The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, our summary of the news; then, a look at today's sentencing in the Martha Stewart case; a health unit report on unseen wounds from the Iraq war; analysis by Mark Shields and William Safire, sitting in for David Brooks; and the latest on a science of the small called nanotechnology.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison today. A federal judge in New York City imposed the minimum penalty under federal guidelines. Stewart had been convicted of lying to an investigator about a stock deal. After the jail time, she will serve another five months under house arrest. She also has to pay a fine of $30,000. But the judge put the sentence on hold pending appeal. After the hearing, the homemaking expert denounced the case against her.

MARTHA STEWART: Today is a shameful day. It's shameful for me and for my family and for my beloved company and for all of its employees and partners. What was a small, personal matter came... became over the last two years an almost-fatal circus event of unprecedented proportions.

JIM LEHRER: Stewart's stockbroker was given a nearly identical sentence. Investors in her company, Martha Stewart Living Omni-Media, reacted positively to the relatively light penalties. The company's stock gained more than 30 percent today. We'll have more on this story right after the News Summary. In Iraq today, an explosion aimed at U.S. forces ripped through a Baghdad neighborhood. The soldiers escaped unhurt, but four Iraqis were wounded. Insurgents also killed an Iraqi policeman in a separate attack. There have been no U.S. combat deaths since last weekend, but so far this month 34 Americans have died from hostile fire and accidents. Almost 900 have been killed in Iraq since the war began. More than 5,000 others have been wounded. At least 84 children died in a school fire in southern India today. More than 20 others were hurt. Witnesses said they were trapped inside a locked building in a town about 1,300 miles south of New Delhi. We have a report narrated by John Irvine of Independent Television News.

JOHN IRVINE: A crowded three-story school with narrow corridors and stairways, lethal impediments. The children couldn't get out; their would-be rescuers couldn't get in. The fire raged for two hours, and in this busy town, desperate efforts were made by fire crews, teachers, parents and others to save the lives of the most vulnerable: The primary schoolchildren in five classrooms. Many of them died in a stampede. It all began around 11:00, as lunch was being prepared for the 900 pupils of the Lord Krishna School. After a short circuit in the kitchen, flames spread rapidly thanks to the heat of the Indian summer and a thatched roof. So badly charred are the little bodies, it's been possible to determine the gender, let alone the identity of many of those killed. Hundreds of parents have been left awaiting definite news one way or the other.

JIM LEHRER: Later, the top government official in the region said school authorities were guilty of criminal negligence, and police arrested the principal of the school. The World AIDS Conference ended today with new alarms about the spread of the disease. Final speakers in Bangkok, Thailand, warned the virus is exploding across Asia and Eastern Europe. And the top AIDS scientist in the United States., Dr. Anthony Fauci, joined the appeal for affordable drugs. He said: "We have a very long way to go with regard to access (to treatment) because the countries that have the greatest needs still have the least access " Millions of Medicare recipients may now get coverage for some weight-loss therapies. The Department of Health and Human Services dropped its official stance yesterday that obesity is not an illness. As a result, Medicare will review the medical evidence on various treatments. They range from stomach surgery and diet programs to behavior counseling. The U.S. Senate voted last night to let the Food and Drug Administration regulate tobacco products. The agency would monitor manufacturing, sales and marketing, but it could not ban cigarettes or eliminate nicotine outright. The Senate also approved a $12 billion buyout for farmers who stop growing tobacco. A House version of the plan includes a buyout, but no FDA regulation. The difference will have to be reconciled in a conference committee. Inflation at the retail level rose again in June, but at a slower pace. The Labor Department reported today the Consumer Price Index was up 0.3 percent. That was half the increase in May. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 23 points to close at 10,139. The NASDAQ fell 29 points to close at 1883. For the week, the Dow lost a fraction of a percent. The NASDAQ fell 3 percent. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to: The Martha Stewart sentence; a wounded Iraq war veteran; Shields and Safire; and something called nanotechnology.

FOCUS - SENTENCED

JIM LEHRER: Martha Stewart's sentence and business. Ray Suarez has our story.

RAY SUAREZ: Martha Stewart's sentence, five months in jail and two years of probation, including five months of house arrest, came after she was convicted on charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators about a stock sale. The sale in question, of stock in a company called Imclone, was made in December 2001, shortly before Imclone announced bad news that sent its share prices tumbling. But Stewart was never charged or convicted on charges of insider trading. After her hearing today, Stewart spoke on the courthouse steps about her personal travails and asked the public to support her company.

MARTHA STEWART: I have been choked and almost suffocated to death during that time, all the while more concerned about the wellbeing of others than for myself, more hurt for them and for their losses than my own, more worried for their futures than the future of Martha Stewart, the person. More than 200 people have lost their jobs at my company as a result of this situation. I want them to know how very, very sorry I am for them and their families. Perhaps all of you out there can continue to show your support by subscribing to our magazine, by buying our products, by encouraging our advertisers to come back in full force to our magazines. Our magazines are great. They deserve your support, and whatever happened to me personally shouldn't have any effect whatsoever on the great company Martha Stewart Living Omni-Media. And I don't want to use this as a sales pitch for my company, but we love that company. We've worked so hard on that company, and we really think it merits great attention from the American public. And I'll be back. I will be back.

