the key moments for you. live coverage in the search for flight 370 continues after this. this is the first power plant in the country to combine solar and natural gas at the same location. during the day, we generate as much electricity as we can using solar. at night and when it s cloudy, we use more natural gas. this ensures we can produce clean electricity whenever our customers need it. they don t know it yet, but they re gonna fall in love, get married, have a couple of kids, [ children laughing ] move to the country, and live a long, happy life together where they almost never fight about money. 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restricted zone at the moment. still so many questions to be answered. and there s going to be a lot of finger-pointing over the next several hours, days and even weeks as this investigation begins to intensify. let s take a kind of a look back now at all we know. at the top of the hour, thank you very much for joining us, it is 3:00 here on the east coast of the united states. we are following breaking news this hour. right now it is 10:00 p.m. in ukraine where earlier today the horrifying scene was captured on camera, the moment a passenger jet falls from the sky, exploding on impact. the tragedy without a doubt. but was it an accident? right now it appears very likely this plane may have been intentionally shot down over eastern ukraine. we don t know for sure. there s a lot we don t know. here s what we know right now. this was malaysian airlines flight a boeing 777 traveling from amsterdam to kuala lumpur in malaysian. on board, 295 people, 280 of them passengers. 15 of them crew members. there are reports americans were among the passengers. president obama commenting on that a short time ago. obviously, the world is watching reports of a downed passenger jet near the russia/ukraine border. it looks like it may be a terrible tragedy. right now we re working to determine whether there were american citizens on board. that is our first prior to. and i ve directed my national security team to stay in close contact with the ukrainian government. the united states will offer any assistance we can to help determine what happened and why. and as a country, our thoughts and prayers are with all the families of the passengers, wherever they call home. the president making no mention of the back and forth going on right now between ukraine and russia. the ukrainian president calling this a terrorist act. of course, we should also point out that on this day in 1996, twa flight 800 crashed into the water off the coast of long island in the united states. those inside the interior ministry in ukraine claiming this plane was shot down by pro-russia separatists using a russian made missile system, a buk, capable of hitting a target 70,000 feet up. this passenger jet was at a cruising altitude of 32,000 feet. cnn is on the ground in ukraine. let s go to victoria butenko in kiev and tom foreman with a closer look at what unfolded. victoria, what s the latest you re hearing from kiev? and we just lost victoria. we ll get her back shortly. let s go to tom foreman with a look. we ve been looking all day at this buk anti aircraft system or anti missile system as it is called out there. we don t know this is what was used. we re looking at the capability of the system, if, in fact, it could accomplish such a thing. if you look at the flight pattern, you see it came across the country as we have discussed, wound up down here before it went down. let me put it on to a more normal map so you can see more of what we re talking about. that puts the crash site down in this area, and this is russia, all over here. all of the green out here, this is all russia. so you re getting quite close to russian territory, 18 miles away from where the plane went down. that s within range. but also it could be within the area, because this is what we re talking about when we refer to the buk system. it is highly mobile, operated by four people. it has four ready-to-launch missiles on top of it. it s quite fast. from the time this thing is rolling to the time it can stop and be ready to fire is five minutes or less. the radar acquisition target acquisition system can find a target and fire a missile in about 22 seconds. so this thing can be moving very quickly, can fire fast and can be gone fast. so no matter where this came from, if, in fact, it was a missile, the launcher could now be very, very far from where it all happened. let s talk a little bit more about the missiles up on top there. there are many different configures for the buk. but if they re using the 9m-317 missiles, each 16 feet long, each weighs 1,500 pounds, carries a 154-pound warhead, high explosive, 154 pounds, that s extraordinary. and all it has to do is guess close to the plane. it can t actually impact its target but get close to a plane and it blows up with tremendous force. and this is really important note here. look at the speed of this. 2,684 miles an hour. that s around three times the speed of sound. this is unbelievably fast. a missile streaking through the sky like that. when you compare it to a plane like this, which is flying along at maybe around, let s say 600 miles an hour, you see that not only could a missile like that be guided in, because it is guided the whole way, to a plane like this, but it could come in so quickly, truly nobody on board, including the crew, might have any idea it s coming. the truth is, if this is what happened, this plane could have been hit and nobody on board would have the slightest idea it was headed their way. and we know from the map we showed earlier it is happening in a region over here, this highly contested region, where pro-russian separatists at work. this is crimea down here. so right in the hot zone. and certainly weapons are capable. one last note, anderson, i want to throw in here. we know they have the buk system is and could reach across the border. we speculate as to whether or not the separatists have such systems. but in all fairness, we have to note that ukraine has been a very important partner with russia for many years in developing missile systems. and despite some difficulties of the late 90s, their missile system is robust here. their production, technology, knowledge. so the ukrainians would have such systems. not incapable of this. that s why we have to be careful about deciding if it was a missile and if so, who fired it? anderson? is. yeah. tom foreman, i appreciate that update. fascinating details about the buk system. i want to go to christian amanpour joining us from london. christian, obviously there is the human tragedy of this, and, you know, and our thoughts and well wishes and prayers are with the families of the 295 people on board, some probably watching right now, trying to get as much as they can. it s very hard sometimes for families to get information directly from the airlines in the early stages of something like this. but there are also strategic considerations, military considerations, geopolitical considerations, in all of this. this is a potentially game-changing situation for the conflict in eastern ukraine. reporter: well, i would absolutely say it is. and to that point, we have just seen dmitry medvedev, the russian prime minister, has posted on facebook, on his site, condolences to all killed and all of their families calling it a terrible tragedy, making no illusions as to what happened or how it happened but very quick to post condolences. let s talk now about what we do know. over the last several weeks, there has been a pattern of aircraft downed in that very region. june 14th, a ukrainian transport military plane down. ukraine accusing and mentioning that two other planes, this week, were downed. and i had a lengthy, lengthy conversation with ukraine s foreign minister on my program yesterday who told me that over the last several weeks, there has been no let up in the russian control of the border. in other words, of russians allowing fighters and material to come from russia into ukraine. he specifically mentioned not just mercenaries but tanks and anti air missiles, as he called them. so this has actually been going on and not just ukraine saying that. it s also europe. the chief european leader who has been spearheading the move to confront the russians over crimea and the continued destabilization in eastern ukraine is german chancellor angela merkel. and just yesterday she said they are considering more sanctions on russia, because they have not met vladimir putin, despite his promises to all those leaders at d-day which we all broadcast live, has not met his promise to stop the flow of weapons and fighters across the border, to stop destabilizing that area. has not met the promise to have a contact group for peace negotiations. and the foreign minister for ukraine very clear on what hasn t happened and so the escalation of heavy weaponry coming over the last several days and weeks, anderson. we have seen that, certainly. and also the growth of russian forces, christiane on the border, more than 10,000 said to be there after a period of which it appeared that russian forces had dwindled in number, they seem to be rebuilding those forces. reporter: that, plus the fact that the international community, president obama, chancellor merkel, the new ukrainian president, petro poroshenko, overwhelmingly elected at the end of may, had wanted to have peace talks with the separatists. president poroshenko thought he had president putin s support and acquiescence on that, there was a so-called contact group which involved the russians and other nations to try to bring this conflict to anent. and that has produced no result. the foreign minister spoke with the head of the russian sort of the russian part of this over the last couple days and said we need to get these talks back on track, because no matter what the evidence turns out to be over what happened to this malaysian airline flight, there have been these planes downed regularly over the last three or four weeks. in that area. plus this fight still going on. and there is no tangible evidence of russia doing anything to stop it, despite president putin s public calls for a peaceful settlement. so there is a double game being played over there and it is now an incredibly dangerous one. and obviously as you said, if this does prove to be the worst-case scenario, it is a massive game changer in terms of this conflict. we should point out, christiane, there have been improvements by ukrainian military forces and their capabilities against separatist groups early on. we saw in crimea and elsewhere, kind of an inability by ukrainian forces really to defend themselves or hold on to territory. that seems to have shifted under the new president. they do seem to have whether it s a fighting spirit or more experienced forces. they have made some games gains on the ground against separatist groups. reporter: yes, indeed, they did in the region a couple weeks and took back that area. but the separatists moved down to donetsk and sort of the regrouped and are still holding out there and this is what the ukrainian government wants to solve peacefully. i asked specifically the foreign minister about whether there was going to be an he escalation of their counter offensives. and he said we don t want to do that. he said we are even ready to hold video conferences to have peace talks with those separatists if they refuse to meet with us now. so even before this plane was brought i see you want to go live. ukraine government spokesman. let s listen in. translator: to establish the links of those of the militants, links of the militants of the russian federations. [ speaking in foreign language ] english, european, france, we send our condolences and providing to ukraine today, making public. we are providing to all international media, to all people, to all relatives, people who lost their relatives, family members in these anti humanic crime in donetsk, we are providing those recorded phone calls, where two officers, two military officers of russia, gru, minister of defense, discussing, one reporting and one is receiving, the report the shutdown of the plane over the territory of ukraine in donetsk exactly at 4:20 p.m. one officer, russian officer, who is reporting is a terrorist, gru russian federation. and the person who received the phone call is cornell wasili and also the russian gru officer. we are also providing to all media, international media, a russian cell phone number used by cornell guranan, while receiving the report. we also are providing the intercepted and recorded phone calls where terrorists are discussing to each other that they arrived to the place where the plane shut down. that they were recognized that the plane is civilian. and they also discuss that there are many, a great number of casualties on the scene, on the site. or where the plane crashed down. we a ukrainian government, will continue to investigate this criminal case, not terrorist, criminal case. which was conducted and committed again by those. two of them i established at this conversation at least documented phone calls gru officers of russian federation. again, let me express deep and sincere con dole he sayses to all people who lost their dearest members of their families. thank you very much. condolences. it s been spokesman for the ukrainian government there. i want to go to noah schneider, an american freelance journalist who i m told is on site. noah, you re here with richard quest on cnn. where are you exactly? reporter: we are in the village a little ways north of a city called torez. it s kind of a long road and a big wide field where the wreckage from the plane is spread out and there is still emergency services working, but it s getting pretty dark so folks are trying to wrap-up for the day. who is in control of the site and what are you seeing? reporter: the site is controlled by the separatist dnr donetsk people s republic forces. there s some rebels down the road. but i think most people here have been hearing battles with the ukrainian forces for are a few days now, stationed not far down the road. at the moment, i m not seeing anything. it s pretty dark. but when you get here it s a gruesome scene. people said the plane exploded in the air and the plane rained down in bits and pieces. the plane itself, the people inside. how intact is the debris you saw earlier? how large are the pieces of debris? reporter: pretty burnt. it s going to be close to impossible to establish what happened here. there are big huge pieces still intact. but for the most part everything is burnt up and charred and scattered over a few kilometers. noah, this is richard quest. this the debris field, is the site, is it secured in any way or are local people able to get access to it, to get access to the property, to go through what s there? reporter: i don t think anyone here in the village has even bothered doing that, to be honest. most are so frightened they have not come near. there are two nests of rebel fighters at the end of the road. but even they themselves are just in shock. most people here haven t seen anything like this, as one man said to me, nothing has happened in this village for 30 years. and then suddenly this. how wide a field of debris are we talking about? reporter: i mean, it s hard to say with certainty, but maybe 5 kilometers. it s a pretty wide radius. and the debris starts up the road. there is a tailspin, and you come further down and you see the place where the emergency services crews have set up a base of sorts. some firefighters, rescue teams. and they re kind of in the center of where most it landed. there a white tent in the field where they are collecting bodies. but you can wander through the open fields. there is not much of anything. there is a chicken farm nearby or chicken factory, as someone said. and then these little ukrainian villages. dilapidated homes, and and not much of anything. so an effort has been made and is being made to collect the remains of those on board. reporter: absolutely, absolutely. rescue teams have been going through the fields the last few hours, marking where bodies are, tying white, cotton ribbons to sticks. so as you walk through the fields, if you see one of those you know that s where a body is. but there is is still a lot 295 people on this plane. and i don t think they ve found all of them yet. and it s too dark now really to do much more work. so people are trying to figure out at the moment what to do with this site for the night. like i said, it s kind of an open peeled. open field. it s unclear. they don t know what will happen overnight. and it s going to be really difficult for anyone to secure this in a way that would be certain that no one can come in. when you say the rescue workers have been going through the debris and making these marks for where bodies are, where have these rescue workers come from? are they the separatists? reporter: no, these are local men who have stayed and worked despite everything that s happening. they re political persuasion here i think are beside the point. they were called, and they came. from pretty much any town that was within range. and they themselves are kind of stunned and have never seen anything like this. one of the firefighting teams putting out the wreckage was driving sort of an old fire truck and the fire hose had holes in it. so they were trying to put the remains of the flames and there was water spraying everywhere. i don t think they ve really had to use it much. do you know what sort of capability they hve for caring for the victims of this flight in terms of i mean, is there a morgue nearby? reporter: they have improvis improvised. no, but is there a morgue nearby? reporter: yeah, so there s two towns, two larger cities nearby, one torez, and and both of which are rebel controlled. the morgues are still working, so the bodies will be taken to the morgue there or in donetsk. i don t think the regional morgues have the capability to handle this number of individuals. when there was a battle at the airport, a month ago now, something like 50 people died and they don t have space immediately at donetsk, the regional capital. so it s going to be a big question. i don t think it s one that people on the ground here have quite gotten around to resolving. and obviously, noah, auto said, these are people, these are people taken upon themselves to do what they can to care for the bodies, to sort through this wreckage. has anyone there expressed any opinions about what happens next in terms of who should investigate this crash? we ve heard through other corresponden correspondents, through leadership from separatist groups they want an international body to investigate. are you hearing that from anyone on the ground here? reporter: yeah, i m hearing that from the separatists, the people in the village, i don t think they have much sense of where it could go. the separatists are saying they want an international commission, they want to send the airplane s black box back to moscow for investigation. there is actually one of the separatist leaders is up the road from me giving a press conference of some sort. so i think they re going to put out a plan. pretty quickly. i imagine it will be nearly impossible for the ukrainian authorities to visit this site. as far as you know, have they found the black box? reporter: i can t confirm that one way or the other. i haven t seen it myself. have they commented on that at all? reporter: they have been quiet. i haven t heard anyone say i ve got it. so darkness has now arrived. there is a difficulty in securing the area. and i m wondering, what happens now? because what must be late in the evening now, getting late in the evening. what happens now during the overnight hours, do you believe? reporter: i hope there will be an understanding between both sides that there needs to be a night of peace here. and they re going to set up a permanent sort of base for rescue teams and firefighters. but there s not much they can do beyond wait. one point to bring out to anderson, europe s flight safety body has just closed eastern ukrainian air space. noah, do you have a expense sense of how many people are onsite. reporter: dozens. rescue crews arrived a couple hours ago. there were two or three fire trucks and kind of spread out and so i would say dozens of local sort of rescue workers. and more and more rebel fighters. so now i would say there s dozens of them, as well. like i said, it s a pretty big area what we re talking about. so i haven t walked the entire perimeter yet. we have seen images, noah, of passports, a travel book for bali. are people s possessions clearly visible and retrievable? reporter: it s visible. it s visible and they re being collected. that s one of the things these rescue teams are doing. as you walk through the field you see a man with his cracked iphone sticking out of his pocket. sort of people s clothing everywhere. most of it s kind of ripped off by the air. other suitis cases and stuff in a while along the road. one was telling us headphones. peoplen had been flying watchi watching movies so they have been finding lots and lots of headphones. have you ever seen anything like this, noah? reporter: in my life, to be completely honest. this is beyond i mean, i ve been in ukraine now for a few months and there has been fighting and you can certainly call it a war but nothing of this scale has happened. and i think that s it s not just it s not just the locals, it s not just the fighters. but a lot of the folks coming, journalis journalists, are kind of stunned. do you think this will change anything. reporter: it s tough to say. it will clearly change things. it s a pretty massive event. but it s way too soon to be talking about who actually did this. there is too much we don t know and too many possible versions of story to get into right now. i think the task is to do right by people on the flight. to have the decency to pause the politics for the moment and collect the bodies and have a proper investigation here. how it change, you have to and mr. putin and mr. obama and mr. poroshenko and leaders. and noah, is an effort being made to collect passports, to collect identity documents? reporter: yeah. i mean, they re trying to collect everything they can. but first and foremost, bodies. i think that s and my sense is that s the rescue crew s number one priority right now. collect as many bodies as they can and gather them under these ten tents, these gathering points. some people are picking up personal effects. some people are walking straight by them. it s also, you know, keep in mind, it s kind of it s a long grass. and like i said, again, a really wide field. so finding things like passports is chance. noah, i appreciate you talking with us. i know this is a horrific scene. reporter: yeah, absolutely. thank you. and i appreciate the way you ve handled it and communicated it to our viewers. thank you very much. noah sneider, an american, freelance journalist, on the scene of this crash. one thing to point out from listening to this extraordinary account from noah. an aircraft crash site is an extremely danger allows but very complex environment. and not only for the debris of the aircraft that needs to be preserved so you can work out what happened, but the preservation of bodies. the respect and dignity. the personal effects. and that why in most cases you have this security zone that goes around it to stop basically do-gooders oral well meaning people. i notice the separatists are talking about a two to three-day truce to allow refer work and recovery work ers to go in and do the job to get the job done. and i have been in situations where there are bodies and i head hate to refer to them as bodies because these are men and women and families just living their lives. it s for those families listening right now to our coverage, i hope there is some small consolation in hearing from noah that there are people on-scene right now who are trying to care with compassion and with tenderness for the victims of this crash who are trying to gather all those who have died together and who are trying to do their best to take care of them as best they can. we re joined also by a journalist, victoria butenko, joining us from kiev, the capital of ukraine. what are you hearing from are the government there in kiev? reporter: well, one of the most disturbing statements we hear is actually from the locals in donetsk who say that neither emergency services or law enforcement agencies have access to the site. the territory where the airplane crash happen is fully controlled by the separatists and they are afraid this will interfear with finding out the reason and compromise the evidence. central government is trying very hard to show how open it is to inviting international investigators. and in kiev, they said the flight did not experience any problems with communication. much much i appreciate your update. we re going to take a short break. we re anticipating hearing from joe biden. we ll bring that to you live. we ll be right back. big plans. so when i found out medicare doesn t pay all my medical expenses, i looked at my options. then i got a medicare supplement insurance plan. 