The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

MARGARET WARNER: Good evening. I'm Margaret Warner. Jim Lehrer is away this evening. On the NewsHour tonight: Elizabeth Brackett and Jan Crawford Greenberg report on today's abortion challenge at the Supreme Court; Spencer Michels examines the controversy over airport expansion; Ray Suarez talks with Congressman Tony Hall about his trip to Iraq; Paul Solman looks at the art of satirist Honore Daumier; and Michael Lythgoe of Washington D.C. reads a poem about the Vietnam memorial. It all follows our summary of the news this Tuesday.

NEWS SUMMARY

MARGARET WARNER: The Supreme Court returned to the abortion issue today, for the first time in eight years. Demonstrators on both sides rallied in the rain outside. Inside, the Justices heard arguments about a procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion. A Nebraska law outlawed it, but a federal appeals court struck down the law. The Supreme Court's decision is expected by June. We'll have more on the story right after the News Summary. On the Elian Gonzalez story today, Attorney General Reno met with senators to defend her decision to seize the boy from his Miami relatives last Saturday. Democrats generally supported her, but Republicans were critical. Afterwards, Majority Leader Trent Lott announced the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings next week.

SEN. TRENT LOTT: Under what law were they proceeding? What laws were being broken and why did they go in with that show of force as they call it -- I call it United States of force when you bring in 130 border patrol and marshals and eight storm in the way think did, I keep asking the question, was that necessary? And I think most Americans would that same question. We want to try to find out the answer.

MARGARET WARNER: But at the White House, President Clinton again commended Reno and the federal agents who conducted the raid. And he said now, the boy and his father need privacy.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I believe it's time for all of us including the media and those of us in public life to give this family the space it needs to heal its wounds and strengthen its bonds, to work to lessen the pressure on them as the matter goes forward in the courts.

MARGARET WARNER: Also today, Elian and his immediate family were moved from Andrews Air Force Base to a secluded site on Maryland's eastern shore. A State Department spokesman said visas will be issued shortly to four of the boy's playmates from Cuba, so they may visit him here. Elsewhere, many businesses closed in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, part of a general strike by Cuban-Americans to protest Saturday's raid. The rest of the city seemed to be functioning normally. The Vermont legislature extended the legal benefits of marriage to gay and lesbian couples today. The governor says he'll sign the bill, making it the first such law in the country. Same-sex couples will be able to obtain a license from the town clerk, and hold a civil union ceremony. Breakups will be handled like divorces. On Wall Street today, bargain hunting helped technology stocks rebound from yesterday's slide. And Blue Chips were higher, too. The NASDAQ Index rose 228 points to close at 3711, a gain of 6.5%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 218 to close at 11,124. That was a gain of 2%. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to a court challenge to abortion, expanding airports, an inside look at Iraq, ageless satire, and another favorite poem.

FOCUS - ABORTION CHALLENGE

JIM LEHRER: The Supreme Court heard an abortion case today, for the first time since 1992. Elizabeth Brackett of WTTW Chicago begins our coverage. A warning to our viewers, her report contains some graphic medical terminology.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: It's an unobtrusive building in a small Nebraska town. But the large sign is clear-- "Abortions are performed here." Whether they will continue to be performed in this clinic, is now up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Clinic director Dr. Leroy Carhart is the plaintiff in the case that challenges the state of Nebraska's ban on so-called partial birth abortions.

DR. LEROY CARHART: This is possibly the most important issue to go before the Supreme Court I'd say since Roe Versus Wade.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Roe Versus Wade is the landmark Supreme Court decision that made abortions legal in this county in 1973. Ever since then, anti-abortion forces have been trying to convince the court, the Congress, and the country to overrule the decision, so far, without success. That has fueled their determination to convince state legislatures to at least set limits on the procedure-- most recently by banning what they call partial birth abortions.

SPOKESMAN: The respondent says the state has no legitimate interest in how a partially born child is killed.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Nebraska's attorney general, Don Stenberg, set up a moot court to practice the arguments he used today before the Supreme Court.

DON STENBERG, Nebraska Attorney General: This case does not involve the issue of overturning Roe Versus Wade. The question here is whether a state may ban one particularly barbarous form of abortion.

SPOKESMAN: The definition of a partial-birth abortion is --

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: The Nebraska state legislature passed a ban on what it called partial birth abortion in June of 1997, but it was enjoined a short time later. Dr. Carhart's challenge is the first of its kind to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. 30 other states have passed similar bans, but many have been struck down in lower courts as unconstitutional. Nebraska's law defines partial birth abortion as: "An abortion procedure in which the person performing the abortion partially delivers vaginally a living unborn child...or a substantial portion thereof...before killing the unborn child." The law bans a procedure called a "D and X," intact dilation and extraction. Dr. Carhart contends this it is an extension of a more common procedure known as Dilation and Evacuation, or a "D and E."

DR. LEROY CARHART: In "D and E," you are classically breaking up the fetus within the uterus and taking out one piece at a time. With a "D and X," you are trying to remove the fetus intact, or at least as intact as possible. There is no difference between a "D and E" and a "D and X." The "D and X" is just an extension of the "D and E."

