Manchester Police: Suspected Bomb A Training Device; ISIS Assaults Gas Plant Near Baghdad; McGurk: Coalition Is Countering ISIS On Social Media; Trump: Britain Won't Be "Back Of The Queue" In Trade
JOHN VAUSE, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: This is CNN NEWSROOM. Live from Los Angeles, ahead this hour --</s>VAUSE: Thanks for being with us. I'm John Vause. NEWSROOM L.A. starts right now. Manchester United Football Club was at the center of a bomb scare on Sunday. Police evacuated the home stadium, but it later turned out to be a false alarm. The suspected explosive device was accidentally left behind by a private company after a training exercise. Christina Macfarlane reports now from Manchester.</s>CHRISTINA MACFARLANE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Fans arrived here at Old Trafford on Sunday expecting to see drama on the pitch with Manchester United took on Bournemouth in the final fixture of the season. But instead they were disrupted by events off it, after a suspicious package was found in the northwest corner of the stands. After 75,000 fans were evacuated from the stadium here and sent home, a bomb disposal team was sent in to conduct a controlled explosion of the device, which is said to have been very life-like. But later on Sunday night, it was confirmed that the package was in fact a training device, which was left behind by a private firm following a training drill. While this isn't an ideal situation for Man United Football Club, there is a great deal of relief that the situation wasn't as dangerous as first suspected and there is reassurance that the fans and the security staff here dealt efficiently and swiftly to the incident. The premier league have announced that the match that was due to take place here today have now been rescheduled for Tuesday, the 17th, where it will draw a close to the premier league season. Christina Macfarlane, CNN, Manchester.</s>VAUSE: Retired special FBI agent and CNN law enforcement contributor, Steve Moore joins us now to talk more about exactly what happened, and what didn't happen at Old Trafford on Sunday. I mean, we've had these reports that after the Paris terrorist attacks, and their attempt to detonate an explosive at a football stadium, given that, how surprising is that this device was left there on a Wednesday and not found until a Sunday?</s>STEVE MOORE, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT CONTRIBUTOR: It is astounding. And it is not in keeping with any kind of elevated security or even mildly elevated security. Before you go to the extent of having a playoff game, you are going to have the entire stadium walked, looked at, and you're going to probably run dogs through it. So that should have been found about two or three times before the event.</s>VAUSE: OK, like in the days before, the morning of?</s>MOORE: At the latest the morning of.</s>VAUSE: OK, so you had the situation where they had this training exercise and apparently had people rappelling out of helicopters, a big training exercise. Wouldn't someone have informed the local authorities in Manchester, hey, hang on, we have this going on. We had a training exercise there on Wednesday.</s>MOORE: You would think that, but they said it was a private company. Maybe it wasn't as --</s>VAUSE: Elaborate, I guess.</s>MOORE: Yes, as elaborate as you thought, but what gets me is the Old Trafford people, they had to allow this training to happen, so why didn't anybody at Old Trafford say, Wednesday, I'm astounded.</s>VAUSE: OK. The situation that they say this fake bomb seemed to be incredibly realistic. It was a cell phone strapped to pipes that sort of bomb if it was a bomb, not a timer, remotely detonated.</s>MOORE: Right.</s>VAUSE: So assuming this was a real world situation, they found this bomb and you have a situation with 75,000 fans now putting on the posting on social media, sending out tweets, the stadium is being evacuated. There is a security scare we got to go, would the police, the authorities have this 90-minute long period to basically disarm this bomb, which is what they had, at 3:00, it wasn't exploded until 4:30.</s>MOORE: If a terrorist is going to take the time to put a cell phone detonator on it, as soon as they get indication that the bomb might be disrupted, they're going to be probably detonate it. They wouldn't have had 90 minutes.</s>VAUSE: So given that, evacuate the stadium, everyone agrees it is the right thing to do, what else can you do? Any other option here?</s>MOORE: The time -- if this was a real bomb, by the time it is right there, if it is a remotely detonated device, your time is over the minute you find it because somebody will be watching that bomb, even if they're not going to be the ones who call to detonate, they're going to be in touch with the people who will. You don't put a -- a remotely detonated bomb in a stadium and not watch it.</s>VAUSE: OK, so essentially what we're saying is that they would have had a lot less than that 90-minute window.</s>MOORE: They would have it about a minute after somebody said, look.</s>VAUSE: Yes, exactly, OK. So we have a situation with increased security. There's obviously been attacks in Paris, attacks in Brussels, are we now in a situation where somebody, if they wanted, this wasn't the case here, but let's say they could build a realistic looking fake bomb and essentially disrupt the lives of 75,000 people like what happened here in Manchester.