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[ male announcer ] join the millions of people who have already enrolled in the only medicare supplement insurance plans endorsed by aarp, an organization serving the needs of people 50 and over for generations. remember, all medicare supplement insurance plans help cover what medicare doesn t pay. and could save you in out-of-pocket medical costs. call now to request your free decision guide. and learn more about the kinds of plans that will be here for you now and down the road. i have a lifetime of experience. so i know how important that is. welcome back to continuing coverage of malaysian flight crashing with 295 people on board. we just heard from a young american freelance journalist, noah sneider, on scene at the crash site where it is growing dark. and an extraordinary account of what it s like, the people doing what they can, local people, separatists, trying to gather the bodies of those who have been found. many not found. and to echo what i said before the break, for family members of those who may be watching right now. there are people on site right now to do the best they can to care for the bodies of all those on board of this malaysian airlines flight, facting them together, the men, the women, children, trying to do best they can as darkness falls. a lot of new information coming in pieces. we want to check with jim sciutto on the response by russia. reporter: the response from the ukrainian officials from very early on, the ukrainian government has placed blame for this on pro-russian separatists and russia for arming the separatists with missiles capable of taking down airplanes. i ve been in with the ukrainian foreign minister and he said that russia sponsors terrorism and we hold putin responsible for this. so the ukrainian government pointing the finger at putin himself, who has played a double game here thinkisaying it wants deescalate ukraine and sending arms across the border and ukrainian officials saying some of those arms and has caused this passenger jet to come down. so in very definitive terms there from ukraine officials. obviously, an important piece in this is who is going to lead the investigation, who is going to investigate this crash site. separatist groups there saying they would like international investigation. richard roth has been monitoring developments at the u.n. and joins us now. what is the u.n. response in. reporter: anderson, the you wanted kingdom has asked for a session. no timing given f. you re going to have an international nicris like, this you re going to get the u.n. involved. you re definitely, according to the british, they would like it open with speeches. ukraine and russian have been going at it almost to exhaust n exhaustion. 18 or 19 meeting regarding the subject and done nothing to slow the combat. the other day language was introduced washing bank the warld, and other members have blocked any movement saying the russia russians are not making a balanced presentation. each side blaming the other. we have had ukraine government officials who have made their case. and as long as russia, a permanent member of the security council has veto power, little retraction contracting agreement on the diplomatic front. christiana amanpour monitoring events out of the london. extraordinary to hear from noah sneider on the scene of this crash. obviously focusinging on human tragedy. there are many aspects to what is going on. reporter: absolutely right. it was an extraordinary eyewitness account of the carnage and although he said that villages are trying to do their best. as victoria said, this is a crime scene and it has to be preserved and it s come down in the heart of those suspected of those taken the plane dawn. this is really serious. and if the international community wants to it find out what happened, needs to get investigators there swaps. and the ukrainian spokesman who has had conversations intercept between pro russian separatists and russia s military service. essentially, talking about this plane coming down, talking about shooting it down and then saying, oh, my goodness, this looks to be a passenger plane. to for those who remember, 30 years ago a plane was brought down over the soviet union in 19 83. and is the russians denied it rpg said it was a military spy pane plane. the past few days, the international community which is holding vladimir putin and the russian government responsible for not closing that border between russia and eastern ukraine and continuing to allow the free flow of heavy weaponry, according to what the more than fini minister told me yesterday. this is a major ccatastrophe thd have implications in geo strategic meetings right now. and also the anniversary. there all carrying on the exact day in july 17, 1996, when twa flight shot down off the coast of long island, killing all on board. we are joined by general ryan. at this point in this investigation, where what the data points you want to understand? well, the first thing to know is that if the aircraft was shot down and if it was flying at its normal cruising level of above 30,000 feet, we re talking about an air defense system like the buk, which has been mentioned already on your show, sa-11 or bigger. so nighit s not shoulder-fired, something one man jumps out of a truck to do. it has to be i a team of defense personnel personnel. so fired by a national military unit, either ukrainian or russia, or it is fired by separatists who have been highly trained in the testimony and who, by the way, happen to have access to a system which most rebels would not have access to. so must have been given to them by some state government. general ryan, if you would hold with us, and i want to ask you about this. and he want israel s prime minister are has instructed the israeli defense systems to begin operations in gaza, not a huge surprise. this has been talked, anticipated for several days as a bombing campaign, rockets being fired by hamas militants into israel, as well as israeli forces firing into targets throughout gaza system and throughout gaza. christiane amanpour joining us from london. a dangerous ground operation by israeli defense forces, very tricky in the close quarters you find in gaza city. reporter: anderson, this had is potentially just incredible to behold. this is the third time in six years, maybe are month, there have been these incursions by air or by ground no gaza. and each and etch we have one a hostilities that never ends the crisis and keeps leading to further crisis. and now with the world s attention focused on this plane this is the time when everybody has to be paying attention also to that conflict and trying their best to mediate some kind of cessation. we have heard that they have all sorts of plans possibly they may implement now as ground offensive. including if the government says it has to do this, the military has said if they want to really root out what we call terrorists, this is not a week s or one-month operation. this is a many, many, many month operation. so everybody has to understand what this in fact does mean. i want to check in with our wolf politics blitzerer, a major escalation. reporter: a major statement, anderson, saying the israelis have died decided to go in on the ground. let me read a couple sentences. following ten days of hamas attacks by air are land and sea and offers to do dehe isca lace. there is an ground eggs within the gaza strip. to establish safety and security while striking significant blow to hamas infrastructure. it looks based on what i m reading, it looks like virtually all aspects of the idf are involved, infantry, artillery, intelligence, combined with aerial and naval support. the effort will also be supported by theis israeli security agency and other intelligence organization. so what so many of us had anticipated over the past ten days is about to happen. israel moving in on the ground into gaza. and as you know, the israeli military have activated military troops, reservists doing their regular jobs, spending time with their family. they were activated of the. meant to units, maybe not close to the border but where regulatory personnel could move. and are now be sbribt deliberately on ground. a huge development unfolding between hamas and gaza. and wolf, as you know, we have all spent time in gaza city. it operating on ground is going to be very difficult and dangerous. of course. there is going to be a lot of casualties, palestinian casualties, they ll go after hamas targets and there will be inevitably be civilians, women and children and elderly caught in the fire. 1. million people people in this gaza strip, one of the most concentrated in the areas. there will be plenty of casualties. they say in the face of tactics the idf will continue in its unprecedented efforts to limit civilian harm. there will also be israeli casualties and the public is gearing up for that. is rah israeli casualties. one israeli has died in this operation. more than 200 palestinians have died you but i expect that number is going up you. the cabinet let by benjamin netanyahu, they have concluded that israel has to go in. and even as we speak,er they re probably on the ground. do we have a time table are are? we know they have been amassing troops along the board border. the statements says along the strip. they have already moved in. let s see how quickly those tanks, armor personnel carriers. i ve been here a week, maybe more, anderson. the races israelis have no desire to reoccupy the strip. they have gave up the gaza strip. they want to destroy as much of hamas military capability as they can. and then leave, basically. and try to crush as much of hamas as they possibly can. that s the operation. that s goal. we ll see how that s achieve if in fact ifs achieved. but this represents a whole new venture. the israelis no longer striking from the air but how moving in as we speak right now, moving into gaza. in terms of rockets today or military action today, what s been going on, wolf? well, they had that temporary u.n.-sponsored truce that is humanitarian cease fire that they that both sides basically honored, but as soon as that was over, it was not only business as usual, are it was even more intense, more palestinian rockets and missiles coming into israel. the iron dome working to try to destroy those that jeopardized major cities or anything along those lines, sensitive areas if those missiles were going into some open area farmland or whatever, they wouldn t bother. it was going trds a populated is area, they would. the israelis upping the ante. we heard earlier in the day that it was the most intense israeli activity they had spotted over the past ten days. so clearly even in advance of word that the israelis have made a decision to go in on the ground, the situation had been heating up dramatically and so that s where we stand right now. i suspect diplomats from around the world will be trying to get some sort of cease fire. i also suspect the israelis will try to destroy as much of hamas s military capability in the coming hours and days as they can before there might be some sort of cease fire. so this represents a whole new chapter in this current crisis. wolf, do you have a sense of how prepared the idf is for an operation like this? i was embedded with idf forces i think it was 2006 going into southern lebanon and they ran into, you know, much more extreme circumstances than they had probably anticipated. i remember being on a mission that was supposed to be two hours ended up being some 14 or 15 hours, ves slow going, very difficult operation, a lot of booby traps and concern about ieds. is the idf ready for this? the idf, i think they re pretty aware of the potential for danger and they ve had some nasty, pretty ugly experiences. remember all the experiences in lebanon where israel went in thinking it was going to be relatively, relatively smooth, relatively quick and turned out to be much more difficult when they were fighting hezbollah in lebanon. a lot of us remember covering that encounter. the israelis eventually left. it was a major major problem for israel. it was not as easy as some of the military planners had assumed it was going to be. they go into this, military planners told me over the past few days with their eyes wide open. they know this is difficult terrain, heavily populated area. they ve appealed to the palestinians to evacuate, especially from the northern part of gaza. they said get out as quickly as you can. here s the problem though. there s not a whole lot of places those palestinians can go. they can go south to gaza city. that s not that safe either as we saw what happened to the four little boys on the beach in gaza city. so many palestinians have evacuated, have left and fled to other parts of gaza. they can t come into israel unless they have a foreign passport. they can t go into egypt and can t go on boats into the mediterranean because that is area has been blockaded as well as by the israelis. they re stuck there, those palestinians. unless they can find some safe place someplace else, there s going to be significant casualties. we re monitoring the situation. you see a live shot from the gaza city. obviously, wolf, tomorrow is friday. it s a day when many people go to mosque. it s a day of prayers. it will be interesting to see how that factors into the israeli operation on the ground. yeah. well, i suspect the fact that it s friday which is the muslim holy day, saturday the jewish sa bat, i suspect that s not going to be relevant right now. this is for all practical purposes, this is a war that s going on. and as much shoal i days are holy days, there s an operation that s under way, i suspect the israelis want to try to the achieve their military goals as quickly as they possibly can. as a result, the fact that it s friday, the fact that it s saturday or for christian sunday, i think that s going to be basically irrelevant right now. this is a new phase in this military operation and the israelis decided to move in. what they keep saying, by the way, anderson, the hamas has a lot of the blame themselves because when that will six hour egyptian brokered cease fire, the israelis honored it for six hours although hamas never kept firing missiles into israel at which point the israelis said if you don t want to do it that way, we ll continue to up the and thee. earlier today they had a few hours of respite. palestinians could get out of their homes, do shopping, prepare. the israelis are moving in. no more cease fires for now. let s see what the reaction is from the u.p. u.n., are from egypt which has been working very hard to achieve a cease-fire. let s see what the u.s., the obama administration is going to do. there are going to be a lot of hectic phone calls going on around the world right now. i want to the go the to ben wedeman in gaza city. i want to correct something i said regard diagnose the plane crash. i said today was are the anniversary of twa flight crashing off the coast of long island in 1996. i believe i said it was shot down. the government said it was a center fuel tank explosion though some people indicated they saw a rocket, there s no evidence of that. it was ruled to be a center fuel tank exexplosion. i apologize for misspeaking about that anniversary. ben wedeman joins us on the phone in gaza city. ben, what are you seeing, what are you hearing? what are your thoughts and any statement from hamas yet? reporter: yes, anderson. we actually just got the order to evacuate our hotel, which is on the gaza coast. that was after some fairly heavy bombardment of the gaza seaport by israeli boats offshore. and we are now headed away from the coastline. apparently that entire area is now unsafe. certainly what we ve seen this evening, anderson, is the most intense israeli bombardment i ve seen in the last ten days. tank fire, artillery fire, fire from ships at sea, air strikes, definitely sort along the entire border but actually focused on the northern part of gaza. but what we re seeing is just strikes from the far south, far north at the moment. andersoned? ben, you have been there before when there have been ground operations by israel. you ve seen what it s like. explain the difficulties, the dangers that lay ahead. well, the dangers are that as soon as israeli ground forces enter and they are very heavy little armed, there s a tendency for huge destruction of houses and huge loss of life. when i was here in 2009, their entire areas of gaza, of northern gaza that were utterly destroyed, house after house after house. and multiple examples of civilian casualties who people caught in the fighting. the problem is, and i think we ve stressed this time and time again on our air, that there s really no where to hide in gaza. the israelis have been sending out these robocalls, dropping leaflets, telling people to go to gaza city, for instance. as we ve seen time and time again, there s strike all over the place. so for instance, this afternoon, we saw an air strike on a building right next to our office three children were killed in that instance. and, of course, yesterday, there was that incidence where four people were killed in gaza city, not the outlying areas where people have been told to evacua evacuate. gaza is bracing for a very, very bad night tonight. and as we were waiting for our car to get us out of the area down by the coast it, ordinary people were coming up and saying what s going on, what s going on? should we take our children? should we go, should we flee? so there s a sort of air of panic. another thing, a lot of power is off in most of gaza city. those lucky enough to have generate sers have some light. for the most part, the city is pitch black. anderson? so it s nearly 11:00 at night there. are you seeing people on the street? where do people try to flee to? well, they try to flee inland away from it because clearly a lot of the focus of the bombardment has been on the coastline. so they try to move further inland to really the center of the city where they re hoping to be safe. but as i said, they re striking in the centers of the city, as well. we saw this afternoon. in fact, we had our cameras aimed on that house where the three children were kill this had afternoon because a warning shot had been fired. we focused our cameras and within ten minutes, that rocket hit the house. so there s really no where to go to, even though people know that will certain areas like the coastline, like any area near the israeli board ser dangerous. anderson? ben, are stay with us.
