The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight: We have the news of the day; then a look at today's dramatic rise in the unemployment rate; two Africa stories-- words and pictures from Liberia by writer Sebastian Junger; a report on the coming again of famine to Ethiopia; plus, an update on what happened to the antiquities of Iraq; and an Anne Taylor Fleming essay on the new word about an old therapy.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The U.S. unemployment rate was sharply higher in June. The Labor Department reported today it climbed 0.3 percent to 6.4 percent . That's the highest since 1994. On Wall Street, stocks fell on that news. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost more than 72 points to close at 9070. The NASDAQ fell 15 points to close at 1663. For the week, the Dow gained nearly 1 percent, the NASDAQ rose 2 percent . The markets are closed tomorrow for the 4th of July. We'll have more on the jobs report in a moment. The U.S. offered $25 million today for information leading to the capture of Saddam Hussein. It equals the amount still being offered for Osama bin Laden. The money will also be paid for confirmation that Saddam is dead. In addition, the U.S. Is offering $15 million for each of his two sons. In Washington, Secretary of State Powell said Saddam's fate must be determined.

COLIN POWELL: We believe it's important to do everything we can to determine his whereabouts, whether he is alive or dead, in order to assist in stabilizing the situation and letting the people of Baghdad be absolutely sure that he's not coming back. And this is just another tool to be used for that purpose.

JIM LEHRER: In Iraq today, ten more American soldiers were wounded. One was hit by a sniper, three were hurt in a grenade attack on their convoy in downtown Baghdad, and six more were injured when their humvees hit an explosive in a town west of Baghdad. In addition, U.S. troops killed at least two Iraqis and wounded a six-year-old boy during the attacks. In all, 25 Americans have been killed in action in Iraq since May 1. That's when President Bush declared an end to major combat. 44 U.S. troops have died in accidents, and another 177 have been wounded. The Iraqi National Museum reopened for several hours today. It displayed the famous Treasure of Nimrud, priceless gold jewelry made by the Assyrians some 3000 years ago. At first, it appeared the artifacts were stolen when Baghdad fell on April 9. Later, they were found in underground vaults. We'll have more on the recovery of Iraqi antiquities later in the program. On the Liberia story, the Associated Press reported today the U.S. Military commander in Europe has been ordered to plan for a possible intervention. But President Bush said he would not be rushed into a decision on sending troops. He told African journalists that getting rid of Liberian President Charles Taylor is "a condition for any progress." Later, the U.S. National security advisor Condoleezza Rice expanded on that point.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: What the president is saying is that, until there is... until Charles Taylor is out of politics, there is isn't going to be any stabilization of the situation in Liberia. It doesn't matter what kind of force you send in, it doesn't matter what you try to do. His leaving is a condition for the parties coming to a stable peace and beginning a political process.

JIM LEHRER: Rice said Mr. Bush believes Liberia is important to America's national interests. As the debate in Washington continued, hundreds ofpeople took to the streets in Liberia's capital. Vera Frankl of Associated Press Television News narrates this report.

VERA FRANKL: Peace protesters desperate for an end to the bloodletting in their country demonstrated outside the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia. They were calling for U.S. Military intervention to bring an end to years of vicious civil war and for Liberian President Charles Taylor to step down.

CHARLES TAYLOR: We can no longer take it. We need peace and lasting peace. We are calling on Bush to reinforce a peace process for Liberia, and we want it now.

DEMONSTRATORS: No more Taylor. We love peace.

VERA FRANKL: The country has been at peace for only brief periods since 1989 with Taylor widely seen as the culprit. The three-year campaign to drive out Taylor has claimed thousands of lives and displaced an estimated one million people. Rebels attacked the capital twice last month, killing hundreds of civilians and worsening the plight of survivors in a city ruined by 40 years of intermittent warfare.

JIM LEHRER: Liberia was founded in 1847 by freed American slaves. We'll have more on this story later in the program. There was new trouble in the Middle East today. Israeli troops killed one militant and arrested another in the West Bank. Both were with the al-Aqsa Brigades. Some members of that group have carried out several shootings despite a cease-fire. And in Gaza, Israeli troops closed a main road junction for six hours after Palestinians fired shells into a Jewish settlement. President Bush has made six al-Qaida detainees eligible for military tribunals. The Defense Department made that announcement late today. The six captives were not identified, but the announcement said they may have aided in financing al-Qaida and protecting Osama bin Laden, among other things. So far, no tribunals have actually been scheduled. A top al-Qaida fugitive was killed in northwestern Saudi Arabia today. Interior ministry officials said he and three other militants died in a gun battle with police. The al-Qaida suspect was wanted in last May's suicide bombings in Riyadh. Twenty-five people died in those attacks, including nine Americans. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to today's unemployment numbers, Sebastian Junger back from Liberia, famine in Ethiopia, an Iraq antiquities update, and an Anne Taylor Fleming essay.

