The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight: The news of this Thursday; then, the debate over the president's health savings account plans; "Bernanke-speak": A look at the words of the new chairman of the Federal Reserve; a report on the race to rebuild the New Orleans levees before the next hurricane season; and an update on the tragedies in Darfur from Senators Brownback and Obama.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: There was word today of a deal to ensure the NSA surveillance program is legal. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said White House officials agreed to a fix of existing law. Republican Pat Robertson of Kansas said it may eliminate any need for a full scale inquiry. He did not give specifics. But the committee's ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West, said Congress has to have a full understanding of the surveillance program before any fix.

Also today, a federal judge gave the Justice Department 20 days to answer requests for documents on the program. A civil liberties group sued to get the records.

Vice President Cheney's account of his hunting accident won a presidential endorsement today. Mr. Cheney told his story to Fox News yesterday. He said he takes full responsibility for shooting a hunting partner, Harry Whittington, at a Texas ranch on Saturday. Today, President Bush made his first public statement on the incident.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I thought the vice president handled the issue just fine. He went to and I thought his explanation yesterday was a powerful explanation. Now, this is a man who likes the outdoors and he likes to hunt. And he heard a bird flush and he turned, and pulled the trigger and saw his friend get wounded. And it was a deeply traumatic moment.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Bush did not directly address the decision to withhold word of the shooting until Sunday. The vice president said yesterday he has no regrets about that. He said he wanted to make sure Whittington was okay and the information was accurate. Today, doctors said Whittington is doing well after a mild heart problem earlier this week.

Attorney General Gonzales rejected demands today to recuse himself from the Jack Abramoff investigation. The lobbyist has pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy, and he's cooperating in a wider probe. But in a letter, 31 Democratic senators said Gonzales has a conflict of interest. They cited Abramoff's contacts with the president and others. In response, Gonzales said unbiased, career prosecutors are handling the case.

A U.N. agency recommended today that the U.S. shut down its prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Some 500 terror suspects are being held there indefinitely. A report from the U.N. Commission on Human Rights called on the U.S. to release them or put them on trial. It cited photographs and testimony by former inmates who said they were chained and beaten, among other things. The report was the work of five experts who did not visit Guantanamo. A White House spokesman dismissed it as a rehash of previous allegations.

The president of Iraq today strongly condemned abuse of prisoners by U.S. troops. Jalal Talibani reacted to newly released images at Abu Ghraib Prison back in 2003. He said, We reject that a civilized country allows its soldiers to commit these ugly and terrible crimes.' But in Washington, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld told a House hearing the abuse has already been punished.

DONALD RUMSFELD: The Department of Defense from the beginning of this conflict has had a policy that prohibits torture. It is not permitted if we do not today. The people are trained to avoid it and there's no question but that there was conduct that was improper and people were court-martialed and people have been sent to prison and people have been reduced dramatically in rank, officers have, and punished for the behavior that was unacceptable.

JIM LEHRER: Still more of the photographs appeared today on the web site salon.com.

In another development, Iraq's interior ministry launched an investigation into claims of police death squads. Iraqi Sunnis have complained for months of kidnapping and murder by Shiite commandos.

Protests over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad moved to yet another city in Pakistan today. This time, it was Karachi, where at least 40,000 people rallied. They waved Pakistani flags and anti-western signs, and they burned the flag of Denmark, where the cartoons were first published; 5,000 security troops were deployed, and the demonstrations were peaceful.

France accused Iran today of making nuclear weapons in secret. The blunt statement came days after Iran resumed enriching uranium. The French foreign minister said it's clearly a "clandestine, military program." Iran shot back that the West must adopt "a logical stance" on the issue.

Rene Preval was declared the winner today in Haiti's presidential election. Supporters thronged the streets after the announcement. It defused a crisis over claims of fraud that touched off violence earlier this week. Preval had been just short of the margin needed to avoid a runoff. And last night, the interim government and electoral council threw out enough blank ballots to give him an outright majority.

At the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, today American Seth Wescott won gold in the men's snowboard racing event. He edged out a competitor by half the length of his board. Also today a Russian skier was stripped of a silver medal and ejected from the games for doping.

On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained more than 61 points to close at 11,120. The NASDAQ rose 18 points to close at 2294.

And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now: Health savings accounts; Bernanke-speak; fixing the levees; and Senators Obama and Brownback on Darfur.

FOCUS COST OF COVERAGE

JIM LEHRER: President Bush's health savings accounts idea and to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: Once again, the president is out in public selling an initiative in the weeks after the state of the union address. Last year, it was Social Security reform. This year it's health savings accounts. Today President Bush's theme was cutting the cost of health care coverage. One proposal: Expand the use of health savings accounts. Today at a forum at the Department of Health and Human Services, the president explained how the accounts, called HSAs, would benefit businesses and employees alike.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The key thing in a health savings account is you actually put a patient in charge of his or her decisions, which we think is a vital aspect of making sure the health care system is not only modern but a health care system in which costs are not running out of control. When you go buy a car, you know, you're able to shop and compare. And yet in health care that's just not happening in America today.