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Stenberg says the law is clearly meant to ban only the "D and X" procedure, not the "D and E" procedure.

DON STENBERG: In a "D and E" the fetus is dismembered piece by piece. In a partial birth abortion the child is pulled from it's mother's womb up to its neck, and then killed. So they are clearly two different practices.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Carhart denies that such a clear difference exists.

DR. LEROY CARHART: It would mean that over 98% of the abortions that we currently do would be criminalized. It would mean that for every time I did an abortion, that I would be subject to a $25,000 fine, up to 20 years in jail and loss of my medical license.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Colleen Connell of the American Civil Liberties union says if the Nebraska law were found constitutional it would put all doctors who perform abortions at risk of breaking the law.

COLLEEN CONNELL, American Civil Liberties Union: The people who like these laws and write these laws say, "okay, it only violates or only bans one method of abortion." In fact, when you look at the medical testimony of the doctors around the country-- including doctors from some of the finest academic institutions-- the doctors say that the language of these laws basically bans everything we do in an abortion procedure, or in an obstetric delivery room, when we run into problems.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Dr. Carhart worries that the law could put a woman's health at stake.

DR. LEROY CARHART: There are times when the "D and X" procedure is the safest procedure for a woman. And I would have trouble telling you if you came to me as a client and I'd say, "listen, I know there's this excellent procedure that will reduce your risks considerably, but I'm not allowed to do that because the state has said we can't do that." It puts the state between the patient and the physician, making me often do something that is less healthful or less in your best interest for health than what they going to make me do.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Nebraska's lieutenant governor, Dave Maurstad, introduced he partial birth abortion ban when he was a state senator

DAVE MAURSTAD, Lt. Governor, Nebraska: Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said this, in fact, that this particular procedure is never medically necessary for the health of the life of the mother. And so it's based upon his belief, the belief of many physicians throughout Nebraska and across this country that that's really kind of a red herring, that this is in fact a needed procedure that needs to be included in the abortionist's arsenal.

WOMAN: I'm here for my checkup.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: The key issue before the Supreme Court is whether the Nebraska law places an undue burden on a women's right to chose. Clearly it does, says Janet Benshoof, president of the Center for Reproductive Law & Policy. Center lawyers argued Carhart's case today.

JANET BENSHOOF, Center for Reproductive law & Policy: It eliminates all health concerns and safety concerns for women. It looks at abortion from the onset of pregnancy. This is not a case about late abortion, and it has no exception for women's health, no exception for life or rape or incest.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Why wouldn't this create an undue burden on the right of a women to choose an abortion?

DON STENBERG: Because it's a little used procedure. Because all of the most common forms of abortion that are currently practiced remain available under this particular law.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Both sides agree on one thing, this is a critically important abortion case.

DR. LEROY CARHART: The stakes are high. I mean a woman can lose everything they have. But hopefully we'll come out at least as good or better, but I think it's tremendous. It's scary. I think that there's a definite potential that we could go back to the deaths and the serious injuries that we saw pre-Roe.

DON STENBERG: I think it's very important. I think that if the court would not uphold Nebraska's ban on "D and X" abortions, what the states would be told and the congress would be told is that you have no real authority to ban any form of abortion, no matter how barbaric, no matter how little used, and it is totally up to the discretion of a doctor, no matter how cruel a person he might be or what unusual manner of abortion might be dreamed up in the future.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, how the arguments went at the Supreme Court today. For that, we turn to NewsHour regular Jan Crawford Greenburg, legal affairs correspondent for "The Chicago Tribune."

Jan, before we get to the arguments, what is the state of play constitutionally and legally in terms of when abortion is legal and when it is it's not.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Well, this is also determined by Roe versus Wade, which as you know, as the court handed down in '73 and said that states could not ban all abortions, that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion. That decision, as you know, has been incredibly controversial. The Supreme Court in 1992 was asked specifically to overrule Roe and allow states to ban all abortions. The court refused to do so then. And it articulated a new way of analyzing when abortions can be regulated. Before the fetus can survive outside the womb, the court said then, states can regulate abortions. But the regulations cannot amount to an undue burden on a woman's right to choose. That's where the undue burden comes from -- a substantial obstacle it said. But after viability by is about 24 weeks now, after that states can step in and ban abortions unless the woman's health or life is at stake.

MARGARET WARNER: And that standard goes back to "Roe V. Wade" in terms of being -

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Right.

MARGARET WARNER: In this country is it fair to say that except for treatment cases involving the health or life of the mother there aren't abortions performed after the 24th week?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: That's right.

MARGARET WARNER: But what this case --

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: This case do want involve this. This is before the fetus could live outside the womb previability.