FOCUS - JOBLESS JUMP

JIM LEHRER: Margaret Warner has the jobs story.

MARGARET WARNER: Today's higher unemployment numbers were far gloomier than many analysts had predicted. The new 6.4 percent rate reflects a net loss of 30,000 jobs in June, and a revised loss of 70,000 jobs in May. Hardest hit was the manufacturing sector. The rate also reflects a growing number of people actively looking for work. June saw an influx of more than 600,000 new job-seekers into the labor market, more than employers could accommodate. To help us understand what these numbers mean, we're joined by Rebecca Blank, an economist and dean of the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration, and Rick Cobb, executive vice president of Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, a firm that specializes in job placement for executives, middle managers and hourly workers. Welcome to you both. Rebecca Blank, this is the biggest one-month drop in percentage terms since right after 9/11. We've seen five months of steady job losses. Where are all these jobs being cut in who's losing their jobs?

REBECCA BLANK: It's interesting. Up until now, in this slower growth economy, many of the losses were spread across all sectors of the economy. In fact college educated workers saw their unemployment rate go over 3 percent, which is pretty high for that group and stay up there for much of the last year. The last couple of months, and particularly this report changes that. What we're seeing now in these last few months is a much more traditional pattern that we often see in recessions where it's the least skilled and the lowest waged workers who lose their jobs. If you look at this report, the big jumps in unemployment are among people who are less skilled, they're among people who are in blue collar jobs, they're among teenagers, black male teen unemployment is now up to almost 40 percent again, a number we haven't seen in quite a while. They're among persons of color, among blacks and Hispanics.

MARGARET WARNER: And they're people working, what, at hourly wage jobs?

REBECCA BLANK: Largely, yes.

MARGARET WARNER: And Rick Cobb, where are the bright spots? There were some job gains that offset some of these losses.

RICK COBB: The stable parts of the market have been the legal environment, insurance, different sectors in financial, as well as the social work and the security-related industries.

MARGARET WARNER: And weren't leisure jobs and housing-related jobs also up?

RICH COBB: Well, there was a spike in housing certainly because of the interest rate declines, and that's been sort of a lagging indicator.

MARGARET WARNER: What would you add to, that Rebecca Blank, in terms of where the bright spots are?

REBECCA BLANK: Well, one of the interesting issues here is actually we've opened up a gender gap in the labor market in favor of women with regard to employment. If you look at this particular report, there's the bigger gap in favor of women on unemployment rates than I've ever seen. It's almost a full percentage point, and that also reflects the real diversity of this particular slowdown. It's the consumer vector and health care sectors that are doing okay, and that's where women are disproportionately employed, while it's manufacturing and the import export sectors that are doing worse, and that's where men are disproportionately employed.

MARGARET WARNER: Rick Cobb, there was another interesting statistic that we just used in the introduction, which was that there were more than 600,000, in fact, more than 600,000, additional people flooding into the job market. What does that tell you?

RICK COBB: One of the things that we've tracked since 1989 is the actual number of announced layoffs. When a Fortune 1000 company makes an announced layoff, that layoff may not actually occur for anywhere from sixty to one hundred twenty days. One of the things that you'll see, then, as these companies go through these reductions, it comes out over time, as their businesses move offshore or as their manufacturing environments begin to take up the orders and build slack.

MARGARET WARNER: But do you think these people that are coming into the job market now-- some analysts I read today were saying, "well, they were listening to the talk about the market was improving and so on and they were getting sort of optimistic there might be jobs out there, so after a while of being unemployed, they came back into the market." Do you see that?

RICK COBB: I don't know that we see that as much. One of the things that we're going to see, as we look at our announced layoff data, which is trending down, and that that's a leading indicator, which says to us after two months, it's possible we're approaching the bottom, is that when the economy actually does start to turn around, if it does, that you won't see this radical reduction in unemployment because there are so many people in the market one, who've come back to market; two, who are underemployed who will fill positions that might be taken by somebody who's legitimately unemployed.

MARGARET WARNER: Rebecca Blank, how do you interpret the greater number of people going into the market at least? Looking for a job?

REBECCA BLANK: Yes, I agree with Rick. But there's another thing that's going on here as well. If you look at this report, there's a growing increase in the number of unemployed workers who've been unemployed long term and we define long term as more than six months, more than half a year without a job. And one of the things that you typically see happening when long-term unemployment rises, is that families who thought they could ride this out suddenly realize that they can't, and both the unemployed person, you know, who lost their job actually starts pretty actively looking or second or third workers, spouses or children start looking for jobs, as well. And I think that's one of the things that's happening.

MARGARET WARNER: So you think in fact it reflects perhaps a little desperation or need to get a job?

REBECCA BLANK: A little more pain, yes.