happened. it seems dubious that the russian military, in other words, would want to take down a major passenger plane. certainly with not the intent of taking it down. again, we simply don t know who brought this down. i m also here with lieu dtenant colonel rick francona. just in terms of kants, we have not seen separatists heretofor, they have brought down at least one transport plane, but they were not flying at 33,000 feet. yeah, this would require, as we were talking about, a more sophisticated system. talking about, you know, hitting it inadvertently, it would be very difficult for that to happen. generally once you re locked onto the target, it goes to that target. and if it veers off that target and is no longer being guided, they self-destruct. but when you re targeting a plane at that altitude, are you clear on exactly what kind of a plane it is? no, it s a return on your radar. right. it will be a certain size, you can estimate the size of the aircraft. you may have other sensors that tell you what it is. but, you know, once you re getting radar returns and you engage the weapon, it just follows the radar path right up to the aircraft. so bob baer s earlier point that this is all trackable, that we will soon know where this missile, if that, in fact, is what it was was fired from, do you believe that? if we have the right sensors in the right place at the right time, yes. if you were monitoring. if you were looking for it, the radar signals can be intercepted. you can analyze those after the fact. can you even sometimes detect the launch of the missile. but your sensors have to be aimed at that spot at that time. and do we know if ukrainian government, which, i mean, their military capabilities have come under a huge amount of questions over the last couple of months. although they have improved lately. whether they would have the capabilities of monitoring that area? the ukrainian armed forces would be able to detect the radars. that s very easy to do. they should be able to, whether one believes them or not, but they should be able to identify where this missile was fired from? they should not only be able to do that, what kind of radar it was, there would be multiple radar signals. there would be a search radar. there would be an acquisition radar, a guidance radar. so they should be able to determine all that. if they have that information, that surely indicates a launch of a weapon and that this was a shootdown. absent that, we don t know. was this an on-board explosion? was it hit with something? there s questions also about command and control of a device like that over who exactly would make such a call to actually fire that kind of a weapon, how organized it is. the russian air defense, when they move, they re all networked together. and someone is in charge. now, if this is a division asset, they would make that decision. if they were provided to the separatists and i think that would be a remote possibility, you know, the systems are self-contained. once you ve got the you know, the radar system and the missile system and you ve got it up and running someone locally can do it. yes. it s not a centralized command. it would not have to be controlled, say, at a filter center up in the chain of command. but again, you believe the likelihood that any of these separatist groups that we have seen operating over the last 3 1/2 months in this conflict, that they would have the weaponry capable of bringing down a plane at this altitude? i agree. i think that s exactly right. hitting something at 33,000 feet requires a much more sophisticated capability than a man pads or something that a dissident group would have. our jim acosta is standing by at the white house. we ve been hearing reports about conversations between russia and the united states. jim, what are you hearing? reporter: right. well, we reported earlier this morning, anderson, that president obama and vladimir putin had a phone call earlier this morning to talk about those sanctions that the u.s. imposed on russia. and it was unclear, according to white house press secretary josh ernest, as to whether or not president obama and vladimir putin talked about these reports of this plane crash. and now we can confirm, according to the press secretary, that president putin did note these reports to president obama near the end of their phone call. so they did talk about it just briefly. it s not clear as to how much they talked about it or what they discussed in terms of covering that bit of news. but they did talk about it. one thing we should also point out, anderson, you ve been talking about what are the capabilities of these separatists and what may have caused that plane to come down. we should point out that senior administration officials briefing reporters yesterday on a conference call about these sanctions that the u.s. imposed noted that some of the defense firms that were being sanctioned were responsible for the production and i m just reading from this of a range of material from small arms to mortar shells to surface-to-air missiles to tanks. the senior administration officials also noted that on july 14th ukrainians lost a transport jet which was shot down from an altitude of 21,000 feet with a crew on board, and the senior administration official noted, anderson, that only very sophisticated weapons systems would be able to reach this height. and so this is part of the concern the president was expressing yesterday in the briefing room here at the white house when he announced these sanctions is that this flow of arms and fighters from russia and ukraine, that s what the u.s. is alleging, was further de-escalating the crisis in ukraine, and that is why the united states decided to bring forth these sanctions. but the headline, anderson, is that these two presidents did talk about this plane crash earlier this morning. we re digging for more details as to exactly what they did discuss, though, anderson. we ll come back to you. i want to go to capitol hill where senator john mccain is standing by live. senator mccain, what do you make of the information that you have heard thus far? thus far, we really don t know what caused it. but the fact is they were able to, quote, separatists, were able to shoot down an aircraft at 21,000 feet shows that there was capabilities. i do not want to leap to any conclusions because we, as you mentioned, it could be an explosion. it could be all kinds of reasons. but if it was a missile that took this plane down, then it has to be a very sophisticated weapons system. and the ukrainians do not have that capability. so if it is the case, we re going to have to act and act in the most stringent fashion including real sanctions, including giving the ukrainians the ability to defend themselves, which we have not done so far. when you say the ukrainians themselves don t have that system, are you talking about the ukrainian government in kiev, or are you talking about ukrainian separatists? the ukrainian government in kiev. the separatists you know, i don t know because they are russian, as we know. they re not separate, russians and separatists. we all know that. the head of the separatists is a kgb army guy or fsb army guy. whether they gave them that capability or whether it was a russian capability is really almost a difference without a distinction without a difference. but again, we don t want to jump to conclusions until we have absolute facts of the case. do you have any information about people on board, if there were any americans on board this flight? have you been given any kind of a briefing at this point? no, we have not. i just talked to some intel people, and they aren t sure yet exactly what happened here. you know, it s horrific. i remember back when they shot down a korean airliner and the repercussions that had throughout the world. and this is even worse in many respects. how closely i mean, obviously, you have been watching the situation in eastern ukraine very closely over the last 3 1/2 months. i was there really at the height of the crisis several months ago. it did seem for a time sha vladimir putin had, at least according to published reports, withdrawn a number of his forces, but it does seem, over the last several weeks or so, that those forces have been rebuilding along the border. and more disturbing than that, they ve shot down several aircraft, as you know, over the last few weeks, including the transport that was as high as 21,000 feet. i think putin was disappointed that he didn t get more support both in eastern ukraine, odessa, other parts of southern so it was russian equipment that was either moved into eastern ukraine or from russia that s helped. most likely moved into eastern ukraine. so they have been doing it. but again, it s impossible for me to imagine this thing being, if it is a shootdown, nothing but a tragic mistake on their part from their point of view, much less the humanitarian aspect of it. right. it would seem that there s no strategic reason or any kind of a reason to bring down for any side to bring down a passenger jet. it doesn t serve a strategic goal in any sense. in fact, if if i keep emphasizing if it was a missile that was launched either by russia or the, quote, separatists, which in my view are indivisible, this would have the most profound repercussions. it would open the gates for our assisting finally the ukrainians, giving them some defensive weapons. the sanctions that would be imposed as a result of that, that would just be the beginning. so i just cannot believe that no one in their right mind would want to shoot down an airliner. senator john mccain, i appreciate your time. thank you very much. thank you. we ll continue to consult with you and others on capitol hill. our nick paton walsh is standing by in london. i understand you have new information you re hearing from nato. reporter: not from nato, but i was speaking to informed individuals who can basically explain to me what kind of capability there is for tracking incidents like this. three possible different ways that are in nato s assets. one, a ground radar that they have, but that doesn t reach far enough into ukrainian territory outside. informed individuals say to be able to track something like this happening in ukraine. other option, there are nato awacs monitoring planes flying over poland and romania to monitor that area because those nato members feel increasingly threatened because of what s happening. now, they would not be able to pick up this either. people talk about space satellites, the belief that we re monitored by the assets that the u.s. have in the sky, but my understanding is that ballistic missiles are picked up and tracked by that. that s ground to ground. that s a scud or an icbm, something pretty enormous. that s tracked by these satellites. but what i understand is not a surface-to-air missile. so there may be something else out there perhaps in the u.s. military armory which can look at things like this. there may be a radar in play that people aren t overly aware about. but according to these informed sources i ve spoken to, we re pretty sure that the major assets nato have don t have some sort of magic rewind button and look at what happened. the people who do and this is where it s going to get particularly interesting or complicated as the blame game begins those who do are the russian military. it s their border space, their capabilities. they will know precisely what happened, as i m sure the ukrainians will have their own anlt capabilities, too. as this blame game continues, they ll, of course, have their own versions of events that they wish to put out. it s interesting to see that we may not magically in the next few hours have a crystal-clear picture from nato as to what they think has happened here, anderson. and richard quest who s joining us as well here in new york, i mean, you know, we ve been focusing on this as sort of a geopolitical incident. we ve been focusing on this as a military incident. but just as a human tragedy, we re talking about 280 passengers, 15 crew members on board this plane. this is a plane that left from amsterdam at 12:15 heading to kuala lumpur. there will be people from all over the world on board this airline. not only yes is the short answer. but look at the date. it s mid to late july. this is a holiday flight for people from europe going to kl and then right through the region. kl being kuala lumpur. and vice versa from europe. this is the typical summer holiday. you have vacation, you have business travelers. you re going to have a disaster rescue operation in kuala lumpur similar to what we saw. i ve just been talking to some pilots in europe this morning. one pilot in particular flying back from moscow this morning was said that there was activity flying over the area, was told, you know, there was activity in the region. there are many pilots that have, for a long time, been extremely concerned about flying over this conflict zone. because of the dangers. now, this pilot i spoke to this morning regularly flies across eastern ukraine, donetsk on his way to moscow. not once or twice, frequently. and he says they are all concerned and scared at what they know have been happening. i see in the last couple of moments transarrow, the russian airline, says it will no longer fly over ukrainian. lufthansa saying it will no longer fly over ukraine. that might be closing the stable door after the horse is bolted. it s clearly been an issue for some time. it of course raises the question now and a question that will be asked by family members of those on board this plane is why wasn t that done sooner? why were planes continuing to fly over such a troubled region, considering that two planes, and one, as senator mccain was pointing out, had been shot down already at 21,000 feet. that s exactly the point. and we know that the faa had a prohibition against flying over crimea and the black sea for u.s. carriers. so there s no doubt that this was a known rick of fsk of flyi this eastern part. it shouldn t have been as big a problem as it has been. but we re looking at the most horrific example of that. miles o brien is joining us from d.c. on the phone. again, miles, i mean, you know this flight path well. you re a pilot yourself. and just talk about a little bit about what is happening now behind the scenes not only with malaysian airlines but all the various countries in the region in terms of dealing with the family members of those on board this flight. is that for miles? yeah, miles, you re on the air. okay. yeah, my apologies. what i can tell you is this. a civilian airliner at flight levels generally is going to be flying down corridors in the sky that would make it very clear what it was doing, what its intent was and the fact that it is not a nonfriendly object. so you have to ask a couple of questions. was there some sort of weather in the region which would have caused this airliner to deviate off of that known flight path which could have aroused some sort of suspicion that was, as it turns out, wrong suspicion which might have made someone on the ground at the controls of a surface-to-air missile to determine that this was an aircraft with some sort of unfriendly intent. the other question you have to ask yourself is, you know, since april, the u.s. federal aviation administration has prohibited u.s. carriers from flying anywhere near this region. because of the concerns of what we re just talking about here right now. and you have to ask why an airline crew, why airline dispatch would make a conscious decision to fly across a war zone, in essence. not declare war, but a war zone is what it is. and so was that, frankly, the straightest the shortest distance between two points is a straight line that takes you right through that area. and this is probably a fuel-saving, time-saving decision. we ll have to see how that plays out as we hear from malaysian airlines. the other thing we have to remember is this horrible unfortunate coincidence that we re talking about apparently, malaysian airline, in this case, we ve already seen pictures of wreckage on the ground. we will know pretty quickly what happened here. an experienced aviation investigator will be able to determine if it blew up from the inside out or outside in. if there s the presence of the kind of fuel that is used for the surface-to-air missiles, rocket fuel, in essence. this will be something that can be found out fairly definitively fairly quickly. i think we ll get answers, but it s not a pretty picture when you consider the decision to fly in this zone and who actually made the call to actually launch that surface-to-air missile. it goes right back to korean airlines 007 back in the early 1983, in the absolute depth of the cold war with the soviets. in that case a fighter jet shot down a 747 with 290 people aboard. we should also point out russia 24 news agency is reporting that the black box has been found, and the crash identified some 60 kilometers, they say, from the russian border. nick paton walsh joins us again from london. i understand you have information about separatists on the ground. well, we re hearing from the pro-kiev government, a billionaire appointed by kiev, he s released a statement in which he says at this moment separatists are preventing any ukrainian investigators from getting to that particular site. he says that will severely hamper their ability to perform any kind of investigation. he also hints later on in the statement the possibility that that may, in fact, be being done deliberately to hide the remains and hinder any investigation going forward. he offers condolences to the family and asks them to permit an investigation here. you see clearly they are this came down in territory held by separatists where the ukrainian military does not have a strong presence. and it seems now, of course, that the ukrainian government itself may have an extraordinarily hard time getting anybody to that place to begin an investigation, all of which will slant what we hear in the days ahead, anderson. which truly, then, raises questions, nick, about who would actually undertake any kind of investigation, what would happen to the black box. the idea if separatists are holding this area, that still has to be worked out. reporter: absolutely. i mean, i think, obviously, the ukraine authorities, they don t control that territory. the separatists do not have the capability to analyze a black box. you have to also ask yourself whether the russians juan want to take that on board and analyze it themselves. it s something they have to give to the international community in a more transparent fashion. it s very messy, the relationship between the separatists and the russian government. they were repeatedly asked by moscow not to hold a referendum about the independence. they ignored that, pushed ahead. people have said that public fissure is for show, that they re really secretly still being run. i think it s clear now that the ukrainian military is on the advance. the open at the same time statd dismay, they re not getting what they expected out of moscow. and that s really going to be key now. do they look to russian officials to move in and investigation, or there s no real investigation actually happening. we re in a very violent civil war at this point, anderson. i want to go to peter goelz with the national transportation safety board, a cnn aviation analyst. peter, obviously, an extremely complicated if, in fact, separatists are preventing ukrainian authorities which seem to make sense, how would this be investigated? i think that that s a great question. iko is the obvious organization, the international civil aviation organization. they must demand immediately an independent, impartial investigation with safety guaranteed by the ukraine, by russia to put a team in there. you know, following you did an extraordinary special on twa on tuesday night. i managed that investigation. we did an enormous amount of testing with the fbi and the u.s. navy on missile strikes and commercial aircraft. there s an enormous amount of information in the resources of the u.s. we ll know what kind of missile, where it struck. it may not be in the black boxes, but we have a lot of information. but the key thing is for the international community to demand an immediate, independent investigation. we can t leave this in the hands of the russians or the ukrainians or the ukrainian separatists. peter, what sort of information i mean, if it was, in fact, a missile strike, would there be information in the black box that that could kind of illuminate that, that could give you information? there could be, depending on how the missile detonated and how the plane came apart. but it also could have been, as it was in twa, both the voice recorder and the data recorder ended in a nanosecond. and there was only the briefest sound on the voice recorder. but a voice analysis, a sound analysis of that showed that it was a certain kind of explosion. it was not similar to say the lockerbie explosion. it was a lower or explosion which indicated that it was a fuel air explosion. so there is a, say, a wealth of material and information in the uk and in the united states that can help solve exactly what happened here. peter, when you see the pictures that we ve seen of large pieces of fuselage, the flag from malaysia airlines clearly visible on pieces of the aircraft, does it surprise you that an aircraft hit at 33,000 feet, that there would be these large pieces on the ground? no, it s perfectly explainable. once the plane s the integrity of the aircraft body is compromised, it literally unzips and comes apart in these kinds of large pieces. it is a horrific tragedy. and if you look at twa, the reconstruction that s kept out near dulles airport now at a training facility, you can see very similar pieces of wreckage. i mean, for, again, i keep coming back to the fact that there were 280 people on board this plane, there were 15 crew members on board this plane, 295 people in all. i m not even sure how to ask this question, and maybe just think about how you would answer it. i mean, are they killed instantly? i mean, is it is a painful question, and it is asked, you know, after each event. on something like this where it appears as though the plane came undone at a high altitude, most likely death would be instantaneously. on kal007 where it was shot down by a russian fighter plane, the plane struggled in the air and came down over a much longer period of time. but on something like this where the wreckage is over a vast amount of territory, my guess is it came undone at altitude, and thankfully in this kind of tragedy, death was very quickly. was quick. 