MARGARET WARNER: So tell us about the arguments today.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Attorney General Stenberg who we just saw argued that the case is about this very rare procedure that he said was bordered on infanticide, he said, and certainly states could ban that when other alternative means of abortion were available to women, that surely that was no undue burden. He urged the justices to read this Nebraska law very narrowly as only banning this one specific procedure. Now the lawyer for the, Doctor Carhart the Nebraska doctor challenging this law says looks, this slaw written very broadly. It doesn't just ban partial-birth abortions as the opponents call it but it bans very common forms of abortion. Therefore because it is so broad, it amounts to an undue burden on a women's right to choose. But he had one more argument: He said even if the court were to narrowly read this law as only banning partial birth abortions, it still would be unconstitutional, because the state, he said, has no interest, no justifiable interest in banning this procedure which he said is safest for some women.

MARGARET WARNER: But he was talking, he was also saying wasn't he, because that there is not an exception for the life of the mother -

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: That's right.

MARGARET WARNER: -- that it's unconstitutional even under Roe V. Wade.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Right, because there is no health exception. For some women, he said, this can be the safest procedure.

MARGARET WARNER: And was he pointing to and I wonder how both sides dealt with this, the wording, we saw the wording in the tape piece, the wording never uses that D and X medical terminology. How did they argue about that?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: That came up quite a lot today. In his -- Simon Heller -- the lawyer's contention was the state could have banned this procedure if that's really what it was trying to do.

MARGARET WARNER: By name.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Right. There is a medical termed - it's called D and X, which is the shorthand for it and the state could have put that in the law and banned it. Because they left the law vague and described the procedure, that meant according to his argument the state was trying to do other things. Now Attorney General Stenberg said at the time when Nebraska was passing this law, there were a couple of different medical terms in use. Instead of picking one, they decided to just identify the procedure. This specific point caused some problems for some of the Justices -- notably Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who obviously is a new Justice, wasn't on the court in 1992 but a supporter of abortion rights. She said, you know, why wouldn't the state, we could have avoided this whole argument had the state only specifically referred to this procedure by name. To her she said, that is glaring, that the state did not do so.

MARGARET WARNER: That, therefore, she meant it's too broad.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Right.

MARGARET WARNER: Tell us about some of the other Justices how did they break down on this?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: This was an interesting argument on a lot of levels because as we saw in the piece introducing this, it's a very emotional issue. Very contentious, 23% were arrested outside today for it erecting very large signs that violated regulations. The issue has been in the state legislatures and Congress. With all of this drama, the courtroom was packed. Reporters were behind the curtains crammed in little chairs sitting together. With all of this drama you would think that the argument itself would have this great import. But the Justices were surprisingly restrained. Unlike more controversial cases, for example, last week when we heard about the Miranda warnings they were engaged and very lively. Today they set back and let the attorneys articulate their positions and make their arguments. They were restrained. There wasn't a lot of give and take or at least not as much as you would expect. The Justice who clearly was most outspoken was Justin Antonin Scalia, a harsh critic of the court's abortion jurisprudence -- one of the three who would vote to overturn "Roe Versus Wade" if that were up here today. He said, you know, he referred repeatedly to the procedure and described it in quite graphic detail suggesting that states could have an interest in banning the horror -- as he said it -- of a procedure that partially delivered a fetus which he referred to incidentally as a child.

MARGARET WARNER: So the language people use is key here, isn't it?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Right, yes, Justice Scalia would see use the term child instead of fetus. Other Justices refer to it as the fetus. So his feelings are clear. He strenuously questioned Simon Heller and was quite aggressive in doing so. Now on the other side, Justice Ginsburg I think was most articulate for her reasons suggesting that the law was too broad. She also was disturbed that there was no exception in the law that would allow a doctor to perform an abortion if a woman's health were an issue.

MARGARET WARNER: What did the three Justices who were considered the swing Justices and in the '92 case, upheld abortion sites, Souter, Kennedy and O'Connor, where were they today?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Souter seemed to be siding with Ginsburg. He is among the more liberal Justices on the court or considered to be. He seemed to suggest the law was too broad. The other two Justices that we consider the moderates, the once that determine how the court goes on controversial issues were harder to read, particularly Justice Kennedy. But Justice O'Connor by the tone of two of her questions suggested that she was skeptical of the law honing in on the doctor's strongest arguments that this did go too bar, that it banned more than one procedure and there was no exception for a doctor to perform it to protect the women's health.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, thanks, Jan. We'll wait for the decision, thanks so much.

FOCUS - GROWING AIRPORTS

MARGARET WARNER: Now, a look at the controversies created when an airport tries to grow. The FAA Began hearings this week on plans to expand San Francisco international. Here's Spencer Michels.

SPENCER MICHELS: John Martin has a problem. He is director of San Francisco International Airport, a once small facility that grew and grew. Now, he wants to build a new runway system extending far into San Francisco Bay, and that is upsetting environmentalists. Ralph Nobles has a plan. As an environmentalist, he wants the airport to restore thousands of acres of wetlands in the bay to compensate for the environmental problems with the proposed runways. That plan is controversial, but if his tradeoff works, it could have implications for expanding airports all over America.