MARGARET WARNER: Mr. Cobb, what do you think this says about the economy, the state of the economy overall? I mean is this a very significant bad news kind of a figure, the 6.4 percent unemployment, that really flies in the face of some of the good news we thought we were hearing the last couple of months?

RICK COBB: Well, I think it's a wake-up call to the idea that the unemployment data by itself isn't the way to predict the economy. Certainly, as you look at... we are still in a recession, but there are signs of a turnaround. Now, the market tends to try and lead that turnaround by guessing when to get in. There's a lot of money on the sidelines that wants to get in and participate. One of the things that you'll run into, though, as I said earlier, is that as things flatten out, you'll have the temporary employee, which will be a stop gap measure for manufacturing and other industries, rather than bringing on full-time employees back, they'll use the temporary industries first. So if we're looking for legitimate turnaround, we look for a slowdown or a reduction in the number of announced layoffs, followed by an increase in activity in temporary services.

MARGARET WARNER: What are you finding right now with the companies that you talk to all the time as you're trying to place people? What kind of workers are they hiring and why aren't they hiring more?

RICK COBB: Well, as I said before, one of the things that you worry about is if you have a spike in your business and you actually have an increase, that's not necessarily guarantee of a long-term turnaround. There are a lot of global events which impact industries. You look at the telecommunications industry, or the apparel industry, where the advent of the SARS epidemic froze all of their inventory overseas in isolation. So there's no way to predict those. What you'll see, then, is you'll see companies being a lot more cautious. They'll hire more in a cost-control and retention area where they can actually hold on to their business, or if they're going to try and deal with a spike in business, an increase, they'll try to do with it temporary services on a part-time or project basis.

MARGARET WARNER: And is that what you're seeing with companies that you deal with, that that's the kind much people, for-instances, when they come to you, they want contract workers, rather than full-timers?

RICK COBB: Well, I think what we're looking at, we're dealing with a population of management and executives who are legitimately unemployed. One of the things that we advise them is that in a down company, economy is 100 percent for anybody, regardless of your level. It doesn't matter what the economy's doing. The only real security-- or the only real way to control your job search is to be aggressive about it. Even in a down economy, as companies continue to reduce, they may reduce a department from 50 to 15, but those 15 people will have to have different skill sets than probably the 50 that they have. So if you look at a reduction in an organization, there will be opportunities created in that reduction by the fact that the skill sets have to be broader and deeper.

MARGARET WARNER: Rebecca Blank, what do you think these numbers mean about the overall state of the economy?

REBECCA BLANK: Well, we they certainly aren't good news. It is true that the labor market lags the overall economy, and we've been in a number of recessions where-- in the past where the labor market is at its worst right before the recovery starts up. And of course that's what the optimists want to see happen, and there are a lot of people who are projecting pretty strong growth for the second half of this year. On the other hand, the more that you see long term and widespread unemployment, of course, the harder hole you have to dig yourself out of. And I'm not quite as optimistic as that. I think these numbers signal this we're probably going to be in a slightly slower economy for a little longer than many people would like.

MARGARET WARNER: And what's your assessment of what it takes-- I mean and this is a macro big-picture question, but-- for companies to really start hiring new full-time workers benefits, the full job, not temperature primaries, not contract workers?

REBECCA BLANK: Yeah, I mean there's several things that can drive that. Of course you can be helped by your partners overseas and that's not going to happen because they're in worse shape than we are. We're not going to get a lot more out of consumer spending. We can't bring interest rates very much lower, so that you've got to be hanging a lot here on sort of changes in confidence about what's happening, that the war is over, that the economy's going to look up, that things are going to get better and that's going to drive the private sector into sort of increasing investment. You've also got to hang a lot of those tax cuts and I hope that that is going to help. Of course the tax cuts aren't necessarily going to help the group that have most recently become unemployed.

MARGARET WARNER: All right, Rebecca Blank and Rick Cobb, thank you both.

UPDATE - TURMOIL

JIM LEHRER: Now, more on the situation in Liberia, and to Terence Smith.

TERENCE SMITH: American military forces stand ready for possible deployment to Liberia to help monitor a fragile truce that has taken hold between troops loyal to President Charles Taylor and insurgent forces. Today, President Bush repeated his demand that Taylor, re indicted for war crimes, leave the country. Journalist Sebastian Junger has just returned from Liberia, where he was on assignment for "Vanity Fair" magazine. At the height of the fighting, he was one of only a handful of western reporters on the ground in country. Sebastian, welcome back to the program.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Thank you.

TERENCE SMITH: It does appear that the Bush administration is moving closer to sending troops in to Liberia, although it decision hasn't been announced yet. If they do go in to Liberia, what should they expect?