295 people on board. and just in that image, we saw a guide book, a lonely planet guide book for bali, the idea you brought up, richard, these are people headed on vacation. these are people probably with their families going on vacation to bali, to other places. absolutely no question in my mind. at this time of the year, that plane is full of holiday makers on their way to do lifelong holidays. now i m sorry, i m told we re getting some more information from jim sciutto. jim, what are you hearing? anderson, i ve just been told by the ukrainian foreign ministry that it is their belief that this plane was taken down by a russian-made buk missile system that you have mentioned before on the air. this is a truck-mounted missile system. they believe that this was a system used to take this plane down, that it occurred at 10,000 meters, about 33,000 feet. they also make the point that a couple of weeks ago, russian separatists claimed and bragged to have captured such a buk missile system inside eastern ukraine. in fact, at a ukrainian base and that there were pictures on russian television of this captured buk missile launcher. and officials also telling me there s a picture up on the screen right now. we re showing our viewers. this is the buk system that you re talking about. yeah. and the official i spoke to in the foreign ministry said that one reason that they re concluding this is that this is the only missile that could hit a plane, a passenger jet like this, at an altitude of 10,000 feet. anyway, that s the conclusion they re coming to already, that this was the system there, as you re seeing on the screen. let me just stop you there. just for clarification s sake, again, this is coming from ukrainian officials. but basically this is a guess by them. they re not saying at this point that they have radar that has confirmed that this is a buk system. they are saying simply this is the only kind of system that could have brought down a plane at this altitude, correct? i m told, anderson, that it is not just a guess, that this assessment is coming from the ukrainian military. now, obviously part of that is an assessment based on the capability of the missile. but they have not told me i do not know if they have missile-tracking data, but it is at least their belief that this is the system that took down the plane. and you re saying, again, because it bears repeating because this is an important point that you raise, that ukrainian separatists, so-called separatists, senator mccain sort of qualifies that term or uses that term cautiously, but that certainly those fighting the government in kiev for separation or a connection with russia in eastern ukraine, that they had bragged about getting their hands on a buk system previously? that s right. not only bragged about it but shown pictures of it in their possession and that the russian television had done reports on this as they captured this weapons system. another indicator, anderson, as the ukrainian government makes this conclusion about this being the system that took the plane down is just what i told you earlier when we spoke a short time ago, that they are also looking at evidence that the plane came apart at altitude which would, from their perspective, and our experts perspective, indicate the possibility of a missile strike at least. so i think what you have here is the ukrainian government looking at a number of indicators here and saying they believe it was a buk missile system that was used to take this plane down. again, as you referenced and as we repeatedly referenced as we ve spoken, these are early conclusions as the clues are just coming in. and again, i m here with richard quest and lieutenant colonel rick francona. again, we ve talked about this buk system. the idea, though, that separatists had gotten their hands on it somehow, whether with permission or without permission, do you find it likely that separatists could figure out how to fire and operate this system? that s the question. if they got their hands on this, that s a quantum increase in capability. then the question is who operated this system? it s not inconceivable that the russians would have provided that expertise to them. formerly with the military. could be or someone that has that training is now part of the russian separatist group. somebody who knows who you to use that system had to be involved in this. you just don t walk in, sit down and start let s just play this by ear and see if we can make it work. i just wanted to talk on the aviation side of this, as opposed to the military side of it, it would appear, anderson, that this area was not under restriction. according to the international airline association, represents all the airlines, although both the europeans and the americans had prohibitions over crimea and parts of the black sea, this eastern part of ukraine was not on the prohibition list for flying over. now, in the last hour, we ve heard from lieu tlufthansa and turkish. this is an old picture from flight radar. if you look at flight radar 24 thousand there s still aircraft flying there. there s still aircraft there s still aircraft flying there. if we were to show a picture of flight radar 24 over that area now, you were just showing yeah, i can t get it on my phone right now, but yeah, we just took a look at the live radar, there are still aircraft operating in this area. civilian aircraft. yes. and the pilots i ve been speaking to this morning still say one of my colleagues or one of my friends flew from missco to a destination in western europe. you re looking at a still photo there. we re looking at live information on various mobile devices. who makes that decision? is it individual airlines who then make the decision, okay, we re no longer going to fly, or is there an international body? no international body. i mean, they might ban it completely, yes. they could in that situation. but normally it would be the airline. it would be the regulator. so the european regulator, the national regulatoregulator, the. i would imagine within the hour we re going to start seeing total regulatory bans. and the question is, why wasn t that done sooner given the concern richard was hearing from a number of pilots for some time. our barbara starr is with us. barbara, what are you hearing? anderson, this is rapidly shaping up tore a security crisis across europe. what i am hearing is that both military services and intelligence services across europe now looking at their intelligence systems for any clues about what may have happened here. there are a number of military and intelligence radars across europe run by the european nations, also by the united states, some of them. and they are all now scrambling, looking for any clues, any signals in their systems, any infrared heat signatures, any acoustic signatures about what may have happened. what we know now is that the u.s. satellite systems that watch for ballistic missile launches, those satellites did not record this event because it happened essentially in a different trajectory than what a ballistic missile would have flown. so u.s. satellites did not see it. those that watch europe for ballistic missile launches. now the military, the intelligence community in the u.s. going back through everything that they have. the supreme allied commander in europe, general phillip breedlove, who is a four-star u.s. air force general who runs all nato military operations in europe has been briefed around the clock since this happened. he s been looking at this. he s looking at nato awacs airplanes. those are radar airplanes that nato flies over europe because of the russian crisis to see if they recorded anything. general breedlove also certainly working with his european military and intelligence counterparts across the continent. so one of the things happening here, anderson, very quickly, because this is an airspace issue, you are now really starting to see other european nations move in, weigh in and look at what information they may have. i also want to go back a minute and underscore some u.s. officials, just as some of your guests said on the air, looking at this russian system called the buk. the buk anti-aircraft missile system. whether it was russian, whether it was separatists, whoever may be operating one, whether they were involved with this or not, this is one of the systems that the u.s. military, the u.s. intelligence community scrutinizing right now to see if it was possibly involved. they know that this system is on the border. they know that the russians know how to operate it. you just have to look at it. you see how complex it is. they are looking to see if there s any possibility the buk was involved. anderson? barbara starr, i appreciate that update. richard quest, i think you re getting new information from klm? klm, yes, the royal dutch airlines, which was a co-chair partner with this flight from malaysian airline, has put out a statement, if i may read it. although not yet officially confirmed by malaysia airlines, it s with great regret that klm has learned about the possible incident with mh17. malaysia airlines from amsterdam to kuala lumpur. we are in contact with the airline. as a precautionary measure, klm, and then it gives a variety of numbers for people if they re in the air and they need more information. again, for family members now, this is going to be just a logistical nightmare, trying to get information. the international organization has very strict guidelines about how our airlines and how countries set up the provision of disaster relief for families. you ve got to practice it. you ve got to be ready. you ve got to have the necessary phone lines. it s a very complicated operation. but in this case, once again, it will fall to malaysia airlines to do it as the state. you re looking at basically the state of airline. you re talking about that s the people who have to do it. who will hold the investigation? normally, anderson, you ll remember, we talk about the state of occurrence, the state of airline, the state of operator, the state of design. so in that situation, we re still looking at malaysia, russia, ukraine as being those involved. and we re told now that we have video from the moment the plane crashed. we are seeing this now for the first time. let s take a look. we ll try to re-rack that just to take another look. it s obviously very far in the distance from where this video was. you tonight actually, as far as we can see it does seem that it came down relatively in one area, or at least the biggest part of it seemed to have come down in one area. well, judging from the amount of flames that we saw at the point of impact, that was a large chunk probably, and that obviously is fuel going up when you get that color of smoke. one s tempted to pause for a moment just to realize the enormity and gravity of what we re looking at in this. the plane would have been fully fueled for the amsterdam to kuala lumpur flight. the missile or whatever hit it clearly didn t destroy it in midair. it was sufficient for the tanks to have hit the ground. do jump in, sir, if there s more that you can add. and for the tanks to have exploded on the ground. but what we re looking at there is and again, the question now, and we have heard our nick paton walsh reporting concerns from ukrainian officials about their ability to actually get to the crash site. this is obviously essential that officials get to the crash site not only to get the black box, to recover any other items, as we saw with the twa flight 800 investigation which again happened, this is the anniversary of that plane crashing. that was a very lengthy investigation where they basically reassembled the aircraft to try to determine exactly what had happened. again, access to this site is going to be essential, and it s not clear at this moment exactly how that will occur. we re going to take a short break. 295 people on board this plane. we have no information about any of them. hard to imagine, obviously, that there could be any survivors from something like this. we re going to take a short break, and our coverage continues in a moment. good afternoon, i m anderson cooper. we are following breaking news right now. the malaysian airlines flight, a boeing 777, has crashed near the border between ukraine and russia. this is graphic video, we want to warn you, showing the aftermath of this crash. these are images we are just starting to get in. we are now getting new pictures of the moment the plane itself crashed in a fiery explosion off on the horizon in this video. malaysian airlines confirming that they lost contact with flight mh17. there you see the impact, the fireball, flames, the presence of fuel obviously still there in the fuselage as richard quest noted a short time ago. this is a plane which would have been loaded up with fuel because of the long flight between amsterdam where the plane took off, was heading toward kuala lumpur in malaysia. a plane carrying 295 people, 280 of them were passengers, 15 crew members. for you, what you re looking at right now is the path the plane itself took after departing amsterdam at 12:30 p.m. local time. as i said, bound for kuala lumpur where it was supposed to arrive the next morning. this is where the plane reportedly went down, an area in eastern ukraine. at this stage in the flight, the plane would have likely been at cruising altitude, some 32,000 or 33,000 feet up. the location and the timing certainly suspect, considering this is an area of extreme conflict right now, ongoing fighting between pro-russian separatists, the government of ukraine and the russian military based on the border there. the ukrainian interior ministry claims this plane was shot down, telling cnn that pro-russian separatists have been, quote, hunting us for weeks using anti-aircraft missiles. but at this stage, both sides are denying responsibility. we do have reporters covering this from every corner of the globe. i want to go first to our jim sciutto. the plane was reportedly shot down by pro-russian separatists on monday. that was at 21,000 feet. this malaysian jet at some 32,000 feet. are we any clearer on who may have shot the plane down? having some problems getting jim. we ll continue to check in. our richard quest is here. again, at this stage, we still don t know exactly who fired this missile, what would the intent of this missile be, this buk system, which is a russian missile system seems to have been what a lot of people in the pentagon are certainly focusing on at this point? if today s events can now be put into two very distinct groups, anderson, you have what has happened and why, the awfulness of the military situation that s led to this, and then you have the aviation side of it, which is why aircraft are in this area, why warnings were given, all these sort of issues, and the tragedy of relatives and the dealing with the disaster and the investigation that falls in. so two very distinct it s almost unique in these, if i can say that, to have these situations where military activity creates civil aviation. of course, there s iran, there s kal, there are all those incidents, but they re few and far between. and when they happen like this, they call the whole aviation spri into question. i m here also with fareed zakaria and lieutenant colonel rick francona, cnn military analyst. obviously there s the human horror of this, and that, of course, is primary in our minds. there s also military implications, political implications, strategic implications. which will largely be determined by who fired this missile and why. absolutely, anderson. if this turns out to be what, frankly, many of us suspect it is, that is a casualty, a terrible casualty of the ukrainian/russian conflict, this is huge because it s even bigger than kal because in this case what appears what might have happened and again, a lot of caveats, but what might have happened is that the russian government has been supporting, training, arming rebels, separatists in ukraine, essentially teaching them how to do this kind of thing. those forces have in the past shot down helicopters of the ukrainian army, cargo planes, as you noted. it would not be difficult to imagine that they thought this was a ukrainian cargo plane because these are poorly trained, ill-equipped. they probably don t have the right kind of radar to figure it out, and they probably don t care. these are not, you know, people following safety precautions. in fact, the separatist group just shortly before this plane went down had bragged about, on this day, bringing down what they said was ukrainian military plane. precisely, which is why, as i say, all the signs suggest that what happened here was that the russian government has had this strategy off training these rogue elements within ukraine to make this kind of trouble for the ukrainian government. this thing went badly awry as a result of that. but frankly, in a perfectly predictable way, when you start using these kinds of forces to do your dirty work for you, something like this is bound to happen because these are not disciplined forces that are under tight command and control from the kremlin. and back to the first point you were making, this produces a major international incident because it points out that what russia has been doing has not only been destabilizing ukraine but destabilizing it on the cheap in a dangerous way largely to preserve a kind of plausible deniability, but now we see the consequences. and we talked to senator john mccain a short time ago in our last hour. he said and he was very cautious about who was behind this but he said if, in fact, this is russia/separatists, that that i mean, it could be a game changer in terms of u.s. involvement bolstering, providing military armaments, weaponry to the ukrainian government in kiev. it would absolutely. it would mean that the united states and presumably europe would be much more involved and invested in helping. i think world opinion will change. but also, however, will make the situation much more tense, much more dangerous. remember, we were trying to move everybody involved to some kind of negotiated solution here where the russians would try to stabilize the ukrainian government because at the end of the day they live right next door to them. i think that s going to be impossible. if you think that relations between russia and washington are going to get tense, imagine the relations between russia and kiev. the ukrainian government and the russian government are not going to sit down for a negotiation tomorrow if again, with a big caveat, if this turns out to be what some signs suggest it is. and lieutenant colonel francona, obviously a lot we still don t know in terms of what sort of a device brought this plane down, but clearly the idea that separatists would have been able to do this without some sort of greater technology from russia or taken from the ukrainian military, it seems impossible. i think if it were if the separatists did get their hands on these systems, a lot of this is starting to make sense now because they would not be plugged into the air traffic control system whereas the russian air defense system is fully integrated into the air traffic control system. they know where civilian airliners are. they know what they re squawking. if this is a rogue element or a group of separatists that got their hands on this high-tech piece of equipment, rolled it out into the field and just turned on the radar and said, that must be ukrainian aircraft and took a shot at it, they would have no trouble knocking it down, but they didn t know what they were shooting at. for those who oppose russia obviously and russia s actions in eastern ukraine, fareed, none of that will really matter that it could be a rogue element. the fact that there are more than 10,000 russian forces on the border, the fact that russia has been on the ground in eastern ukraine, that they have been behind events in eastern ukraine, there will be a lot of fingers pointed at russia in this, whether or not it was russian forces who actually pressed the button. absolutely, anderson, because this has been the distinctive signature of russian policy in this region. that s how they took over crimea. that s how they obviously is an incident if it turns out to be an act of war is going to dramatically escalate the stakes for everyone involved, europe as well as the united states. and andrea, let s check in briefly with someone we both know, retired army four-star general, and nbc news military analyst, general barry mccaffreys in seattle. what strikes you as you have been watching incoming pictures? a couple things, brian. one is, i m sort of astonished at the inability to say anything sensible at all about the situation. one would think the u.s. embassy in the netherlands almost immediately within an hour or so would know whether u.s. passengers are aboard. second comment, obviously this was a mistake shootdown by somebody. nobody wants to bring down a commercial airliner. they re now trying to hide their engagement. third observation, these sa-17 buck missiles, tremendous self-propelled capability, a range out to 40-some-odd kilometers. you can t see an aircraft at 300 feet. so normally engaged by target acquisition radar. if this was the russians, i would hope they would have easily detected a known flight path, iff, an identification, friend or foe. it s hard to imagine the russian military would have done it. so the conclusion is, if it s a shootdown, then it s more likely the very sophisticated equipment the russians are pushing across that border, that would have targeted and brought down by mistake a commercial airliner. finally comment, nobody in his right mind should be flying commercial aircraft in that part of the world. it s just astonishing to me that malaysian airlines is still using that route. andrea mitchell, back to you, briefly. just very briefly, i want explain, the first word has to come from malaysia air who was on the manifest. there were also privacy laws and we know when things like this happen, whenever incidents happen, the state department is not permitted to release names until families are notified. but the first word as to whether the americans would come from the manifest of that plane, that will the rectangle administration of the producer of the aircraft and investigation. thank you. translator: ex extraordinary situation. the search is conducted by the forces of governmental service in donesk region. it s difficult for the wreckage. and the search is also difficult, because of challenges that are supposed by armed terrorists who are there is headquarters in one of the essential buildings of the service. 24 hours. the hotline 247-350. also, you can find information on you can ask request information from the special hotline 101. we thank you all. we can assure you that we will take all necessary measures to resolve and to establish circumstances of this horrible, awful tragedy. and we will keep you updated with our investigations about this tragedy. thank you for your attention. all right. a press conference from ukraine officials. want to go to our jim acosta, getting information from the white house. jim, what are you hearing? reporter: appearannderson, w hearing the president is expected to talk about the plane crash. at the top of his remarks coming up several minutes from now. he s going to be speaking at a previously scheduled event in wilmington, delaware, supposed to be there to talk about infrastructure endeavors being undertaken here at the white house. the other thing we want to point out, anderson, the white house has read out the phone call between president obama and president putin and wanted to highlight something i think is very important. of course, we don t want to draw any conclusions, but it was noted during this phone call by the president to vladimir putin that in the face of extensive evidence that russia is significantly increasing the provision of heavy weapons to separatists of ukraine and russia s failure to take other steps to deescalate the crisis, it was necessary to impose additional sanctions. the president wasn t drawing any conclusions during the phone call. they talked about the plane crash later on in the phone call but it was during the conversation that the president once again restated his grave concerns about what is happening, the u.s. allegations there is a steady flow of arms and fighters across that russian/ukrainian border. anderson? for clarity, the president is expected to speak at the top of the hour? reporter: right now on the schedule at 2:10:00 p.m. eastern time in wilmington, standing in front of the i-495 bridge there, in a serious state of disrepair, going to talk about fixing roads and bridges around the country. this has been the white house message all week. but we understand it s now expected that the president will be talking about the plane crash during those remarks, probably at the top of those remarks, anderson. all right. we ll obviously bring that to our viewers live. i want to check in with chad myers, new information about the flight, the path of this plane took. chad, what are you learning? not the normal flight that this usually takes. we talked to miles o brien, and we can go ahead and talk to richard quest about this. the lines on the map. that s the highway. those are the roads that the plane can take. and we have l-980. that s the plane on that one. typically, though, down here around n-991, or even n-190, just like the highways that you have in america on any roadway, you get numbers. you get names. what happened with this plane is that because what i believe to be a thunderstorm complex down here over the normal flight path, there s that one right there, we talked about that, on 980. it could have been on 991, and a lot of the time, this is now sunday, monday, tuesday, wednesday, most of the flights down here on this n-190. but because of the weather down here, right on top of that n-190, the plane was farther to the north right up here, and that s where the plane finally ended. anderson. chad, we re also getting more information i think from other airlines. i want to check in with rene marsh. what are you hearing? reporter: anderson, perhaps a snapshot we have for you here, just goes to show you the activity within the air space shortly after this crash, which is unfolding. so we want to go to this here. this is from flight aware.com. if you take a look, you can see most of the commercial airlines we do know at this point, these flights are avoiding this area that just simply speaks to the continuing concern of the potential danger of flying over this air space at this hour. we could tell you just about 20 minutes ago, at last look, we saw that there were only three commercial aircraft which were seen flying within this area. two were russian airliners. that was flying north of crimea and a malaysian flight 21 heading to kuala lumpur from paris. but again, if you take a look at these applications here, flightaware.com, just one of them, you can see that there is not heavy traffic within this area where this plane went down. and most likely for good reason. because there is a lot of concern as to what happened and what caused this plane to go down. again, we have been in very close contact with the agencies here. it just goes to show you, information doesn t travel as fast as social media or even the news media, because even here in the united states ntsb doesn t have concrete information they can share with us. we do know, though, if this plane was indeed shot down, the ntsb would not be involved in this investigation. because then it is automatically criminal. that is something for the fbi to take over. so we do know that. we do know what the ntsb s role would look like if this was indeed a criminal activity. but, again, that remains a big question at this point, anderson. it also remains a big question, rene, about the ability to actually investigate this, to actually get to the site. and we re going to talk about that in the upcoming hour with our analysts and richard, just as we are awaiting president obama s comments ten minutes or so from now, still a lot we don t know but the picture is starting to form. it is. on what happened, the picture is starting to form. who investigates it i was just listening to the defense minister from ukraine. he has clearly laid out the case for ukraine investigating this. saying he is putting together the necessary investigation. so the ukrainians are clearly putting a land grab. we will investigate. the only alternative, really, would be that russian authorities would investigate, and that would obviously raise huge questions if there was some sort of russian military involvement at all. in terms of getting access to the site, it s either russian authorities or ukrainian
