The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer; March 16, 2007

I'm Jim Lara, today's news, Valerie Blame's story, don't ask, don't tell, shields and brooks and life underwater, all tonight on the news out. Good evening, I'm Jim Lara.

On the news out tonight, the news of this Friday, then Valerie Blame tells Congress about how she was publicly identified as a CIA agent. Two views on whether the military's don't ask, don't tell, policy is working, the weekly analysis of Mark Shields and David Brooks, and a science unit update on new findings about life underwater. Major funding for the news hour with Jim Lara is provided by. What Susie and I retire, we'll be taking trips like this whenever we want, it's a good thing we've been planning.

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This program was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you, thank you. The woman at the center of the CIA League case appeared before Congress for the first time today. Valerie Blame said her cover as a CIA officer was carelessly and recklessly blown in 2003. She told a house hearing it was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover. Her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had criticized the pre-war intelligence on Iraq. The League of Plains Identity prompted a four-year federal investigation. We'll have more on this story right after the news summary. In Iraq today, division surfaced among Shiite militants in Baghdad, a militia commander loyal to Mutata Al-Sater, said Renegade shot a local official on Thursday. He said their angry Sater is cooperating with security efforts in Baghdad.

A U.S. Army commander confirmed that cooperation is helping. What we have seen is when the Sashia extremists departed our area of responsibility, specifically in western Baghdad, incidents rates in the Shia areas drop dramatically. That rates in the Sunni areas increased a bit with vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices targeting Shia gathering places and Iraqi security force locations. Later outside our issue to statement urging his followers to stay united and to oppose the U.S. presence. In other developments, U.S. officials reported two more American deaths so far this month in 1946 U.S. troops have died in Iraq, more than 3,200 Americans have been killed since the war began four years ago. Defense Secretary Gates has approved sending another 2,600 troops to Iraq. It came at the request of Army General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander there.

The new deployment involves a combat aviation unit being sent ahead of schedule. That will bring the new overall military buildup to almost 30,000 U.S. troops. There were new questions today about the firing of eight federal prosecutors. They focused on Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser. He was mentioned in White House emails from January of 2005. In one, a legal staffer said, Karl Rove stopped by to ask how we plan to proceed regarding U.S. attorneys. White House officials had said Harriet Myers floated the idea first when she was White House counsel. Today, press Secretary Tony Snow said memories on that point are hazy. The most certain thing I can say this juncture is that Karl Rove has a recollection of Harriet having raised it with him and his expressing to her that he thought was a bad idea. I don't know if there were other discussions about it, but that's really as far as we

can go. Snow has also said there's been no decision on whether Rove will testify before Congress. subpoenas for Justice Department officials testimony could come as early as next week. China's National Legislature passed sweeping new safeguards today for private property. It was the latest step in China's move away from communist economics starting in the 1970s. Influential scholars and retired communist officials condemned the new law. They said it will challenge the role of the state and lead to an even wider income gap between rich and poor. In U.S. economic news, the Labor Department reported consumer prices were up for tens of a percent last month. It was due mostly to the rising cost of gasoline and food. But on Wall Street, the inflation news dampened hopes for lower interest rates. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 49 points to close at 12,110, then Aztec fell six points to close at 2372.

For the week, the Dow lost more than one percent. The Aztec fell just over half a percent. And that's it for the news summary tonight. Now Valerie Plains speaks, gaze in the military, shields and brooks, and life underwater. Judy Woodruff has our Valerie Plains story. Photographers crowded around a congressional hearing witness table this morning, anticipating the arrival of Washington's most talked about spy in decades. Valerie Plains was called by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to describe for the first time publicly the impact of having her status as a covert CIA operative revealed in the press. I felt like I had been hit in the gut. It was over an instant, and I immediately thought of my family safety, the agents and

networks that I had worked with, and everything goes through your mind in an instant. I could no longer do the work, which I have been trained to do. There was, after that, there is no way that you can serve overseas in a covert capacity. And so that career path was terminated. It was conservative columnist Robert Novak, who on July 14, 2003, intimated in his column that Plains sent her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, to Africa, to investigate a claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger. Novak wrote, Valerie Plains is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me she suggested sending Wilson to Niger to investigate. Novak's revelation led to an independent investigation by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