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: My impression of the people in Liberia and Monrovia, was that there was an overwhelming fondness, affection for America based mainly on their idea that, in some ways, they are American. Monrovia was founded in the 1840s by freed American slaves, and there's a very, very strong feeling of kinship with this country, maybe analogous to Puerto Rico, something like that. Of course on these shores we're not as aware of it as they are. But my sense is that if American troops came ashore, they would really be greeted as saviors in that country. The country is suffering horribly. And just from talking to people on the street, talking to soldiers who wear the American flag when they fight, I frankly I don't think anyone would even take a shot at them.

TERENCE SMITH: We have some of the video that you shot, Sebastian, while you were there last week. And tell us what it was like there at the height of the fighting and explain, if you will, who's fighting whom and over what.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Well, that disentangling who's fighting whom is a difficult job. But basically there are two rebel groups in the country fighting the government of Charles Taylor. Now, Taylor's forces are composed of to a really motley group of militia, police, quote, unquote, soldiers. One of the big problems in the war isn't so much the fighting between government and rebels, but is the utter lawlessness of the government forces themselves. They have not been paid in two years, so when fighting breaks out, they sort of rub their hands in glee because the civilians flee and there are entire neighborhoods that are open to be looted by the very soldiers who are supposed to be protecting those people. War... the war there, in many senses, is a money-making scheme. And I think it was set up that way by Taylor so that, a, he didn't have to pay his forces; and b, they're so disorganized that they could never possibly overthrow him. I saw gun battles in the streets between different factions of the government forces over looting rights. It's extremely chaotic.

TERENCE SMITH: You had pictures, as well, of these armed men, although in civilian clothes, driving around in jeeps and open trucks. It looks chaotic.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yes, it's terrifying, frankly, as a journalist, I found it absolutely terrifying. We went up to a town called Ganta on the northern border with Guinea that the soldiers up there said that the Guinean army was actually shelling Ganta from the border. They had just taken it back from the rebels a couple of days earlier. The guys I was with were teenage soldiers, twelve, fourteen, sixteen years old, armed with machine guns and R PG's.

TERENCE SMITH: Rocket-propelled grenades.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Rocket-propelled grenades exactly, like you see in Afghanistan and Iraq. They seem to have tremendous loyalty to their immediate commander. It wasn't clear to me that they had great loyalty to Taylor. In fact, the government ministers that I was with up in Ganta were visibly nervous around these guys. I had the feeling that they were not convinced they really were in control of these very forces who were supposedly protecting their government.

TERENCE SMITH: In Monrovia, you have images there of houses burning and damage in the city. How extensive is it?

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: We, as journalists-- and you know, there was only four of us thereduring the height of the fighting-- we were severely limited in our mobility, in our access to the city, not because of the fighting. That's actually not particularly hard to navigate around, but because of the lawlessness of the militias. Every checkpoint you went through, and there was one on every block practically, you ran the risk of having them seize your car at gunpoint, being dragged out of the car and beaten up. After a while, they were actively looking for Americans. They thought that I for one was a spy, and I was in quite a lot of danger because of that. Basically, for a few days, no one dared go out because the street was so lawless. But what we saw afterwards and what we heard from locals was that artillery had started fires in town, had killed people in town, and that there was mainly a huge amount of damage from the looting by government soldiers. That seemed to be the main sort of destructive force in Monrovia while the battle was going on. It was looting by the government itself.

TERENCE SMITH: What's the humanitarian situation there in terms of public health and any sort of medical facilities?

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: It's nothing short of a disaster. The people in the countryside had fled their homes months ago and were -- hundreds of thousands of people were in refugee camps, displaced person's camps, outside of Monrovia. This last round of fighting drove those people into the capital itself. There is literally hundreds of thousands of displaced people who are just squatting in the streets. They have maybe a bag full of rice and not much else. They're exposed to the weather, they're exposed to increasing risk of cholera. And you know, I spoke over and over again with people who hadn't eaten days. I think fighting or no fighting, if the relief organizations cannot get in there within the next week or two, you're going to start seeing mortality rates from disease and starvation that will absolutely eclipse the deaths from the actual fighting.

TERENCE SMITH: What about... the people you talked to there, Sebastian, did they expect President Charles Taylor to heed President Bush's call to step down, at least at some point?

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: They seem sort of split on that. They do have a strange loyalty - a sort of fondness for him. The day after the cease-fire... I'm sorry, the afternoon of the cease-fire, there was a very belligerent rally in town, tens of thousands of people, by my guess, and they were shouting "We want peace." But it was the most war-like, "we want peace" that I've heard . I think in their terms it meant step down, because the Lurd rebels were attacking Monrovia because of Taylor's reversal of his position to not step down. On the other hand, they look to America to sort of come in and impose a peace regardless of what Taylor does. The overriding feeling I got in Monrovia of was of a people who are desperate for peace and they don't real care who's president or not. This is going to end up being a power struggle in some ways between Taylor and the war crimes court in Sierra Leone, possibly the U.S. Government.