minutes. so when that statement comes, we ll, of course bring it to you. and of course all of this ongoing in sydney as it comes up on 6:00 local time. this siege going on now for more than eight hours. i m john vause at the cnn center in atlanta. and i m natalie allen. we have been with you for several hours, and we will push on as this situation in australia continues. it is breaking news of a siege there in a coffee shop that has been ongoing. a gunman holding people hostage at the lindt coffee shop in downtown sydney. sky news has just informed us that the gunman is calling himself the brother , and has contacted a radio station and two tv stations via hostages with demands, a conversation with the prime minister and an isil flag. we do know five people have managed to get out. three men were seen running out two hours ago. two of them were customers. the man in the blue jacket, the man in the white zirs and a few moments later there was a man wearing an apron who appeared to be a worker. coming out of a different door. and it appears he was a worker at the lindt coffee shop. he s wearing that apron. and we ve been questioning our experts. was this an escape or were they released. and according to our sky news reporter, the police saying this was a report, just there. then, after this, two women ran out, about 45 minutes later. this is a different camera angle, coming from a different way. there goes one. and police hustled her away. a then right after her another suddenly emerges. police tell us they have been in touch with the hostage taker, though they will not say who he is or what his motives are. let s listen. our number one aim is to resolve this incident peacefully. we have numerous resources from the new south wales police force on-site, in that effort to make sure that everybody who is in this location remains unharmed. we do not have any information that suggests that anybody is harmed at this stage. and a peaceful resolution will be what we are working towards. that was the new south wales deputy police commissioner there, a little over two hours ago. well, when the standoff began more nan eight hours ago, a flag with an islamic phrase was held up to the cafe s window. also as can you see, hostages were norsed to stand in that window with their hands on the glass. since then, heavily armed police have taken positions around the coffee shop anchor dod cordonede area. our reporter on the scene has reported this is a ghost town in this area. otherwise, very, very busy area. three blocks in every direction of this coffee shop. there have been evacuations linked to suspicious packages found around the city. air traffic has been re-routed around sydney. this is a very disturbing incident. i can understand the concerns and anxieties of the australian people at a time like this. but our thoughts and blaprayers must, above all, go out to these individuals who are caught up in this. i can think of almost nothing more distressing, more terrifying than to be caught up in such a situation. our hearts go out to those people. well, tony abbott is part of this story, since we just learned that the hostage taker, the brother , as he wants to be called, wants to talk with the prime minister. he wants a conversation with the prime minister and he also wants an isil flag. he had displayed that other flag which had an islamic phrase on it. many people thought it was an isis flag. it was the white writing on a black background. but now from our affiliate reporter in sky news, he is demanding an isil flag. it will be interesting to know how the police negotiators are dealing with this person and his demands. we want to go now to anna coren. she s been live there and on the streets of sydney for us, talking about what people are saying, the surprise from typical australians, and what she is learning. it s been very hard to get information. but anna joins us now. anna? reporter: well, the siege has been going on now for more than eight hours, and it doesn t look like it s going to be finishing anytime soon. as we said, five hostages have been released. and it s a promising sign that police negotiators are in touch with this gunman and making his way to release those hostages. we don t know. we can t confirm that that is the result of those negotiations. but certainly, from the people within the area, people who have evacuated from nearby buildings, there really is a sense of fear, that this is taking place, this is something australia has not been exposed to yet. australia very much involved in the war against isis in iraq and syria, but not here. there have been no attacks on home soil, threats most definitely, but no attacks. obviously raids over the past couple months and numerous arrests made, but, as for anything event waiting or coming to fruition, law enforcement authorities keeping on top of that. but this gunman walking into the lindt cafe this morning, really catching people off guard. we don t know if he had guns or other weapons, if he had bombs. but he clearly sought out his target. he is opposite 7 network australia. tv cameras able to film the cafe, film what s taking place. so obviously that building is being evacuated or everything nearby as is the u.s. consulate. there are dozens of buildings within that vicinity, and the police have gone and blocked off much of the cbd around the cafe, around martin place, not allowing anybody in. there s heavy, heavy police presence. we ve seen snipers. heavily armed as well as other police with flak jackets. there is that contingency of law enforcement. they are not your regular police officers but the more experienced and highly trained law enforcement officials who are on the scene as well, monitoring what is taking place inside that cafe. i want to talk to you about the fact that this was hour the ago that this thirfirst broke o there were images of the hostages inside the coffee shop, and there s been nothing since. is that because think cordoned off the area? is that because it s an ongoing dangerous situation? how come we haven t seen anything else as far as video from, through that first window that we saw earlier? reporter: yeah, it s safe to sayna all media has been evacuated from the media. so that live that you ve been getting through channel 7, that has now stopped. they ve probably been told they have to leave the building. they re not allowed to leave any crews there because of the potential threat. we were within 100 meters of lindt cafe a few hours ago. police then came and moved us on. they don t want to have visuals of the cafe, they say, security reasons. obviously, if the gunman starts to spray bullets or if there is an explosion, they want people away. they re greetitreating it very, seriously. we spoke with a woman earlier, and she said they have contact with him, they are in touch with him. but they want this resolved peacefully. at this statement, it s gone 6:00 here. it could very well go into the night. but they do want this to resolve peacefully. we ve just received some new information. i think we have a comment from someone who saw the gunman. this is a witness. outside the cafe actually saw the gunman. and he describes exactly what, he said it was, i believe it was a man who was actually didn t realize that there were hostages as first. let s listen to what the person had to say. when i first ran into the building, he was trying to get someone s attention, trying to get in the doors. and on the third run, i was looking in there, wondering what her problem was, why she didn t go somewhere else to get her coffee. and then obviously the gunman or alleged yoefder held a bag out, and she said gun, gun, gun. in a blue bag. i saw the gunman. i was quite tall. probably late 40s. long white sleeved shirt on with a vest. i was very calm and pacing, looking out. and several customers were sitting down at their tables, still drinking. i m not sure how alert they were as to what was going to go on. but they were locked in. clearly that person did not want to be identified, which is why he was shot that way, but giving us very interesting details about this woman who was turned away, and telling us just what the gunman looked like. his age and that kind of thing. earlier there had been a report that he was in his 40s, and some people were surprised that that seemed a little old. old, for whatever reason. these people who carry out these kind of things are younger, more easily influenced, are looking for some kind of direction in their lives. we often hear how it s not just religion but poverty, unemployment, lack of opportunity which drives people to these extremist groups. as we ve heard from sky news our affiliate in sydney, that the government is debating an isil flag. isil is another term for isis. isil is often used by governments. islamic state. that s all it is. it just depends on who you are, what you use. that link is very, very close to isis. at least from the government s point of view. he is aspirational. he wants to be a representative of this group, which is why he wants this flag. why he didn t have one in the first place i guess is another question. some plan in reaching out to the media. now three member the of the media so far that s been reported. well, this, of course, we ve always been told about the lone wolf situation, or, as you say, anyone who just needs someone to pay attention to them for whatever deranged reason. but australia s grand mufti released a statement. we want to read it in part. and we quote, the grand mufti and the australia national imam s council condemn this criminal act and unequivocally denounce. and we aspire to a peaceful resolve to this calamity. let s go to the president of the lebanese muslim associate in sydney on the line with more details about this. so samir, explain to us, there were occasions where police raided an area southwest of sydney. an area where many ex-pats from lebanon live. that was not the case. tell us exactly what had happened the last couple hours. caller: well, i don t know where you got this report. in fact, there s been reports of police on their official website. there have been a lot of these type of reports and trying to link it to what s happening in the cafe, and police have come out and said that none of those events in any kind of shape or form related to what is currently taking place in the cafe. so you ve got a car driving down, a police vehicle driving down the street, people getting a little frustrated or calling up and being concerned maybe that this is sort of related. so it s more fear mongering than anything else to be quite frank with you. my understanding from one of the reports i read said that police actually met with leaders from the islamic community. that s not the case? caller: that s not the case. i ve been in direct discussion with the premier of the state just about ten minutes ago. we had another conference call to try to give us more briefs. there have been these briefs been giving to the community leaders every few hours to give us a bit more of an insight and give us a little bit more information about what is currently taking place. and what can you share with us about those conversations? what are they telling you? caller: they re telling us in terms of information, which is not much. they currently don t know the identity of this individual. they don t know what the motive is. they re treating it as a criminal hostage situation. they re not sure whether he s linked to any particular group. and hopefully that information will unfold. there are five hostages that have left the cafe so far. so we don t know whether they have been released or whether they ve escaped. taken from the point of view from what you ve reported that he s seeking an isil flag, so he comes across as someone who s not really well prepared if he intended to cause that type of harm. as community leaders, we ve offered our help and assistance in any shape or form if they can identify who this individual is so we can be involved in a negotiation and a dialog with this individual. i was going to ask you about that samir, because i wondered if they asked you about that, are you disappointed in any way that they haven t reached out to the community to incorporate you somehow, seeing this to a peaceful end? caller: well, unless they have facts as to which group he belongs to it will be hard to engage. he carried a black flag with some type of arabic writing on it. it s not the isis flag. we don t know who this individual is. then we can target this eideal. the police and the government have been in close contact with community leaders, as i highlighted. we ve also made contact with different departments within the police offering our help and assistance when they see or feel the need. we have the protocol and the safety and security of these hostages at the utmost importance. this is at the point where we as a community coming together as australians. our first and foremost priority is the safety of these hostages. samir, when this situation first started unfolding and there was this confusion about whether or not it was a shois flag or a flag with an islamic phrase on it. and everybody s making this connection that this is this lone wolf terrorist attack that many in australian security had been warning about, was that your reaction? or did you think this was something else? caller: i take everything seriously when someone s life is at stake. it doesn t bother me whether this is a lone operator or connected to a group or not. i m someone who needs to be well-informed about the facts. and this is where we leave it to the authorities. once the facts become available then we can deal with the situation. the current situation which is of crucial importance to us is the safety of the hostages and the families. this is our main concern. the fact that we saw a black flag with arabic writing on it made us more concerned, obviously. you can just imagine where we wanted to try to deliver everything we can to help defuse the situation. it s important what group he belongs to. what we want to do is defuse that. once more information comes available we are more briefed and more informed and we can deal with this issue accordingly. we have new images of what appear to be the gunman inside the cafe. s wearing a hid band, a vest and a white shirt. a backpack as well. you said you re trying to defuse the situation regarding who this guy is and what his motivation might be. exactly how do you do that? caller: well, once the police officers, if they get aligned to talk to this guy and identify who he is, and then if we reach out to the community organizations to identify his family members. maybe he s got someone that he s a trusted individual from an ethnic group or a family perspective, maybe we can help the police identify the individual and bring them into the negotiations, try to defuse it. from the video right there, it s almost hard to believe that they can t figure out who that person is. caller: because they haven t been able to speak to the individual. so you tell me well, they did say the negotiate eors have been in tou with him, but they haven t been able to work out who he is. caller: that s something you need to work out with the negotiators. do you think they re talking through hostages to the gunman? caller: no, i don t think so. from what we know so far, there s been absolutely no conversation with the gunman. we did hear from sky news that the negotiators have made contact with him. you don t have any more information about that, obviously. caller: no, i don t. well, we thank you for your time and letting us know that community members have been briefed every so often on this case. that s good to hear. it must be frustrating. you can imagine that they re standing by, they want to help, they want to get involved and find out who this person is. when they do find out who he is, maybe they can reach out to him and work to defuse the situation. all we know at this point is what we ve heard from sky news australia is that that guy there, right there in the vest with the white shirt is calling himself the brother. he has made two demands. one is to have a conversation on the radio with prime minister tony abbott. it s unlikely that will ever happen. but you nene never know. the other demand is that he wants an isil or isis flag in exchange for one hostage. he apparently has said there are two bomb the inside that cafe and two bombs inside the sydney cbd. and this security camera that picked this up, he s adamant whatever he s saying and someone is walking up to him with their hands up. hands up. right that s right. this is the latest since we ve been here for many hours now. but we have seen people, of course, run out. and we have some compelling pictures of one of the two women who ran from that cafe toward police, not long ago, wearing lindt aprons. three men ran out before them. one of the men that ran out also had an lindt apron. that s three staff member the working in this coffee shop. i believe the woman who came out before her was carrying her purse. this woman looks like she just got out with her apron and out. and sky news reporter we talked with, believing information she has this was an escape. it wasn t a part of negotiations. and john and i s perspective. it did seem as if the police weren t expecting they did seem to be taken a little bit by surprise. earlier, the deputy director of the new south wales police took questions at a news conference. that s when we learned that police have maid cde contact wi the gunman. i cannot confirm numbers. about how many people might remain or have left. it is really important, i think, for us all to take on board that as this situation is continuing, and as it is unfolding, and as it is that we actually have people who are in this premises at the moment, that we manage it through patience through our negotiators, and we give them the time at the moment that they need to work through this so that they can resolve it. so those operational details will be forthcoming, but it s not a good point in time to speculate. can you talk about negotiating? does that mean the police have made contact with the gunman? police negotiators have had contact, and they phone have contact. and we will work through this as, as we do with our negotiators. it might take a bit of time, but we want to resolve this peacefully. and i assure you, if it takes a bit of time, we will take the time. who is the gunman and what does he want. i know you can t give specifics. but basics, who is i and what does he want? at this stage, those might vagss are not known, and it would not be good to special late, but we have set up our protocols. so the moment we have activated our investigators and our intelligence officers. so we now have numerous police who are working on establishing who this person is and what those motives might be. all i can say is that they are now out of the building, and they are now with police. do the police have a rough idea about how many hostages were in the, how many had initially before the three left? look, i know there has been some speculation about numbers, but it really is not really helpful at the moment to speculate. we clearly, we clearly are dealing with a situation that is unfolding, and it s happening as we speak. and the most important thing is the safety of those hostages. so i wouldn t want to do anything that might impact on their safety. some of the speculation has been up to 30, 40 hostages. that seems high with some of the other estimates. that sort of a number does not equate with what we be assuming. we don t know. we don t know for a clear fact, but it is not as high as 30. those that have escaped, candidate police have contact with them? we are with those people now. the first thing we are doing is making sure they are okay. we will then establish who they are. and we will continue to work with them. there was some suggestion coming from inside that some hostages were, had fallen ill, that they were not okay. the information that i had is that nobody has been harmed or injured at the moment. we have been working through our