RAY SUAREZ: Using a health savings account, money can be set aside tax-free for medical bills. But each account must be combined with a separate catastrophic health insurance policy with a high deductible. Medical expenses must hit $1,050 for an individual and $2,100 for a family before coverage kicks in. Unused funds can be rolled over to the next year's account.

President Bush's plan offers tax incentives to businesses and individuals and subsidies to lure more people to use the health savings accounts. So far, three million people have signed up for HSAs, according to the president, but some health analysts say the number is significantly lower.

At his visit yesterday to Wendy's International's Ohio headquarters, the president said 9,000 of the chain's 40,000 employees have signed up for the accounts since company began offering them last year.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: At the end of the first year with HSA'S, more than 90 percent of Wendy's employees had positive balances in their savings accounts.

Medical claims through this company have decreased by 17 percent since they've implemented HSAs. It's an interesting statistic, I think. After more than five years of health care costs growing at double-digit rates, Wendy's overall health care costs rose only by 1 percent last year. HSAs have had a positive effect. It's had a positive effect on the individual employee; it's had a positive effect on the income statement of the company. They work.

RAY SUAREZ: The White House has estimated that the HSA plan will cost the federal government about $59 billion over five years.

RAY SUAREZ: Two views now on the president's proposal. Daniel Kessler is a professor at Stanford University Business School and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. And Karen Davis is the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that researches health policy.

Well, Professor Kessler, you heard the professor makes claims on behalf of health savings accounts. Will they be good medicine for what he says currently ails the health system?

DANIEL KESSLER: They will. HSAs are a good tool to help people get better value for their health care dollar. Before HSAs if you bought your health care through your employer-provided insurance, you effectively got to deduct that from your taxes, but if you bought your health care on your own or with out-of-pocket money, you didn't get to deduct it. What that did was create a powerful incentive that pulled people into low deductible. Low co-payment health care plans, and in turn created a health care system that was unconscious about the cost of care.

What health savings accounts do is level the tax playing field between insured and out-of-pocket expenses and get rid of the tax bias against high deductible catastrophic economical health insurance; in doing that, they help give everybody in the health system, doctors and patients alike, an incentive to care more about the cost of their decisions.

RAY SUAREZ: Karen Davis, will health savings accounts do what Professor Kessler claims they will?

KAREN DAVIS: No, I think that is the wrong prescription. The patient is not at fault for high health care costs, and the solution isn't making the patient pay more of their own bills out of pocket.

The president's talked about giving patients more control over the decisions and compared it to buying a car or buying tile but it's really not like that. The highest health care costs come when people have heart attacks or strokes or cancer. There's very little discretion or very little opportunity to shop and compare. And there's almost no information.

So in fact, what the president's plan would do is tell people they have to pay the first $1,000 if they're an individual, at least $2,000 if they're family out-of-pocket. They have to put their own money into a health savings account to pay those expenses. So it's really just increasing the cost that people pay and shifting costs from employers to workers.

RAY SUAREZ: But the design, the rationale that's put out there is that if consumers have to pay that $1,000 for an individual, that $2100 for a family, they will be more careful about what these costs that are otherwise shifted in conventional insurance plans, be more conscious about what those costs are and thus shop them down.

KAREN DAVIS: Well, that's not for where the cost problem is. 10 percent of the sickest people account for 70 percent of the outlay. It's the big ticket items that are really the source of high health care costs. And why does that happen? It happens because we've got a fragmented health care system, and we have all the wrong financial incentives for our doctors and our hospitals.

The more tests the doctor orders, the more procedures a doctor does, the more the doctor gets paid. In fact, we even pay for medical errors. So if you do it wrong the first time, you get paid again. 20 percent of Americans report that they have to have tests repeated because they can't be found when they show up at the doctor's office.

So we have got a lot of waste; we've got a lot of inefficiency in the health care system, but it comes because of the way we design the delivery of care. It comes because the way we pay and reward our hospitals and physicians. It's not because the individual patient isn't a cost conscious shopper.

RAY SUAREZ: Well Professor, you heard Karen Davis say that most of the costs come from the most serious maladies and that the information isn't there to shop for things. Will people really be pricing heart surgery?

DANIEL KESSLER: I'd like to disagree with Ms. Davis on two fronts. The first front is that health savings accounts are not a means to shift costs to workers. When you get a health savings account with a high deductible health plan, it's true that you have more out-of-pocket expenses. But then your health insurance premiums go down correspondingly. Where would that money go? Well, that's just going to be rolled back into worker's wages; just like workers now are bearing the burden of higher health cost, so they'll get the benefit of lower costs through health savings accounts.

The second point on which I'd like to disagree is that higher deductible health plans won't effect health spending because it's only a handful of people who account for most of the costs. The evidence we have on that just points the other way. The Rand Health Insurance Experiment, which is a big social experiment run about 20 years ago showed that when you gave people higher deductible health insurance plans, they had lower health spending overall and essentially the same outcomes, and further follow-up research using observational data shows essentially the same thing. So I just don't understand where that point's coming from really.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, what would you suggest is going to happen if these plans are adopted in a large scale way; what kind of effects as opposed to the ones that Professor Kessler posits do you see coming?

