The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MacNeil: Good evening. Leading the news this Wednesday, Czech Pres. Vaclav Havel urged the U.S. to help the Soviet Union carry out its democratic reform, the U.S. condemned China for human rights abuses and consumer prices last month posted their biggest increase in more than seven years. We'll have details in our News Summary in a moment. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: After the News Summary, former [NEWS MAKER] West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt discusses the reunification of Germany, we have excerpts from Czech Pres. Vaclav Havel's speech to Congress [FOCUS - SPECIAL SPEAKER], Assistant Secretary of State Richard Schifter [FOCUS - INHUMAN TREATMENT] the new State Department human rights report, and we close with a Tom Bearden report [FOCUS - SOFTWARE SAFETY] on the vulnerability of sophisticated of computer software. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. LEHRER: Vaclav Havel spoke to the U.S. Congress today about democracy and the family of man. The President of Czechoslovakia addressed a joint session of the House and Senate. He was greeted by several standing ovations. He said he is often asked what the United States can do for Czechoslovakia.

PRESIDENT VACLAV HAVEL, Czechoslovakia: [Speaking through Interpreter] My reply is as paradoxical as the whole of my life as has been. You can help us most of all if you help the Soviet Union on its irreversible but immensely complicated role to democracy. I can only say that the sooner, the more quickly and the more peacefully the Soviet Union begins to move along the road towards genuine political plurality, respect for the rights of the nations through their own integrity, and through a working that is a market economy, the better it will be not just for Czechs and Slovaks, but for the whole world.

MR. LEHRER: Havel goes to Moscow on Monday for talks with Pres. Gorbachev about removing Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia. We'll have further excerpts from today's speech after the News Summary. Robin.

MR. MacNeil: In Moscow today, the Supreme Soviet considered a proposal that would increase the power of the presidency, the post Mikhail Gorbachev holds along with his position as Communist Party leader. We have a report from Moscow by Tim Yuert of Independent Television News.

MR. YUERT: Critics charge the proposed changes will give Mr. Gorbachev the powers of an American president without any of the constitutional restraints. His supporters argue that at the moment he has virtually no executive power at a time when the country is in crisis and its system of government is being reconstructed. They insist that it is not a step towards authoritarian rule.

NIKOLAI SHISHLIN, Central Committee Member: I don't think that in your system of our democracy our president will be a dictator. That's simply impossible now. They are going to a multi-party system.

MR. YUERT: Nevertheless, it's proposed parliament, not the people should pick the new president, and that he'll serve several years before a general election. All this comes at a time of intense pressure for the Kremlin. Soviet soldiers were today still imposing a state of emergency in Tadzhikistan, searching cars and collecting an alarming array of weapons. It's claimed that the president must have the authority to respond more decisively to the growing threat of disorder.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. Gorbachev had some cautious words about German reunification today. In an interview published in the Soviet newspaper Pravda, Mr. Gorbachev said the Germans do have a right to unity, but he stressed that the Soviet Union "has an inalienable right to expect that the possibility to exert efforts to ensure that our country should not sustain either moral or political or economic damage from German reunification."

MR. LEHRER: The U.S. State Department issued its annual report on human rights today. It had words of praise for the Soviet Union but criticism for China. Asst.Secretary of State Richard Schifter spoke to a House Committee about the China situation.

RICHARD SCHIFTER, Assistant Secretary of State: While we witnessed progress on the human rights front in Eastern Europe in 1989, we noted regression in China. As our report shows, the killings in Lsasa and Beijing were only the first step. The crackdown that followed put into reverse in very short order much of the significant movement toward a more open society which had taken place in China during the last 10 years.

MR. LEHRER: The report also had criticism for Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Nicaragua and Iraq were also criticized. Sec. Schifter will be with us for a News Maker interview after the News Summary.

MR. MacNeil: Inflation took its biggest jump in more than seven years last month. Consumer prices went up 1.1 percent in January. The bulk of the increase was caused by higher energy and food costs largely the result of December's cold weather, which reduced heating oil supplies and destroyed many crops. Concerns about higher interest rates caused a big drop on the Tokyo stock market today. The Nikkei Stock Average fell more than 3 percent, its third biggest single day loss ever. That drop combined with today's inflation news sent Wall Street's Dow Jones Average down 30 points early in the morning, but the Dow recovered slightly, to close with a loss of 13 points. There was another bit of inflation news from Wall Street today. This one involved executive bonuses. Drexel Burnham Lambert confirmed that it paid out more than $300 million in bonuses just weeks before its parent company filed for bankruptcy. Some top executives reportedly received more than $10 million each.