negotiations to try to make sure that the people inside are cared for, that they have what they need to, so that they don t become ill or injured. so we will continue to do that. i think that from the information that i had, that is not related to the incident that we are dealing with. as you know, we have certain protocols in the city. and particular infrastructure and building have their own protocols. that might have been a matter for them, but we are not saying that that is connected with this. we have our protocols in place. pioneer has been activated. are you treating this as a terror could you explain a little bit more about what pioneer is? this really is about setting up command-and-control, so that we make sure that we have a clear police commander in charge, that we have an incident management team is he sce menme people are able to identify the resources needed. in terms of a policing response, this is a reasonably familiar policing response. [ inaudible question ] any other links? there have been several reports of at the moment the martin place incident is what we are dealing with. there have been other reports, as you would expect, because we do urge people to be vigilant, and we do urge people to contact us if they see anything suspicious, whether that be a suspicious package or vehicle, and people are doing that, which is what we want. so we want people to continue that. and we will respond. but at the moment, the situation that we are dealing with is in martin place. can you confirm that there are one or two hostage takers. i can t confirm those numbers. there are reports that ieds might be involved, that he may have an explosive buielt. all this will be forthcoming once we get the information. i believe the police commissioner made the comment in that regard. can you confirm that is the case? i can t confirm what the police commissioner has said. no, whether that is the case that there is an ied. i can t speculate on what may or may not be, and that would be unhelpful at the moment. at the moment we know that the person we are dealing with is armed. we are aware of that. and what we would do in terms of their situations is make sure that we consider any, any possibility and so that we are able to respond accordingly. can you confirm if this is a terror incident? we still don t know what the motivation might be. but in terms of our protocols as i ve said, we ve set up our command-and-control protocols [ multiple questions ] we ve had three hostages released unharmed. how positive is that for this afternoon? i ve said, as long as nobody gets hurt, we want though resolve this peacefully. and that is what we are working towards. and the negotiators are extremely experienced and skilled at what we are doing with the negotiation and if it goes on for a few more hours, it will go on for a few more hours. but, as i say, the priority is the safety of those people as well as the safety of everybody in new south wales. thanks very much. we d like to welcome you back to our continuing coverage of the situation in sydney. a gunman continues to hold hostages at the lindt coffee shop. the hostage taker seen here has identified himself as the brother. he has reportedly contacted three media organizations, using the hostages to speak with the outlets. he is demanding an isis flag and also a fon call with australia s prime minister. take a look at this video. five hostages that managed to get out. three men were seen running out first. all this happened about three hours ago. two customers it seems, followed shortly by a man who worked at this coffee shop. he is wearing an apron which read lindt on it. then two women ran out about 45 minutes later. all five hostages reportedly escaped from the cafe. they were not released. still not clear how many hostages remain inside that coffee shop. the situation began almost nine hours ago now. a flag with an islamic phrase was held up to the cafe s window. hostages were forced to stand in that window with their hands pressed against the pane of glass. anna coren joins us not far from the coffee shop. bring us up to date. we are now in the situation where there are five less hostages being held. we have more details about who may be holidaying them and what he wants. reporter: yeah. that s right. we re learning certainly more details from police about what in fact this hostage taker wants. as you say, he wants a phone call with the prime minister tony abbott and also an isis flag. but this is all unfolding about a block from where we are standing. as you can see, the ambulances parked up here on mcquarry street, where this cafe is, the lindt cafe. it s about a block, 100, 200 meters as the crow flies, but heavy police presence. we ve also seen sniper police, many of them taking position, watching and waiting. as we heard from the deputy police commissioner, catrkathry burn, if this goes on longer so be it. we know there are still hostages inside with that gunman who is armed. we don t know if he has other explosives or bombs, but certainly, all the people working in the buildings around lindt cafe have been evacuated. obviously, the 7 network, australia, that have opposite the cafe. the reserve bank of australia, the law society, very close by are the law courts. as well as the u.s. consulate. so all these people, you know, hundreds of people have been evacuated from the heart of martin place, in the cbd here in sydney as this siege unfolds. a short time ago, over the last hour or so when you got there, you were much closer to the action. so why are they continuing to expand this exclusion area? reporter: yeah. that s right. where we were several hours ago, we could actually see the cafe. we had a visual on it. since then, police have moved us. they are concerned. you know, like i said, they don t know what this gunman has or if he will start shooting. so they want everybody out of harm s way. they want to focus purely on this gunman. very senior negotiators are currently speaking to him. we don t know if the release of those five hostages is a result of those conversation, a result of the contact that these negotiators now have with this gunman. but certainly, there is a dialog. there is a conversation taking place. we know for a fact that this gunman chose that position because of its location. he wanted attention. he got it. he was in the heart of the city. he was opposite a major tv station. he clearly wanted the world watching what was taking place. now we know that the part of his demands are to speak to the prime minister of australia and to get an isis flag. other than that, we don t know his motivations, and we don t know, you know, who in fact this man is. okay. we appreciate that. we want to go to ray hadley now. he is the number one rating radio host in sydney. i think in australia as well. you re with 2 gb. i understand you had a conversation with the gunman via hostages earlier today? caller: good day. we kept going because we made contact with the hostages on my program. obviously, i didn t want to put them to air. so i took their calls off air and at the same time could hear the hostage taker giving the young man as he spoke to me, a 23-year-old, instructions on what he wanted to do. what s revealed by your reporter, he wanted the isis flag, a conversation with the prime minister. i spoke with our police chief in new south wales and spoke to him, spoke with the premier, which is a bit like your governor, and they told me off air that it would be best if we didn t report those matters. i kwept in contact with the young man. he gave me his mobile. whee about four conversation, and i felt troubled. i asked the police to supply me with a negotiator. i didn t feel equipped to negotiate with him. the negotiator arrived here, and i went off air about 20 minutes ago. and the negotiators are still dealing with him. as you ve been told, five people have been escaped. they weren t released. one of them a worker. and then two young ladies who were also workers, escaped as well. and police continue their negotiations. they re dealing with a lunatic. they re dealing with a person who s making outrageous claims. he wants the government to acknowledge that this is a terrorist operation, that he s doing this on behalf of isis or isil. and the government at this particular stage are treating a terrorist as you would treat any terrorist in any part of the world. they re doing their best to secure the safety of the hostages without meeting too many of his demands. explain how this process works. you got this phone call, this 23-year-old man, a hostage being held inside the cafe. and he relayed what the guy with the gun was saying and then he told you and you d respond and he d say it to the gunman? is that how it went down? i could hear the gunman. first of all, we were skeptical. you get a phone call on your line saying i m a hostage. i wouldn t talk to him on air, because i was fearful that i was being duped or that i might be at risk after i came off air. and i spoke to the man and ringed him back to confirm he was a hostage. i had spoken to police, they had a list of some of the hostages. his name was given to me by the young man. i could hear the hostage taker issue the instructions about wanting to talk to the prime minister, calling me a scumbag, calling the media generally scumbags for incorrectly reporting isil as being a group of people who are murderous bastards who have no regard for human life. i didn t report what i d been told. i said i have a phone call from a hostage and i contacted police, which i did do. he phoned back again and left his number. so i went to a newsbreak and rang him again. at the end of three or four conversations when these demands were still being made, that he wanted, the hostage taker wanted to talk to the prime minister, mr. abbott, i then said to the police we need someone over with a bit of expertise. so a negotiator came over and decided to take the calls. since then he s had conversations with a number of other hostages over the course of the last two or three hours. can you describe what i sounded like? was he unhinged? was he yelling? what kind of accent he had? caller: he had a middle eastern accent with an australi australian tinge. we have been a country like your country, very welcoming of people from that part of the world. we have a long tradition of lebanese christians coming to sfr australia. and more recently, people of the muslim faith. the vast majority are peaceful, hard-working people who want to make a life for themselves. but we have these radicals, lunatics who have between 12 and 25 people holding hostage. the police know, but they won t release the number. originally there were somewhere between 15 and 30. so you take a guess. it s either ten people in there or 25. we don t know. now you say he threatened to dispose of hostages. i m making the assumption he threatened to kill them. caller: that s what he was saying. police negotiators say now that we re in the ninth hour and no one s been hurt or injured this is someone they can deal with, if you nknow what i mean. hang on. we re getting a live news conference. might assist, and, again, i put out that plea and that message, if anybody does have information, please let us know. it s really important that you pass it on, because even a small snippet of information might be vital. inside, facebook and social media some of the demands that the gunman s making. i know you need to keep some things under wrap, but it s out there for everybody to see. we were monitoring what s happening on facebook and twitter. and that is forming a part of our tactical response and how to handle this. yes, that is out there, and we are aware of that. what do you tell the negotiators? that s not what i can talk about, what he might be telling negotiators, but the contact that we have will be ongoing, and it will be based on our best assessment about how to get those people out safely, which is what does count most. some are talking about that there are to police? or is he trying to use the media to make those demands? i think that there s probably a number of mediums that are being used at the moment, but we all have to be very careful not to completely overreact at this time. because it is still ongoing, but it is important to reiterate, that we are aware of that. we are monitoring it. and we are using that as a part of our strategy. why can t you say how many are still inside? it s not something that i can confirm at the moment. and it s not technically useful to actually confirm potential numbers. for people who we are, we might be dealing with who may have concerns that a friend or relative or a loved one might be in that building. we have set up, clearly, our, our public information inquiry number. the people who have been released, they have been able to tell you how many are inside? 30 is an imperative why is that so sensitive? because at this point, everything has to be about the safety of the people in the location. so it s important that we don t confirm it at this point. can we talk, would you be able to explain a little bit about task force pioneer? pioneer is really just a term, a standing arrangement. it s a term that relates to our command-and-control arrangement. so when we do have a major incident, such as this, we set up our police operation center so we have a commander in place, and we have a forward command, and we have other management protocols so that we are ensuring that we have the best police response. so that includes investigators. that includes intelligence. that includes logistics. it includes all resources. and it also includes long-term planning. so that is basically a standing arrangement in terms of a response that we put in place to make sure that we have the best control and command arrangement under way. can you [ multiple questions at once ] again, i don t want to speculate, but we are in contact, and we will continue, and we will continue and the aim is peaceful resolution. that there are bombs, that this man has threatened that there are bombs across other places in sydney. can the public be and feel safe with that threat? we have a large police response in place as a part of this operation. we have our police out. they re very visible. we have our police transport command as well as reminding the public to be vigilant and to be aware. our police are also vigilant and aware and are making sure that if there are any suspicious packages or suspicious vehicles, but i think it is important for me to reiterate that we have got this situation contained to one area at the moment. we are responding to other pieces of information, other calls, et cetera, and we will continue to. but our response is in relation to the incident at martin place. [ questioning simultaneously ] can you tell us more about the gunman? we have to wrap it up. thank you. thank you. thank you. we ve been listening to another briefing there by the new south wales deputy police commissioner. and, again, not a lot of information coming out. she is saying there is an operation under way. we know that. we have been watching it for some time. they are limited in how much they are willing to reveal to the public at this point, which is fair enough i guess. it is frustrating for a lot of people. there are reports out there that catherine burn discussed it that there are some hostages inside that cafe who have been posting on facebook and twitter. really bizarre. the police don t feel comfortable addressing those reports. if they rt stastarted to, wh would they stop? the main message we re getting from these briefings, and we had it again there, the police are stressing that the situation is contained to just one area. that one area just happens to be the very center of the sydney cbd. that would be if there was a hostage situation in times square and that area was closed down. you can imagine how that would throw the city into disarray. the banks and u.s. consulate is there as well. and that is the person causing all of this described by ray hadley, the number one radio guy, as a lunatic. that s i have commvery commoo use that type of language. in the past ray has been very outspoken about the influence of radical islam and the effect is having across australia. he s been very vocal about it. so that may explain why he was the first call before reaching out to other media outlets like channel 9 and 10. the gunman has been making two demands. the first is that he wants an isis flag, which raises the question, if he is affiliated with isis, why didn t he have an isis flag in the first place. the second demand is that he wishes to speak via phone with tony abbott. there was some discussion that he wanted to do that live on the air as well. that would be unlikely that that would happen. and ray hadley also telling us that he was speaking to the gunman by the 23-year-old hostage who was inside that cafe, and he could hear the gunman in the background. he spoke with a middle eastern ak sechbt with an australian tinge. he didn t sound very rational. he did threaten as ray described it, to dispose of hostages, which is an indication that he would be inclined to kill some hostages, but there s no indication that anybody inside that cafe has been hurt. i was wanting to ask him, too bad that we did have to go away from him to take the news conference, which we didn t learn very much from, but what was the demeanor of that young hostage that was being kind of the filter the go between. for this gunman. we ve been talking about whether these three men who got out first, followed by the two women, whether they were part of this negotiation that was going on. we do know part of the developments is that the negotiators have made contact with the government. the police aren t confirming it, but what we ve heard from a number of reports as well as ray l hadley, that these five people managed to escape. he had what, three conversations with this poor hostage before the police got involved. yes. he kept calling his cell phone, and the guy kept answering. let s bring in justin hastings. he s a terrorist expert currently in hawaii. we have a situation that we ve got this guy taking hostages, but he doesn t have the right flag. he s allowing hostages inside there to receive cell phone calls, on their mobile calls. he s let five people actually manage to escape, if that is in fact what has happened. he s allowing people to post on facebook as well as twitter. is this adding up to a profile of a guy who isn t really in control of what s going on? caller: it doesn t seem very well planned. it depends on what his actual goal is, if it s to get attention for his cause then it s suck sided beyond his wildest dreams. if it s something else, he s got a problem. he didn t control the exit. he didn t control information in and out of the building. and he does sort of sound crazy to people who overhear him. it may be something drove him to do this without a lot of planning, without a lot of forethought. that s what you said earlier when you joined us, the whole thing by isis, if this is indeed related to that, which it does appear, is that they reach out to all kinds of people in the west and other countries to try to mobilize them and these aren t people that, in particular, have any experience, thankfully, in dangerous situations or taking hostages and causing harm. so that s some good news, but it seems like this person didn t really have or hasn t had a plan. caller: right, so isis reaches out. they may or may not have been in contact with him. but in some sense it doesn t matter. isis wants people to go and attack outside their home base. people do it. they may or may not be successful in killing anyone, but they certainly attract a lot of attention for the cause and they certainly are able to cause a lot of disruption even if they have no training at all. so from this point of view, isis would say, if in fact he s doing this on behalf of isis or sympathetic to isis, this a win for us even if we didn t order it ourselves. we ve got five people who got out, a guy who doesn t have a particularly good plan. this has been going on for mean ho nine hours. no one has been harmed. this seems to be the indication, as far as you can tell, coming to a benign end? caller: well, i don t know. this could go either way at this point, right? they re trying to wait him out, he may get tired of waiting. he may start to lose more control and lash out. or he may just sort of give up. it s difficult to say, right? so, you know, things are delicate. it depends on how the police and the gunman handle things. but the fact that hostages have escaped shows that his plan isn t working to the extent he wants it to. it doesn t mean it s going to be a benign end, but we hope it will be. now that he has asked to speak with the prime minister and requested a flag, according to reports, what typically would be the police response to something like that? a negotiator, are they trying to drag this out? do they turn him down cold? how does the process work? caller: well, you know, the police could try to delay, to see if that would sort of help the situation. they could sort of, the largely unobjectionable. see if that will calm him down or if that will sort of, you can trade some hostages for the flag for example. we can see what s going on and then sort of come back out again. but, again, it s all subject to negotiation. they may not want to have it happen in delay. natalie and i were quite surprised when we heard these reports that the gunman is a man in his 40s. that seemed a little old for us, for, you know, the typical profile of the young, disaffected, you know, muslim who, you know, takes up the cause on behalf of one of these jihadi groups. caller: right. it s certainly outside the standard demographic in terms of age, but the full range of sort of terrorists are much younger and much older than, you know, might say the 18 to 35-year-old. there were some australians who were found to be much younger than 18. you see people older helping out. we don t want to derive too much from the fact that he s in his 40s. i want to ask you this last question. what has struck you as watching this unfold for the last several hours as the most unusual thing about this particular hostage situation? caller: anything unusual about it? mm-hm. what has struck you as being the most unusual as far as the guy that we re seeing on the screen here? caller: i would say that what s unusual about it is that, you know, typically, we, you know, in the past couple years we thought of terrorist attacks as sudden, an explosion or they ll capture someone and behead him. but this is being drawn out. in some ways, the fact that it s drawn out and sighieeing it plat over a long period of time is more dangerous than a sudden explosion. justin hastings, we talked with you earlier, we appreciate you talking with us again out of hawaii. we should mention he s with the university of sydney. so he has an understanding of the current terrorism situation in australia. we ve also been hearing more from witnesses in sydney. they ve been coming forward and speaking with our affiliate. and some have described the events before the gunman took hostag hostages. in the few minutes i was on the phone this unfolded. i don t know whether the gun man was in there when i was in the cafe. but this unfolded very quickly at about 9:35, 9:40. and inside that cafe people were sitting down chatting over could have e coffee. the building was on lockdown. it was a bit scary, really. did the police come and clear your building? what happened. they were clearing the channel 7 news building. and then we were put on lockdown. we wouldn t go out. we couldn t go down to the public toilets downstairs, and basically we just got took out. we got shipped out in single file really fast. it s just amazing, isn t it, with all of the threats in the world. people are just caught off guard because they re just living their life. they don t think anything s going to happen where you are. well, the #sydney siege is the number one topic right now. many world leaders are weighing in on their comments. david cameron says he was briefed overnight. my thoughts were with all those caught up in it. stephen harper says canada s thoughts and prayers are with our australian friends. john keith send this message, i ve contacted prime minister tony abbott to let him know our thoughts are with the people of australia. and finally from narendra modi. i pray for everyone s safety. and we also know that in the united states, the u.s. president, barack obama has in fact been briefed by his senior terrorism adviser, so he is aware of the situation which is ongoing right now. it is coming up to 3:00 in the morning on the east coast on monday. and earlier, bob behar told us this is not in line with what an extreme group like isis would do. caller: the police will get an idea, not until he comes out and starts talking will they get an idea of what the situation is. now they re talking about negotiators in contact with the government. first of all, how would they have done that, and exactly what will they be talking to this guy about, if they re in fact still talking? caller: well, they re going to first try to figure out who he is and what he wants. he may simply be a lunatic or several of them. they won t know that until they talk to the released hostages and ones that got away. and i think that the situation s looking more benign as we go. i think when we saw the police helicopters and closing downtown, this is a standard procedure. it s an overreaction, but it s absolutely necessary in a situation like this. and what gives you the conclusion that this is more benign? caller: well, simply because, if you re going to go into a mall, and you are an isis-like group, you almost immediately resort to violence. and lockdown a place like this and some sort of a martyrdom operation. with shoisis, a lot of these pee are self-recruited and a lot of their information they re getting off the internet. we ve seen them attack in