KAREN DAVIS: Well, we supported a survey last fall about people who had these high deductible plans with health savings accounts and they do report that they go without needed care, they don't fill a prescription where they really should be taking their prescription to control a chronic condition.

So I'm afraid this is an example of really discouraging the kind of early preventive and primary care that really does benefit patients and could lead to higher costs later on if we don't catch those conditions early.

Dr. Kessler mentioned the Rand study. I happened to oversee the Rand study when I worked for President Jimmy Carter and what that study showed is first of all it was a very different proposal from President Bush. It capped the amount people had to pay at only 5 percent of income so it made sure it wasn't too high. 5 percent/10 percent of income; and furthermore, it excluded those with very serious health problem, the disabled, and even with that group, it did find that if you were low income or chronically ill, you were likely to have health problems. Your hypertension wasn't as well controlled and you were at greater risk of dying. So we know from that study and many studies that making people pay means they'll cut down on essential care, not just frivolous care.

RAY SUAREZ: Professor Kessler, we talked a lot about costs so far but would health savings accounts make health insurance more available? The president visited Wendy's yesterday. They have a lot of low-income workers in the fast food industry. Would those people be more likely to get employee-assisted plans, and would they be able to buy insurance?

DANIEL KESSLER: Absolutely they would. One of the benefits of having more economical insurance is that more small businesses are going to offer policies to workers and more workers are going to take it up. There's now currently lots of people are offered insurance through their employer but just don't take it up because it's too expensive. When you have health savings accounts coupled with high deductible catastrophic insurance, you're going to make it easier for people like that to buy insurance and easier for small businesses to provide it. This is the best way I think to start to chip away at the un-insurance problem. That coupled with the president's plan to help subsidize the chronically ill and allow employers to contribute greater amounts to HSAs for chronically ill people I think addresses the concerns that Ms. Davis is pointing out.

RAY SUAREZ: Will this help with access to health care?

KAREN DAVIS: I really think this will have a negligible effect on the uninsured. We have about 46 million people who are uninsured in this country up from 40 million in the year 2000. But 95 percent of those have incomes below tax brackets, below a 15 or 10 percent tax bracket, and so these tax breaks aren't going to make much difference.

And people can't afford the premium. They can't afford the deductible -- who are currently uninsured. Who it does favor are those in the top tax brackets. For example, somebody at higher income has a child that needs braces, the orthodontist charges $2,000. They get 35 percent off of that cost in tax savings back from the federal government. If you're in the 10 percent tax bracket and your child needs braces, you'd only get $200 off of that.

RAY SUAREZ: But apart from the tax

DANIEL KESSLER: Could I disagree with Ms. Davis on that point?

RAY SUAREZ: Extremely quickly please.

DANIEL KESSLER: I mean, the survey that she talked about, the Commonwealth Fund Employee Benefits Research Institute Survey, showed that the income distribution of people choosing HSAs was roughly the same as the income distribution of people with conventional insurance. And furthermore, analysis that we did showed that the act of making all health care tax deductible was actually a progressive tax policy.

Now it's true that higher income people have higher tax brackets but because low income people spend such a greater share of their income on health care, on out-of-pocket health care, the act of making that tax deductible actually reduces their tax burden relative to higher --

RAY SUAREZ: And quick response from Karen Davis?

KAREN DAVIS: Well the president didn't embrace Dr. Kessler's ideas so in fact the uninsured who have no insurance get no break from this savings. You have to buy a specific kind of health insurance policy to qualify so it doesn't help the insured low income who are paying for their health care out of pocket.

RAY SUAREZ: Karen Davis, Daniel Kessler, thank you both.

DANIEL KESSLER: Thank you.

RAY SUAREZ: Thank you. Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, Bernanke compared to Greenspan, the New Orleans levees and Senators Brownback and Obama on Darfur.

FOCUS STYLE & SUBSTANCE

JIM LEHRER: Now, learning Bernanke-speak. The new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, made his first appearance before Congress this week since taking over the job. And today he testified before the Senate Banking Committee. And he was asked about a wide range of subjects: The price of energy, the impact of deficits, and whether to leave interest rates at their current levels.

BEN BERNANKE: The interest rates we currently see are at some levels historically low. Take mortgage rates for example. They're about 6.25 percent right now, which is relatively low historically.

Senator, there's two possible mistakes: One is to go on too long and one is it not go on long enough. And it's a very difficult balancing act and, as I said earlier, we don't have any kind of mechanical rule. We don't have built in any kind of set of future moves; as we go along, we are going to be looking carefully all at the data, higher energy prices would put pressure on inflation but higher energy prices would also hurt consumer budgets and would probably or could possibly lead consumers to spend less.