RALPH NOBLES, Citizens' Committee to Complete the Refuge: We have lost almost all of the bay's historic wetlands, which are the support for the whole food chain of the bay. And so now the bay is suffering. It's polluted, its wildlife is endangered. And we have the unique opportunity of being able to recover 80% of those lost wetlands that were taken away years ago before people realized the value of wetlands.

SPENCER MICHELS: Nobles says it's a unique opportunity because the money to restore the wetlands isn't available anywhere else but from the airport. Airport director martin, concerned about environmental objections, supports the exchange in principle.

JOHN MARTIN, Director, San Francisco International Airport: I think it ultimately may make very good sense from a public policy perspective that we can return 15 times as much to the bay as what we're taking, then that can be a very good deal for the bay area itself.

SPENCER MICHELS: Nobles' idea is the biggest mitigation or trade-off plan ever suggested for an airport. Today airports all over America are struggling to deal with growth that's expected to double air traffic in the next 20 years. The most common answer is to enlarge the airport, but that is always controversial. Building the terminals, like this huge new international terminal in San Francisco, is relatively painless. Runways, however, are another matter. In St. Louis, the demolishing of a whole neighborhood for expanded runways brought howls of protest. Runways have also run into opposition in Boston, Detroit, and Atlanta, where citizens are concerned about noise, growth, and the environment. In San Francisco the current runway configuration dates back to the 40's. It suffers from extensive weather-related delays, frustrating airline officials like United's Frank Kent.

FRANK KENT, United Airlines Regional Director: This is one of the highest growth areas in the country, as you well know. And the business demand is tremendous and we can't provide the level of service we'd like to because of the inclement weather and the effect on what is an inferior, inadequate, outdated infrastructure at the airport here in San Francisco.

SPENCER MICHELS: That infrastructure consists of two sets of runways. One set is for takeoffs, another set allows two aircraft to approach and land at the same time, side by side. In good weather, the airport can handle 60 landings per hour. When the weather turns bad, it's different. Captain Dick Deeds is a retired pilot who flew into San Francisco for decades.

SPENCER MICHELS: On a day like today, now, what happens in the airport when the weather is so lousy?

CAPT. RICHARD A. DEEDS, Retired Pilot: On a day like today with the bad weather, we can't land on both runways-- we can take off on both, but we can't land on both-- so that means we're down to what we call single stream; we're down to one runway so that one airplane can land, slow down, stop, and turn off the runway before the next airplane's wheels touch the runway.

SPENCER MICHELS: And that cuts the number of...

CAPT. RICHARD A. DEEDS: That cuts the number of landings per hour at the airport by more than 50%.

SPENCER MICHELS: The unusually severe weather of the last five years has helped make San Francisco the most delayed major airport in the nation, and delays at one airport quickly cause backups around the country. On this day, United, the biggest operator here, canceled 41 out of 248 flights, and consolidated others.

PASSENGER: The incoming flight here in San Francisco got delayed, so our connection in Denver got real tight, and eventually they moved us to a flight from San Francisco to LA to go on to Houston. So we'll get into Houston hopefully about midnight tonight.

SPENCER MICHELS: Airport officials say the only solution is bigger runways farther apart so it's safe to land planes side-by-side in bad weather. And they say the only place to build on the densely populated San Francisco Peninsula is into the bay. One of their plans calls for as much as two square miles of new landfill, the biggest fill project in the bay in generations. But most environmentalists consider the bay to be sacred, and quickly voiced their opposition. Debbie Ruddock is with the Sierra Club.

DEBBIE RUDDOCK, Loma Prieta Chapter Sierra Club: We will do whatever we can to prevent the bay from being destroyed.

SPENCER MICHELS: Can you see any circumstances under which the Sierra Club would support bay fill?

DEBBIE RUDDOCK: No.

SPENCER MICHELS: None at all?

DEBBIE RUDDOCK: None.

SPENCER MICHELS: On the other hand, Nobles, who heads a group dedicated to restoring bay wetlands, is willing to cut a deal with the airport: His support of the runways, for airport support of marsh restoration.

SPENCER MICHELS: Some environmentalists think this is a bargain with the devil.

RALPH NOBLES: Well, that's true. And I have had reason to disagree with some of my environmental colleagues on this point, because I try to look at the whole picture. And I see bad things about filling a portion of the bay, but I see the much larger value of restoring the wetlands.

SPENCER MICHELS: So the controversy is not the conventional environmentalists verses developers, but now includes environmentalists battling among themselves. Several governmental agencies-- local, regional, state, and federal-- will each have to give the plan an okay.

WILL TRAVIS, Bay Conservation & Development Commission: Our job is to be professionally skeptical and to ask the questions.

SPENCER MICHELS: One of the most influential is the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, whose executive director is Will Travis. The regional commission is charged with balancing the needs of development with the needs of the bay. But that's not always easy to do when the sides don't sort themselves out neatly.

WILL TRAVIS: One of the things the airport is saying is they plan to mitigate this project like you've never seen mitigation before. And there are some in the environmental community that are so enamored of the mitigation that they are willing to accept that we don't look as carefully at the runways and the impact on the bay. We're seeing it from the perspective of, if we do an objective investigation of what the needs are in the region to meet our future air transportation needs. And the conclusion is, we need new runways in the bay, and the impacts will be minimized and fully mitigated, we see a regional consensus coming together on that.