TERENCE SMITH: Sebastian Junger, thank you so much for sharing your observations, your video and your experience with us. Thanks very much.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Thank you.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, famine in Ethiopia, what happened to the antiquities in Iraq, and an Anne Taylor Fleming essay.

FOCUS- FAMINE RISK

JIM LEHRER: The Ethiopia story. Once again, that East African nation faces the risk of famine, similar to the one that killed a million people in 1984 and '85. Today, the Bush administration said it would send another 250,000 metric tons of food there. Brian Stewart of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was in Ethiopia this spring. Here is his report.

BRIAN STEWART: Again, the wide path of another drought, the high roof of Africa, of sun-blasted mountains and cracked riverbeds. After some years of decent harvests, rains have failed, crops die. Some of the poorest people on earth are left with virtually nothing. 90 percent are bare subsistence farmers. In past droughts, they've had to sell off all they own. Now, 11 million, 15 percent of the nation, are too destitute to make it without help. Simply put, food aid must rumble up these isolated roads for a year or the death toll will again be immense. This drought is fierce, there are five million more people at risk of famine than in '84 and the general level of health and poverty is even worse to begin with. Ethiopia is a unique country with some core strengths in any crisis. Never really colonized, it is fiercely proud and profoundly religious. The second oldest Christian country on earth. This gives Ethiopia a strong sense of social cohesion that is striking to foreign aid workers like John Graham of Save the Children.

JOHN GRAHAM: You come here and you see very strong families, very strong moral values. So Ethiopia, for example is an incredibly poor place, but there's incredibly little crime.

BRIAN STEWART: Now both the dominant Christian orthodox church and Muslim leaders have united to call for national sharing. All here promise to help those in need, and Ethiopian are renowned for sharing whatever they have with extended families and poor neighbors.

JOHN GRAHAM: When there is a crisis here, people begin to donate part of their salaries, you know, you'll have entire departments or organizations where they'll get together and say we're going to give, you know, 50 percent of our monthly salary into fighting against this drought."

BRIAN STEWART: Already across the North there's a sharp rise in malnutrition cases showing up at clinics. Fortunately, this is part of an efficient famine early warning system. Past governments tried to hide famines. Now clinics like this quickly report when the average weight of children begins to drop. Other early warnings are field reports by the Relief Society of Tigra, called REST. Drought and food shortages are checked daily by traveling experts like Sigia Assefa.

SIGIA ASSEFA: My experience, the drought is so bad that it resembles already, equal to the "84/'85 situation, except that the response mechanism is good now. The drought itself is equal to that of "84/'85. People have produced nothing.

BRIAN STEWART: What is going to happen if the world doesn't respond? What then?

SIGIA ASSEFA: Well, the need is enormous. If the response is very low, well, the thing would be very bad, extremely bad. We will see people dying. We will see people moving here and there. We will see a lot of beggars in the cities. The rural population will flood into the cities just for search of anything else it could get.

BRIAN STEWART: And this is exactly what Ethiopia must now prevent, a mass movement of the starving to overcrowded food aid camps. Many too famished simply died on the way. Others succumbed to diseases in the squalled camps. Tens of thousands forced down to the unfamiliar tropical south died of malaria. Here, mass movement equals mass death. So today, relief workers gather the hungry where they are, listened to them, find out their needs, bring food before panic movement sets in. This gathering is another part of the early warning system. We find out many are close to the edge.

MAN (Translated): We cannot get anything from the land now. In 1984 we got a little, but now it is very bad.

WOMAN (Translated): During 1984, we left our land and our home. We were forced to leave our village and migrate. Now we are here, even under difficult times, we have not left our home.

BRIAN STEWART: Another key advantage now is that the long years of civil the more recent conflict with Eritrea have finally ended. Ethiopia's fragile democracy is still open. Prime Minister Meles Zenawai who led the old famine against the old dictatorship does not hide grim facts.

MELES ZENAWI, Prime Minister, Ethiopia: These are anxious moments for all of us here. The risks are there for everyone to see. Anything between 11 million to 14 million people are facing food shortages. We do not yet have the resources in our hands to be sure that we will manage in the coming months and we have political power to do something about it. So however difficult things might be, desperation and despair is not something that has enters my mind.

BRIAN STEWART: The government is racing food reserves into countryside. What's frightening is Ethiopia will need one and a half million tons of food from the world. Hour after hour, day after day the food is pouring out to go to the countryside and the sheds are emptying one after the other. If sheds like this ever completely empty, you will have mass starvation. And this is a nation that does not waste any food. Almost every family here lost members in that famine. Even a break in the steady flow of supply trucks carrying food to the countryside could trigger the start of another migration. And it's here where fear is monitored -- weakly gatherings which locals call rumor markets. It's where peasant farmers meet every week to trade or sell what's left of their sheep and goats. Ethiopian hate having to ask for food. A big problem is many won't ask until they're too weak to go on. So they're now encouraged to take some aid before it's too late. Opposition leaders like Mayan Petros express a national anger at Ethiopia's constant weakness.