Widening deficits over a period of years will reduce national savings, will probably exacerbate the current account deficit, may raise interest rates and will probably inhibit the dynamism of the economy.

JIM LEHRER: And to David Wessel, deputy Washington bureau chief and columnist at the Wall Street Journal.

David first on matters of policy, were there any major differences between what Bernanke said and what his predecessor Alan Greenspan said?

DAVID WESSEL: No, in fact he's trying very hard to convince us all that he is going to continue the monetary policy of Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan left office on Jan. 31, saying that more interest rate increases might be necessary and Mr. Bernanke said in his testimony this week that he agrees, more interest rate increases are going to be necessary.

JIM LEHRER: On issues like deficits, are they in sink?

DAVID WESSEL: Well, that's different. Mr. Bernanke was very careful to duck questions about fiscal policy, deficits, taxes, even some questions that Mr. Greenspan in the past has been willing to answer.

Mr. Greenspan, for instance, was a very strong defender of the notion that if Congress cuts tax, they should find offsetting tax increases or spending cuts. But when Mr. Bernanke was asked about that, he took a pass. He said it wasn't his business. So on matters outside of the Fed's narrow purview he's trying to be a lot less open than Mr. Greenspan was when he testified.

JIM LEHRER: What about his overview of the economy right now?

DAVID WESSEL: I think that his overview of the economy was something that Alan Greenspan would have said almost the same thing -- perhaps different words but the same sense.

The most interesting moment came where he suggested that just maybe the economy could be on the verge of overheating, that is, growing so fast that it might spark some inflation. That's not something that I remember Mr. Greenspan saying in the last couple of weeks. But that was really the only place. I think he was -- he had studied Mr. Greenspan's forecast and was determined to underscore the continuity in monetary policy.

JIM LEHRER: And the overheating of the economy, of course, inflation relates to keep raising interest rates if necessary, right?

DAVID WESSEL: That's right. Mr. Bernanke's prime mission, as he sees it, is to prevent inflation from breaking out and the major tool that the Fed has to do that is to pull the interest rate lever and slow the economy down. He expects them to increasing interest rates in order to produce that result.

JIM LEHRER: Now on the question of style, while the policy was the same, the approach and the use of words, were they the same?

DAVID WESSEL: No, it was really strikingly different. You know, I've been in Washington for almost as long as Mr. Greenspan was the chairman. And you had to sort of get with the Zen of Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan was denied some vital vitamin when he was a child and it prevents him from speaking in clear, declarative sentences.

Mr. Bernanke was a very successful college professor. In fact, Congressman Maloney from New York complimented him -- and said, you must have been a good teacher -- in the testimony this week. He spoke in clear sentences. I think as the clips you showed at the beginning showed, most intelligent people could understand what he's talking about and that's just a big change.

JIM LEHRER: But to give Greenspan his due, he intentionally kept things -- he wanted things to be a little bit mystical, did he not or mysterious or not so clear?

DAVID WESSEL: I think he did. In fact, as you know, he joked about that. I think that reflects two things: One is Mr. Bernanke is committed to the notion that the Feds should be very open about what it's doing and why. He comes from a tradition in academics that thinks that the economy works better when everybody understand what the Fed is looking at. So that -- and Mr. Greenspan didn't come from that tradition although he moved in that direction over his tenure at the Fed.

And I think the other thing is that Mr. Bernanke thinks that the world really needs to know what his agenda is because it will give them more confidence than he has the smarts and savvy to exceed Mr. Greenspan. I think that was his mission this week and in my opinion he did pretty well.

JIM LEHRER: But that compares with Greenspan, who wanted to keep people guessing a little bit so he would have more flexibility when somebody happened, right?

DAVID WESSEL: Absolutely. Mr. Greenspan maximizes flexibility because you could never go back to him and say, when you testified before Congress, you said this and then you did that, because the this sentence he uttered had so many clauses and caveats that he could never be pinned down. Mr. Bernanke doesn't do that. Now I think he runs a risk because he may some day change his mind when the Fed meets at the end of March, the economy may look different to him than it does today and he my find that being so clear leaves people to compare his statements and suggest that he misled them but for now he's taking this experiment, which will be fun for us to watch.

JIM LEHRER: Okay, speaking of fun to watch. It's only about a few days now and style and substance are watched very carefully and related to any Federal Reserve chairman. What's been the reaction thus far in just a few days now to Bernanke and the financial community?

DAVID WESSEL: I think he passed his first test with flying colors. The most important thing he had to do was not to say something silly or something that sent the markets into a tizzy. He spent two days before congressional committees and didn't do that.

I think he got the kid glove treatments from members of Congress. They weren't as tough on him as they had been -- some of them had been on Mr. Greenspan. I think he basically the markets and the politicians and people like me who make a hobby of sort of rating Fed chairmen and there appearances think that he did a pretty good job for a guy who's been on the job for just two weeks.

JIM LEHRER: But a pretty good job in his context or in a Greenspan context, or what kind of context?