SPENCER MICHELS: The Commission assembled a panel of scientists who called for an ambitious program of research to determine what impact the runways would have on the bay. Professor Stephen Monismith at Stanford served on that panel. He and his graduate student developed a mathematical model of tides and currents in the south bay.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN G. MONISMITH, Stanford University: Here we see the arrows go up on the ebb and come down on the flood. The tides are going out, you see these long arrows going out, the tide is turning, and coming down the spine through the channel.

SPENCER MICHELS: So this is the airport the way they want to build it.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN MONISMITH: As proposed, that's one of the configurations.

SPENCER MICHELS: Is there much effect if you build these runways?

PROFESSOR STEPHEN MONISMITH: Well, if you look closely, you can see this eddy that forms around the runway extension here itself. But other than that, the currents are almost unchanged over the entire rest of South San Francisco bay.

SPENCER MICHELS: That sounds like a minor change, but there are many unknowns. The state of California surveys fish populations around the bay, and some of its experts say that part of the bay isn't well enough understood to say what might happen to the fish that inhabit the area. Monismith believes the long-term effects are hard to predict.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN MONISMITH: If you look at the existing runway configuration, which I believe was a fill in the late 1950's, early 1960's, it's sedimented up behind there. I think it's a reasonable supposition that over what period of time, ten, 20 years, it would probably sediment in behind the new runway configuration.

SPENCER MICHELS: But scientific experiments may not be as important as whether the public trusts the airport. Airports almost always coexist uneasily with their neighbors. Sometimes even years of meetings and efforts on issues like noise have failed to convince the local population that the airport is working to find a solution they can see and live with.

SPOKESPERSON: More planes need to be over the bay rather than over congested neighborhoods.

SPENCER MICHELS: The mayor of Foster City, a town in the airport flight path, is suspicious of claims that the new runways will help solve the noise problem.

MAYOR DEBORAH E.G. WILDER, Foster City, California: I don't want to stop progress, but they haven't followed through on their promises to our community before so I'm not inclined to say, "gee, this is fine." You're going to need to show to me up front, in writing, in a commitment that we can enforce that they are in fact going to stand by their commitments.

SPENCER MICHELS: Airport Director Martin thinks some of the opponents have blown the risks out of proportion.

JOHN MARTIN: I think some of our vocal opponents are folks who have a very low risk profile. That means they recognize this is a big project, and they are concerned that even though we've committed to achieving net environmental gains, there is a possibility it could all go South. And as long as there is any possibility that there could be increased noise or environmental losses to the bay, that they don't want to even come to the table to discuss this project.

SPOKESPERSON: The plane has not arrived yet.

SPENCER MICHELS: Passengers who wonder when the delays will be cleared up are in for a long wait. Governmental reviews could make a long-term solution as much as a decade away, and that's par for the course when it comes to expanding airports in America.

MARGARET WARNER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight. A inside look at Iraq, an ageless satirist, and a favorite poem.

FOCUS - IRAQ REPORT

MARGARET WARNER: Ray Suarez has the Iraq story.

RAY SUAREZ: Iraq has been under a UN economic embargo ever since it invaded Kuwait in 1990. By most accounts, many ordinary Iraqi people have suffered shortages and hardships as a result, even as Iraq's ruler, Saddam Hussein, remains in power. A U.S. Congressman with a long interest in hunger and humanitarian issues is just back from a trip to Iraq. Congressman Tony Hall, Democrat of Ohio, has been reporting on what he saw.

Welcome to the program.

REP. TONY HALL, (D) Ohio: Thank you.

RAY SUAREZ: Were you able to see a lot of the country and able to move freely?

REP. TONY HALL: I saw a good portion of the country. As you may know, with sanctions you can't fly into the country, so you have to drive in. So it's a ten-hour drive from Amman, Jordan to Baghdad. So it's ten hours in, ten hours back, and then that's in the central part. And then from there, I went South about seven hours and stopped at various little towns, looked at hospitals, various healthcare centers, water treatment plants, and then came back up on the other side. So I saw approximately, you know, a good portion of the central and southern portion of Iraq.

RAY SUAREZ: And were you able to move freely, and take a look at the things that interested you?

REP. TONY HALL: Well, before I went, there was a schedule that I had asked for. I had told them that I wanted to see basic primary healthcares, water treatment centers, hospitals, orphans, widows, the kinds of things that I could evaluate, and match what I had read from UNICEF reports and Red Cross. And they pretty much let me see what I wanted to see. On the other hand, a lot of the things that they showed me were set up. I mean there was a lot of propaganda. Obviously, you can't go into Iraq and not receive a lot of their propaganda, and there was a lot of setups. For example, I mean, first thing they try to do, they try to get you to stay in this one hotel that is in Baghdad, that has a picture of George Bush on the floor. So they want you to step on his face, take a picture of it, and make it look like, you know, you don't agree with George Bush. So I wouldn't stay at that hotel. They played these kind of games, but if you look below the surface, you could see that there is a real humanitarian problem there.