MAYAN PETROS, Opposition Leader: Ethiopian feel that we are competent and we have proven that competence is no problem, and without competence and resourcefulness, we're embarrassed. It's embarrassing to always talk about famine and go around, beg for food, and we're really embarrassed about not being able to feed ourselves.

BRIAN STEWART: At the orthodox service of epiphany, priests bless holy water which they will spray on the vast congregation. It is also a prayer for rains to return and a call to hope.

JIM LEHRER: And in recent weeks since that report was completed, there has been some rain in Ethiopia, but more than 12.6 million Ethiopians still need food aid.

UPDATE - RECOVERING HISTORY

JIM LEHRER: Now, an update on what happened to Iraq's antiquities, and to arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown.

JEFFREY BROWN: For a time in the confused aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, it appeared the very cradle of civilization had been robbed. The plundering of Iraq's national museum in early April drew headlines and recriminations around the world, as priceless artifacts spanning the Sumerian to Islamic civilizations appeared to be completely lost. The news media, including the NewsHour, reported that as many as 170,000 items might have been stolen or destroyed. U.S. military commanders and officials in Washington were condemned for failing to stop the looting. In the months since, it's become clear that the loss, while real, was far less than initially feared. Just weeks after the initial looting, a U.S. interagency team working with Iraqi museum officials began an inventory of the museum. Since then, thousands of valuable items believed lost have been recovered or otherwise accounted for: Approximately 3,000 items were returned or recovered in raids. One of the most studied objects in art history was returned: The Warka Vase, carved from alabaster in ancient Sumer before 3100 BC, was brought back in the trunk of a Volkswagen. Some treasures, it turned out, had been stored for safekeeping, some as far back as the first Gulf War; 8,000 items from the museum's public galleries were found stored in boxes in a secret vault believed to be on the museum's grounds. More than 6,700 pieces of gold and jewelry were hidden in a vault below Baghdad's central bank. Sometime during the recent war, the basement of the bank had been flooded, burying much of the nation's currency reserves along with the museum's hidden treasure. In May, a "National Geographic" team found three pumps and organized the draining of the vaults. Over three weeks, the team pumped out more than half a million gallons of water, recovering millions of dinars of wet currency, and boxes with precious gold and jewelry excavated from royal tombs in the ancient capital of Nimrud, and the royal cemetery at Ur.

DONNY GEORGE, Director, Iraq Antiquities Department: We've checked all the material, all the material is there, nothing is missing from all the things that we had from the museum in the vaults of the central bank.

JEFFREY BROWN: Still missing are precious items like a beautiful marble face of a Uruk woman more than 5,000 years old. In the meantime, many archeological sites outside Baghdad continue to be at risk. Last month, a team of archeologists reported that a "culture of looting" had taken hold in many areas and tens of thousands of artifacts have been dug up and smuggled abroad. In Baghdad today, however, it was a time of hope: A special one day opening at the National Museum, with the treasures of Nimrud on view.

JEFFREY BROWN: For more now on the hunt for missing antiquities, we're joined from Baghdad by Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, head of the U.S. team of military and civilian investigators trying to recover items taken from the Baghdad museum. A reservist now on active duty, Colonel Bogdanos is an assistant district attorney in New York and has a masters degree in classical studies. And in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Henry Wright, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan, and coordinator of a team of experts who recently visited Iraq for the National Geographic Society.

Beginning with you, Colonel Bogdanos in Baghdad, now that you've had several months to look at what happened, how serious was the loss at the museum?

MARINE COL. MATTHEW BOGDANOS, Iraq Museum Investigation Team: Well, that's both an easy and a difficult question to answer. The easy part is that, given the value of these items, a priceless piece, relics and priceless antiquities that represent our shared heritage, the loss of a single piece is an absolute tragedy. On the other hand, as we have gone through over the last two and a half months in the investigation and come to grips with exactly what is missing, we have learned that the originally reported numbers were simply inaccurate. The best way to do this is to divide the museum in half -- the public galleries themselves containing some of the more historically significant items. From the public galleries, we have determined that there were 42 items stolen. Of those 42 stolen, ten have been returned, most notably the sacred vase of Warka, obviously the most significant piece the museum had. So that means 32 pieces from the public galleries or the museum proper, remain missing. Turning to the magazines or the storage rooms, which contain excavation site pieces and other small statuettes, pendants, cylinder seals, all important in their own right -- well, in those storage rooms, we have determined that there were approximately 12,000 items originally missing. I should point out that, if you have a string of beads and there are 50 beads, those would count as 50 pieces. Of those, more than 12,000 pieces that are missing from the storage rooms, we have recovered almost 3,000 during the course of the investigation.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, Colonel Bogdanos, early reports were of organized looting, perhaps from outside, but with help from inside. What do you know about that?

