Five Britons Found Guilty of Plot to Attack U.K. Mall, Clubs, Trains, Power Plants; D.C. Sex Scandal
JOHN ROBERTS, CNN ANCHOR (voice over): Commuter meltdown.</s>WILL KEMPTON, DIRECTOR, CALIFORNIA DEPT OF TRANSPORTATION: We expect that 80,000 or so vehicles will have to find a new route.</s>ROBERTS: The San Francisco Bay Area bracing for the worse for months to come after a dramatic inferno and freeway collapse. And exposed. The D.C. madam shaking up Washington, promising to drop more high-profile names as her case heads to court on this AMERICAN MORNING.</s>ROBERTS: And good morning to you. It's Monday, April the 30th. I'm John Roberts in Washington.</s>KIRAN CHETRY, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Kiran Chetry here in New York. Good to see you, John. We have some stories on our radar this morning, and one of them comes right from your neck of the woods -- the alleged Washington, D.C., madam. So far, two high-profile figures now connected to her, and it looks like D.C. is bracing for one of its biggest scandals ever.</s>ROBERTS: Lots of backlash, lots of talk about George Tenet, the interview on "60 Minutes" last night and the tell-all book that was released at midnight today. We're going to be talking with the former CIA agent who thinks that George Tenet was not made a scapegoat, that he's just trying to do a little bit of CYA here, and also that he should give back his Presidential Medal of Freedom. That coming up in the next half hour here -- Kiran.</s>CHETRY: And also just in to us here at CNN, a British terror trial, the outcome now. Five men convicted of a plot to carry out various bomb attacks using fertilizer. For the first time we're hearing about the suspects' connection to al Qaeda and the 2005 transit bombings. So we're going to have much more on that. But first this morning, commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area are bracing for what is going to be a traffic nightmare that could drag on for weeks, even months. A tanker truck carrying gasoline crashed and caught fire yesterday. The intense heat, at thousands of degrees, melted the ramps of one of the busiest interchanges in the Bay Area, and it could take months to repair that damage. AMERICAN MORNING'S Chris Lawrence is live in Oakland this morning for us with a first-hand look at just -- how bad is it, Chris?</s>CHRIS LAWRENCE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Kiran, the last time something like this happened on this same stretch of freeway, it took five months to get it fixed. And really, this could not have happened at a worse place -- right where three major freeways converge and lead into the Bay Bridge, which connects Oakland to San Francisco. You can kind of see behind me where that damage has occurred. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was out here at the scene last night touring the area. He has authorized the state of California to pick up the tab to provide free public transportation for everyone in the Bay Area today, and he's also declared this area a disaster area.</s>GOV. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER (R), CALIFORNIA: The state has put money aside specifically that no one has to fight over who is going to pay for the first few days. It's all taken care of. How fast you move people and goods and services, that's economic power. We don't want the economy in the Bay Area to bedisrupted, nor the economy of California to be disrupted.</s>LAWRENCE: And this is what it looks like when the tanker crashed and what it looks like 8,000 of gasoline just explode on the freeway. That heat, some say, got up to nearly 3,000 degrees. It literally melted the steel and the steel bolts that support the freeway overpass above it. Again, they're looking at about five to six months of repair. Crews are already out here. The demolition crews removing some of the debris. They've already got some engineers who have been out to assess the damage and try to come up with a repair plan. But it's going to be a headache from now until fall for the commuters here in the Bay Area -- Kiran.</s>CHETRY: Oh, that's just unbelievable when you look at those pictures. And unbelievably, also, is that that the driver was not seriously hurt.</s>LAWRENCE: No, he walked away. He did suffer some second-degree burns, but he walked under his own power to an area where he hailed a cab, hailed a cab to the hospital. Right now they're looking into whether he may have been speeding or not. That's still under investigation.</s>CHETRY: Yes, whether he took that curb a little bit too fast. Chris Lawrence, thanks so much. Police in Kansas City are still trying to figure out why a gunman opened fire in the parking lot of a shopping center. The gunman shot and killed two people before police shot and killed him. At least two others were hurt. And witnesses describe the panic at the crowded mall.</s>TRAVIS JOHNSON, WITNESSED SHOOTINGS: People were screaming and yelling, and I'd look up and people were just running and crying. And I started to step out into the aisle, and, like, people just, like, knocked into me and knocked me to the ground. And someone helped me up and said, "You need to get out of here, someone is shooting."</s>CHETRY: Well, that gunman has not yet been identified. Police say that his crime spree may have actually started at an elderly woman's home. She was found dead yesterday afternoon, her car stolen. Police say the gunman then shot and wounded an officer at a gas station before he went to the mall.</s>ROBERTS: There's already a backlash this morning aimed at former CIA director George Tenet and his new book which goes on sale today. Already, a former colleague at the CIA is telling us that he thinks Tenet is not telling the whole story. Tenet told CBS' "60 Minutes" about his deeply personal feelings on fighting terrorism.</s>GEORGE TENET, FMR. CIA DIRECTOR: People don't understand us. You know? They think we're a bunch of faceless bureaucrats with no feelings, no families, no sense of what it's like to be passionate about running these bastards down. There was nobody else in this government that felt what we felt before or after 9/11. Of course, after 9/11, everybody had that feeling. Nobody felt like we felt on that day. This was personal.</s>ROBERTS: Earlier on AMERICAN MORNING, we spoke with Michael Scheuer. He is the former head of the CIA's unit on Osama bin Laden who is highly critical of Tenet's version of the events.</s>MICHAEL SCHEUER, FMR. CIA OFFICIAL: I think he's being less than truthful, certainly in regard to Osama bin Laden, saying that we didn't have the opportunity to kill him. That, at least in my mind, having been there first hand, that's a lie. He could have been dead in '98 or '99.</s>ROBERTS: Scheuer said that they had eight chances to kill bin Laden, by his estimation. You can hear more from George Tenet tonight on "</s>LARRY KING LIVE," 9: 00 Eastern.