that we seize it. my presidency is entering the fourth quarter. interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter. and i m looking forward to it. going into the fourth quarter, you usually get a time-out. i m now looking forward to a quiet time-out. christmas with my family. i want to wish everybody a measure wrimerry christmas, a happy hanukkah, a happy new year. i hope that all of you get time to spend with your families as well because one thing that we share is that we re away too much from them. and now, josh has given me the who s been naughty and who s been nice list and i m going to take some questions. reporter: thank you, mr. president. starting with north korea since that seems to be the biggest topic today, what does a proportional response look like to the sony hack? and did sony make the right decision in pulling the movie or does that set a dangerous precedent? let me address the second question first. sony is a corporation. it suffered significant damage. there were threats against its employees. i m sympathetic to the concerns that they faced. having said all that, yes, i think they made a mistake. in this interconnected digital world, there are going to be opportunities for hackers to engage in cyberassaults both in the private sector and the public sector. now, our first order of business is making sure that we do everything to harden sites and prevent those kind of attacks from taking place. when i came into office, i set up a cybersecurity interagency team to look at everything that we could do at the government level to prevent these kind of attacks. we ve been coordinating with the private sector but a lot more needs to be done. we re not even close to where we need to be. and one of the things in the new year that i hope congress is prepared to work with us on is strong cybersecurity laws that allow for information sharing across private sector platforms as well as the public sector so that we are incorporating best practices and preventing these attacks from happening in the first place. but even as we get better, the hackers are going to get better too. some of them are going to be state actors. some are going to be non-state actors. all of them are going to be sophisticated and many of them can do some damage. we cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the united states. because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don t like or news reports that they don t like. or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody s sensibilities who probably need to be offended. so that s not who we are. that s not what america is about. again, i m sympathetic that sony as a private company was worried about liabilities and this and that and the other. i wish they had spoken to me first. i would have told them do not get into a pattern in which you re intimidated by these kind of criminal attacks. imagine if instead of it being a cyberthreat, somebody had broken into their offices and destroyed a bunch of computers and stolen disks. is that what it takes for you to suddenly pull the plug on something? so we ll engage with not just the film industry but the news industry and the private sector around these issues. we already have. we ll continue to do so. i think all of us have to anticipate occasionally there are going to be breaches like this. they re going to be costly. they re going to be serious. we take them with the utmost seriousness but we can t start changing our patterns of behavior anymore than we stop going to a football game because there might be the possibility of a terrorist attack. anymore than boston didn t run its marathon this year because of the possibility that somebody might try to cause harm. let s not get into that way of doing business. reporter: would you consider taking some sort of symbolic step like watching the movie yourself? i have a long list of movies i m going to be watching. reporter: will this be one of them? i never release my full movie list. let s talk of the specifics of what we now know. the fbi announced today and we can confirm that north korea engaged in this attack. it says something interest about north korea that they decided to have the state mount an all-out assault on a movie studio because of a movie starring seth rogen and james flacco. i love seth. i love james. but the notion that that was a threat to them i think gives you some sense of the kind of regime we re talking about here. they caused a lot of damage, and we will respond. we will respond proportionately and we ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose. it s not something that i will announce here today at a press conference. more broadly, this points to the need for us to work with the international community to start setting up some very clear rules of the road in terms of how the internet and cyber operates. right now it s sort of the wild west and part of the problem is you have weak states that can engage in these kind of attacks. you have nonstate actors that can do enormous damage. that s part of what makes this issue of cybersecurity so urgent. again, this is part of the reason why it s going to be so important for congress to work with us and get an actual bill passed that allows for the kind of information sharing we need because if we don t put in place the kind of architecture that can prevent these attacks from taking place, this is not just going to be affecting movies. this is going to be affecting our entire economy in ways that are extraordinarily significant. by the way, i hear you re moving to europe. where are you going to be? brussels. helping politico start a new publication. congratulations. i think there s no doubt that what belgium needs is a version of politico. [ laughter ] the waffles are delicious by the way. sheryl, you have been naughty. go ahead. reporter: thank you, mr. president. looking ahead to your work with congress next year, you mentioned as an area of possible compromise tax reform and so i m wondering, do you see a republican congress as presenting a better opportunity for actually getting tax reform next year? will you be putting out a new proposal? are you willing to consider both individual and corporate side of the tax ledger there. also, are you still concerned about corporate inversions? i think an all democratic congress would have provided an even better opportunity for tax reform, but i think talking to speaker boehner and leader mcconnell, that they are serious about wanting to get some things done. the tax area is one area where we can get things done. and i think in the coming weeks leading up to the state of the union, there will be some conversations at the staff levels about what principles each side are looking at. i can tell you broadly what i would like to see. i would like to see more simplicity in the system. i would like to see more fairness in the system. with respect to the corporate tax reform issue, we know that there are companies that are paying the full freight, 35%, higher than just about any other company on earth if you are paying 35%. and then there are other companies that are paying zero because they ve got better accounts or lawyers. that s not fair. there are companies parking money outside the country because of tax avoidance. we think it s important that everybody pays something if in fact they are effectively headquartered in the united states. in terms of corporate inversion, those are situations where companies are headquartered here but on paper switched their headquarters to see if they can avoid paying their fair share of taxes. i think that needs to be fixed. so fairness, everybody paying their fair share, everybody taking responsibility. i think it s going to be very important. some of those principles i heard republicans say they share. how we do that, the devil is in the details. i ll be interested in seeing what they want to move forward. i m going to make sure that we put forward specific proposals building on what we already put forward. one other element of this that s important is i ve been on this hobby horse now for six years. we ve got a lot of infrastructure we ve got to rebuild in this country if we re going to be competitive. roads, bridges, ports, airports. electrical grids. water systems. sewage systems. we are way behind. and early on we indicated that there is a way of us potentially doing corporate tax reform, lowering rates, eliminating loopholes so everybody is paying their fair share and during that transition also providing a mechanism where we can get some infrastructure built. i would like to see us work on that issue as well historically obviously infrastructure has not been a democratic or republican issue, and i would like to see if i can return to that tradition. julie pace? reporter: thank you, mr. president. i wanted to ask about cuba. what would you say to dissidents or democracy advocates inside cuba who say policy changes could give castro regime benefits without addressing the human rights or political system. when you lifted sanctions on miramar, you sought reform. if i could follow up on north korea, do you have any indication that north korea was working in conjunction with another country, perhaps china? we have no indication that north korea was working in conjunction with another country. with respect to cuba, we are glad that the cuban government has released slightly over 50 dissidents, that they re going to be allowing the international community red cross and united nations human rights agencies to operate more freely inside of cuba and monitor what is taking place. i share the concerns of dissidents there and human rights activists that this is still a regime that represses it people. as i said when i make the announcement, i don t anticipate overnight changes. what i know deep in my bones is that you have done the same thing for 50 years and nothing has changed, you should try something different if you want a different outcome. and this gives us an opportunity for a different outcome. suddenly cuba is open to the world in ways it has not been opened before. it s open to americans traveling there in ways that it hasn t been before. it s open to church groups visiting their fellow believers inside of cuba in ways they haven t been before. it offers the prospects of telecommunications and the internet being more widely available in cuba in ways that it hasn t been before. and over time, that chips away at this society. i believe offers the best prospect then of leading to greater freedom, greater self-determination on the part of the cuban people. i think it will happen in fits and starts. but through endpajment, we have a better chance of bringing about change than we would have otherwise. do you have a goal of where you see cuba being at the end of your presidency? it would be unrealistic for me to map out exactly where cuba will be. but change is going to come to cuba. it has to. they ve got an economy that doesn t work. they ve been reliant for years on subsidies from the soviet union and then on subsidies from venezuela. those can t be sustained. and the more the cuban people see what s possible, the more interested they are going to be in change. it s country specific and culturally specific. it could happen fast. it could happen slower than i would like. it s going to happen and this change in policy is going to advance that. leslie clark? reporter: i have a number of questions as well. do i have to write all these down? how many are they? reporter: as quick as i can. i want to see if you have any assurances from the cuban government that it would not revert to the same sort of sabotage as it has in the past when president presidents have made similar overtures to the government. be specifically. what do you mean? reporter: when the clinton administration made overture, they shot down planes and have this pattern of doing provocative just general provocative activity. reporter: any time the u.s. reached out a hand to them and what s your knowledge of whether fidel castro had any role in the talks and when you spoke to raul castro, did fidel castro s name come up, have you asked about him? how is he doing? people haven t seen him in a while. and given deep opposition from republicans in congress to lifting the embargo to embassy to any changes that you re doing, are you going to personally get involved in terms of talking to them about efforts they want to do to block money on a new embassy? leslie, i think i m going to cut you off here. this is taking up a lot of time. all right. so with respect to sabotage, my understanding of the history of the plane being shot down, it s not clear that was the cuban government purposely trying to undermine overtures by the clinton administration. it was a tragic circumstance that ended up collapsing talks that had begun to take place. i haven t seen an historical record that suggests they shot the plane down specifically in order to undermine overtures by the clinton government. i think it is not precedented for the president of the united states and president of cuba to make an announcement at the same time that they are moving toward normalizing relations. there hasn t been anything like this in the past. that doesn t mean that over the next two years we can t anticipate them taking certain actions that we may end up finding deeply troubling. either inside of cuba or with respect to their foreign policy. and that could put significant strains on the relationship. but that s true of a lot of countries out there where we have an embassy and the whole part of normalizing relations is that it gives us a greater opportunity to have influence with that government and not. so i would be surprised if the cuban government purposely tries to undermine what is now effectively its own policy. i wouldn t be surprised if they take at any given time actions that we think are a problem, and we will be in a position to respond to whatever actions they take the same way we do with a whole range of countries around the world when we do things they think are wrong but the point is that we ll be in a better position to actually have some influence. they may be carrots and sticks that we can then apply. the only way that fidel s name came up, i think i may have mentioned this in the interview i did, i delivered a fairly lengthy statement at the front end about how we re looking forward to a new future in the relationship between our two countries but that we are going to continue to press on issues of democracy and human rights which we think are important. and my opening remarks took about 15 minutes, which on the phone is a pretty long time. at the end of that, he said, mr. president, you re still a young man. perhaps you have the at the end of my remarks i apologized for taking such a long time, but i wanted to be sure before we engaged in the conversation that he was very clear about where i stood. he said don t worry about it, mr. president. you re still a young man and you still have a chance to break fidel s record. he once spoke seven hours straight. and then president castro proceeded to deliver his own preliminary remarks that lasted at least twice as long as mine. and then i was able to say obviously it runs in the family. that was the only discussion of fidel castro that we had. i sort of forgot all of the others. reporter: i have a few more. how personally involved are you going to get with respect to congress, we cannot unilaterally bring down the embargo. that s codified in the act. what i do think is going to happen, there s going to be a process where congress digests it. they re bipartisan supporters of our new approach. they are bipartisan detractors of this new approach. people will see how the actions we take unfold i think there will be a healthy debate inside of congress. i will weigh in. i think ultimately we need to go ahead and pull down the embargo which has been self-defeating in advancing the aims that we re interested in. i don t anticipate that happens right away. people will want to see how does this move forward before there s any serious debate about whether or not we would make major shifts in the embargo. all right. reporter: under what conditions would you meet with president castro in havana? would you have preconditions you would want to see and on the hack, i know you said you re not going to announce your response but can you say whether you are considering additional economic sanctions on north korea? can you rule out the use of military force or some kind of cyberhit of your own? i think i m going to leave it where i left it, which is we just confirmed it was north korea. we have been working a range of options. they ve been presented to me. i ll make a decision on those based on what i feel is proportional and appropriate to the nature of this crime. with respect to cuba, we re not at a stage here where me visiting cuba or president castro coming to the united states is in the cards. i don t know how this relationship will develop over the next several years. i m a fairly young man. i imagine at some point in my life i ll have an opportunity to visit cuba and enjoy interacting with the cuban people. there s nothing specific where we re trying to target some sort of visit on my part. colleen mccain nelson? reporter: you spoke earlier about 2014 being a breakthrough year and you ended a year with executive actions on cuba and immigration and climate change. you didn t make much progress this year on your legislative agenda and some republican lawmakers have said they are less inclined to work with you if you pursue executive action so aggressively. are you going to continue to pursue executive actions if that creates more road blocks for your legislative agenda or have you concluded it s not possible to break the fever in washington and the partisan gridlock here. i think there are real opportunities to get things done in congress. as i said before, i take speaker boehner and mitch mcconnell at their words that they want to get things done. i think the american people would like to see us get some things done. the question is going to be are we able to separate out those areas where we disagree and those areas where we agree. there are tough fights on areas where we disagree. if republicans seek to take healthcare away from people who just got it, they will meet stiff resistance from me. if they try to water down consumer protections that we put in place in the aftermath of the financial crisis, i will say no, and i m confident i ll be able to uphold vetoes of those types of it provisions. on increasing american exports and simplifying our tax system and rebuilding our infrastructure, my hope is that we can get some things done. i ve never been persuaded by this argument that if it weren t for the executive actions, they would have been more productive. there s no evidence of that. so i intend to continue to do what i ve been doing, which is where i see a big problem and the opportunity to help the american people, and it is within my lawful authority to provide that help, i m going to do it. and i will then side by side reach out to members of congress and reach out to republicans and say let s work together. i rather do it wou. immigration is the classic example. i was really happy when the senate passed a bipartisan comprehensive immigration bill, and i did everything i could for a year and a half to provide republicans the space to act and showed not only great patience but flexibility saying to them, look, if there are specific changes you would like to see, we re willing to compromise. we re willing to be patient. we re willing to work with you. ultimately it wasn t forthcoming. so the question is going to be, i think, if executive actions on areas like minimum wage or equal pay or having a more sensible immigration system are important to republicans and they care about those issues and the executive actions are bothering them, there s a very simple solution and that s pass bills and work with me to make sure i m willing to sign those bills. because both sides are going to have to compromise. on most issues in order for their initiatives to become law, i m going to have to signoff and that means they