MARINE COL. MATTHEW BOGDANOS: Well, the evidence has suggested throughout the course of the investigation at least three different dynamics that interacted during the looting period. You have first individuals who appear to have known what they were looking for and precisely and selectively chose those items as if from a shopping list. Those are primarily the pieces from the public galleries that we spoke about. Then you have, in the old storage rooms, or old magazines, you have what clearly appears to be wanton, indiscriminate looting. Entire shelves appeared... arms appear to have swept across entire shelves, emptying those shelves into bags and boxes that were then taken away. But you also see pieces strewn about or pieces that were stolen from one end of the storage rooms and dropped in another. These pieces tend to be, for the most part, excavation site pieces, as I spoke about, pottery shards, smaller statuettes and those types of things. Then you turn to the new magazines, an annex that was built in 1986, and this is -- the evidence that we found here is the most troubling of all. In the farthest corner of the farthest room of the most remote part of the basement, there is an area that contained the most priceless collection, or one of the most priceless collections of coins, Hellenistic, Greek, Roman and Arabic coins, and cylinder seals, truly a remarkable collection. Well, that... the individuals that entered that particular storage room, not only needed to know exactly where the items were kept, but they also had the keys with them to all of the storage cabinets. Ironically, the individuals who... individual or individuals who were down in that particular area dropped the keys. Remember, there was no electricity, there were no lights, so a true catastrophe was narrowly averted. However, there were a series of 103 plastic fishing tackle-sized boxes that were down in the new magazines, and in those boxes there were almost 10,000 pieces stolen. And as I have said, the evidence clearly suggests that the individual or individuals who did that had to have had an intimate knowledge of both the museum and its storage practices.

JEFFREY BROWN: Professor Wright, in Michigan, what's your assessment of the damage at the museum? And I know that you've been looking at a number of the sites outside of the city around the country.

HENRY WRIGHT, University of Michigan: As an external figure, my assessment of the losses in the museum are that they are really quite serious, even if they're not as serious as we had at first feared. In a given excavation season on a systematic archeological excavation, you are lucky to see ten cylinder seals. And yet a large number were taken. These are our best indication of the structure of ancient political hierarchies, the positions of powerful priests and merchants. These are the items with which they seal tablets of legal sort, with which they send messages, with which they seal storerooms. They are a remarkable index of how these earliest urban societies operated and to lose any number of them is like tearing pages from the book of history.

JEFFREY BROWN: And what about the sites around the country? Hundreds, thousands of sites around Iraq, particularly in the South I've heard there's a lot of looting.

HENRY WRIGHT: We found that in the North, the looting was relatively minor. There's been a lot of damage from the digging of trenches, preparatory to military action that, fortunately, didn't happen in that region. And we found that in many cases, the U.S. Military authorities had put 24-hour guards on the important sites in the North. In the south, the situation is much more grave. In half the sites, the site guards representing the very competent Iraqi apparatus had stayed on the sites and protected them. But in more than half the important major urban centers the guards had not held. There were in some cases hundreds of people digging away, looking for valuables. We have no idea of exactly how much is leaving the country, but one can speculate that thousands of objects were taken out every day, and that in the course of any week, probably as much left the country from these illegal excavations as left the museum when it was looted.

JEFFREY BROWN: Colonel Bogdanos in Baghdad, how are you actually getting the pieces back? Give us a sense of how that's working, both through force and through cooperation.

MARINE COL. MATTHEW BOGDANOS: The first thing we did was to establish and announce an amnesty or no-question-asked policy through community leaders, religious clerics, walking from marketplace to marketplace and simply putting out the word to the community that anyone could return items without any fear of retribution or prosecution. The second component to the methodology was to develop and continue to develop that rapport with the community so that we could have sources and informants in the community who would give us information about a possible location of particular stolen pieces of antiquities or artifacts from the museum, and then we would act on that information, conducting really law enforcement, classic law enforcement raids in and around Baghdad. They come to the gate, a statue of Shal-Manasser, from the 9th century BC, 7,000-year-old pot someone who walked up to the gate. We have through the amnesty program recovered almost 1,500 of the pieces from the museum. In addition to that, we have also recovered slightly more than 1,400 pieces pursuant to both investigative raids that we have conducted in the area, and also through the assistance of the international law enforcement and art communities through seizures in several countries throughout the world.

JEFFREY BROWN: Professor Wright, I wonder, are you hopeful that most will be recovered? Is it possible or even likely that much of this will never be recovered?