But no one was charged with leaking. Last week, however, a jury convicted vice president Cheney's former chief of staff, Louis Scooter Libby, of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the investigation. This morning, plain finally gave her side of the story. In February of 2002, a young junior officer who worked for me came to me very concerned, very upset. She had just received a telephone call on her desk from someone I don't know who. In the office of the vice president, asking about this report of this alleged sale of Yellowcake Uranium from Niger to Iraq. She came to me and as she was telling that this what had just happened, someone passed by, another officer heard this. He knew that Joe had already, my husband, had already gone on some CIA missions previously

to deal with other nuclear matters. And he suggested, well, why don't we send Joe? And I will be honest, I was somewhat ambivalent at the time. We had two-year-old twins at home, and all I could envision was me by myself at bedtime with a couple of two-year-olds. So I wasn't overjoyed with this idea. Nevertheless, we went to my branch chief, our supervisor. My colleague suggested this idea. And my supervisor turned to me and said, well, when you go home this evening, would you be willing to speak to your husband, ask him to come in to headquarters next week, and we'll discuss the options. See if this is what we could do. Of course, Blame said she agreed to draft a memo about the plan, which is how she became associated with her husband's mission. And Blame tried to put to rest claims that she had not been a covert operative.

Most like a general is a general, whether he is in the field and Iraq or Afghanistan when he comes back to the Pentagon, he's still a general. In the same way, covert operations officers who are serving in the field when they rotate back for temporary assignment in Washington, they too are still covert. But Virginia Republican Tom Davis asked Blame whether members of the Bush administration knew she was a covert operative. I think what's missing, and I think from at least from a criminal perspective, not from a policy, but from a criminal perspective, that the special prosecutor in this case looked at that and found that the people who may have been saying this didn't know that you were covert and you don't have any evidence of the contrary. That I think is a question better put to the special prosecutor, Congressman. Blame no longer works at the CIA. She and her husband are moving out of Washington. Meanwhile, Committee Chairman Henry Waxman has promised further hearings into the White

House's use of classified information. Now the return of the gays in the military issue, Margaret Warner has that story. Here this week, Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace provoked controversy in a taped interview with the Chicago Tribune. He was defending the military's don't ask, don't tell, policy toward gays in their ranks. I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral in that we should not condone immoral acts, but not do not believe that the armed forces of the United States are well served by saying through our policies that it's okay to be more in any way. Yet just two weeks earlier, Democratic Congressman Martin Mann introduced a bill to abolish

the policy and let gays serve openly. Today I am reintroducing the Military Readiness Enhancement Act. It will be an uphill climb. Those strikingly different views dramatize the deep divisions that persist over the Pentagon's don't ask, don't tell, policy. For 14 years, gay men and lesbians have been able to serve in the U.S. military if they keep their sexual orientation private. One academic study estimates there may be as many as 60,000 gays serving. The policy was crafted in 1993 by then President Bill Clinton as a compromise with top Pentagon brass and congressional conservatives who wanted to keep a blanket ban on gay service members. Service men and women will be judged based on their conduct, not their sexual orientation. Recruits are no longer asked their sexual orientation, but nearly 11,000 servicemen and women have been thrown out after disclosing it or having it discovered.

The discharges hit a peak of more than 1,200 in 2001, but had been declining since then to just over 720 in 2005. Now with the armed forces stretched thin, there are renewed calls to abolish the policy altogether. Former Joint Chiefs Chairman General John Shali Keshvili, in a January opinion piece in the New York Times, said he had, quote, second thoughts on gays in the military. I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, he wrote, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces. Congressman Mann argued last month that the policy itself is actually undermining the military by robbing it of good people. Yet while we struggle to find and keep soldiers we need to the point of lowering our recruiting standards and allowing people with criminal records to enter our armed forces, we're actually turning away highly effective people because of a policy of discrimination. This is a matter of our own national security interest.

Beside him was Marine Staff Sergeant Eric Alva, badly wounded in the Iraq invasion four years ago. He was awarded the Purple Heart by President Bush and then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There are people like myself among the ranks of many women in the armed forces that have served to protect this nation, but I asked that you give them the chance to serve openly. The current Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, was asked after paces remarks this week for his personal opinion of the don't ask, don't tell, policy. I think personal opinion really doesn't have a place here. What's important is that we have a law, a statute that governs don't ask, don't tell. That's the policy of this department and it's my responsibility to execute that policy as effectively as we can. Though more than 100 members of Congress have co-sponsored legislation to overturn the policy, no hearings have been scheduled. So how well is the don't ask, don't tell, policy working after 14 years?

