with this issue, a host of other ones and think, an ongoing situation in israel is the last thing that anybody needs on top of that. it is changing as we speak. exactly. well, in terms of priorities for this white house, if you were looking at the landscape of the last five hours, where does secretary kerry go? that s a very good question. i mean, look, the apparent shootdown of a passenger airliner with almost 300 people onboard, you know, i think you have to deal with that especially if you think it was possibly done by a russian separatist, possibly with russian-provided weapons. you have to get some information, but if that s what happened, i think you have to focus on that. how do you ignore the middle east? how do you ignore the fact that israel s air strikes in gaza have turned now into a ground invasion? one of the things i suspect well, i know the administration
passenger airliner, in this case a malaysian passenger airliner on purpose thinking they were shooting at a bomber of some kind, a military plane? that s the head scratcher here. analysts are trying to figure out what else could they have been shooting at. there is one kneery that there may have been a ukrainian military plane in the area. these weapons are not necessarily infallible. they are radar guided. what satellites detected was first the radar being turned on. then almost instan tan kwously the missile being fired. was it a fault of the system, of the operators who probably don t have as much training as the russian forces unless russians were controlling the weapon. nobody knows it for sure. it very well could have been an accident. every military analyst we are talking to said in a situation like this there would be no
crash. are recovery, reconstruction, black box analysis. joining me now here on hardball, dan hampton, former combat pilot, daniel rose, a rose, military trained pilot, and aviation attorney, and james hall, the former chairman of the national transportation safety board. let me go to let me go to mr. hall now. what do we what further evidence are we looking for here if this tape recording, let s look at this tape, by the way. take a couple seconds to get this up. this is a conversation which was picked up by the kiev authorities involving a conversation between a russian officer, military person, and someone in the separatist movement in which the separatist movement basically the guy basically admits that he screwed up, or his phrase, f d up the situation by hitting a passenger airliner rather than a military target. let s watch this.
ukrainian military plane having no idea they had enough sophistication to push the but tob to launch the missiles, not enough sophistication to know what they were shooting at. then the plane hits the ground, they find the pieces and realize, oh no, we ve sht down a passenger airliner. at this point, what happens? blame it on the ukraine. everybody is pointing fingers at each other. that s going to be a huge problem. i think ukraine can claim innocence because if they don t have their own military on the ground to secure that crime scene, then how could they have military in the area to shoot the plane down? peter goals, there are rumors as you know that these pro-russian separatists are already obtained the black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder. so much is unknown right now. what concerns you about all of the tampering that could be going on right now? there s two things.
so far u.s. officials say they don t see any data that that emergency beacon system went off. certainly nothing that the malaysians have shared with them yet. so that adds to the mystery. the plane if that did not go off was certainly for some period of time in some form of relatively stable flight, officials say. but did it land somewhere? we ve asked everybody. and i have to tell you, you get the same answer, piers. head scratching. in today s modern world, in today s age, is it actually plausible that a passenger airliner with so many people on board landed somewhere and nobody noticed? but at the same time, barbara, clearly everything about this story is highly mysterious. reporter: absolutely. if not suspicious. i think most viewers will be sharing my utter disbelief that it s taken nearly a week to discover that they had these ping signals and this data information, presumably they had that pretty immediately and yet