</s>MOORE: That's how terrorism works. They make our lives worse this way. They make it to where people are so on edge that anything like this, it doesn't even have to be that realistic. People are getting thrown off planes for speaking different languages. So yes, this is now the world we live in.</s>VAUSE: The new reality.</s>MOORE: It is.</s>VAUSE: Steve, thanks for coming in.</s>MOORE: Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.</s>VAUSE: A series of attacks by ISIS have killed dozens of people in Yemen and Iraq. Yemeni security officials say a suicide bomber struck a southern military base on Sunday. The blast killed at least 30 troops and left 29 others wounded. An hour later, another suicide blast targeted the convoy of a Yemeni security official killing two of his guards and injuring four others. And in Iraq, a car bomb struck just south of Baghdad on Sunday killing at least two people, wounding almost a dozen more. There was violence also which erupted just north of the Iraqi capital on Sunday when ISIS militants attacked a natural gas plant killing at least ten security personnel. The deadly assaults sent plumes of smoke into the air and left several storage tanks ablaze. Ian Lee has more on the attack.</s>IAN LEE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Fireballs lit up the early morning sky north of Baghdad after ISIS launched a deadly attack at a gas plant. Two attack helicopters from a nearby base helped repel the attack more than ten guards were killed. This attack sparked harsh criticism from Baghdad's governor, Ali al- Tamimi (ph), he slammed the chief of the plant for failing to provide adequate protection. He pointed to the inappropriate number of guards and their light weaponry, no match compared with ISIS' firepower and tactics. He called for an overhaul of the plant security to protect the facility, which is important economically for the services it provides and geographical location. The plant is north of the capital, along the road that leads to the ISIS stronghold of Mosul. Another failure of the attack, was the delayed response by Iraqi security forces especially forces. The governor called for security leaders to be replaced after it took the forces two and a half hours to respond. This latest attack underscores two important points. First a change in ISIS tactics, while the terror group faces battlefield losses over the past few weeks, sleeper cells have increased the number of attacks in territory controlled by Iraqi security forces. Second, highlights the failure of security forces to root out is in that area. Ian Lee, CNN, Cairo.</s>VAUSE: More on the surge of ISIS attacks joined by CNN military analyst, Retired Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona. Colonel Francona, thanks for being with us. As ISIS moves to this sort of insurgent like attacks, very good question, are the Iraqis capable of adapting to that? Because up to this point, it sort of been more conventional war if they were the frontline. Now they have to adapt to these tactics, these changing tactics, are they up to the job?</s>LT. COLONEL RICK FRANCONA, CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Well, they have done it in the past. The problem, John, is that they're spread very thin. If you look at Iraqi Army collapsed, two years ago, when Mosul fell to ISIS, and it is never really recovered, we're starting to get there, but it is not there yet. So you got the Iraqi security forces, which includes the police, Special Forces and the Army. And there is just not enough of them to handle all of what they're trying to do. They are trying to fight in the Euphrates Valley and cut the supply lines there. They are trying to get ready to push up the Tigris Valley toward Mosul and also provide security to this large area around Baghdad and they're just stretched so thin. So as they concentrated one area, ISIS nearly attacks another. It's just typical asymmetric warfare. ISIS is very good at. They are reverting to the old tactics that worked for them before. I think we're going to see more of this. Ian brought up a very good point. This is causing a lot of problems for the government because the Shia population of Baghdad is complaining that you cannot protect us and they're more concerned with their own safety than the liberation of Mosul.</s>VAUSE: Do you think there should be now a reassessment there by officials in Baghdad to secure the capital than more about everything else later on?</s>FRANCONA: That's the goal. That's what ISIS would like to have them do. ISIS would like to have them pulled back, reassess what is going on and say, you know, maybe we don't need to go to Mosul just yet. Maybe go to Mosul at all because the Iraqi government has its own problems. As you know, there have been all these demonstrations by Moktad al-Sadr (ph) and his group demanding a complete change in government, the end of corruption and the Baghdad government is very corrupt. And they want to make these changes and ISIS would like to see them focus on that and leave them alone. I don't think that's going to work but that's the goal.</s>VAUSE: Well, you mentioned the amount of territory, which ISIS has lost and how the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military is trying to take back this territory from ISIS. During a briefing in Amman, Jordan, U.S. President Barack Obama's special envoy, Brett McGurk (ph), he did talk about the territory which ISIS has lost in Iraq. This is what he said.