RAY SUAREZ: Well what are the kinds of things that you saw and were able to tease apart from what they were trying to show you, the impression they were trying to create, so you could conclude for yourself?

REP. TONY HALL: Well, you see malnourished children and they have extended stomachs, you know, red hair. They have spots all over their hair. They... there is certainly a lot of wasting among children. Wasting is a term that they use in countries that are facing famine. 25-30% of the children that are from the ages of one to six are chronically malnourished. There is cholera, and polio has come back with a vengeance, all of the major diseases. Any time you have cholera and the major diseases like this, you have a country that's going downhill quickly health-wise.

RAY SUAREZ: And the built-in infrastructure, water supplies, that kind of thing?

REP. TONY HALL: Well, the infrastructure was there in the 70's and 80's, and it's a vast infrastructure, even the highways, six, seven lanes. The problem is it is crumbling now, a lot of the infrastructure, especially the water, because, you know, first off they had a war with Iran that lasted eight years. And apparently there was something like almost eight million people that lost their lives on the combined totals of the two countries. Then you had the Gulf War, then you had the sanctions. You put all that together and you have an infrastructure that hasn't been repaired and that is coming apart.

RAY SUAREZ: So after the sanctions were put in place, Iraq was allowed to sell some of its oil and buy needed supplies. Why is there this kind of privation?

REP. TONY HALL: Not enough food, not enough medicines are coming in, in any large quantities. That's the first thing. Secondly, there is a sanctions committee; it is called the 661 Committee, and it's made up of a lot of bureaucrats that are not particularly sensitive to emergency needs and to the disease and things that are going on there. They hold up lists of consumer... not consumer goods, but humanitarian goods like medicines and foods and refrigerated parts that they need to keep serum for polio cool, and they hold these parts up for... because there might be a list of maybe a hundred items, and there might be two or three items that they don't like, so the whole list is held up, and one of the things that we could do is they ought to be able to line item veto -- you know, things that might have a dual purpose, and then send the rest in and don't even question it, especially if it's food and medicines.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, along with the people who are in charge of managing the sanctions, if you had a different kind of administration in Baghdad, would there be this kind of distribution with so many people having so little?

REP. TONY HALL: Well, the NGO's that are there, the international humanitarian organizations, the heads of them feel that the distribution is... what they have now is fairly decent. Doesn't mean they don't have problems, but they feel that the food and medicines are getting to the hospitals. I, you know, I saw pharmacies. I saw, not a lot of drugs, but I saw some drugs. The only thing I could do is to take the word of the international... international humanitarian workers so we would have to check on that, but they are not bad. I mean, the monitoring is somewhat decent right now, and it's getting better.

RAY SUAREZ: So where does the blame lie for the situation in Iraq today?

REP. TONY HALL: The blame lies in a lot of different places. First off, you got to blame Saddam Hussein. He uses the situation very well as far as propaganda. He uses his own people, in my opinion. Secondly, I think the blame belongs with the United Nations and while we have... United Nations and other countries, because we have held up shipments of humanitarian goods. While we have focused on sanctions, which are important, we've missed the most important point that's going on right now, that the people, especially the children, which are innocent, they're dying. And they are not living a good life, and they are they're not even having a life. As a matter of fact, one of the humanitarian workers said that the kids don't dream anymore. They don't have anything to dream about, and they lost their ability to dream about good things.

RAY SUAREZ: So would you advocate having them lifted, modified, sharpened? What conclusion did you come to?

REP. TONY HALL: Sharpened, smarter, we've got to have better, a better sanction committee. We've got to put, allow emergency equipment and emergency goods on... for humanitarian purposes to go in immediately. We need serums for cholera and diseases. We need more international workers. That's the first thing I would do. Secondly, as far as the sanctions on weapons of mass destruction, those in my opinion should not be lifted.

RAY SUAREZ: So make the weight lie heavier on the government, the military and less of a burden on the people?

REP. TONY HALL: Exactly, and really, really pick up on the humanitarian part.

RAY SUAREZ: Can it be done?

REP. TONY HALL: It can be done. And as we talk, the sanctions committee in New York, they are continuing to review some of the things that they've heard, not only from my trip but from other people that have gone in there and that it is a necessity. And they are starting to hear very strongly. Hopefully they can hear from other nations that are very close, that have members on these sanctions committee because they're not doing a good job.

RAY SUAREZ: Congressman Tony Hall, thanks for being with us.

REP. TONY HALL: Thank you.

FOCUS - AGELESS SATIRE

MARGARET WARNER: Next, a 19th century cartoonist with a 21st century bite. Paul Solman of WGBH-Boston, reports from Washington.