DAVID WESSEL: I think in both contexts. As I say, his major mission was, don't make a mistake that embarrasses yourself. So he didn't do that. But I think people were impressed at his facility with a number of issues, at his ability to stand up to some pretty tough questioning today from Sen. Sarbanes about questions of bank charters and so forth.

He seems to have the self confidence to say, Senator, I just don't know about that yet and I'll get back to you.

So I think the reviews you get from the commentary on Wall Street and from what I picked up in the corridors of the capitol are, you know, this guy might actually be able to do the job, thank God.

JIM LEHRER: And the markets went up yesterday and they went up again today. Is there any relationship to that, do you think?

DAVID WESSEL: Well I think the markets went up because we have signs of strength in the economy and because oil prices came down a little bit. I don't think you could say that he caused that. But if he had said something that unnerved the markets, the markets might have gone down.

JIM LEHRER: I see. He had the potential for a negative more than he did for a positive?

DAVID WESSEL: That's correct; that's correct.

JIM LEHRER: Finally, do you expect his every word to be parsed the way Greenspan's were?

DAVID WESSEL: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's no more important economic official in the world. The markets are always looking for clues as to how his thinking is changing and how that will affect rates and they're going to parse every word and he's going to make it easy for them because he speaks so clearly and we'll find out whether he thinks that speaking clearly is as good an idea in practice as he said it was when he was an academic.

JIM LEHRER: Is it your impression that he knows his every word will be parsed?

DAVID WESSEL: I think that none -- no one who takes a job like this appreciates the strength of the megaphone they've been handed. And one of these days he's going to say something that strikes him as innocuous and there are going to be ripples in the markets. I've seen it with almost every new Fed official and every Treasury official since I have been in Washington and I expect some day we'll see it with him.

JIM LEHRER: Okay. David, thank you very much.

DAVID WESSEL: My pleasure.

FOCUS RACE AGAINST TIME

JIM LEHRER: Now a science unit update on efforts to rebuild the levees in New Orleans. Betty Ann Bowser reports.

KEVIN WAGNER: This is my house in the background right here, 3301 Charles Court.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Like thousands of people from St. Bernard Parish, Kevin Wagner lost his home to Katrina. His brother lost this house nearby, and a neighbor's family lost something irreplaceable.

KEVIN WAGNER: The father and the son survived. They went from rooftop they went from rooftop to rooftop to get to this two-story house here, but she didn't make it. She drowned.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: So when Wagner puts on his hard hat and goes to work for the Army Corps of Engineers, he is a determined man. The third-generation St. Bernard native is in charge of rebuilding the same levee that was washed away by Katrina and destroyed his home.

KEVIN WAGNER: My family was affected by the storm, so this is very persona, and I've got very many friends, family and neighbors that all want to come back to this area, and they are waiting for us to see what happens with this levee construction.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: He and his crew are working hard to fix the 76-mile-long levee adjacent to the Mississippi River Gulf outlet, which locals refer to as "Mr. Go." On Aug. 29 last year, MR-GO lived up to its unfortunate nickname. As the storm surge from Katrina came in, MR-GO went. Eleven miles of it were destroyed.

Rebuilding MR-GO is a race against time, because the Army Corps of Engineers has promised that they will rebuild all the other damaged levees to pre- Katrina conditions by June 1, the start of hurricane season.

Col. Lewis Setliff heads the New Orleans operation for the Army Corps of Engineers.

COL. LEWIS SETLIFF III: Phase-one repair that we have engineered here at the 17th Street will withstand a storm surge equivalent to what would be associated with a Category Three hurricane. I am very confident that we are building these levees to a point where not only will they meet the specifications, but they will be better than they were before.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: As Louisiana State Professor Paul Kemp rides alongside MR-GO, he doesn't see how the work will be done in time. Kemp was one of the first scientists to demonstrate with computer models that water did not overtop the levees, as the Corps said early on. His findings showed water actually came through the levees in some places. In those spots, the levees actually failed. Now he questions another assertion: That the Corps could keep its promise.

PAUL KEMP: My thinking is that it should be crawling with earth-moving equipment and compactors. That would be kind of what we would expect if we were talking about actually getting something serious done by June 1.

KEVIN WAGNER: As our colonel says, success is the only option and failure is not, and that's our intent. We will be done by June 1. We're going to have this levee up seventeen and a half feet. That's the original design grade. Actually it will be a little bit higher because we put an additional two and a half feet of material on top to allow for future settlement and subsidence.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Wagner explained the best levees are built of a combination of materials, but the most important one is clay because it doesn't crumble when exposed to strong water forces.

KEVIN WAGNER: This is some good imported clay material that we are actually bringing in from Mississippi. We plan on bringing them on in by barge, as you can see in the background here, and we plan on using it in this area of levee that we're actually standing on.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Wagner is also counting on getting clay from what the engineers call a borrow pit. Using heavy construction equipment, they're literally borrowing material from the washed-away levee and putting it back where MR-GO once was. But experts who've inspected the Army Corps' work question the quality of the soil they say is being used.