RAY SUAREZ: For more on today's developments, I'm joined by: Constance hays, who's been covering the story for the New York Times-- she was in the Manhattan courtroom when the sentence was announced-- and Hayes Roth, vice president of worldwide marketing for Landor Associates, a brand consulting firm. Constance Hays, outside on the courthouse steps we saw a composed, smiling, occasionally defiant Martha Stewart. Is that the same woman that you saw in the courtroom when she got a chance to speak and she heard her sentence?

CONSTANCE HAYS: Not at all, Ray. Inside the courtroom she looked very juan and almost depressed. She was dressed very plainly in a black suite; she really didn't look around much or smile. When she stood to speak and to tell the judge why she thought she deserved a lighter sentence or leniency in general, she appeared to almost be on the verge of tears. Her voice cracked a couple times and she sniffled, and she seemed to be truly penitent at that point.

RAY SUAREZ: The federal sentencing guidelines call for a minimum of ten months. She'll only have to serve five of them behind bars, according to Judge Cedarbaum's sentence earlier today. Did the judge deliver anyrationale about how she came to the decision she did?

CONSTANCE HAYS: Well, she gave a couple reasons. She said Martha doesn't have a prior criminal record, which is true. She also said she'd received over 1500 letters of support saying how Martha had done wonderful things for people and the people supported her. That was a factor in her decision. She also felt that Martha that had suffered enough and she told her that. She said, you have suffered enough and will continue to suffer.

RAY SUAREZ: In her sentencing pronouncement, did she specify that Martha Stewart can remain free pending her appeal, or is there a chance that she may be incarcerated as that wends its way through the system?

CONSTANCE HAYS: She's going to file an appeal. She's hired a new lawyer for that appeal. She has been ordered to go free pending the outcome of the appeal, which the timing of the appeal no one can really say for sure.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, what's the machinery? Do documents have to be filed that then are seen by a panel which decide whether or not the appeal moves forward?

CONSTANCE HAYS: Right. She has a ten-day limit starting now in which to file notice of appeal. Then the documents can be turned over. I'm not sure exactly the deadline there, but then the appeals court has to scheduling a hearing on the appeal. That could take months.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, right now given her status as a convicted person, is she barred from holding certain positions within her own company?

CONSTANCE HAYS: Yes. She can't be an officer or director of her company. That's something the SEC will demand as part of the separate settlement of the SEC charges against her stemming from the same case. It sometimes can be repealed by a judge, but at the moment, you know, that's the status for her.

RAY SUAREZ: Have you spoken to any legal experts about the chances she has on appeal? Today one of her legal team noted two people associated with the trial have been found to have lied at various points during the proceeding.

CONSTANCE HAYS: Ray, what's interesting is her lawyers have already asked for a new trial based on the lies or perjury of those people and been rejected by the district judge, that's Judge Cedarbaum, so it's unlikely that would help her on appeal, but the fact is that criminal convictions are only overturned on appeal in about 3 percent of the cases, so her odds are pretty bad here. The other thing to remember is that her company has been through a really terrible time. Some legal experts think that in asking for a new trial or asking for an appeal, she'll just prolong the agony for the company, which has really seen some damage as a result of her own legal problems.

RAY SUAREZ: Hayes Roth, what do you think of that idea, that there's an almost cut-your-loss prescription some people are making?

HAYES ROTH: No one would recommended the terrors of going to jail, but I think from a marketing perspective, Constance is right. I think it's time to move on, take the medicine and become a better citizen as a result of that.

RAY SUAREZ: Today the stock shot up on the news of the sentence. Does Martha Stewart Living Omni Media stand as a pretty intact company given what's happened to the woman that it bears the name of?

HAYES ROTH: I think they've done a remarkable job keeping the momentum of the company going. They've lost ad revenue and circulation, but the actual merchandise has sustained itself. They're still selling a lot of product because the core product is great. The loyal customers who know her and love her believe in it.

RAY SUAREZ: So what would you recommended if you were retained for the next year or two? Does she minimize her own presence in the company's range of products? Does the Martha Stewart name remain in boldface on all the products?

HAYES ROTH: Well, I think the Martha Stewart name is never going to get totally disconnected from the brand, but they've made efforts over the last year to minimize it to a certain extent. You don't see her on the cover of the magazine anymore. It's actually smaller in the masthead now. I think I would recommend they stay the course. I think they've done a good job in keeping their eye on the ball and trying to keep the products up to the standards that were originally set, and I think how she comes back depends on how she serves her sentence and whether she's the revitalized Martha, the perhaps chastened Martha at the end of it.