We hear from retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert McGinnis. He was an advisor to the Pentagon task force that formulated the don't ask, don't tell policy in 1993. He's now a consultant to the Army. And former Army Captain Sharon Alexander, she served an active duty from 1993 to 98, in the National Guard and Reserves until 2003. She's now Deputy Director for Policy at Service Members Legal Defense Network, which advocates repealing the policy. Welcome to you both. Colonel McGinnis, is this policy working successfully for the military? That is, is it meeting the standards that you intended, you all intended when you've crafted it 14 years ago? Oh Margaret, you know, the intent was to deny access for people who are openly gay to serve in the military. Is it working? It has certainly discharged almost 11,000 people since 94. There are some issues with it that I personally had because I think it's a double pretense.

I think homosexuals have to pretend they aren't homosexual and the military has pretended doesn't care that homosexuals serve. But that's the politics. The reality is, yes, a lot of people have been discharged. We are a very discriminatory organization. We discriminate against a whole host of issues. And it was the experts in 93 that compelled the Democratic Congress that, look, this is a category of people that you don't want to assume will not harm readiness. And in fact, they bought that. And you and your organization do not think that this is a successful policy for the military, from its point of view, why not? We think this is not a good public policy for a number of reasons. First of all, in the time of war, when we need all good people who are willing to serve serving, this is a policy that, like Colonel Gannes says, has resulted in the discharge of over 11,000 capable, skilled, trained personnel from our armed forces. Among those 11,000 were 55 speakers of Arabic in a time when we are fighting a war in Iraq and are badly in need of Arabic translators.

It's a bad policy also because it does indeed force people to lie as a condition of serving our country. We think that a great threat to unit cohesion is a law that says, in order to serve, you have to lie about who you are to be here. What about that point, Colonel, that at a time when the army is stretching to meet its recruitment goals, has indeed lowered its standards on aptitude tests on criminal records, does it make sense now to be essentially putting off limits, anyone who happens to be gay? And doesn't want to hide it. Well, obviously, that is, as Sharon indicates, that is a decision Congress has to make Article I, Section A to the Constitution, it's very clear. They make the rules and regulations. They have to revisit that, and apparently they aren't willing to do that through hearings. But as far as denying access to a particular category of people, there's no constitutional right to serve, as it says, in the law. But the fact is, we have to regulate by category. And we looked at the time in 93 at unit cohesion and we looked at unit readiness.

The certain general came back and said, as a category, this is a high-risk group, and then we asked those that are experts in group psychology, and they said, look, cohesion is going to be damaged because it's a polarizing category of people. So Congress bought that explanation, and as a result, we have what we have today. What about that argument, that being homosexual isn't like, I mean, other things people are discharged for are, say, being overweight, that it's not in that category, that it is something that is polarizing and cultural, social, even religious terms? Yeah, I don't buy that, and I don't think, honestly, people within the Pentagon really buy that. Any, every study that's been commissioned by the Pentagon to study the question of whether openly gay people in the ranks contribute negatively to unit cohesion has come to the conclusion that they do not. Our experience with our service members, who we serve through our legal services program, indicates to us that many of them are serving openly, and in fact are not causing any detriment

to unit cohesion. We think that the threat to unit cohesion is, again, any law that distinguishes among people in a way to make an entire class of people have to lie as a condition of serving your country. In your own personal experience, when you were serving, what did you find that? I found this to be a very difficult policy to implement, as a young platoon leader. I did lose a soldier to this policy, and I found it very disruptive, very difficult. Much more disruptive than it would have been if there had just been a gay person in the platoon like anybody else. The thing about military people and the thing about the military experience is that people come from diverse backgrounds, diverse philosophical perspectives, diverse religions. But unit cohesion is not based on shared philosophy or shared religion. Unit cohesion is based on a commitment to a mission that lies ahead of you, that transcends if you will, are individual differences. That's one of the great beauties of serving in the United States military. I think that this idea that people won't be able to serve with somebody with whom they

have religious differences vastly diminishes the capacity for service members to be tolerant of one another and to respect each other's differences. I think that evangelical Christians who believe homosexuality is wrong are perfectly capable of serving alongside gay people, and in many cases are doing so today. My concern is really, and I've been to Iraq a number of times talking to soldiers, about how do you build trust and confidence, how do you bond? Are these privacy issues a problem? When you look at all of these and you consider the privacy issues, there isn't any, basically, in any situation at a forward operating base, and especially now that we're going and doing a counterinsurgency and a security mission in Baghdad, very different. But the point is that you are really tearing apart the trust and confidence. The only reason I go out there and fight is because I'm fighting for the guy on my left or the girl on my right, it has nothing to do about motherhood and apple pie.