MR. LEHRER: And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, Vaclav Havel before Congress, human rights around the world, and computer software. NEWS MAKER

MR. MacNeil: We begin tonight with the German story and the thoughts of Helmut Schmidt about the latest steps toward German unity. A week ago at a meeting in Ottawa representatives of the two Germanies and the four World War II allies agreed on a procedure for planning Germanies future. Under the terms of the so called two plus four plan East and West Germany will discuss internal aspects of their eventual reunification and then the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain and France will deal with external security issues. Since the accord was announced West German and American Officials have said that reunification might occur by the end of the year. but others have sounded more cautious. East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow has criticized West Germany for rushing the pace of unification. Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze said despite the two plus four accord German reunification should be handled by a conference of 35 European and Atlantic nations. Yesterday Soviet President Gorbachev threw in more qualifiers saying the Soviet Union had an inalienable right to make sure reunification did not hurt his country which lost 20 million people in World War II. And today Poland's Premier held a news conference to appeal for a place at the negotiating table saying his country is opposed to any plan that might change its post World War II boundaries. We turn now to Helmut Schmidt the Social Democrat who was Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982. I talked with him late this afternoon. Mr. Schmidt thank you for joining us. Chancellor Kohl campaigns for the election in East Germany as though the two Germanies were already one. Are you as optimistic as he is that it can go through quickly and with out to much fuss?

HELMUT SCHMIDT, Former Chancellor, West Germany: There will be a lot of fuss but the Unification already is underway. Last year we go an influx in West Germany which is a country the size of Oregon but 62 million living in that little territory. We got an influx of about 1 million. Right now we have about 4000 Germans from the East every day. If this goes on it will be another million in the course of 1990 and therefore any West German Government and Chancellor has to see to the way to quickly improve the economic and social circumstance in East Germany to create confidence in the Germans there to stay at home and work for the improvement. Improvement will take about ten years it may take a little longer. The infrastructure is very poor and the environment is worn down and productivity is very low. So they need a lot of private investment in the factories and they need a lot of public investment in infrastructure, telephone system, road system, air traffic, railways systems and so on. It will take time.

MR. MacNeil: Suppose there is legal reunification some time after the East German elections. Will that prevent East Germans from wanting to move to West Germany still where there is a higher standard of living to be attained.

MR. SCHMIDT: The standard of living will be higher for some time to come. The legal side of it is not that important. All that is important is that they can tangibly feel that economic improvement for them is underway. This is more important then legal unification.

MR. MacNeil: Let's talk about the external reality that so concerns many of Germany's neighbors right now. Mr. Shevardnadze said that it can't happen, he said this yesterday, it can't happen as they think in Bonn. It requires several years to bring about. What is your view of that?

MR. SCHMIDT: Well Shevardnadze, of course, has technical considerations in the back of his mind and this is not the only one to gain time but basically I think that it will take some time but the legal side of that is not so important. For the Germans the economic side is the most important. They are convinced the unification will happen. So am I. The security side of it is very important. I mean what is the favor of Soviet troops in East Germany. They have 350,000 troops there. They have already agreed to pull out of Czechoslovakia, to pull out of Hungary, they still have 40,000 troops in Poland, 350,000 in East Germany. Obviously Shevardnadze and Mr. Baker have agreed to reduce to 195,000 and 195,000 on the American side as well but this leads of course to the necessity to rethink the security status of a unified Germany. First it was Baker, Secretary Baker first talked of getting the unified Germany as a member of NATO, all of it. If I was a Soviet representative I wouldn't accept.

MR. MacNeil: And yet the Bonn Government has promised that. That is its official approach to reunification.

MR. SCHMIDT: Not really the Bonn Government has been a little cloudy and foggy on that one. I think that the Bonn Government thinks that a unified Germany should be a member of the North Atlantic Alliance but the territory on which the Atlantic Alliance has pledged defense should not be extended beyond the present territory of West German.

MR. MacNeil: Which the Americans have a accepted too. Baker has accepted that too.

MR. SCHMIDT: They have revised that yes.

MR. MacNeil: I read a poll last week that said 9 out of 10 West Germans want a neutral Germany. What is to prevent that reality bubbling up through West German politics when the two countries are united and a United Germanies Parliament voting to have a neutral?

MR. SCHMIDT: It will not happen.

MR. MacNeil: It will not happen?