RAY SUAREZ: In allegations of crime and corporate misdeeds that have been making the news over the past several years, they've often involved officers of the company but also the company itself involved in misdeeds. Martha Stewart herself noted that this was personal conduct when she said in her statement on the courthouse steps. Does that create a different situation for the company and its future, the fact that this was private conduct on the part of a well-known person rather than company misdeeds?

HAYES ROTH: I think so. I was struck by the passion of her voice when she started to talk about her company. She became a very human person at that moment. That is a company she's built from scratch. It's an amazing achievement. And I believe that it is a strong company. I think she will get her hands back on the wheel at some point. I'm quite optimistic about their prospects as an organization and a brand.

RAY SUAREZ: Have there been cases where someone so closely associated with the fortunes of an enterprise, so far as to even give their name to the enterprise, goes through this kind of trouble and comes out the other end all right?

HAYES ROTH: Well, there are some instances. People refer to the Steve Madden situation and also... I'm old enough to recall the Leona Helmsley era. Whether or not she came back on the other side as strong as they were going in for the hotel, the name is still on the door. It's still a quality product. So it is possible to do. I wouldn't recommended it as a marketing strategy necessarily, but it's possible to do.

RAY SUAREZ: Constance Hays, when Martha Stewart emerged after her sentencing, was there a sense that the rank and file of Lower Manhattan was on her side? Did she attract a crowd when she was speaking to the press?

CONSTANCE HAYES: There was a crowd of what we call the loyal Martha followers. They come out dressed in chef hats and wearing huge sandwich boards that say, "save Martha from unfair persecution," rather than prosecution. And those people were out there today in force; they had a drum; they were chanting and shouting "save Martha," and "we love you Martha," that sort of thing, which is I'm sure is very heart warming to her in that position.

RAY SUAREZ: Is there anyway to know about wider public sentiment?

CONSTANCE HAYES: It's not really clear. I think there is a core of Martha followers, you know, who subscribe or who watch the shows who aren't that bothered by what's been going on. I think they've always known she was human and they never assumed she was totally perfect. Those people will stick with her. I think the advertisers are the ones who have the hardest time with this. As Hayes mentioned, the ads have fallen in the magazine. They've had to put the whole television show on hiatus because of concerns about ads and distribution. And that's something that they will have to build back almost from scratch starting right now.

RAY SUAREZ: Hayes Roth, Martha Stewart spoke directly to her fans and said, "please ask the advertisers to come back." Are the kinds of companies that advertise in a lifestyle magazine open to that kind of pressure?

HAYES ROTH: I don't think they're going to immediately come flooding back, and I wouldn't call that pressure. I would call that an invitation. I would think that as they watch the company and see what happens over the next six to twelve months, if they see customers buying Martha Stewart's product, as I'm sure they will, sooner or later they understand that's a place to market.

RAY SUAREZ: Hayes Roth and Constance Hays, thank you both.

CONSTANCE HAYS: Thank you.

HAYES ROTH: Thank you.

FOCUS - IRAQ WOUNDED

JIM LEHRER: Now returning home from Iraq and recovery from a different kind of injury.

Susan Dentzer of our health unit has the story. The unit is a partnership with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

SUSAN DENTZER: The occasion was a Memorial Day observance at a Veterans' Administration hospital in Richmond, Virginia. Patients listened to an Army band from their wheelchairs or gurneys. Then U.S. Senator George Allen spoke.

SEN. GEORGE ALLEN: On this Memorial Day we do pay tribute, of course, to the fallen, and we also ought to remember our living heroes. Some of y'all here today are some of those who are still bearing the burdens of scars of your service to the nation.

SUSAN DENTZER: One of those bearing scars was former Army Chief Warrant Officer John Sims. But Sims's scars aren't visible. Since he's a recovering brain injury patient, they're inside his head.

Sims was a Maryland National Guardsman and an airline pilot in civilian life. Last year, he volunteered to join the Army's 101st Airborne Division as a maintenance pilot in Iraq. He was aboard a Blackhawk helicopter on his first flight into Iraq when the chopper crashed.

JOHN SIMS, former Army Chief Warrant Officer: One of the guys that dragged me out of the airplane said that when he got there, my helmet was already off, and I'd already hit my head on the instrument panel and fallen forward enough to crush the cyclic stick under my body with all the armor I was wearing.

SUSAN DENTZER: Now Sims is among a growing number of service members returning from Iraq with traumatic brain injuries. The wounds have been caused by a range of factors...from crashes like Sims's....to motor vehicle accidents... to blast injuries from explosive devices or rocket-propelled grenades.

Thanks to new body armor, many of those who once died in such attacks are now surviving them. But along with their other wounds -- like missing limbs -- many have brain injuries as well.

Sims, who's fifty-one, was lucky. Severe brain injuries like his can kill or leave victims permanently disabled. But Sims is recovering -- though he'll probably never pilot a plane again.