It has everything to do about how I respect that person, how I work with that person, how I live with that person. That's how you build that bond, and that bond is so absolutely critical, Margaret, to how our army fights, and it was a scientist, and it was, she talks about studies. It was a scientist that came back and said to the Congress and to us, look, we don't need these radical differences in our bonding techniques because that's going to hurt us. And so, you know, we bought into that. But could I just ask you just to ask, as Captain Alexander discussed in her own personal experience, do you have personal experience that tells you either that the current policy is a good idea that it's maintained unit cohesion somewhere, where otherwise it could have been ripped a sunder, have you talked to people who have actually told you that if they knew their fellow platoon members were gay, that would undermine their family. Well, as sure, most people that are homosexual, if they want to continue service, they aren't going to announce that to the world. They're going to be discharged in most cases.

So you don't know, you anecdotally hear cases, oh, I knew that, but you really didn't know that because it's a commander's obligation to dismiss them based on the law and the regulation. So, you know, you get in situations where you get to know this person if you suspect something, then, you know, you work it out. But if it's a sexual proclivity, you know, as a father of teenagers, I have a tough time keeping teenagers, you know, apart from one another, those, you know, opposite sexes. When you throw in that sexual drive into a forced sentiment situation, it's hard to control. We have a war going on. We don't need to be battling one another, you know, when we're talking same sex attraction. I think that, again, vastly underestimates professionalism of the men and women who are fighting this war for us today. I think, in Colonel McGinnis' generation and in my generation, it's true that most gay people in the military did not serve openly. They stayed very much in the closet. That's not true today.

We talk to clients every day in the 18 to 25-year-old category who are over there in combat fighting, and they are, in many cases, open to their colleagues without incident. They are accepted. Even by people who might have philosophical or religious beliefs or you think the way this policy is enforced is fairly arbitrary. It's very arbitrary. Many people are serving openly gay under this policy. Discharges tend to happen as a result of retaliation. Maybe someone's mad at somebody, and this is a great tool to hurt someone. And very briefly, Colonel, is it the case, though, that the number of forced discharges has dropped fairly significantly in the last five years since we've been engaged in that war in Iraq, isn't it? Yeah. It's a sign wave, and it has come down. In fact, the army, though, I guess what I'm asking is, is the army tacitly now allowing openly gay members to serve because of the need to be... You're not going to find a commander to say that, Margaret. It may be happening out there, but by and large commanders are focused on doing what they have to do with commanders. Incredibly tough mission. Let's not put something else on their shoulders to deal with that they shouldn't have to in a time of war.

All right. Colonel McGinnis. Captain Alexander, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Still to come on the news hour tonight, shields and brooks, and life under water. But first, this is pledge week on public television, and we're taking a short break now. So your public television station can ask for your support. That support helps keep programs like ours on the air. For those stations, not taking a pledge break. The news hour continues now with two reports from Afghanistan, Bill Neelley of Independent Television News, is embedded with the Royal Marines. His first story is about fighting the Taliban and Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. Beneath the smoke screen, British snipers return to base. They've just killed at least two Taliban gunmen, the mortar fire covering their withdrawal.

It's a short, fast operation. Among the hills of Helmand, Royal Marines are hunting down an elusive enemy, searching the valley below for the gunman who just months ago called this province their own. There's been law of activity over the last couple of days with Taliban trauma move forwards and a real position that we've already pushed them back on. It's been also planned to deliberate attacks going in as well, which have proved to be very successful. Not long ago, the Taliban held this hill and from here attack British troops down below. Now they've been driven off it and forced back there for about three miles. And every day, they're being driven a little further away. The problem now for the troops here is to hold that ground. This is how they took the ground. These compounds around Kajaki were used by the Taliban as a base from which to attack Marines.

They take them one by one, but it's not without danger. Three Marines have been killed in a Salz near Kajaki in as many months. And these are the Taliban fighters they face. This video taken, say, the Taliban in Helmand in recent weeks. The fighters are lightly armed. Their target here appears to be the Afghan troops. The Marines are here to support and train. They're also here to protect Kajaki's dam and the power station that gives a million Afghans' electricity. But the fighting has terrified civilians' village after village is deserted. The Marine's aim is to wipe out the Taliban and to win over the population. It's a battle and a balancing act that's finally poised. Nearly second report is a rare look at a final goodbye for four soldiers killed last week in Afghanistan.

A bleak desert airstrip, lines of commandos, and the formal farewell every soldier dreads. Four young men who came here together five months ago, and would go home together. Ben, Michael, Ross, Liam, may you go in the name of the father who created you? Marine Ben ready was 22. He was shot last Tuesday. A friend read a letter from his parents. We are so proud of you. I love you so, so much. You cannot believe you have been taken from us until you come home to us all alone. I hear them, mom and dad, I'm doing it. Lance Bombardier Ross Clark grew up in South Africa and died in Sanguine, Afghanistan, in a rocket attack, killed alongside his friend Lance Bombardier Liam McLaughlin. A surfer, 21 years old. Sergeant Major Mick Smith died on Thursday in the same base at Sanguine.