PAUL SOLMAN: Honoro Daumier, the famously prolific, politically infamous lithographer -- in thousands of cartoons printed in newspapers, Daumier pricked the pretensions of 19th century France. The show from Paris and Ottawa now at Washington's Phillips collection also highlights his genius as a three dimensional caricaturist and as one of the most influential painters of his era. But to set the scene let's begin with the NewsHour's first ever cartoon quiz. For which of these pictures was Daumier sent to prison? Was it "Rue Transnonain," depicting the slaughter of innocent Parisians not long after the Revolution of 1830? Harvard's Jim Cuno explains.

JIM CUNO, Harvard University: The army rushed and indiscriminately murdered these people. And the gravity of the figure of the man, who has fallen onto his child-- he's dead; the child dead-- and the intimacy of this domestic room was profoundly moving to people.

PAUL SOLMAN: Or was Daumier jailed for this attack on the French courts? Eliza Rathbone, curator at the Phillips, says the magistrates are contemplating a bloody shirt and knife.

ELIZA RATHBONE: Hideous evidence of crime on the table in front of them, and they all look so bored, wondering, when do we go to lunch? And above them, of course, you can see the bottom part of the crucifixion hanging behind them.

PAUL SOLMAN: Or was Daumier locked up for his "Hanging the king: Louis- Philippe in effigy as a pear"?

SPOKESMAN: And it doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to go from this pear to that part of the human body that has these round, bulbous-shaped forms and long cylindrical neck. And that is a lampoon of the king that persisted through five years before ultimately the September laws were enacted, which made it impossible to publish political caricatures.

PAUL SOLMAN: Or finally, was the go-to- jail cartoon "the king as monster"? The show's audio tour, from the national gallery of Canada, explains.

NARRATOR: Seated on a commode in the middle of the place de la Concorde, we see the giant

figure of Gargantua, alias Louis-Philipe, greedily devouring money being provided by the nation's poor.

The royal digestive process complete, ribbons and commissions fall beneath his seat into the eager hands of a crowd of politicians gathered outside the Chamber of Deputies.

PAUL SOLMAN: Okay, while you're working on the answer, a little context. From the 1830's through 1870's, France kept switching between despotism and democracy. Repressive regimes were the rule, revolutions the cure, insensitive bureaucracies the constant. Daumier mocked those in power, mostly in lithographs for the newspaper "le charivari." Even his boss, activist publisher Charles Philipon, was the subject of caricature. But the king was Daumier's first great theme. "The King as Pear" was actually Philipon's idea, but in lithos like the three-faced past, present, and future, Daumier magnified the metaphor. Doug Marlette, who's identified with Daumier since he started cartooning 30 years ago, loves how "The Pear" encapsulates the king's status quo regime.

DOUG MARLETTE: It's distilling it to an essence. I mean, you know, what the entire impulse for political cartooning is trying to get things across in a minimum of lines, an essential quality. And finding his countenance in a pear, which meant something in France. The word le poire means fat head. You know, drawing the king as a fat head. (Laughs) It has layered meanings. My favorite cartoons are wordless cartoons, drawings where the image is saying everything. You know, I once drew Bob Dole as a hand grenade, his face on a hand grenade. It was Dole's Pineapples, but it didn't require much explanation.

PAUL SOLMAN: From bob dole's temper to his kudzu comic strip, Marlette's pen has been tough-- to some, offensive. He's had cartoons killed, like this one of former attorney general Ed Meese dissing the Bill of Rights. But Marlette was never jailed for his backside swipes at authority which brings us back to our Daumier cartoon quiz. And while King Louis-Philipe did have "Rue Transnonain" confiscated, the most egregious cartoon was "The King on the Pot," which landed Daumier in the can for six months, plus a 500-franc fine-- thousands in today's dollars. Daumier kept cartooning from the beginning of his career to the end. But, despite his high standing among other artists-- the poet Baudelaire called him the Michelangelo of caricature-- he spent much of his life in debt. When things got too hot for politics, he would turn to safer subjects: The perils of Paris in the 1850's, crossing its new broad boulevards, proto- feminists, pursuing their art at the expense of their kids. But as you may know, Daumier saved his bitterest barbs for lawyers. The caption on this cartoon reads, "Dear Colleague, you're going to argue today against me, just what I argued against you three weeks ago in an identical case?" To which the other lawyer says, "And I'm going to use your response." Frankie Sue del Papa is the attorney general of Nevada.

PAUL SOLMAN: Has this ever happened to you?

FRANKIE SUE DEL PAPA: Well, actually, in a case that we've got going on right now, someone accused me of arguing the opposite way in a different case several years ago. It's clearly something that could happen.

PAUL SOLMAN: Edwin miller is a retired lawyer. So you knew guys like this?

EDWIN MILLER: Oh, yes. They didn't look like that because they didn't wear their hair that way, but they had the same attitudes. He's bragging about that fine point he made and they're enjoying the humor and how well he pulled it off. He's pretty slick I'd say.

PAUL SOLMAN: Pretty slick.

EDWIN MILLER: That fellow on the right, yeah.

PAUL SOLMAN: Daumier did nearly 5,000 cartoons, but only a few hundred paintings, rarely shown or bought in his lifetime. Yet it's works like "The Uprising" of 1848 that give Daumier his current standing as a progenitor of modern art: No frills, no fuss, the real world as it looks and feels to the artist.