Brain injury survivors can benefit from a growing understanding of how much a damaged brain can heal. A damaged brain can forge new neural connections to replace those destroyed by a blast, a bullet or a concussion. But that process doesn't always happen spontaneously.

So brain injury survivors like Sims often need special care to spur the growth of those connections -- and to help them recover speech or other functions they may have lost.

We asked Sims to help us reconstruct his recovery, and the long road back that brain injury patients travel.

After his accident on April 4, 2003, Sims was flown to a combat field hospital -- then on to a U.S. Navy hospital ship anchored in the Persian Gulf. Neurosurgeons operated to stem bleeding in his brain.

JOHN SIMS: My wife got the word from the doctor that, hey, you know, he's got this, that, and he's broken this and that, and, you know, our prognosis is that he'll be dead in the next day or two.

SUSAN DENTZER: But on April 21, still alive and in a coma, Sims was brought here, to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. It's the home of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center -- a network of military, veterans' and community programs. Dr. Deborah Warden, the center's director, says it was created with three goals in mind.

DR. DEBORAH WARDEN: One was to provide care for the injured person, the soldier, the veteran, to provide clinical research, the understanding about what is the appropriate care to give, and also to give focused educational interventions to the survivors and to their family members as well.

SUSAN DENTZER: We asked Warden to show us how Sims's brain had been injured in the crash. She told Sims that he'd suffered a "closed" brain injury. That's different from a penetrating head wound, in which the skull and protective tissue around the brain are pierced.

But Warden explained that these closed injuries can still be devastating. Since the brain floats within the skull, it moves at a different pace from the skull under the extraordinary forces of a crash. The brain can also twist around on the much smaller brain stem.

Together, those movements stretched Sims's brain and its billions of neurons, or brain cells. Communication fibers that make up part of the neurons were stretched or chopped in two -- like a garden hose sliced down the middle, Warden said.

Among other things, those injuries impaired Sims's so- called executive functions. Those are the abilities to organize one's thoughts and work.

DR. DEBORAH WARDEN: There was also some localized, or what we call focal injury to this part, the left front temporal area.

SUSAN DENTZER: That's the area of the brain that involves speech. Sims's brain was badly bruised there and had bled inside the skull.

Sims spent two weeks in this hospital ward at Walter Reed, most of them in a coma. He told Warden that he remembered nothing of that period.

JOHN SIMS: My memory cuts out about a day before the accident. I remember the day before pretty well, but I don't remember briefing for the mission, I don't remember preparing for the mission, I don't remember anything of the mission. The other pilot that I was flying with, neither one of us remembers exactly which one of us was flying the airplane at the time of the accident.

SUSAN DENTZER: By early May of last year, Sims had emerged from his coma and ready to start rehabilitation. He was transferred to the McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond, another institution in the brain injury network.

Dr. Timothy Silver, McGuire's chief of physical and rehabilitative medicine, told us Sims was in an agitated state typical of brain injury patients.

DR. TIMOTHY SILVER: They don't really understand what's going on to them and why folks are gathering around them, and their threshold for stimulation is very low. If you come in and you turn the lights on, they may use foul language or whatever, you know, agitated type reflexive behavior will come out of them.

SUSAN DENTZER: Clinical nurse specialist Marian Baxter told us Sims also experienced post-traumatic stress -- including flashbacks to the crash.

MARIAN BAXTER: If you ask John now, he couldn't tell you what happened in the accident. But when he first came to us in this agitated phase, he was crying out about the helicopter, and about the accident, and trying to save people, and it definitely was not usual.

SUSAN DENTZER: During our return visit to the VA, speech pathologist Micaela Cornis-Pop told Sims that the bruise on his brain left him with an inability to understand or formulate language.

MICAELA CORNIS-POP: You were trying to tell me a word or sometimes a whole sentence, but you were not really aware that you were only using the sounds of English and not necessarily the words of English. You might have picked up this orange and said it was an orange, or you might have told me "tum," or something that was not an English word at all."

SUSAN DENTZER: Sims has no memory of that period. So Cornis-Pop showed him the exercises he performed to help him recover his speech and thinking skills.

MICAELA CORNIS-POP: Like John, will you please show me where the clock is - show me the clock -- very good - and show me the cookies -- very good.

SUSAN DENTZER: Sims's VA caregivers told us that, by the time seven weeks had passed, he was a new person. His memory had returned and his speech was close to normal.

By the end of June, Sims was well enough to leave the VA but not to return home. So he came here, to Charlottesville, Virginia, to stay in a group home like this one with other brain-injured patients. The home is part of Virginia NeuroCare, a community-reentry program that was Sims's last stop on the Defense and Veterans' Brain Injury Network.

Sims also worked part-time in a used bookstore Virginia NeuroCare operates to help patients recover thinking and work skills.