MR. SCHMIDT: No the major parties in West Germany are strictly against neutrality, I am against neutrality as well, and it will not happen. I doubt this poll 9 to 1. I doubt. I have heard about it, I doubt it. It is an uneducated attitude of the nation after so many modern tenures in which they have been made afraid of nuclear war. They have thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons on German soil, West German soil, East German soil. There are more nuclear weapons on the soil of that little Germany then are on the soil of vast United States of America. So this anxiety about nuclear war is still in the minds of people and they believe that if they declare neutrality they would not have a worry about the nuclear war threat. Now I think that is an uneducated attitude. We have to see to it that they become educated.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. Mazowiecki, the Polish Solidarity Prime Minister said that there shouldn't be reunification before there is a peace treaty signed and if it is just a peace treaty signed with Poland to cement legally the Post War Border of East Germany. How would that go over in Germany?

MR. SCHMIDT: Well it depends. Number one I think that he is right. Mazowiecki is right and the Polish nation has a right to ask for a legal cementation of the presently existing border. And I think that if you put this to a vote to a referendum Germany would get a 9 to one majority for that. Secondly I very much wonder whether you need a peace treaty for that because a peace treaty opens up a host of personal questions, property questions, citizenship questions and others. If you bother to look at the peace treaty of Versailles you will get a book from the Library and I am a little bit worried that 45 years after the end of the war that one should again look into property questions and parts that formerly were Germany and now are Russian or now days are Polish. Former Germans very well know American Citizens, Canadian Citizens coming back to Europe and suing for their former property. This all would have to be settled in a peace treaty. I think that one should leave it alone and a lesson for the rest of history.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. Gorbachev also raised the issue of a peace treaty saying that it was the only way to legalize the situation but he also said that the Soviet Union, to use his words, had an inalienable right to guarantees that Germany , a united larger Germany would not harm the Soviet Union, politically, economically, militarily. Does he have that inalienable right in view of the history?

MR. SCHMIDT: The World inalienable he has taken from the Federalist papers of the United States more than 200 years ago, the constitutional debate in America in order to impress the American public. I don't think that he has an inalienable right but he has a legitimate Soviet security interest to pursue. Until a couple of years ago they thought by having Berlin, they had a foothold in the center of Europe and they regarded all the territory between the Eastern Border of the Federal Republic in the West and the Western Border of the Soviet Union as their security. Now they have already agreed to retreat their troops from Hungary, from Czechoslovakia and they have already agreed to almost cut their troops in East Germany in to half. From 350,000 down to 195,000. They still will I think help and negotiate for keeping their troops there. Now I have nothing against it. I think in the course of let us say ten years time, may be 15, maybe shorter than 10 years they will nevertheless retreat their troops because they become sort of speak hostages of the German population. Already today they are hostages, they must not leave their barracks and if they did they have no money to buy even a beer. They are very poor people these Soviet soldiers and they lead a very uncomfortable life. They can not maintain for ever. On the other hand they will claim that if their troops are leaving then also American, British, French troops ought to be leaving and I think that they can be reduced. America has to regard herself a European power as well as a power of the Western sub hemisphere.

MR. MacNeil: How do you feel as a German and after 40 years as a fully fledged democracy some many years which you lead that the prospect of your country being reunited arouses so much mistrust, anxiety, fear or whatever?

MR. SCHMIDT: Well this was to be foreseen. I just finished a book which will come out in the course of the summer and I used 5 years to write it. A book on the Germans and all their neighbors and the book is trying to educate the Germans to understand what the concerns of the Poles are of the Danes, of the Slovaks of the Dutch, of the French. It is easy to understand because the unified Germany will be a country of between 76 and 80 million people and the next largest people in Europe except the Russians are the Brits or the French or the Italians are 55 or 56. The Dutch are just 16. It is a small country. The Belgium are even less. So in the middle of Europe you have this huge German nations which already today is the most productive industrially. It has the greatest surpluses in the current account. By the way a silly surplus. And they are afraid of that enormous economic power.

MR. MacNeil: But why does economic power, I mean, after 40 years of impeccable democratic institutions translate psychologically in a threat of military power.

MR. SCHMIDT: This is a question you should have asked from a Danish Guest not from a German one. But it must translate into anxiety their concern. Economic power means power today in the absence of military conflict. Japan is an economic power of sorts an economic super power and you are afraid in the United States this economic power of Japan. So some Europeans are concerned about the future economic power. We will be able to bring East Germany up to our standard, standards of living wise and so on. And the remedy for that concern is a strongly involving of the united Germany in to the European Community the EEC.

MR. MacNeil: You are just publishing a book here which completed a couple of years ago and published in Germany in which you envision a kind of tri polar world at the end, at your conclusion in the end, that the United States, China and the Soviet Union. How much have recent events transformed your view?

MR. SCHMIDT: Not really.

MR. MacNeil: Not really?