He had been injured there in another attack two days earlier. Mick, you were a soldier to the end, a legend within the regiment, but above all else a friend, and you'll be missed late. These are tough men, but the loss of four comrades in five days, 45 and nine months, is tough too. This has been one of the deadliest weeks since British troops were deployed here, but at this the start of their biggest ever offensive against the Taliban. No one here is under any illusions, there will be many more casualties, more ceremonies like this one. Their enemy, the Taliban, have promised their own spring offensive. For the four men who were due to go home in four weeks time, the plane's wings dipped.

One had been planning to retire within months after 22 years' service. For those they left behind, war beckons once more. And to the analysis of shields and brooks, indicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks. Mark, what did you think of Valerie playing before Congress today, what she said? Well, it's fascinating, Jim, because she had never spoken a word in public to my knowledge. I've never heard her voice in a microphone, and I thought she was a compelling persuasive witness, and I think she dominated the room. She persuades you to what? That she, first of all, that in spite of all the statements to the contrary, from everybody else involved in the case on the other side, to put it that way, she said she was a CIA operative, and what she was covert in her actions.

And that she was outed by that disclosure made, she was a big entity, she was a big entity, and her career ended, effectively ended by that experience and that outing. What was your reaction to her story? Well, just on that subject, there is a, there were laws about who was covert and who was not, and it's not, once you're covert, you're not always covert as she claimed. There are, you have to be in the field and such things, I'm not an expert on the law, but that is a matter of dispute, and then as we saw this republicans said, did the republicans intentionally out her? I personally think this story is over and done with, to be honest with you. I thought the story was hot, as long as people thought Rove and Cheney might beat the end of the, at the end of the line for the investigation. Once became clear, it was Richard Armitage, interest in the story, died down, the prosecution went on, the only trial that is going to be has concluded, so I basically think the story is over. You don't think she was a victim? No, no, no, she certainly was a victim, no, she certainly was a victim of a campaign to out her, and I thought, you know, I've, I've said on this program before, I thought the whole process was terrible, I thought it started with the, the misleading things

her husband said, I think it, it continued with the vicious campaign by the White House to destroy her and to overreact the, the op-ed piece, and then it continued, I thought with the prosecution that went off in the direction it was not supposed to go on, it was supposed to be out, adding a CIA officer, not about going after the vice president, and so it was, I thought it was a travesty from the beginning to end with no real influence on policy. You're great, no real influence on policy. I think it's a reflection, I think it gave us a, an x-ray view of the, of the White House and how it operates, I don't have any question, the vice president was into it up to his eyebrows to get her to, to denounce her, the findings of her husband, which were not refuted, that, that in fact the, the statement made by the president in the state of the union addressed was inaccurate, that's the first thing, the second thing is that the president himself made a solemn pledge that anybody who was involved in revealing her identity would not continue to work at the White House. To this day we have the vice president in place, we have Karl Rove in place, and we know

that Karl Rove was actively involved in, in that attempt, and that, in that effort in, in removing her name, to, to press people. I feel like I'm getting involved in a dispute about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and this is ancient history, but, but Wilson's report, as, as a, as a bipartisan commission found, was not dis, dis, disputing what the president said in those 16 words, it was mildly supportive, he was dishonest about what it said. There's a, I mean, there's a, there's a whole series, as I said, of dishonesty, building upon the dishonesty's, which is not to, it's sculpt, sculptate, or whatever that word is. It's a great word, whatever it is. I will never say it on television again, the, the vice president, and the way they reacted. But it's just one long, totally series of events after. It was the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee, it was not a commission that made that finding it. It's the only one that, to my knowledge, that was negative on, on Joe Wilson's. Through subject, speaking of the White House, David, the fired U.S. attorneys and Attorney General Gonzalez. Is he on his way out?