BOB BEA: In differing locations along the length of the MR-GO levee, we stopped, I got out and collected the soil samples.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Bob Bea is a civil engineer from the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a member of an independent team investigating why the levees failed. Bea recently took three samples of soil from MR-GO and had them tested.

BOB BEA: This material is relatively sandy, comes from probably something that is like a beach that has had clay mixed into it.

Now the concern for such material is underwater erosion like comes from waves that are building up against the levee, we want this material not to be very erosive under water action. It falls apart.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: It falls apart.

BOB BEA: It falls apart.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The same thing happened when two other soil samples were placed under the spigot.

BOB BEA: Well, we'll mix these three things together, do a fairly good job like a bulldozer would do and then you can watch what the effect is. It will wash away actually easier because of the peat humus and the fine-grained materials that have been incorporated into the sample.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: What do you think of that?

BOB BEA: Well, I think I wouldn't want to build a home behind this levee.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: He says instead the Corps should be using Pleistocene clay, which is found in abundance in the New Orleans area.

BOB BEA: Now this material, when you put it under water won't erode. It's extremely resistant to the force of water, so that as waves and surge are building up against this segment of the levee it'll behave essentially as though the water wasn't there. It'll act like a dam.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: A spokesman for the Corps said the soil being put into the levee is "exceeding our expectations for shear strength" and that Pleistocene clay is "not necessary" to build a strong and reliable levee.

Bea also maintains the original MR-GO was built inadequately and questions rebuilding something he thinks wasn't done right in the first place.

BOB BEA: It was badly flawed in concept, design, construction, then we followed that into operations and maintenance, and it caught up with us. We've actually met and talked with the engineers that were on the site at the time they built this levee, and at that time they knew they were using dredged spoil from the construction of MR-GO.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Which is below their standards?

BOB BEA: Is below their standards.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: They knowingly built a levee below their own standards in the first place?

BOB BEA: That's correct.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: And now they're building it back to what it was before, and it didn't work?

BOB BEA: And that's correct.

COL. LEWIS SETLIFF III: We have the ability to restore what was here pre-Katrina, and that was a system that's lasted for decades; it's protected this city for decades; and the prudent step is to let's do that, let's get to what level of protection we had before the storm.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: And in spite of criticism from both the independent investigative group and from a state forensic team, the Corps' official position today is that it still doesn't know what went wrong.

COL. LEWIS SETLIFF III: I think we may find that the design parameters were exceeded in some areas, so there are a lot of factors involved that we need to make sure that we know what happened, and if someone particular or an agency is accountable, and if it was the Corps of Engineers, we'll take responsibility for it.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Members of the investigative team are also critical on another front. They say the Corps has tried to block their work.

Two weeks ago the team had to get help from the Louisiana Attorney General's Office to get onto the Corps' 17th Street Canal construction site to take soil samples. Meanwhile, just a few yards away, Col. Setliff was denying to us there was any conflict.

COL. LEWIS SETLIFF III: We're not hiding anything. We need people to help us and we will accept any outside -- whether it is a university or other government agency coming in to help us. But our obligation is to make these repairs. It's very dangerous areas at times, so we have to do that safely; we can't have everybody just showing up at these construction sites.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: So you are not discouraging scientists from doing their work?

COL. LEWIS SETLIFF III: Not at all, absolutely not at all.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: With hurricane season just around the corner, local residents are rooting for the Corps. St. Bernard Parish native Jeff Pohlmann is back and has his Today's Catch restaurant up and running again making Gumbo, Etouffee, and Po-boys. But he's worried.

JEFF POHLMANN: Three big concerns: Levee, levee, levees. I'm just hoping that they will take these levees to a much higher elevation to guarantee us that we won't relive another Katrina. Everybody I'm talking to is scared to come back for that reason. And I can't blame them, including myself.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Kevin Wagner says he wants to make believers of people like Pohlmann.

KEVIN WAGNER: If we've got to make the contractors go 24-hour operations and bring out whatever lights are necessary to light up the world out here, we'll go ahead and do that.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Should people in St. Bernard Parish sleep easy at night?

KEVIN WAGNER: Well, not until we get the levee finished.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The independent team expects to issue its report on the levee failures in April. Meanwhile, the Corps says its own investigation won't be completed until June.

UPDATE CALL FOR HELP

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, new calls to stop the violence and killing in Darfur. Gwen Ifill has our update.

GWEN IFILL: Since these pictures of attacks on African villagers were sent around the world in 2004, the situation in western Sudan has by all accounts grown only more desperate. At least 200,000 people have been killed and two million people displaced in a conflict where local militia known as Janjaweed have attacked civilians and destroyed villages.

Half of Darfur's six million people rely on outside aid for survival, and international observers have said Sudan's government may be supporting the Janjaweed. The human suffering has spread into neighboring Chad, prompting international officials like United Nations envoy Jan Pronk to declare the response so inadequate that "people on the ground are just laughing."

Seven thousand peacekeepers from African Union nations have taken the lead in stabilizing the region to little effect.