MR. SCHMIDT: The Soviet Union is weakening and it might very well happen that Gorbachev for whom I have great respect as regards his intelligence and courage might fail and might be replaced. This can happen. Nevertheless even if the Soviet Union gets under some form of dictatorship again, even if they lose their Western Republics like Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania which they have conquered after the last World war. Even if they lose their Islamic Republics in the South and so on even then the Russians will remain an enormous power and they will remain to be a nuclear strategic super power. They have been a European power since at least 300 years and they will remain to be a super power for the foreseeable future and great deep in to the next century. But your mentioning of three powers leads me to mention which I wrote in that Book, Man and Powers is the title that Japan has almost become a super power today in the economic sense the financial sense. It is the financial powerhouse of the World with the greatest savings, the greatest capital formation, the greatest export of capital and product and I hope that the European Community the EEC will also become an economic power of that same order of magnitude. I hope this for several reasons because it is too late in human history for these 33 European nations states each of them to go it alone. We are too close to each other. We have to combine our resources, intelligence our abilities. We anyway are one culture since the Renaissance. The Renaissance was the first cultural movement which spreads all over European and also it brought the era of enlightenment and classicism and all of that and we need to be able to economically stand up as one and not as 12 right now or 33 if you count all the others. But to talk about 33 reminds me of the fact that the Helsinki Conference of 1975, 15 years ago embraced 35 States namely also the United States of America and Canada and Brezhnev in his time did not object to the fact that the United States and Canada were participating as if they were purely Europe Empires and I think that it was wise of him to do that and I think that it would be silly now voluntarily for the United States to leave Europe and thereby open up a situation in which the balance of Power might not be easy to keep in the future. It needs the United States of America in Europe to maintain the balance of power. It does not necessitate that you have 200 or 300 thousand troops there but some.

MR. MacNeil: Alright Mr. Schmidt thank you for joining us.

MR. LEHRER: Still to come on the Newshour tonight, Havel before Congress, Human Rights around the World and vulnerable computer software. UPDATE - SPECIAL SPEAKER

MR. LEHRER: Next Vaclav Havel's Words to the Congress of the United States. Czechoslovakia's Playwright, President and Former Political Prisoner spoke to them this morning at a joint session of the House and Senate. Here is an excerpt.

PRESIDENT VACLAV HAVEL, Czechoslovakia: [Speaking through Interpreter] When they arrested me on October 27th, I was living in a country ruled by the most conservative Communist Government in Europe and our society slumbered beneath the pall of a totalitarian system. Today less than four months later I am speaking to you as the representative of a country that has set out on the road to democracy, a country where there is complete freedom of speech, which is getting ready for free elections and which wants to create a prosperous market economy and its own foreign policy. We playwrights who have to cram a whole human life or an entire historical era in a two hour play can scarcely understand this rapidity ourselves and if it gives us trouble think of the trouble it must give to political scientists who spend their whole life studying the realm of the probable and have even less experience with the realm of the improbable than us, the playwrights. This is, I'm firmly convinced, an historically irreversible process, and as a result, Europe will begin again to seek its own identity without being compelled to be a divided armor any longer. Perhaps this will create the hope that sooner or later your voice will no longer have to stand on guard for freedom in Europe or come to our rescue, because Europe will at last be able to stand guard over itself. [Applause] It is not true that the Czech writer Vaclav Havel wishes to dissolve the Warsaw Pact tomorrow and the NATO the day after that as some eager journalists have written. Vaclav Havel merely thinks what he has already said here, that for another hundred years, American soldiers shouldn't have to be separated from their mothers just because Europe is incapable of being a guarantor of world peace, which it ought to be in order to make some amends at least for having given the world two world wars. If Czechoslovakia were forced to defend itself against anyone, which we hope will not happen, then it will be capable of doing so with a considerably small army, because this time its defense would be not only after decades, but after centuries supported by the common and indivisible will of both its nations and its leadership. Our freedom, independence, and our newborn democracy have been purchased at great cost and we shall not surrender them. [Applause] For many years Czechoslovakia, a somewhat meaningless satellite, has refused to face up honestly to its co-responsibility for the world. It has a lot to make up for. If I dwell on this and so many important things, it is only because I feel along with my fellow citizens a sense of culpability for our former reprehensible passivity and a rather ordinary sense of indebtedness. What I'm trying to say is this. We must all learn many things from you, from how to educate our offspring, how to elect our representatives, all the way to how to organize our economic life so that it will lead to prosperity and not to poverty. We too can offer something to you, our experience and the knowledge that has come from it. The specific experience I'm talking about has given me one great certainty. Consciousness precedes being and not the other way around as the Marxists claim. For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility. I think that you Americans should understand this way of thinking. Wasn't it the best minds of your country, people you could call intellectuals, who wrote your famous Declaration of Independence, your Bill of Human Rights, and your Constitution, and who, above all, took upon themselves the practical responsibility for putting them into practice? They inspire us all. They inspire us despite the fact that they are over 200 years old. They inspire us to be citizens. [Applause]