I think he might be. What strikes me aside from the, the substance of this? What strikes me about this story is, first of all, how much Republicans around the country, and especially on Capitol Hill are sick of the White House, and sick of them of the Republicans having to wake up in the morning and try to defend something which they think is incompetent. And so there's just, there's just a wall of hostility coming from Republicans now. And there's also apparently disputes within the, between the White House and the Attorney General. And there's also the knowledge that if they want to pursue substantive matters, having to do a national security and other things that go through the Attorney General's office, this guy is not to be able to do that in an effective way. So I think all that adds up to the likelihood, regardless of the merits of this case, that they're going to have a new Attorney General. Attorney General Mark? Uh, it's certainly, I wouldn't bet on, uh, on long term that the one thing he is going for him right now is that, uh, democratically to Harry Reid said it'd be gone to matter of days. Then it becomes a matter of pride, not to have it on a few days. But, but should he go? But, well, Al Gonzalez has a unique problem as, uh, the judges, he's known by his colleagues and called by his colleagues.

He has a constituency of one. Very rarely to some, and, and that one is the George W. Bush. George W. Bush took him from the law firm in 1994, made him his own counsel, and then brought him to Washington, where he's a White House counsel, and made him Attorney General. And even considered him seriously for the Supreme Court. That's that he has no institutional support. It isn't like he comes from a constituency. He's, he's never held elective office. I mean, in a strange way, it's, it's, it's been his undoing. It's been that most is doing and his undoing because his loyalty and his identity has been solely to the President, um, and I think that if anything is probably going to lead to his, to his downfall. Do you feel, David, that something really wrong was committed here by the White House, Gonzalez, and all of the above? I really don't know. I'm amazed everyone else around town seems to have an opinion on this subject. It goes on to whether these attorneys were wrongfully fired, wrongfully dismissed for political reasons. And a lot of the cases, which the administration was pushing these guys to push, have to do with New Mexico, uh, for all voter fraud and New Mexico and Washington state, capital

defense cases, immigration law. I know nothing about any of these cases, but a lot of people in Washington assume that the White House must be wrong and the attorneys were right not to push these cases. I don't think we know that. Nonetheless, I think what's clear and what's created this cure, especially on the Republican side, is just the incompetent way they first said they were not being fired for cause. Then said cause denied that there was any politics in it when, of course, there's politics in it. And so it's that whole atmosphere that has created this little stermi, but the substance, unless you're a real expert in these cases, I don't think anybody knows. You agree that this is more of a handling, uh, offense rather than a substance offense? Well, I don't know, Jim. I mean, certainly the San Diego U.S. attorney, I mean, raises serious questions to Carol Lampt. She was the first one and the most conspicuous one, uh, sacked and, uh, according to the chief of staff that Department of Justice's own emails, uh, they wanted, uh, somebody ready on the 18th of November when her four-year term was up to take her place, uh, and that

was just the day that she announced their investigation of Jerry Lewis, the ranking Republican and appropriations committee, uh, in the House, uh, on, on the question of involvement with the defense contractors right after that, that, that her office had prosecuted Randy do cutting him. So the, the allegation was that she was soft on immigration. The allegation was also, Jim, that Harriet Myers came up with this idea. Now Harriet Myers is a very lovely person. The idea that Harriet Myers is a global political schemer and sat there and said, you know, we got to get rid of 93 U.S. if she was the White House council, she was the White House council. She didn't come up with that idea, Jim, any more than I came up with the idea for number theory in, uh, in Albania. I mean, that, that was not, that was not Harriet Myers. And so, you know, going after her on immigration, uh, you know, that, that seems to be, be a little bit of a smoke screen at this point. Do you think you want to add to that, David? Uh, I thought Mark and all of our number theory in Albania, uh, but this is the second,

this follows on claim. This is the second attempt to get rid of. This is the great white whale of, of Washington politics. And there were, he's sort of vaguely implicated in this. And so there's a desire to see if he's deeply involved. I think that, I think that complicates the Gonzalez. I think Gonzalez may very well go. I think there's a, there are a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill who want to get Karl Rove in there to testify. Just as all of the White House staff was brought in to testify in white water, what we call when, when Bill Clinton was president. And they'll, they'll want to fight this. Um, and I think one way will be that Al Gonzalez is offered up as the going is a peace offering that they play out next week. He had a friend of mine said he'd be a really good ahead of the Bush library in Texas. That'd be a great job for Al Gonzalez and that. Uh, Mark, what do you see as the meaning of the Democratic moves in the House and Senate on the Iraq, uh, resolutions, those, those, uh, more than resolutions in the House involving funding, those in the Senate involving resolutions. Um, I think, uh, first of all, looking at perspective, there were 296 votes for the war, uh, in the House. Um, they'll probably,

it won't be 210 votes, uh, you know, in support of the president, uh, coming next week. I don't think, uh, the 23 and the first vote in the first vote in there was 77 in the Senate in there were 48 yesterday. They were going on record to end that war. Um, I think the House vote is the most significant one, Jim. Um, the House Appropriations Committee extends from conservatives like Bud Kramer of Alabama and, and, and, uh, Allen Boyd of, uh, of Florida and then Chandler Kentucky to Jose Serrano of, of, of the Bronx and Jesse Jackson Jr. on the left, uh, Carolyn Kilpatrick of Detroit. And they were able to get a, uh, an agreement that all of them could support, which was really a, a single achievement because it was done in public. And I, I, I think that, uh, the fight is going to be on the left of the Democratic Party where, uh, Nancy Pelosi, uh, has political roots. They're considerable degree. The peace left of the Democratic Party. Only one broke in the committee. And I,