</s>BRETT MCGURK, U.S. SPECIAL ENVOY FOR COALITION AGAINST ISIS: And now the caliphate as they call it, perverse caliphate, is shrinking. So they're very much on the defensive. They have not -- any territory really since their operations in Ramadi going all the way back to May.</s>VAUSE: This is the flip side of the coin here. The Iraqi military has taken with the Iraqis with the support of the U.S. and other allies have taken back a lot of territory. What is the strain now? Are ISIS under, I guess when you look at from a propaganda point of view, financially, psychologically, that kind of stuff?</s>FRANCONA: They're under pressure in both countries, both the main enclave in Syria, Iraq, other self-declared capital and Mosul. The Iraqi Army with the Kurdish support and with the American air power has been able to pretty much isolate those, not quite all, but the goal is to cut these two enclaves off and surround them so that there is no escape. Remember what happened in Afghanistan, the al Qaeda was able to escape into Pakistan. We're trying to prevent that from happening again by completely surrounding them in that way we can destroy them in place. Otherwise, we're going to see what we're starting to see the beginnings of and that's ISIS moving to Libya, to Yemen and setting up enclaves there. So if the military plan holds, as Mr. Berger (ph) mentions, we're going to keep pushing ISIS from all sides and roll them up into these cities and eventually Mosul and Raqqah are going to have to be taken.</s>VAUSE: You mentioned something interesting when it came to social media and propaganda, and ISIS is being squeezed on that front as well.</s>MCGURK: They had free reign in the propaganda sphere. They had millions of Twitter and Facebook pages pumping out these lies every single day. We have now worked as a coalition to counter that. For every pro -- Twitter handle, there is now six calling out its lies and countering that message. That's very important.</s>VAUSE: How important is this part of the strategy and how will the U.S. and its allies know if it is working?</s>FRANCONA: Yes, I think this is one of the success stories of what we're doing. Our cyber capabilities are quite good and they've zeroed in on ISIS and they've really had an effect. You look at the recruitment numbers and that's a good metric for how effective they are. It's down about to a third of what it's used to be so instead of 3,000 fighter showing up, we're seeing about a thousand. Of course, a lot of it also has to do with the effect of the air campaign and the ground campaign. But we don't see as much effect of this propaganda onslaught that we saw, you know, even last year. So I think this is a success story and good thing, but it has to continue. But it's not over yet. I don't think we're counting the death nail of ISIS just yet. There is still a lot of fight left in these guys.</s>VAUSE: Yes, we're seeing it every day, over and over again from Iraq to Yemen to Libya, of course, in Syria as well. Colonel, thank you.</s>FRANCONA: Always good to be with you.</s>JONES: The leading figure in the campaign for Britain to lead the European Union says the E.U. is following a doomed path by trying to create a European superstate. Former London Mayor Boris Johnson told the "Telegraph" newspaper, Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out and it ends tragically. Adding that the E.U. lack democracy and a unifying authority. Johnson's comments drew criticism from those who want Britain to remain in the E.U. ahead of a referendum next month. The foreign affairs spokeswoman for the opposition Labour Party said this. "After the horror of the second world war, the E.U. helped to bring an end to centuries of conflict in Europe and for Boris Johnson to make this comparison is both offensive and desperate." Donald Trump says Britain won't be worse off in trade negotiations with the U.S. should it leave the European Union. President Barack Obama has warned Britain would move to the back of the queue in U.S. trade deals if it does in fact exit the E.U. In an interview with (inaudible) Piers Morgan, Trump insisted it wouldn't happen if he was president.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you become president, and we come out of European Union, what would your view be about where Britain should sit in priority terms with trade deals with the United States?</s>DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I don't think they'll be hurt at all. They have to make their own deal. Britain has been a great ally. To a point where they --</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: -- front of the queue.</s>TRUMP: Britain is such a great ally that they went into things they shouldn't have gone into, like as an example going into Iraq, OK. With me, they'll always be treated fantastically well.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We'd be front of the queue with --</s>TRUMP: Well, I don't want to say front or anything else. I'll treat everybody fairly. It wouldn't make any difference to me whether they were in the E.U. or not.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We wouldn't be back of the queue.</s>TRUMP: You would certainly not be back of the queue. That I can tell you.</s>VAUSE: Donald Trump may win some British support with his Brexit position, but at home, he's facing some big challenges with women voters. Coming up, the "New York Times" has an in depth report in his past relationships with women. Plus, the men some call the Donald Trump of the east strikes again. We'll tell you what he's saying now about capital punishment.