PRESIDENT VACLAV HAVEL, Czechoslovakia: [Speaking English] When Thomas Jefferson wrote that governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the government, it was a simple and important act of the human spirit. What gave meaning to that act, however, was the fact that the author backed it up with his life. It was not just his words. It was his deeds as well. [Applause] I will end where I began. History has accelerated. I believe that once again it will be the human mind that will notice this acceleration, give it a name, and transform those words into deeds. Thank you. [Standing Ovation] FOCUS - INHUMAN TREATMENT

MR. LEHRER: Now the state of human rights around the world as seen by the U.S. State Department. The Department's annual report on how other nations have upheld or abused the rights of their citizens was released today. The man who released it is the man who prepared it, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Schifter. Mr. Secretary, welcome.

SEC. SCHIFTER: Very nice to be here.

MR. LEHRER: First, in general terms, are things getting better for the rights of men and women around the world?

RICHARD SCHIFTER, Assistant Secretary of State: I don't think you can generalize. We have to look at it country by country or at least region by region. Certainly as far as Eastern Europe is concerned, as we just heard from Pres. Havel of Czechoslovakia, the situation is vastly different from where we were four or five months ago, as recently as that.

MR. LEHRER: Is that where the most dramatic change, the most dramatic positive change has been, Eastern Europe?

SEC. SCHIFTER: And the Soviet Union.

MR. LEHRER: How would you characterize what's happened in the Soviet Union in the human rights area this last year?

SEC. SCHIFTER: I think we had some very remarkable changes that have to some extent not received the attention that perhaps they deserve. In many ways, the way the Soviet Union operated has significantly been altered in that power is now being transferred from the Communist Party to organs of the state and within the state for the first time in the history of the Soviet Union, the people are granted the opportunity to influence the course of events through elections. We had the election, indirect election, of the Supreme Soviet last year which in parts of the country was open and free and other parts was not, and March 4th we have coming up in most parts of the Soviet Union the election of local legislators.

MR. LEHRER: Has fear pretty much gone out of the political process?

SEC. SCHIFTER: In significant proportions. I want to say not entirely. I would say that if you get into outlying areas, it would still be a serious problem of people being concerned about what the organs of the state might do to them, but certainly in the major metropolitan areas, by and large, yes, fear is behind.

MR. LEHRER: The sharpest words or among the sharpest words in your report were for China. Things are getting worse there, are they not?

SEC. SCHIFTER: Let me put it this way. If one compares the situation since June 4th with the situation prior to that day, yes.

MR. LEHRER: June 4th being the date of the shootings at Tiananmen Square.

SEC. SCHIFTER: That's correct.

MR. LEHRER: But you have categories, killing, disappearances, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, denial of fair public trial, arbitrary interference with privacy, home, family, correspondence, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, the list goes on and on. It's, where would you place it in terms of the changes that were underway? Where has China gone back to?

SEC. SCHIFTER: It started out in 1978, '79 with a very tight totalitarian system. We certainly moved a significant distance from there in the 10 years that ended on that day. We don't know how far back they have gone. The hope still is that there will be a turnaround in the foreseeable future.

MR. LEHRER: No sign of it yet?

SEC. SCHIFTER: No.

MR. LEHRER: Then is it fair to say that the administration's policy, the two Scowcroft visits, et cetera, some other softening, the veto of the student bill, et cetera, has not worked?

SEC. SCHIFTER: One cannot really make a judgment here in terms of the developments in the short run. What we have to see is what the future is going to bring. The hope and expectation undoubtedly is that over time those that are interested in reform in China will come to the floor again and will be able to move the country forward once more.

MR. LEHRER: But the opening paragraph, which I don't have in front of him, but it was very stunning that you said essentially the people who are running the government now are the same and they are determined to pretty much keep it the way it is, so that's essentially what you've just said too. It's going to take some changes in the people in charge for there to be changes in the human rights situation.

SEC. SCHIFTER: There may be divisions also among them. We cannot be absolutely sure about that. It may be that there are different forces at work, people of different attitudes and points of view, and one would hope that those that are interested in a more open society will ultimately prevail.

MR. LEHRER: But it may have to, there may have to be a revolution like the one that was in Czechoslovakia, maybe a quiet one, or a bloody one like was in Romania for it really to happen?

SEC. SCHIFTER: Well, you never know, you never know. The fact of the matter is look in the Soviet Union it came very much from the top.

MR. LEHRER: All right. Let's go through some of the other countries. Your report also criticized Israeli conduct in the occupied territories. Why?