I think that, uh, the vote in the House next week, um, could be the, the vote that starts to trigger the true erosion. You'll see the Republicans scampering. I think behind John wanted to come up with some sort of a resolution that gives them cover that, if it isn't done by September, we're going to be out of here. We, uh, they have to be progress made and so forth. And I, I think, I think that's what's happening. You see that happening? Uh, no, I think so far, the Democrats have made it incredibly easy for the Republicans. The Republicans privately are all over the lot. They, they, they something we should get out very quickly, something more gradually. So, nobody likes the president basically. They're a 5 or 10 maybe who support the president's policy. But the Democrats have handled this in a very partisan way. Instead of having a bipartisan thing, which the left of the Democratic Party would be happy with, but a lot of Republicans would be happy with. The Democrats, at least in the Senate, have tried to, to hold the Democrats together. And they've made it very easy. They've pushed all the Republicans apart. So, we had this week basically a party line vote in the Senate on this. And to me, the problem with the Democratic approach, another reason why it's become so easy for

the Republicans is they took the president's policy, which is the surge. They took the left, the liberal policy, which is to get out now, uh, on the grounds that it's a failure, both of which I think are serious policies. And they cut it in the middle to say, well, we should get out vaporously in the end of 2008, a policy which has no substance. And so, to me, I think they were undermined by their own desire to keep political unity here, ignoring any reality in Iraq. I would say this, Jim. The Republicans are going to be in a terrible position next week on the House of Representatives in political reality. They're going to be in the position they've always tried to put the Democrats in, which is you're voting against appropriations for the troops. And that's, that's the vote next week. It's whether, in fact, you're going to send troops there who are equipped, who are trained and who are armored. And the Republicans are going to say, nope, we're not going to vote for it, because we don't like other provisions in it. That, that is a difficult vote for them to cast. And I think, I think it's a, I mean, this is a political, this is a political issue. It's a political fight. And I think there's been very, very, uh, effective political, uh, leadership demonstrated

legislatively by the Democrats in the House, particularly David O.B. and Jack Mirtha. But not so much on the Senate. Well, I think the Senate's a different fight. They've got it, they've got to the point where they, they're off procedural votes, they're now on, and all you need on our appropriations bill on the Senate is a majority. It needs 60 yesterday on that resolution. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We have to leave it there. Thank you both. Finally tonight, new findings about the lives of the ocean. Ray Suarez has our science unit update. The findings come from a global expedition that's been compared to Charles Darwin's sea voyages more than a century ago. Scientists have been trawling the ocean since 2003 in search of the smallest organisms, microbes, to create a kind of microscopic marine census. The project was launched by geneticist Craig Venter, who turned his own private

yacht, sorcerer, too, into a floating laboratory. Venter, already well known for his pioneering work to help crack the human genetic code, set off with his team from Halifax in Canada on the Atlantic coast, sailed through the Panama Canal into the Pacific Ocean, heading for the Galapagos Islands and French Polynesia. In a report published earlier this week, the team set it found millions of new genes and proteins among the bacteria and other microorganisms. The data that's been analyzed to date has already doubled the number of known genes on Earth. Venter and his team are now sharing the information they've gathered on the internet. And for more about the significance of these findings and the voyage, I'm joined by Craig Venter, the expedition's leader. So we're out on the open ocean and we take the serious high-tech bucket and throw it over the side and pull up water that's full of what?