JOHN SIMS: It's our job to come in here, locate the book, get it out. We bag it up, you know, fill out the proper shipping paperwork, and then, you know, have one of the supervisors check it and take it down to the post office to have it moved off.

SUSAN DENTZER: Sims explained why that was good therapy for him.

JOHN SIMS: After you've been in a hospital for a while, being treated for a while, being able to get into a situation and be controlled, even if it's a minor thing like getting a book on the shelf, doing that for the afternoon left you with a basic positive feeling about the way the day went.

SUSAN DENTZER: Sims needed any positive feelings he could muster. Dr. Daniel Slater, his physician at Virginia NeuroCare, told us Sims was depressed. He prescribed Zoloft, an antidepressant.

DR. DANIEL SLATER: Some say as high as 60 percent of our patients have depression. It's pretty natural to think where is my life going after I leave this place, after such a huge change.

JOHN SIMS: I had miserable feelings when I first got here because I didn't know exactly what was happening. I had spent my entire adult life working in flying and, you know, because of my injury I was permanently grounded, and I didn't know what condition I'd be under, you know, lifestyle or income or anything like that, or what I would do for continuing or replacement employment or anything like that.

SUSAN DENTZER: Sims finally left Virginia NeuroCare last December and came home to northern Virginia. His wife, Violeta, left for Europe soon after to care for her sick mother.

Now, fifteen months after the crash, Sims feels grateful for having survived.

JOHN SIMS: When I run into people that I used to work with in the airline I say, 'Hey, I got my ticket. And I opened it up and the destination was a crash. But I got a little coupon that went along with it that says, 'Hey, you get to go home anyway.' So to me, that's a winner.

SUSAN DENTZER: For now, Sims is retired and temporarily living on three-quarters of his former pay. He still has trouble remembering names, and performing the math that, as a pilot, he once did routinely in his head. He's looking for a new job, but so far hasn't had much success.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight: Shields and Safire, and the science of the small.

FOCUS - SHIELDS & SAFIRE

JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist William Safire. David Brooks is on vacation. Mark, first these two reports on pre-war intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The Senate Intelligence Committee and then later this week the one in Britain. What effect, if any, are they having on the presidential race?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I'm not sure what the British report will have, Jim, because it basically said nobody was responsible. They didn't finger anybody. The Senate was a little bit different because the senators all have to defend their own vote, and so their own reputations and their own records are at stake, the most serious vote that any of them will probably cast, that is the decision to send Americans into battle. So you see them... it's having an effect already in the sense of senators changing their own positions, saying if they'd had this at the beginning. And I was quite struck this week by the Economist Magazine, that had strongly supported the war. And it's become increasingly disenchanted -- it had on its cover a picture of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair called "sincere deceivers" and reported in there...

JIM LEHRER: They're accusing them of being the deceivers... not the deceivees

MARK SHIELDS: No. That's the deceivers because they took their country to war on information that most people in America, the United States, now believe was false and 70 percent blame the CIA for the misinformation, but 60 percent blame the White House. It's not good.

JIM LEHRER: You agree this is not good for President Bush?

WILLIAM SAFIRE: No. I read it quite differently, which is why we're here together. The lead in the story, the substance of the Senate report is that nobody cooked the books, that the White House did not pressure and the Pentagon did not pressure the CIA to change their evaluations to fit preconceived policy -- just the opposite. The Democrats in Congress who voted for the war voted on the same information that the White House had and Tony Blair had. And they made perhaps some misjudgments and had some facts that weren't quite facts, but this was their best judgment. And what you have to then take into consideration is, having made their best judgment, for the last ten years, the Senate Oversight Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, after doing nothing to improve things or to actually be a good, tough oversight committee, comes up with a report, 511 pages, saying it's been terrible over there. And, of course, we knew nothing about it.

JIM LEHRER: Over there meaning the CIA?

WILLIAM SAFIRE: The CIA and the whole intelligence community. So that's kind of a condemnation of the congressional oversight, as well. In terms of political fallout, I don't think people are going to think, gee, they lied to us at the White House. I think people are going to say, hey, this is the information they got, and they acted on it.

JIM LEHRER: Sen. Roberts, Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas,was on here the day this report came out, and he, with Sen. Rockefeller, who is the vice chairman of the Democrats, and Sen. Roberts said, Mark, that he expected President Bush to show real anger about this because he was... the information that he got was wrong. Have you detected any of that?

MARK SHIELDS: I haven't, Jim. What I found interesting this week is the president, who kept emphasizing that Saddam was a bad guy and he should have been removed, was... that's really become the mantra. And the problem is that the president, people don't doubt his sincerity; they question his credibility. But where I disagree with Bill is the United States is less respected, more feared, more isolated with diminished credibility in the world than it was two years ago tonight as a direct consequence of going to war. It's the most fateful decision that a president asks a country to do, and this president did. He made the case. He made it with what has turned out to be flawed, faulty and false information.