SEC. SCHIFTER: I think we spelled out in the report what the concerns are. The situation in the occupied territories is one that differs from what we normally view as the typical human rights abuse, which the typical case is that, as the case of China demonstrates, of a government imposing severe restrictions on freedom of expression of its citizens. In the occupied territories, the issue is really ultimately one of the peace process, that is, the principal problem, the fact that after all of these decades, a state of war still exists between Israel and its neighbors, and beginning here with an occupied land and with a population or a significant portion of a population engaged in acts of violence against the occupying power and the occupying power responding. The concern that we have is where the response is in our view excessive, and those are the points that we are making.

MR. LEHRER: Apology there. You also made a point there, about the conduct of the Palestinians, themselves, against each other. What was that?

SEC. SCHIFTER: The problem there is that there has been a sharp increase in violence of Palestinians against other Palestinians.

MR. LEHRER: Palestinians who are considered to be sympathetic to the Israelis, right?

SEC. SCHIFTER: We don't really know exactly what it is, in some cases perhaps also those that may have different points of view. We don't really know exactly what the reason in each instance might be for the killings.

MR. LEHRER: There are some other countries in the Middle East, Arab countries in the Middle East, that you also criticized, Syria, Iraq. What's the problem there in those two countries?

SEC. SCHIFTER: We have in both countries governments that are repressive that are in both instances maintained by a rather small group within the population, group around Sudam Hussein, Iraq, and the Alouites and Syria. In both instances you have let's say a small group of people imposed, both instances as members of the Both Party, on the population of the country, and their ruling by force.

MR. LEHRER: Give me an example of the kind of force they use in Syria.

SEC. SCHIFTER: Arrests of dissidents, of anyone suspected of in any way differing from the system and torture.

MR. LEHRER: The same in Iraq?

SEC. SCHIFTER: Oh, yes.

MR. LEHRER: In Latin America, you had some tough words for Nicaragua, which is about to have an election. What were they?

SEC. SCHIFTER: The criticism of Nicaragua dealt with the system of intimidation of the general population by the government, the problem of political arrests which this was in 1989, the report was for the entire year. They have now finally released most political prisoners, not all. We don't know whether they still keep some. But it is a government that has tried to repress dissent.

MR. LEHRER: And Cuba, and this of course was a Communist nation that has not experienced any kind of revolution. What is it that Fidel Castro is still doing down there that the State Department finds violations of human rights?

SEC. SCHIFTER: As far as Cuba is concerned, we're dealing really with one of the tightest run dictatorships in the world. It is a country in which all forms of dissent are totally repressed, in which the practice of brainwashing goes on in the schools, through the media, through the operations of the so-called committees for the defense of the revolution which are spying groups that are organized in practically every locality throughout the country and in a report to the Ministry of the Interior which then keeps a tight rein on the entire population. It is in many ways a Stalinist system. North Korea is another example of that, except perhaps that Cubans by nature are not suited to this kind of government, but nevertheless, Castro has tried to impose it and has succeeded in doing that.

MR. LEHRER: And it's as strong today as it ever was?

SEC. SCHIFTER: There is one thing that's different. In terms of the intent of the government, yes, very definitely so, and one of the things that you had last year also was the execution of Gen. Choa and others.

MR. LEHRER: On drug charges?

SEC. SCHIFTER: About which we really have serious doubts.

MR. LEHRER: Oh, is that right?

SEC. SCHIFTER: Oh, yes, as to what the motivation there was.

MR. LEHRER: Do you think they may have been dissenters?

SEC. SCHIFTER: This may, well, this may be -- it reminded me of what happened in the Soviet Union in the '30s, the repression by Stalin or actually the execution of people as to whom he had doubts as to their loyalty to him personally. That is the situation in Cuba now. What is different now is that a younger generation is growing up that are simply tired of the old slogans that come from Castro and that may be increasingly disillusioned. Of course, the other aspect of it is they may now face a very sharp economic decline as a result of the fact that Eastern Europe and perhaps the Soviet Union are much less inclined, Eastern Europe not at all inclined, the Soviet Union less inclined to provide them with economic subsidies.

MR. LEHRER: As you go through these countries, particularly Cuba and some of the others, when you sit down to evaluate their human rights record, do you do it through strictly American democracy eyes, in other words, when you say country A does not have a good system of a fair trial or intrusion, like in China, arbitrary interference with privacy, home, family, and correspondence, is that always in comparison with what life is like in the United States of America?

SEC. SCHIFTER: No, it is not. As a matter of fact, one point I've frequently made is that we do not expect every country in the world to essentially abide by the last decision of the Supreme Court on due process, for example. That's not the issue.

MR. LEHRER: What is the issue?

