CNN "The Situation Room" - Transcript: Arming TSA Officers and National Security Agency

Interview

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BLITZER: All right, Stephanie Elam with the latest from LAX.

Thank you.

So could the LAX shooting have been prevented if -- if TSA officers at the airports had guns themselves?

Let's discuss with Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California.

She's the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Senator, thanks very much for coming in.

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D), CALIFORNIA: Thank you, Wolf.

Good to talk to you.

BLITZER: Thank you.

Do you believe these TSA officers should be armed?

FEINSTEIN: No, not per se. But I think there's a problem there. I can understand how an armed police officer would not want to stand at a checkpoint for a full eight hours. Maybe they should be rotated in every two hours.

But to have a two to three minute delay to getting an armed police officer to a checkpoint, I think, is too long. And I think what this does, in addition to the tragedy it has caused families and those people wounded, is also another thing that was pointed out, and that is that this shooter could have gotten onto that plane in the process of loading with an open cockpit door. And that presents a whole host of other problems.

So I think you've got to take a look at the checkpoint. You've got to have the checkpoint protected with armed officers virtually at all times, maybe not TSA, because TSA is up close and personal. They're doing body searches, you don't want someone snatching a weapon from a TSA officer -- but with other forms of armed police. I really think it's going to do -- it's -- what this has done is expose a big loophole in sec -- in plane security.

BLITZER: Yes, I'm sure everybody is taking a close look to learn some lessons from this and move on.

FEINSTEIN: Right.

BLITZER: One of the things that jumped out at me and a lot of other folks, if you take a look at this incident, so many recent incidences of these lone individuals going some place and starting to shoot and kill people. And we've got a list over here, going to the Navy Yard recently here in Washington, Sandy Hook Elementary, the Aurora theater, Tucson, Virginia Tech. There's a history of mental illness in all of these shooters.

What, if anything, can Congress do, should Congress be doing to deal with these mental health issues, these -- these individuals supposedly hearing voices in their head forcing them to go out and kill people?

FEINSTEIN: Well, Congress or the United States government doesn't run mental health facilities. What we do is provide funding to local jurisdictions who do. So this is very difficult.

There have been a lot of speeches made on we've got to increase mental health protection, uh, diagnosis.

But how, exactly, do you do that?

And how do you know that when somebody goes in to buy a gun that they are mentally ill if they don't appear to be so at the moment?

This is, I think, a real dilemma. It is not easy to do.

I think -- and -- and my view has been, after a long time of watching this, since the first mass shooting in 1968 at the Texas bell tower, is that we have to care about the kinds of weapons that are available to people.

And here you have a .223 MP-15, MP standing for military and police. That was the supposed use of this weapon. It's a -- it's an AR-15 type weapon. It's made by Smith & Wesson. Whether it has a bullet button in it that would make it legal to use in California or to sell in California, I don't know.

BLITZER: Well, supposedly --

FEINSTEIN: But --

BLITZER: -- Senator, he went to a gun store in Van Nuys, bought this assault rifle legally, without any problems, with magazines and -- and all of that. A --

FEINSTEIN: That's my understanding.

BLITZER: And so --

FEINSTEIN: And I --

BLITZER: -- is there are problem there in Van Nuys --

FEINSTEIN: -- the --

BLITZER: -- (INAUDIBLE) California, where someone can just go in and buy this -- this gun, even if -- even if he may have some sort of history of mental illness? FEINSTEIN: Well, I don't know whether this was a federal firearms dealer or not. So that has to be shown. I've heard that it was, but I don't know for sure.

But I think there's got to be a way to prevent people who have unstable mental illnesses from obtaining firearms. Now, in Aurora, this young man was clearly unstable. His mother should have known it from a lot of the -- of his attitude and behavior and his room. She took him out shooting. Now, that's a strange thing.

So how you do this, I wish I knew. How you categorize somebody as mentally not able to buy a firearm, I wish I knew. I don't happen to know that right now.

BLITZER: Let's talk about the NSA for a moment. You're the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Eric Schmidt, the Google executive chairman, telling "The Wall Street Journal" this. "The NSA allegedly collected the phone records of 320 million people in order to identify roughly 300 people who might be a risk. It's just bad public policy and perhaps illegal."

Do you agree with him?

FEINSTEIN: No. And I'll tell you this much. You take down that phone records program and you will increase the risk of an attack in this country. I very much believe that. These phone record programs were part of at least 12 potential arrests in the country in the past.

And I think because we have been saved from a major attack, I think there's a belief around, well, terrorism is down.

Terrorism is not down. Worldwide, it is up. It is up 69 percent in the year '12 over '11. And fatalities are up 89 percent.

So you've had 8,500 attacks worldwide with some 15,500 people killed.

Now, we're lucky it isn't the United States. It's Africa. It's Asia. It's the Middle East.

But you begin to cut back on the ability of our systems to protect this country and you make it more likely that there will be an attack, that you will make it easier for these people to attack.

Additionally, we now know there's a bomb that gets through airport magnetometers. We now know that there have been three instances to penetrate the United States with this bomb, actually, with four bombs, one on Christmas Day with Abdulmutallab in '09, one in Dubai with two printer cartridges of computers having this bomb in the cartridge, reportedly headed to Chicago. And then in 2000 -- about a year and two months ago by an asset who developed a -- who had access to one of these bombs from AQAP in Yemen.

Now, the -- the bomb maker is still alive. We know that they want to attack the United States with one of these weapons.

Do we want to make it easier or harder?

That's what I would say to the American public. I want to make it harder.

BLITZER: Senator Feinstein, thanks so much for joining us.

FEINSTEIN: You're very welcome, Wolf.

Thank you.

BLITZER: Thank you.

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