ELIZA RATHBONE: Daumier is giving us what he would have seen right there in the streets, the street just packed with people, and the drama of this leader, who the others are riveted by and going to follow.

PAUL SOLMAN: The style suits the subject: Bold, dynamic, dramatic; a modern cartoon on canvas.

ELIZA RATHBONE: The handling of the paint around his head and on his sleeve is just... There are just a few dashes of paint. And then his arm that goes up to the top left corner, almost bursting out of the painting. I think it's the composition and these incredibly swift strokes that are so expressive of this moment. The artist's gestures all contribute to the subject and the feeling.

PAUL SOLMAN: The subject and the feeling. Daumier worked hard to merge them. You can see his efforts in successive versions of the "Third Class Carriage" and its main characters: The old woman, the young one, the sleeping boy, the traveling box. The old woman is older in the more finished work; the young one younger; the sleeping boy is de-emphasized, less cute; the traveling box is turned and highlighted for the artist's signature, this being a commission. Daumier kept trying to capture, quietly, the collector looking quietly at art; the inspired artist, lit up by an unknown source; the weight of being poor, which the struggling Daumier and his large family knew firsthand; the silhouetted, windswept anonymity of being a refugee. Jim Cuno, though, thinks Daumier's style matched his subject matter in an even larger sense.

JIM CUNO: He was a painter with allegorical ambitions. When you look around the gallery and you see these great paintings of immigrants parading through, great masses of people parading through indeterminate landscapes with generalized features, not with individual features. The fugitives could be the exodus. The woman with her child could be Hagar and Ishmael. There's a biblical depth to these pictures, a generalized human condition that I think he's trying to paint.

PAUL SOLMAN: You see it most clearly in Daumier's final and favorite theme, says curator Rathbone: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

ELIZA RATHBONE: We see his tremendous interest in not as an illustrator, not to describe incidents in the book in any detail at all, unlike his contemporaries, but instead his desire to express their human experience, what he found in Cervantes' book about human experience-- the aspirations of Don Quixote, and then the human folly that the book is full of.

PAUL SOLMAN: The art historian sees something more specific.

JIM CUNO: I think these are among the most personal images for Daumier. This is an image, after all, of a man as an artist, as a man of great imagination, imagination that turns to madness at the end of his life. And we have to think of Daumier looking at this, painting this picture thinking of his own father, who died insane, who died mad, and who was an aspiring author all his life.

PAUL SOLMAN: And last of all, what does the political cartoonist see?

DOUG MARLETTE: Don Quixote is a wonderful symbol and image for the political cartoonist, for the social satirist -- you know, the tilting of the windmills, the idealism, the line, the uplift of the lanky, elongated form, and then Sancho Panza who was, you know, down in the dirt, in the muck, and - you know -- squished down onto the planet earth. You know, in satirists there's always kind of the disappointment in the world.

PAUL SOLMAN: And in artists, Daumier might say, there's always the possibility of transforming disappointment into delight.

MARGARET WARNER: The Daumier exhibit remains at the Phillips Collection until May 14th.

SERIES - FAVORITE POEM PROJECT

MARGARET WARNER: Finally tonight, another in poet laureate Robert Pinsky's project of asking Americans to read their favorite poem. This Sunday marks 25 years since the last Americans withdrew from Saigon, and the Vietnam War came to a close. Tonight's reader is Vietnam veteran Michael Lythgoe, of Washington, D.C.

MICHAEL LYTHGOE, Educational Foundation Director: I first read Josef Komenaka's poem "Safety Net" in "Best American Poems." For me as a veteran, it's a poem that pays tribute to all the veterans. And I was in Vietnam in 1965 for six months with a tactical fighter unit, F.-100 pilots. I had not been able to face the wall, and that poem helped me, I think, unlock my emotions, and it captures I think the feelings of a lot of us. But it also interprets the monument, the memorial for others, to help us see the integration I think, of our atmosphere and our memories as well as that sea of names. "Facing It" by Josef Komenaka. "My black face fades hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't, damn it, no tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh. The profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way. The stone lets me go. I turn that way. I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names half expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name 'Andrew Johnson.' I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse, but when she walks away, the names stay on the wall. Brush strokes flash. A red bird's wings cutting across my stare. The sky, a plane in the sky, a white vest image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman is trying to erase names. No. She is brushing a boy's hair."

RECAP

MARGARET WARNER: Again, the major stories of this Tuesday: The Supreme Court heard arguments over banning a procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion, and Senate Majority Leader Lott announced the Judiciary Committee will hold hearings next week into the government raid that seized Elian Gonzalez from his Miami relatives. The Vermont legislature extend the legal benefits of marriage to gay and lesbian couples. The governor will sign the bill making it the first such law in the nation. An editor's note before we go, about a "Frontline" documentary airing tonight on most public television stations: "The Execution" examines the life-- and death-- of a convicted murderer in Texas. Please check your local listings for the time. We'll see youon-line, and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Margaret Warner. Thanks for being with us. Good night.