JIM LEHRER: Have you been surprised, Bill, that President Bush hasn't got upset or hasn't expressed annoyance with the Central Intelligence Agency, the intelligence community, for giving him bad information?

WILLIAM SAFIRE: He played it cool, but what really turns me on, both about the Senate Intelligence Committee Report and the Butler Report in Britain is the yellow cake myth. Sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel. You remember the most important single blast that came at the president for misleading us into war was about the purchase or the attempted purchase of uranium from Niger, this yellow cake story that was in the president's state of the union address: 16 words, you know. Well, what happened? Now we look at this, and you remember Joe Wilson was on the air and on Meet the Press and all over the New York Times and every place castigating the government for misleading people on this so-called seeking uranium. Well, now we know that both the Senate Intelligence Committee, which goes into pages and pages of detail, and the Butler Report say, yep, the president, what he said, those 16 words were true, that the British had indeed learned that...

JIM LEHRER: We're going to have a segment on that with Wilson and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday, but do you think that's of overriding importance on this?

MARK SHIELDS: Jim, the president apologized for the 16 words. Now he's going to apologize for the apology, I guess, and so did George Tenet and the CIA apologized for its being in the state of the union. What you can't ignore here is the warning the president had from some or the smartest, most experienced and most battle-savvy generals, and that was that we would be the first western, Christian, pro-Israeli invading an occupying army of a Muslim holy land. I don't know what part of that Don Rumsfeld and George Bush didn't understand. But they just went right through the stop sign. And we are paying for it today. I mean, the hatred for the United States in the Muslim world has increased exponentially, and the deterioration. So I mean politically there's no way that this is... I don't think it's a big winner for the Democrats, but it's a big loser for George W. Bush.

JIM LEHRER: What about this other point, Bill, that both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have said it really doesn't matter whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction, going back to this issue of weapons of mass destruction, it really doesn't matter because Saddam Hussein was an evil man and we should have got rid of him anyhow? Is that the reason they're not upset, and do you agree with that, with that justification?

WILLIAM SAFIRE: No, they had several justifications. And the word "justification" is loaded. I would say reasons for going to war. Will you go with me on that?

MARK SHIELDS: I'll wait till your Sunday column on that - "justification " --

WILLIAM SAFIRE: Because I think the reasons we had to go to war, not only to stop this monster, who was killing tens of thousands of people every year in Iraq, many more than were killed since the war, but who was also connected with al-Qaida as the Senate report shows and as the 9/11 Commission will report - will detail. And if we can change that 50-year downward drift that's been happening in the Middle East, and if we can establish some kind of beginnings of democracy in one of the most important countries there, that can change the tide of terrorism. And, for that reason, we went to war, and I think history will judge we did the right thing.

MARK SHIELDS: That isn't the reason we went to war. We went to war because we were told that he had chemical, biological and was making nuclear weapons and represented a real threat to the United States. Jim, the war leaves nothing unchanged. It leaves people... people are changed, relationships are changed between people, among countries. And one major change in this is that the president's cherished doctrine of preemption. No President will be able to go to the American people in the future and say, we have to go to war on a preemptive strike and face anything but a skeptical Congress and a skeptical American public because of what has happened in this experience with Iraq. And we are told that he had this armaments, this army, the plans to do all these things. I still disagree strenuously with Bill that there was collusion and cooperation and all of this effort that Saddam had any involvement in 9/11. That has certainly not been proved. And the al-Qaida thing is tenuous at best, so, you know, we could argue about this, but it has changed American domestic politics.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: Well, you see where John Kerry just today and recently has been talking about there may be a time for preemptive war. He's backing away from dovishness, from your dovishness, Mark. I think he's asserting, you know, he uses the word "values" every single sentence. And one of the values -

MARK SHIELDS: He use values in every sentence? What's that got to do?

WILLIAM SAFIRE: That doesn't mean you have values. And in foreign affairs one of the values is an aggressive stand against terror. And that's why I think the -- a central campaign that we have is going to be on which candidate will best protect the United States in the next four years.

MARK SHIELDS: Well, the central value, before any policy, is that a leader be trusted with and level with the American people, and that did not happen in this case, and the American people do not feel they were leveled with. That's the reason that their support for this war is eroding and eroding on a regular and predictable...

WILLIAM SAFIRE: -- the report you just asked us about -- arguing just the opposite, that they were acting on the basis of the best information they had.

MARK SHIELDS: The best information was flawed information. You have an absolute --

WILLIAM SAFIRE: So what information do you act on?

MARK SHIELDS: -- you have the reliance of the citizen to trust your leadership, they're in a position, a position that most citizens don't have available to them to, find out things. And this president came and told the country all sorts of things about Iraq which have proved to be untrue. And whether it was a potential sale in Niger and 16 words that were taken out ought to be put back in is hardly vindication and excuse or justification for that war.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: But nobody is looking at those newly found words and newly found facts.