have to take into account the issues that i care about just as i m going have to take into account the issues that they care about. all right. i think this is going to be our last question. reporter: thanks so much. one of the first bills that mitch mcconnell said he ll send to you is one that would authorize construction of the keystone excel pipeline. i wonder if you could tell us what you would do when you receive that bill and also what you see as benefits and given the drop in oil prices recently, does that change the calculus and whether it makes sense to go ahead with that project? i don t think i ve minimized the benefits. i think i ve described the benefits. at issue in keystone is not american oil it is canadian oil that is drawn out of tar sands in canada. that oil current ly is being shipped out through rail or trucks and it would save canadian oil companies and the canadian oil industry an enormous amount of money if they could simply pipe it all of the way through the united states down to the gulf. once that oil gets to the gulf, it is then entering into the world market and it would be sold all around the world so there s no i won t say no. there s very little impact, nominal impact on u.s. gas prices, what the average american consumer cares about, by having this pipeline come through. sometimes the way this gets sold is let s get this oil and it s going to come here and the implication is that it s going to lower gas prices here in the united states. it s not. there s a global oil market. it s very good for canadian oil companies, and it s good for the canadian oil industry, but it s not going to be a huge benefit to u.s. consumers. it s not even going to be a nominal benefit to u.s. consumers. now, the construction of the pipeline itself will create probably a couple thousand jobs. those are temporary jobs until the construction actually hams. there s probably some additional jobs that can be created in the refining process down in the gulf. those aren t completely insignificant. it s just like any other project. when you consider what we could be doing if we were rebuilding roads and bridges around the country, something that congress could authorize, we could probably create hundreds of thousands of jobs or a million jobs. if that s the argument, there are a lot more direct ways to create well paying american construction jobs. and then with respect to the costs, all i ve said is i want to make sure that if in fact this project goes forward, that it s not adding to the problem of climate change, which i think is very serious and does impose serious costs on the american people. some of them long-term but significant costs nonetheless if we have more flooding, more wildfires, more drought, direct economic impacts on that and as we re rebuilding after sandy for example, we re having to consider how do we increase preparedness in how we structure infrastructure and housing and so forth along the jersey shore. that s an example of the kind of costs that are imposed and you can put a dollar figure on them. in terms of process, you have a nebraska judge determining whether or not the new path for this pipeline is appropriate. once that is resolved, the state department will have all of the information it needs to make its decision. i ve just tried to give this perspective because i think that there s been this tendency to hype this thing as some magic formula to what ails the u.s. economy and it s hard to see on paper where exactly they re getting that information from. in terms of oil prices and how it impacts the decision, i think that it won t have a significant impact except perhaps in the minds of folks when gas prices were lower maybe and less susceptible to the argument that this is the answer to lowering gas prices. it was never going to be the answer to lowering gas prices because the oil that would be piped through the keystone pipeline would go into the world market and that s what determines oil prices. in terms of congress forcing their hand on this, is this something where you say you re not going to let congress force your hand on whether to approve or disapprove this bill. we ll see what they do. we ll take that up in the new year. reporter: any new year s resolutions? april, go ahead. go ahead. reporter: thank you, mr. president. last question i guess. six years ago this month, i asked you what was the state of black america in the oval office and you said it was the best of times and the worst of times. you said it was the best of times in the sense that there has never been more opportunity for african-americans who have received a good education and the worst of times for unemployment and the lack of opportunity. ending 2014, what is the state of black america as we talk about those issues and race relations in this country? like the rest of america, black america in the the aggreg is better than when i came into office. the housing equity that s been recovered. 401 pensions that have been recovered. a lot of folks are african-american. they are better off than they were. the gap between income and wealth of white and black america persists. we have more work to do on that front. this is a legacy of a troubled racial past. it s not an excuse for black folks. they are out there trying to get an education sending their kids to college but they are starting behind often times in the race. and what s true for all americans is we should be willing to provide people a hand up and not a handout. help folks get that good early childhood education. help them graduate from high school. help them afford college. if they do, they ll be able to succeed and that s good for all of us. we ve seen some progress. the education reforms that we ve initiated are showing measurable results. we have the highest high school graduation that we ve seen in a very long time. we are seeing record numbers of young people attending college. in many states that initiated reforms you see progress in math scores and reading scores for african-american and latino students as well as the broader population. but we ve still got more work to go. now, obviously how we re thinking about race relations right now has been colored by ferguson, the garner case in new york, a growing awareness in the broader population of what many communities of color have understood for some time and that is there are specific instances at least where law enforcement doesn t feel as if it s being applied in a color blind fashion. the task force that i formed was supposed to report back to me in 90 days not with a bunch of abstract musings about race relations but concrete practical things that police departments and law enforcement agencies can begin implementing right now to rebuild trust between communities of color and the police department. and my intention is to as soon as i get those recommendations, to start implementing. some of them we ll do through executive action. some will require congressional action. some will require action on the part of states and local jurisdictions. but i actually think it s been a healthy conversation that we ve had. these are not new phenomenon. the fact that they are now surfacing in part because people are able to film what have just been in the past stories passed on along a kitchen table allows people to make their own assessments and evaluations and you re not going to solve the problem if it s not being talked about. in the meantime, we have been moving forward on criminal justice reform issues more broadly. one of the things i didn t talk about in my opening statement is the fact that last year was the first time in 40 years where we had the federal prison population go down and the crime rate go down at the same time, which indicates the degree to which it s possible to think smarter about who we re incarcerating and how long we re incarcerating and now are we dealing with nonviolent offenders and how are we dealing with drug offenses, diversion programs, drug courts. we can do a better job and save money in the process by initiating some of these reforms and i ve been pleased to see that we ve had republicans and democrats in congress who are interested in these issues as well. the one thing i will say, and this is going to be the last thing i say, is that one of the great things about this job is you get to know the american people. you meet folks from every walk of life and every region of the country and every race and every faith and what i don t think is always captured in our political debates is the vast majority of people are just trying to do the right thing. and people are basically good and have good intentions. sometimes our institutions and our systems don t work as well as they should. sometimes you ve got a police department that has gotten into bad habits over a period of time and hasn t maybe surfaced hidden biases that we all carry around. if you offer practical solutions, people want to fix these problems. it s not a situation where people feel good seeing somebody choked and dying. i think that troubles everybody. so there s an opportunity of all of us to come together and to take a practical approach to these problems. and i guess that s my general theme for the end of the year, which is we ve gone through difficult times. it is your job, press corps, to report on all of the mistakes that are made and all of the bad things that happen and the crises that look like they are popping and i understand that. but through persistent effort and faith in the american people, things get better. the economy has gotten better. our ability to generate clean energy has gotten better. we know more about how to educate our kids. we solve problems. ebola is a real crisis. you get a mistake in the first case because it s not something that s been seen before. we fix it. you have some unaccompanied children who spike at a border and it may not get fixed in the time frame of the news cycle, but it gets fixed. and part of what i hope as we reflect on the new year, this should generate some confidence. america knows how to solve problems. and when we work together, we can t be stopped. and now i m going to go on vacation. thank you, everybody. the president of the united states at a news conference a year-end news conference. he s off to hawaii tonight with his family for a little r&r. a little vacation. we want to welcome our viewers in the united states and around the world. i m wolf blitzer reporting from washington. the big headline, the president of the united states saying sony pictures made a mistake in canceling the release of the film the interview. a film about north korea, the north korean leader kim jong-un. i want to play the clip. here is the sound bite from the president saying sony pictures made a mistake. sony is a corporation. it suffered significant damage. there were threats against its employees. i am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced. having said all that, yes, i think they made a mistake. we cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the united states because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don t like or news reports that they don t like. or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended. the president also saying he wishes sony pictures had discussed the issue with them before they decided to pull the release of this film. he also said north korea was responsible echoing what the fbi said earlier in the day that north korea deliberately did this. he promised the u.s. would respond but he refused to say how the u.s. will respond. he said only it would be proportionate and the u.s. will respond in his words when we choose to do so. he s not going to release that information in advance. jake tapper, strong words from the president. he surprised a lot of us by going as far as he did. i thought he would be more cautious and talk about how he knew where sony was coming from as a business. he gave a sweeping statement about free speech and not giving in to threats from people like kim jong-un especially when it came to a comedy film and then he started talking about the precedent it set. what happens if they don t like documentaries? what happens if they don t like news? where does it go from there? it was very strong pro-free speech statement from the president and you re right. i m very surprised. evan perez, you have new information. you re learning right now, you re our justice reporter, about the fbi and how they came up with this decision that it was in fact north korea no doubt about that. reporter: there was no doubt, wolf. i have to tell you one thing real quick. what the president just said echoes what i m hearing from u.s. law enforcement intelligence officials. they are outraged. they understand sony did what they did but they are outraged that a dictator won censoring the american movie industry as a result of this hack, wolf. the fbi pretty quickly thought they knew where this hack was coming from and they said that they they say that there was some telltale signs despite that north korean hackers did a very good job to try to mask where this was coming from. they tried to route the attacks through several countries in asia and europe and even latin america. in the end, what the fbi found was telltale signs and lines of code, encryption cal algorithmst show where it came from matching an earlier attack from last year that was carried out against south korean banks and media companies and so this is one way they were able to very quickly this is unprecedented for them to make a determination so quickly and go public with this. the president also said that there is no indication any other countries were working together with north korea. he said he has seen nothing along those lines. this was a north korean operation. gloria borger, you know, the president almost seemed liberated, if you will, to go out and speak cannopenly about many issues. he didn t want to engage. he said when we respond it will be proportional at a time and place of our choosing. i won t raise their profile anymore than it already has been raised over a comedy satire. i can t remember the last time i saw the president so cheerful other than when we won re-election actually. he went out of his way to say i m energized and excited and this is the fourth quarter and great things will happen in the fourth quarter. a lot of interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter, which it often does. he was clearly sending a message to the american people as we ve been talking about before he had his press conference. they may call me a lame duck, but i m going to keep quacking here. this is not over by any stretch. i think he is boyd by what happened over the last several years. what will the united states do to retaliate against north korea? no question the president is setting out an unyielding position. we ll decide how to respond and it will be on our own time and had a dismissive comment for the north korean leader. it tells but the tells you about the regime if they are upset over this movie. he had a message to the american people saying we as a country have to respond to this dismiss it, go on, go to the movie theaters, et cetera. despite that, north korea because of this hack rocketed to the top of the national discussion even in a year 2014 when we have all of these other grave international challenges. he only had brief mentions of ukraine and russia. ebola. the fight against isis. we ve got two ground wars in asia still going on. afghanistan and iraq big commitments of u.s. troops there. not a single question about those issues. and consider all of the stories and discussion we were doing on that earlier this year. he only took seven or eight questions. all from print reporters. really typical style, he gave lengthy answers. he tends to do that. something else that s interesting that i suspect a lot of republicans in congress are paying attention to is the fact that he basically issued veto threats. he said if republicans in congress bring me bills that weaken wall street reform legislation, he ll veto it. he also while not saying he was going to veto the keystone pipeline legislation that republicans in the senate said would be the first order of business, he made the case for vetoing it saying it will have only a nominal effect on u.s. gas prices. this will benefit canadian oil companies but not really have an effect on the united states. he didn t say i ll veto it but he laid out the case for doing so. let me bring in jay carney. jay, did you get the same sense that he s laying out the case to veto that keystone pipeline legislation because republicans clearly want to put it on the table very, very quickly in the new session. woflf, i know he s ambivalen about it. in many ways both sides of this argument have turned it into a much bigger issue than it factually is. keystone if it s built will not create the number of jobs that proponents claim it will. nor will rejecting it save the global environment the way some environmentalists claim it will because tar sands will be exploited regardless if the pipeline is built. i think he s been of two minds of this and it s hard to predict where he will go. it s true that some of the senators, democratic senators, who would have been most vulnerable if he vetoed it will no longer be in the senate so that may give him more political leverage. i tell you, i think gloria said earlier talking about how upbeat he was and buoyant he was. i was there as press secretary for three end of the year press conferences and this one was quite different. what was going on at the end of the year. no fiscal crisis. no international crisis. at least not yet knock on wood. he does clearly feel in the wake of the midterm election that he s been able to demonstrate that he s relevant and that he can execute and get things done and he feels good about it. let s get some reaction from a different perspective. cliff may is joining us, president of the foundation for defense of democracy. on north korea specifically, cliff, what did you think of what he said? i was glad that he said that a dictator shouldn t be imposing censorship on the united states or on the free world. i don t think it s sony s battle to fight primarily. i think it s our battle. he said that there will be a response. less so he assured north korea that it would be proportionate and that it would not be beyond that because there needs to be some deterrent. cyberwarfare is a dangerous thing. in this case it was used to shut down a movie and there were terrorist threats and cyberwarfare could shut down our entire society. we re not where we should be on cyberwarfare and there has to be a very strong response to such an attempt. this was on a company in the u.s. but it s really an attack on american freedom. in the past, we in the u.s. and in the west have not responded effectively to attempts to shutdown free expression. imagine if there had been nuclear weapons. his successor may have nuclear weapons and that was a subject not at all discussed and i think it s the most important national security threat we face today. let me get bobby into this conversation. another big issue that came up, cuba. the president pleased with what s going on in this improved u.s./cuban relationship although he played down this notion he was about to fly off to havana any time soon. he seemed to suggest it was much more likely he would return to being a private citizen than during his presidency, which is probably wise. it would be pretty bad optics for the president to go to cuba or have raul castro over to the white house. raul castro is not welcome to the grand halls of the world and major war leaders don t go to havana because everyone recognizes he is as the president said, a dictator. repressive regime. makes sense to get rid of an embargo that doesn t work. it was very interesting. the president started by invoking the cuban people rather than the cuban government. i think that was the key point. it s not the regime. it s people to people relations. he s hoping that just by allowing that to happen, the u.s. will have greater leverage, greater say in cuba s activities in the future. that s bank shot. it s better than no shot. that s a good point. if he goes to cuba, he would like to engage with the cuban people. doug brinkley, how did he do in this end of year news conference? who would have thought on midterm election day, he would sell this was a great year 2014 in america and it was a great year for him and it s all about the economy. you can almost feel how optimistic the president is in. he feels the country is moving in the right direction. dwight eisenhower with the great missile gap crisis in 1957 ended up creating nasa. i think this situation with north korea although newt gingrich calls it a war, it may be a cyberbattle with north korea, he may need to create cybersecurity agency or something. i think he would get bipartisan support. not that people want to see more government on the right, but we have to address this. i think something important and significant that we ll have to watch. i m writing on fdr. i m writing about public works projects. this is a president that is not green lighting keystone. i don t know how other ways you could tell him. you don t talk down your product and say, okay, i m going to do it. let s get a thought from dana bash. i m sure members of congress, democrats and republicans watching very closely. how is what the president said today likely to play with them? first of all, he s somebody who a lot of members of congress are looking at saying who is this guy and where has he been for the last six years? he s somebody as everyone mentioned in various ways who feels free to say what he wants and do what he wants. on what doug was just talking about, we should note that s the very first legislative battle in january in just a couple weeks. the new senate majority leader mitch mcconnell said he ll do it right out of the gate. if the president is going to use his veto pen and leaning into do that, it will probably be the first thing that we ll see. the other thing i just think that s worth noting, it may seem to our viewers to be naval gazing from reporters, he not only talk to print reporters, he only asked women for questions. he only called on female reporters. that s very telling for a white house that has gotten a lot of flak, maybe as they should have, for the women inside the white house not rising to the top and not having a seat at the table. the fact that he ended this year only calling on female reporters was no accident. let me ask jay carney, former white house press secretary, our cnn political commentator now, was that just coincidental or deliberate? what do you think? i m sure it was deliberate. i m sure it was discussed beforehand among the president s advisers. i think it was an excellent decision to make. there are a lot of superb female reporters that cover the white house every day. i think it was a fun way and smart way to end the year by calling on only female reporters. as a former print journalist even though i m on tv now, i like to see print journalist get