</s>CHETRY: A just-released government report lays out a bleak assessment of Iraq's reconstruction, that Iraq is still plagued by power outages and a lack of clean water and health care. The Iraq rebuilding project has already cost U.S. taxpayers $30 billion. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice heading today to a conference in Egypt aimed at finding solutions to the violence in Iraq. Iran will also attend that conference, which is being sponsored by the United Nations.</s>ROBERTS: A developing story now in London. A jury found five British Muslims guilty of plotting a series of bombings. The men claim to be members of al Qaeda, and investigators say they planned to use fertilizer bombs to destroy shopping malls, trains, power plants, even one of London's biggest nightclubs. And there's an extra connection, as well, that came out of this trial. CNN's international security correspondent, Paula Newton, is live now in front of the courthouse in London. Paula, how important are these convictions?</s>PAULA NEWTON, CNN INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: They're incredibly important. This was really the case that was the granddaddy, as we call it, of the U.K. terror plots, that kind of British homegrown terror, this next generation of jihadis in Britain, that security sources and police were tailing here. John, this was a very extensive, very expensive, $100 million operation. They were tailing these guys for months and months and months, and were trying to uncover information about plots. This, you can say, is a success. They have five guilty verdicts on their hands, two not guilty. They feel that the ringleaders in this were caught and that now they have been prosecuted, and those charges do carry life sentences. What was really uncovered here during this trial, John, and what we learned, really, a few months ago but have been unable to report because of reporting restrictions, is that during that surveillance, two men who were the two of the suicide bombers during the July 7, 2005 transport bombings that killed 52 people here in London, injured hundreds -- a lot of Americans caught up in that transport chaos here in London -- two of those men were also picked up on surveillance. Police identified them, but afterwards, John, they failed to continue to tail them. The big question here today, John, is could 7/7 have been prevented? Imagine finding out that -- as Americans would -- that 9/11 could have been prevented. We expect a lot of outrage. In fact, already heard a lot of outrage about this issue -- John.</s>ROBERTS: Yes. I mean, how much of that are you expecting to hear? Particularly because these guys were picked up, they were surveilled, but they were sort of dismissed as bit players, if I understand the evidence correctly.</s>NEWTON: Well, and the story -- that's right. They were dismissed as bit players, and the stories don't jive. I mean, we expect MI5, the secret service here, to come out and say, look, we put guys into two categories. It was either essential to tail them because they were a threat, or it was, you know, at some point desirable to tail them. They said that these guys, it wasn't essential. We didn't have to tail them 24/7. They weren't that much of a threat. They turned out to be an incredible threat. And more than that, what doesn't jive with the stories is they never even passed them on to local police to say, look, keep tabs on these guys and see what they're doing.</s>ROBERTS: All right. We'll keep monitoring the situation there, Paula. And if we start get reaction on that front, we'll get back to you. Thanks very much.</s>CHETRY: The big question today, will she name more names? Washington is on edge waiting for that answer. A California woman who's accused of running a prostitution ring for the rich and powerful in the nation's capital has a court date this morning. CNN's Jim Acosta is live at the federal courthouse in Washington. Hi, Jim.</s>JIM ACOSTA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Kiran. Yes, there are growing worries in Washington that this alleged D.C. madam will disclose reams of phone records that could embarrass scores of high-level Washington officials in this case, but so far federal prosecutors are not backing down.</s>ACOSTA (voice over): Deborah Jeane Palfrey denies accusations she ran a D.C. prostitution ring.</s>DEBORAH JEANE PALFREY, PAMELA MARTIN AND ASSOCIATES: The firm Pamela Martin and Associates operated as a legal, high-end, erotic fantasy service.</s>ACOSTA: But there are fears in the nation's capital that the woman behind the business Pamela Martin and Associates has every intention of naming names to stay out of jail.</s>PALFREY: This is on the head of the government. This is not on me. They had a chance at any given point in the last six or so months to stop this thing, but they don't seem to care.</s>ACOSTA: In an interview with the Internet radio site WS Radio, Palfrey says she plans on disclosing more than a decade's worth of phone records from her self-described erotic fantasy service as part of her defense.</s>PALFREY: Look, we're going to use some, if not many, of these 10,000 people who used the service for the 13 years as defense witnesses, and many of these people have government clearances, security clearances, high-level individuals. Do you really want this to happen?</s>ACOSTA: High-level individuals like Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias. He resigned last week for personal reasons after confirming to ABC News that he was one of Palfrey's clients. Tobias, a proponent of abstinence-based AIDS prevention, and seen here with President Bush, told ABC he had only received massages from Palfrey's service.</s>ACOSTA: And later this morning, Deborah Palfrey, who also goes by Jeane, is expected to be back in court at 10:00, where she will -- or when she will request a new public defender in this case. She claims she's broke after federal authorities seized her assets last fall as part of this investigation, and we should note about that interview you just heard, she is now trying to sell clips of that interview to raise money for her legal defense -- Kiran.</s>CHETRY: Oh, wow. All right. Well, if she does names name, it looks like it's going to be highly explosive there in Washington. Thanks a lot, Jim.</s>ACOSTA: I think so, yes. Sure.</s>ROBERTS: Delta Air Lines is coming out of bankruptcy today. See what it's going to mean for passengers. And we check in on the new kid on the block, an airline that promises flights for just 10 bucks. Too good to be true? We'll tell you. Plus, who's most likely to get pulled over by police? And then what happens afterward? After all the controversy over racial profiling, we'll have some surprising new findings. You're watching AMERICAN MORNING. The most news in the morning is on CNN.