MARK SHIELDS: You are.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: You bet I am. I'm doing my best. I think what we'll see is a decision on the basis of who can best protect the country.

JIM LEHRER: Quick question before we go, if I may: This vote this week in the Senate on the same-sex marriage thing, was that an important event?

WILLIAM SAFIRE: I frankly think that was a stunt that the Republicans pulled, and maybe it will help in some states, but I think of the cartoon that Mike Peters had in the Detroit paper, you know how Edwards and Kerry have been hugging each other and squeezing each other's arms and patting each other's cheek? And pictures of that all over the place - and the caption on this was, I think the issue is should we have same-sex rung mates.

JIM LEHRER: How do you feel, the politics of this vote? We remind people the Senate didn't even get past cloture so there was no vote... or they didn't get to a majority - but it is going to hurt the Democrats is what the Republicans --

MARK SHIELDS: You know, I think it was intended to hurt the Democrats. Jim, this is a big issue election. This is an election about war and peace, it's an election about jobs, it's about people losing their insurance, not being able to afford health insurance, about employers not funding employees' pensions. It's all of these things. It's not... this is an issue that was intended to divide the Democrats, ended up dividing the Republicans. More Republicans divided - the point where it divided the vice president's own home. Mrs. Cheney endorsed the position the vice president had taken four years ago. Leave it to the states - and the vice president switched, flip-flopped I guess you'd say, and endorsed a constitutional amendment --

JIM LEHRER: Use that term. We have to go. Thank you both.

FOCUS - SMALL SCIENCE

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, a science unit report about the cutting edge field called nanotechnology. Jeffrey Brown reports.

SPOKESMAN: Oh, it's like a slow-motion beach ball.

JEFFREY BROWN: It's not every day you get to play catch with a molecule, and not every day you get a top scientist to play along.

JIM GIMZEWSKI: If we just go like this, right, it doesn't move like a soccer ball. But if we exert force, we can distort the molecule.

JEFFREY BROWN: At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently, Scottish-born Jim Gimzewski tried to explain nanotechnology, the science of manipulating materials at the scale of a nanometer, the distance between a few atoms. Building a new world from the smallest particles up is something scientists have been struggling with for over 40 years, since Nobel physicist Richard Feynman challenged them to invent new techniques to work at a scale then impossible. Each of these soccer ball shapes, part of an exhibition called "Nano," represents a single carbon-60 molecule, named a "buckyball" for Buckminster Fuller. In reality, a buckyball is far too small to see.

JIM GIMZEWSKI: Push back, yeah. You're getting good at it.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hey, yeah.

JIM GIMZEWSKI: It's a kind of dancing process. Okay, and if we go together, we can push...

JEFFREY BROWN: What have we just done?

JIM GIMZEWSKI: What we've done is flattened a buckyball.

JEFFREY BROWN: ( Laughs ) It's the first time I've ever done that.

JEFFREY BROWN: In Gimzewski's lab at UCLA, the equipment is more complicated; the labor more intensive. But the idea of prodding and poking molecules and atoms is the same, and research into this science of the small is suddenly very big-- hundreds of universities and companies around the world and a $3.7 billion initiative by the federal government recently signed by President Bush. Nanotechnology's promise: New materials and new devices that could one day lead to advances in health care, architecture, space travel; in theory, pretty much everything.

JIM GIMZEWSKI: Imagine you could arrange atoms anyway you wanted, all the way up to a thing, okay? And this thing could be anything. Okay, how do you, with your human imagination, cope with that? What do you design? What do you make? It has this tremendous possibility for creativity like we have never known before.

JEFFREY BROWN: The word "nano" comes from the Greek work for dwarf. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, approximately 80,000 times thinner than a human hair. In order to manipulate matter this small, nanoscientists, chemists like Gimzewski but also physicists, biologists, and others, use amazing-looking equipment. This one, called a "Scanning Tunneling Microscope," or STM, was built by Gimzewski and his team. It can't actually see the nanoparticles. Instead, it feels them, and moves them around with an atomic size probe.

JIM GIMZEWSKI: The image we see here is the tip of the microscope, which is about twice the thickness of your hair, the large part. And then the very sharp part terminates in one atom.

JEFFREY BROWN: The key to nanotechnology-- and this is perhaps hardest of all to understand-- is that, at this scale, particles behave differently than at the mass scale we live our lives in. For nano-objects, the relative amount of surface atoms is much greater than for a larger object, and those surface atoms act upon, and change, each other constantly. Gimzewski explains the nature of the nano-world using two tennis balls.

JIM GIMZEWSKI: This ball does not know about this ball unless they collide. And this picture is something that emerges from Newton, you know, Newton's laws of motion. Basically, the model of industry, the industrial model we use is off this type of interaction-- gears, even electronics is based on, more or less, a model like this. Now, in the world of shrinking these balls then, some 100 million times or so, where they become atoms, this atom would know about the presence of this atom.