SEC. SCHIFTER: The issue is adherence to the principles of the universe -- of human rights, which is a simple document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, which spells out internationally accepted standards and these are indeed internationally accepted standards. These are not the standards of the United States of America.

MR. LEHRER: Is there evidence that there is an impact from these reports?

SEC. SCHIFTER: I would think there is an impact, yes, not uniform, not in all parts of the world, but if we take a look, for example, as to what it is that has happened in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, let me simply tell you that I have been amazed, going to Moscow as I have now done many times in recent years, how many people in that country basically got our message on human rights. They understood it, including a good many of people in the diplomatic service who used to argue against this, they understood the message and it had an impact.

MR. LEHRER: All right. Mr. Secretary, thank you very much for being with us.

SEC. SCHIFTER: Thank you. FOCUS - SOFTWARE SAFETY

MR. MacNeil: Next tonight we have a computer story, more precisely a computer software story. As our society grows more dependent on computers, software programs, the instructions that tell a computer what to do, become more sophisticated. But as Correspondent Tom Bearden reports, they also make us more vulnerable to their mistakes.

MR. BEARDEN: Katy Yarbrough is a victim of bad software. After doctors removed a cancerous tumor from her breast, they used a state of the art machine called a Therac 25 to perform radiation therapy. But the software that controlled the machine had a flaw. Mrs. Yarbrough says she knew something was wrong immediately.

KATY YARBROUGH: I just sat up on the side of the table and she said, what's the matter, and I said, you burned me. And they said, oh, no, that's not possible, this is the most sophisticated piece of equipment on the market, and it's not possible for you to be burned. And a week later I was totally paralyzed on the left side.

MR. BEARDEN: Like all software, the program that controlled the Therac 25 was composed of thousands of lines of instructions called codes. When a certain rare sequences of events occurred, the code acted in a way the software designer hadn't anticipated. Mrs. Yarbrough says she was supposed to have received 200 rads of radiation; she got 20,000 instead, that in spite of the fact that the Therac 25 had been used tens of thousands of times before and had never hurt anybody.

MS. YARBROUGH: They denied that the accident even existed.

MR. BEARDEN: But you had physical evidence. You had a burn mark on your chest.

MS. YARBROUGH: It actually became a hole. I had a hole all the way through my body.

MR. BEARDEN: And they still said the machine couldn't have done that?

MS. YARBROUGH: Yes. They really believed the machine was infallible. It was that kind of a thing like it's just not possible, there's no way, and when you say it's not possible, and then you've got a person that has a perfectly normal arm and it has absolutely no value to me. We've talked about taking the arm off. I'd be no better with it off than I am with it on. It's not going to help the pain.

MR. BEARDEN: Mrs. Yarbrough said the treatment center continued to deny the machine had malfunctioned until the accident was repeated in Tyler, Texas. Thirty-three old Ray Cox was getting his ninth treatment for a tumor on his back when he felt a severe jolt of heat. The machine was inspected. The technicians couldn't find anything wrong. It was put back in service. Twenty-two days later at this same center 66 year old Vernon Kid screamed in pain during his 30th treatment. This time technicians found the answer. Excessive radiation was delivered if an operator made a typing mistake while programming the treatment sequence and then corrected it in a certain specific way. Both Cox and Kid died from radiation exposure. The Texas machine was never used again but Therac 25 machines are in use in other states with new software.

NANCY LEVESON: The problem isn't necessarily in using computers; the problem is in having over confidence in them.

MR. BEARDEN: Nancy Leveson is an associate professor of computer science at the University of California.

NANCY LEVESON: Previously, before they had computer control, they built hardware protection in to make sure that they couldn't produce too much radiation to the patient, and so when they put in the software, they assumed that the computer control would be correct and they took out the hardware protection. If they had kept in the hardware protection, we would have been able to protect ourselves against these kinds of software errors.

MR. BEARDEN: But hardware protection is impossible with some systems. Telephone connections used to be made manually by operators physically plugging wires into switchboards and by mechanical switching networks, but it is simply impossible to handle today's phone traffic that way. Computers do the switching now; human beings aren't fast enough. Technicians at the AT&T Network Operations Center had every reason to have confidence in their computer switching system. After all, it had handled 100 million calls a day for decades without a significant failure until January 15th.

ROBERT ALLEN, Chairman, AT&T: [January 15] About 2:25 yesterday Eastern Time a software problem occurred in the network. Preliminary indications are that the troubles in the signalling system spread rapidly throughout the network.