Water even crystal-clear ocean water. If we take a teaspoon of it, that teaspoon will contain millions of bacteria and tens of millions of viruses. We've missed them because we can't see them with our own visual acuity. And when we try to culture these organisms, only about a tenth of a percent of them have ever grown in the laboratory. So we've used the new tools that we developed for sequencing the human genome to take the DNA from these organisms in the ocean, sequence the DNA to find out, in fact, who's there and what they do. Did we not know before that all that was in that water? In fact, we clearly did not know. In fact, seas like the stargasso sea were thought to be a desert, very little life because there's no nutrients. So it was the new photoreceptors similar to our visual pigments in our eyes that capture energy from the sun that allows these organisms to grow. And these are key part of the carbon sink in the ocean for capturing CO2. How do all those organisms get into the water and what are they doing in there? Well, obviously they've been there for hundreds of millions of years. In fact, we found

such incredible diversity unexpected from almost any type of study. Every 200 miles, 85% of the organisms and sequences were unique to that region. So instead of this homogeneous primordial soup, it's millions of micro environments like miniature multicellular organisms involving the chemistry of the moment of that site. So they've been there, they've been evolving, they've been changing over time and we're seeing them now for the first time by looking at their genetic code. So you look at their genetic code. So like us and like a blade of grass and like a fruit fly, they have a DNA sequence. What does knowing that get you to further find out about? What does that unlock for you? Well, unlocks everything from understanding evolution better. For example, genes that we thought were only unique to humans and mammals, we're now finding go across all branches of life. We just doubled the number of known genes that we have sequenced from. So it expands the databases for everything from trying to understand how many proteins and genes

we even have on our planet to finding practical uses for them. We're trying to create bioenergy by taking some of these genes in pathways and converting, for example, sunlight and the hydrogen or sugar into a burnable fuel. We also allow now to try and understand the chemistry of the oceans where we capture back the CO2. We put three and a half billion tons a year into the atmosphere. The ocean is the biggest carbon sink over a hundred billion tons. If we can shift that equilibrium slightly, we might be able to capture back more that's actually doing real harm to our planet. As you were taking these samples, every couple of hundred nautical miles on a long voyage, did you find that there's more stuff in cold water than warm or shallow water than deep or water that's close to land as opposed to the middle of the ocean? What we found is each site differs from each other, but the diversity and the amount of organisms is extremely high everywhere. But there's different ones that grow in the cold

water of the North Atlantic than in the South Atlantic. The Atlantic Ocean is different than the Pacific Ocean. The freshwater, the Panama Canal, is totally unique with organisms. The most important thing that we found is these photoreceptors see the color of light in the region reflected by the seawater. In the Sargasso Sea, it's a deep indigo blue. The photoreceptors, it's like having one eye, only sea blue light. You get into coastal waters. They see green light reflected off the chlorophyll, and a single letter change in the genetic code changes one amino acids in this protein that changes the wavelength of light that these receptors see. So we might have a huge vast reserve of new molecules that capture different wavelengths of light that we might use to capture sunlight and unique metabolic processes. So here you've got these cells that are like the cells in the human eye. You've got these things that no one ever knew were in the ocean before. Do you look at the ocean differently now, almost like a living organism itself?

I definitely do. And it's hard because our visual acuity, it looks like some of these places, it's the most beautiful crystal-clear water. And I constantly have to remind myself I'm looking at billions of organisms just in that one area. We have to change our thinking. These are the most abundant life forms in the planet. You can take all the bacteria out of the sea in that outweigh all the plants and animals that we can see with our own eyes. It's a different view of biology and how it originated here. Well, just like finding something in the Amazon, Rainforest, or in a central African jungle, are there countries that are going to say, hey, Craig Venter, this is part of our national patrimony, our genetic property. Don't come and just take stuff out of there. Well, in fact, it is an issue. We've had to work through the State Department to get sampling permits from every country where we went out of international waters into their 200-mile limit. And we've been required to label every sequence in these public databases as the patrimony to the genetic patrimony of those countries where they're reserving commercial rights. So it's a very different world than Darwin experienced, where he just traveled around

on this expedition and collected species. We now have to get permission to even take a barrel of seawater. Craig Venter, thanks for talking to us. Great to be with you. And again, the major developments of this day, the woman at the center of the CIA leak case, appeared before Congress. Valerie RePlame said administration officials acted recklessly when they disclosed her identity. And defense secretary Gates approved sending another 2,600 troops to Iraq. Washington Week can be seen later this evening, almost PBS stations. We'll see you online. And again, here Monday evening, have a nice weekend. I'm Jim Lara. Thank you and goodnight. Major funding for the new hour with Jim Lara is provided by the world's demand for energy will never stop, which is why a farmer is growing corn, and a farmer is growing soy, and

why ADN is turning these crops into biofuels. The world's demand for energy will never stop, which is why ADN will never stop. We're only getting started. ADM, resourceful by nature. And by Chevron, Pacific life, the Atlantic philanthropies, the National Science Foundation, and with the continuing support of these institutions and foundations. And this program was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you. To purchase video cassettes of the news hour with Jim Lara, call 1-866-678-News. We are

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