JEFFREY BROWN: You mean it would feel it.

JIM GIMZEWSKI: It would feel it already remotely at long distance. And essentially, the properties of this atom, okay, would be changing just by the proximity of this atom.

JEFFREY BROWN: Until now, scientists have not been able to exploit these properties and shape, or reshape, the world at the molecular level; now, they're learning how. You keep talking about the mechanical properties, the sort of new way of building. You're really a builder.

JIM GIMZEWSKI: Yes, yes, I'm a builder, a builder on this very small scale. And I would say that if you look at science and technology up until this point, people have been concerned with electrons, you know, electricity, computer chips. People have been concerned with light, lasers. The mechanical world of the atoms has not been accessible to them. So it's a brand-new field, and it's amazing that you can by very gentle forces generate new structures.

JEFFREY BROWN: Nano processes and materials have already shown up in some early consumer products. A company called Nanotex created pants that are treated with a thin molecular layer to be stain resistant. They're sold through Eddie Bauer and other clothing companies. Sunclean Windows self clean through nanotechnology. The glass breaks down organic dirt and provides a sheathing action on contact with water, flushing the surface clean. But that's kid stuff compared to what could one day be done with carbon nanotubes, carbon atoms arranged in the form of hexagons and rolled up into tubes that are very long and very thin-- one nanometer in diameter. Gimzewski showed us a large- scale model.

JIM GIMZEWSKI: They have amazing mechanical properties in terms of strength. They're stronger than steel and lighter than steel. In addition, just the very form suggests of a probe, a tip. We know we can open the ends of these tubes, we can put material into them. You could think of this to be the smallest syringe needles in the world.

JEFFREY BROWN: So much of what we're talking about really is the stuff of science fiction.

JIM GIMZEWSKI: Yes, and one of the reasons for that is that science as such doesn't have a language really to describe nanotechnology. So, to a certain extent, scientists borrow from science fiction, and science fiction borrows from, you know, nanoscience.

JEFFREY BROWN: Do you mean that scientists are in fact groping for ways to describe what they're doing?

JIM GIMZEWSKI: Yes, very much so.

JEFFREY BROWN: If scientists are groping, how are the rest of us to understand this alternate universe, something we can't even see? One way is through art. At the "Nano" exhibition at the LA County Museum of Art, a team of scientists, including Gimzewski, curators, architects, and artists have tried to let visitors see what life feels like at nanoscale. On the day we visited, fifth graders on a field trip crawled inside a kaleidoscope, ran through a quantum tunnel, and built their own 3-D crystals.

JEFFREY BROWN: Are you feeling kind of dizzy?

STUDENT: Yeah.

JEFFREY BROWN: Artist and UCLA Professor Victoria Vesna says that nanoscience requires some major rethinking in many aspects of life.

VICTORIA VESNA: If you look at some of the images of the atoms and molecules that they teach our kids in school, it all looks like this plastic, 3-D, rigid world, which it's not. It's all in flux and motion-- particles, waves. So I've really started questioning that. And I truly believe that this new science needs a new form of art to interrelate and to project and move people into a new way of thinking about the world we live in.

JEFFREY BROWN: In one exhibit, Vesna worked with Tibetan monks and the UCLA Lab to make a Buddhist Mandala sand painting, and bring viewers literally inside one grain of sand.

VICTORIA VESNA: First we went with a regular microscope, where you see these boulders appearing. Then we go beyond the color scheme into this grain of sand, and then you're down to particles and waves.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, this is literally the grain of sand containing a whole world.

VICTORIA VESNA: That's right, as William Blake said a long time ago. He said it as a poet, but now we're actually experiencing it through science and art together.

JIM GIMZEWSKI: It's all about understanding and manipulating complexity on more and more levels. And then to tell you the truth, we're at a fairly low level in that process, at the moment. But give us twenty, thirty years, who knows where we'll be.

JEFFREY BROWN: In the shorter term, Gimzewski and other scientists are concerned that nanotechnology is being over hyped and oversold to investors. And there are other potentially bigger concerns. Some critics, including a group called the Foresight Institute, have raised environmental and ethical questions about the potential for unintended consequences when we change the world at the molecular level. In his latest novel, "Prey," best-selling author Michael Crighton even posits a world in which nanorobots run amok, beyond man's control.

As these issues begin to receive more attention, Jim Gimzewski says scientists have a responsibility to explain to the public what they're doing as they go forward. For now, he'll continue his own cautious dance to the promise of nano's future.

JIM LEHRER: "Nano," the art exhibit, runs through Sept. 6 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For a slide show of that and a forum with experts, and much more on nanotechnology, please visit our web site at pbs.org.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: And, again, the major developments of this day: Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison for lying about a stock deal. And at least 84 children died in a school fire in southern India; more than 20 others were hurt. A reminder: Washington Week can be seen on most PBS stations later this evening. We'll see you online and again here Monday evening. Have a nice weekend. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.