At the White House Monday, Kofi Annan said the United Nations must play a greater role. Annan, who met with President Bush in the Oval Office, later elaborated in an interview on CNN. He said that any U.N. force must prepared to respond quickly to new violence.

KOFI ANNAN: And this is going to require troops from governments with capacity, well-trained, well- equipped troops. It should include troops from western countries, troops from third world countries who have participated over the years in peacekeeping. And we all need to pull together to make it happen. And the president is in agreement with me.

GWEN IFILL: Last week, the U.N. Security Council agreed to commit thousands of additional peacekeepers to Darfur. The United States, however, has resisted sending American forces. Vice President Cheney spoke to the NewsHour about the issue last week.

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: We've played an active in terms of urging the folks that are involved in it to try to end it. We've supported the work of the African Union and the insertion of peacekeeping forces in there. The president, of course, early on, in terms of the basic conflict between the North and the South in Sudan, sent former Senator Danforth in there, put a lot of personal time in as an envoy.

JIM LEHRER: Hundreds of thousands of people have died. So you're satisfied the U.S. is doing everything it can do?

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: I am satisfied we're doing everything we can do.

GWEN IFILL: But the Darfur conflict still attracts international attention. At the Olympics Monday, U.S. speed-skating Gold Medal winner Joey Cheek announced he will donate his $25,000 purse to relief efforts for Sudanese refugees in neighboring Chad.

GWEN IFILL: Two senators from opposite sides of the aisle have joined together to call for increased U.S. involvement in Darfur. They are Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, and Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois.

Sen. Brownback was in Darfur in 2004 and Sen. Obama is a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Welcome to you both.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Thank you.

SEN. SAM BROWNBACK: Thank you.

GWEN IFILL: Gentlemen, you both co-authored an op/ed piece in the newspaper in which you called for increased U.S. involvement and you said that the situation in Darfur is dangerously adrift. Sen. Brownback, what does that mean?

SEN. SAM BROWNBACK: It means people are dying. It means the genocide continues. It means that there's been inadequate international force in place to be able to stop the people from being slaughtered by the Janjaweed, by militia being supported by the government in Sudan. It means that we have got a bad situation and it has not stabilized and we need to do more to be able to stop the carnage from taking place.

GWEN IFILL: Sen. Obama, to what do you attribute the bad situation that Sen. Brownback talked about?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, essentially you've got a protection vacuum. Originally the thinking was that as a consequence of a negotiated settlement between Northern Sudan and Southern Sudan, that you could broker a peace deal between the Sudanese government and rebels. And that would then take some pressure off the people who were being displaced. And we also hoped that an African Union force could ramp up sufficiently quickly to provide some protection. That has not happened.

Essentially the African Union force has never been of sufficient size or force nor has it had the mandate to provide real protection to ordinary Sudanese who are being attacked by the Janjaweed, and there has been essentially no real progress in terms of political settlement. So you have a situation where just recently 30,000 displaced persons as a consequence of attacks are wandering Western Sudan.

You've got situations in which you continue to have rapes and assaults on women who are trying to gather firewood. You've got two million people who are displaced, 300,000 dead, and you don't have any kind of force on the ground that can really provide them the protection that they need.

GWEN IFILL: Now, Sen. Brownback, Kofi Annan was in Washington this week meeting with President Bush and among the things that he was talking about was increasing the U.N. peacekeeping force, something which the Security Council has agreed to at least start the wheels in motion but that might not happen for a year. Is that soon enough?

SEN. SAM BROWNBACK: It's not soon enough. Something needs to take place now. That's why a number of us have been pushing the idea, let's get NATO involved at this point in time; that there's a discussion of changing the African Union force into an U.N. force. It's still going to have to be upgraded in size, scale, ability and mandate.

But in the interim, let's get NATO involved in this process because every day you wait, you're going to have more people dying.

GWEN IFILL: If NATO gets involved, Sen. Brownback, I'll turn this question to Sen. Obama, if NATO gets involved, does that increase the chances that there will be U.S. troops involved on the ground?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I don't think that the issue right now is U.S. troops. The issue is U.S. leadership. What we can do is to insist that NATO forces provide a bridge as was indicated by Sen. Brownback. Otherwise you could have a situation, even if the U.N. finally does authorize a larger force, let's say of 20,000, it may take a year, year and a half to create that force and get it on the ground.

In the interim, having NATO force there that could be supplied by some of the middle powers, Canada, Australia, others that have experience in peacekeeping would be absolutely crucial. We also need to provide additional funding for the AU troops who are already on the ground. There's been some talk that funding may discontinue sometime this year for that force and if they don't have any kind of support, then it's going to be fair game across the board for the people who are being assaulted by the Janjaweed.

The main thing that we've got do is use the kinds of political pressure that we can bring to bear on other countries when we really think that something is of our national interest. And this is a situation where not only for humanitarian reasons should we be concerned but situations of failed states like this are going to continue to come up in the coming years.

And if we don't have an international structure that's prepared to deal with failed states, genocide, displaced persons, refugees, ultimately that is going to create a situation that undermines a world order in which we have an enormous stake.