HENRY WRIGHT: It's possible that important items will never be recovered, but we can hope for lucky breaks. We have to strengthen the international system for guarding against the movement of illegal antiquities. There's a bill in the House now, House Bill 2009, which will strengthen our capacity to block the import of archaeological material from Iraq into the states. Other countries are taking similar measures. There is hope to get much of it back, and the problem is will we get it back with the numbers still on so that things can be put back in their proper documented position where they're helpful to future research or not.

JEFFREY BROWN: And Colonel Bogdanos, are you hopeful? How long do you expect your investigation to go on?

MARINE COL. MATTHEW BOGDANOS: I'm a Marine. I expect to recover these items, no matter how long it takes. And again, I agree as I usually do with Professor Wright, it is going to take a long time and it requires patience. To those who have taken the items, I urge them to listen to their conscience and their sense of duty in returning those items. And to those who need to be guided by emotions other than those, my message is simple: We will find you, no matter how long it takes and no matter where you are, we will find you and we will recover this property.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, Colonel Matthew Bogdanos and Professor Henry Wright, thank you both very much for joining us.

ESSAY - HORMONAL BLUES

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, essayist Anne Taylor Fleming weighs the impact of recent news stories about hormone replacement therapy.

LAUREN HUTTON (ad): When I started having hot flashes and night sweats at menopause, my doctor recommended hormone-replacement therapy.

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: I remember watching that ad and thinking "great casting." After all, here was one of the original supermodels-- not of the super plastic variety, but a real outdoorsy, all-American girl/woman with a famous gap between her teeth she had refused to fix: The perfect someone to pitch hormone replacement therapy to us self-conscious trailblazing baby boomer women. As we slid towards menopause, we would take HRT as it's known, wouldn't we? Why not? The medical establishment was all for it. And it came with a well-known list of virtues trumpeted in the media by these frisky, glowy- skinned women like author Gail Sheehy, who had one of the first big menopause best-sellers. Their message was simple and direct: HRT would mute our hot flashes, keep our bones strong, our skin supple, our libidos peppy, our hearts sound, even our brains more alert. In short, biology need not be destiny. That always got us; that had been our generational mantra from way back when. After all we were the first generation of American women to go off to college with birth control pills in our purses, the first generation of women in history to have almost iron-clad control over reproduction. And it had been daring and thrilling and liberating, no question, allowing for a revolution-- sometimes acted out in the streets-- that put women on an equal footing and equal bedding with men. Now there was a supposed panacea for the end of our reproductive lives: Hormones. And we took them happily, millions of us, until last July, when the first big study done by the Women's Health Initiative found that HRT did not do what it said, but precisely the opposite. It increased the risks of heart attack and stroke, increased the odds of blot clots, increased the risk of invasive breast cancer. And now another sharp dissenting study: Not only does it not keep our brains sharper, but actually doubles the risk of Alzheimer's and dementia in women who began the treatment at 65 or older. What's going on? What has been going on? All the women I know are asking themselves that. There is confusion and anger at the pharmaceutical companies, and a sense of betrayal by our doctors. Why have they been handing out this stuff if there were no real studies? But underneath there is the harder question: Why have we been so ready to take it? I know there are women with maddening menopausal symptoms who were avid for relief, but there are millions of others were just following the prescription. What kind of rebels are we? Why shouldn't we age? What does it mean to age? Why must we conform to some commercialized notion of female appeal? And it's not about men. They're caught up in the same market-driven, youth-defying sweepstakes, being offered a hair transplant here, a jolt of Viagra there. When I went to buy a bathing suit recently, the young saleswoman assessing my age offered me something called the "miracle" suit, one of these euphemistically-named camouflage suits for the midlife women, a fierce bandage of a suit, with, as it says on the label "full cup support and a tummy- midrift toner." I grimaced. Has it come to this? Have I? Why not bare a little flesh, turn an aging body loose? Getting older is scary, exhilarating. It's about wisdom and loss and grief and glee and it can't be fixed. We have to live through it, through the backwards longings and the lessening libidos. It is a chance to see, after all the fuss and after all the fun, what we're really made of. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major developments of this day: The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 6.4 percent in June. The U.S. offered $25 million for information leading to the capture of Saddam Hussein or confirmation that he's dead. Ten more American soldiers were wounded in Iraq. And President Bush said he would not be rushed into a decision on sending troops to Liberia.

JIM LEHRER: And again, to our honor roll of American service personnel killed in Iraq. Here, in silence, is one more.

JIM LEHRER: A quick personal note: I'm going to be away on vacation for the next few weeks. But the real team will be here, the full team will see you online, and again here tomorrow evening with Mark Shields and Byron York, substituting for David Brooks. We'll also have a July 4th discussion of what the founding fathers might think of America, 2003. For now, I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you. Have a happy Fourth, and good night.