MR. BEARDEN: Ironically, the problem occurred when engineers installed a software upgrade that was supposed to make the network more reliable. These screens are designed to display problem circuits and help reroute traffic. Normally only a few bad lines show up, but on January 15th, controllers watched helplessly as line after line went down. The failure cascaded throughout the system because all the computers were interconnected and all had the same software bug. The software had operated perfectly for a month before the failure as it had during thorough testing before installation.

KARL MARTERSTECK, Vice President, AT&T: It turns out that the combination of circumstances that have to simultaneously occur in order to trigger this event are of such a low probability so unlikely to occur that that simply wasn't anticipated by the designers of the tests.

MR. BEARDEN: In fact, computer scientists like Peter Neumann say software has become so complex that absolutely reliable testing is simply impossible.

PETER NEUMANN, Computer Scientist: Testing only gives you some confidence that things haven't screwed up in the test. They don't give you any real guarantee that they won't screw up in the actual live execution of the program.

NANCY LEVESON, Computer Scientist: To adequately test software, to have high confidence there are no errors, would take sometimes dozens of years of testing, sometimes even hundreds of testing, depending upon the software. So for more realistic software, it is just impossible to completely test it.

MR. BEARDEN: AT&T believes it has fixed the problem, but concedes there are no guarantees that other bugs aren't lurking in the millions of lines of codes. For most people, the AT&T bug merely meant delays in completing long distance calls. But what about so- called life critical systems like air traffic control? FAA Deputy Associate Administrator Dr. Andres Zellweger.

ANDRES ZELLWEGER, FAA: The terminal system that's in place, has been in place for 20 years now, had been running for 10, 15 years, and it went down with the software problem that had been there originally. Those things can happen.

MR. BEARDEN: The nation's air transportation system would grind to a halt without computers. They are an indispensable aid to controllers keeping track of aircraft altitude and speed. Air traffic is growing exponentially and like A&T, the FAA is now updating both the hardware and software in the system. Plans call for even bigger changes in the future to meet the demand. Are they heading for the same kind of massive failure? Dr. Zellweger says no, because unlike AT&T, all of their computers aren't interconnected. One failure won't bring down the whole system.

DR. ZELLWEGER: For air traffic control, you can build systems that are sufficiently robust to do the kinds of things you want to do. We're not talking about a totally automated system here, because people are still in the loop.

MR. BEARDEN: Software is playing an increasingly important role in the aircraft, themselves. Computerized systems make planes more efficient and cost effective, but they aren't immune to error either. Dr. Geoffrey McIntyre is a special assistant at the Federal Aviation Administration.

GEOFFREY McINTYRE, Special Assistant, FAA: The best programmers in the business produce approximately three programming errors for every one thousand lines of code written. Now obviously if you've got a highly software intensive system such as say the new 767 put out by Boeing with over 5 million lines of code written, you've got a "potential" of roughly 15,000 errors. Now this is not to be taken to mean that this aircraft is replete with errors, but this is a potential and we feel that in terms of the safety criticality functions, we need to look at those.

MR. BEARDEN: Industry is beginning to look at those potential problems. The usually obscure Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics drew a standing room only crowd at a recent committee meeting in Washington. They're studying revisions to the international standards that govern the design of avionics software. But some critics say it will take more than standards committees to deal with the growing risk. There are calls for government regulation and licensing of software designers.

MS. LEVESON: I believe very strongly that there should be. In many of the cases and accidents that I've been involved with, some of the practice and the competency of the programmers were really in question and of the practices of the companies, themselves.

PETER NEUMANN, Computer Scientist: I think it is simplistic to think that software certification of programmers would solve the problem.

MR. BEARDEN: Computer scientists like Neumann say this is an intrinsically unsolvable problem.

PETER NEUMANN: I think we all need to be aware of the limitations of the systems that we depend on for our lives and for our livelihood. That doesn't mean that each of us should be worried about flying on a plane or stepping into a car or whatever. But it does mean that there is a shared responsibility for trying to account for the things that go wrong. And certainly when something does go wrong, we should immediately be alerted to the fact that it might just be a computer problem. Whether it's hardware or software doesn't really matter, and if that's the case, it's likely to happen again.

MR. BEARDEN: There is a growing awareness that as society continues to demand more services from computers, the systems inevitably become more complex, with more risk of failure, and that leaves society more vulnerable to the consequences of those failures. RECAP

MR. MacNeil: Again Wednesday's main stories, Czech President Vaclav Havel told a joint session of Congress that the U.S. should help the Soviet Union stay on its current road toward democracy. The Soviet Union drew praise from the U.S. in its annual report on human rights. But the Bush administration condemned China for its crackdown on the pro democracy movement. Iraq, Israel and Nicaragua, were among other nations cited for abuses, and consumer prices in January hit a seven year high. Good night, Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Good night, Robin. We'll see you tomorrow night. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.