GWEN IFILL: Sen. Brownback, Sen. Obama just talked about the need for U.S. leadership. You may know that vice President Cheney told Jim Lehrer in an interview last week that the United States is doing all that it can. How do you respond to that?

SEN. SAM BROWNBACK: Well, I think the United States is doing a lot, and I think we've done more than any other country regarding the genocide that's taking place in the Sudan. But it's not enough. And people continue to suffer in very large numbers, in the millions. And it would not take that large of a group from NATO or a larger group from the African Union with mobility, with a broader mandate, to stop the killing from taking place. So I applaud the Bush administration leadership relative to the rest of the world but still not enough is occurring that it's stopping this -- as former Secretary Albright called it -- this rolling genocide that continues to occur.

GWEN IFILL: There are 7,000 African Union peacekeepers on the ground, Sen. Brownback. Do you think the African Union is capable of bringing around the bringing about the peace that you're suggesting?

SEN. SAM BROWNBACK: Not with that size and scale. You're talking about an area of size of France. They don't have the mobility. They don't have the intelligence information that they need. And they don't have the mandate enough. I think you're going to need a much larger troop. They have done some good; by being there they have stopped some of the killing and they've stabilized the situation in some places but it's escalated again.

And as the forces against the Janjaweed were at one point in time united, they've now fractured and so you've got a lot of different places where attacking and pillaging is taking place and people are being driven away from their homes. You need a larger force with a broader mandate and greater mobility.

GWEN IFILL: Sen. Obama, you referred to the need to have for the U.S. to use its leverage to make other countries does what it ought to do. I assume you're referring to countries like Chad and Libya and China even. Is Khartoum listening to anyone?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I don't think that they're listening to anyone because they're not feeling enough pressure. I mean, part of what we have to stay to our allies and part of what we have to communicate to countries like China is that this is an important national priority for us, that we expect sanctions on Sudan if it is not willing to abide by basic humanitarian standards, that we may choose to freeze assets. We may impose travel bans. We expect support from other countries who claim that they're concerned about humanitarian issues. And that kind of pressure on a consistent basis in a sustained basis is not something that we've seen.

I completely agree with Sam that, in fact, the United States has done more than our European allies, for example, and that's a scandal. But that does not excuse the situation on the ground. We still have a lot of work to do. We have more weapons in our arsenal diplomatically that we have not yet deployed, and would I hope that the sense of urgency that's needed remains in the administration.

I was concerned that Under Secretary for Africa Frazier, suggested recently that maybe this wasn't a genocide after all. When three hundred thousand people have been killed, two million displaced, I think that that is the kind of disaster that merits world attention and world action.

GWEN IFILL: Sen. Brownback, what can Congress do to jumpstart this process?

SEN. SAM BROWNBACK: We can pass the Darfur Accountability and Peace Act. We've cleared it through the Senate. It's in the House of Representatives. I urge the action to take place there.

There's been negotiations back and forth of what all should be in that but basically this is a bill that provides for key sanctioned language and aggressive sanctioning takes place against the perpetrators in the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed leadership. I think that's something we could do.

Second is we've got a fund and helping the funding of the African Union force. We'll have supplemental bills coming through and I'm hopeful that we can get that funding pushed forward there.

And third, I think we need to continue to push this administration and NATO to get much more aggressively involved. I applaud the actions by a recent U.S. Gold Medalist at the Olympics where he's going to give everything that he gets out of this to Darfur. There is support in the country, particularly on young people young people on college campuses to do something against this genocide; we should listen to those urging us and get some of these things done.

GWEN IFILL: And Sen. Obama, Robert Zoellick, the State Department official who has been the most on the ground four times in the past year, representing the United States in Darfur, was quoted recently at saying if people are determine to kill each other, there's not a lot the United States can do. What is your -- and he is one of the most involved people in this process. What is your response to that?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, the people who have been displaced are not killing anybody. They're being killed. They're being raped. There may be great difficulty in bringing back bringing about a political settlement between the rebels and Khartoum, the Sudanese government.

What we have is a situation in which millions of people have been displaced, murdered, raped and threatened who are essentially innocent bystanders to this conflict. And I think we can't be cavalier about that. That's happened before in Rwanda, and at some point we say to ourselves that it is in our interests to make sure that those kinds of events don't happen again.

It's also in our national security interest because as things like this occur, over and over again, not just in Africa but potentially in other parts of the world, this not only creates the seeds of terrorism, it also creates the kind of despair that over time spills over into our own country.

GWEN IFILL: Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Sam Brownback, thank you both for joining us.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Thank you.

SEN. SAM BROWNBACK: Thank you, Gwen.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major developments of this day: There was word of a deal to ensure the NSA surveillance program is legal. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said White House officials agreed to a fix of existing law. President Bush said he was satisfied with Vice President Cheney's account of his hunting accident; and the U.N. Commission on Human Rights called for the U.S. to shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening with Mark Shields and Rich Lowry, among others. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.