The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight: The news of this Tuesday; then, a look at what is not being done for the endangered survivors of the Pakistan earthquake; reaction from Senators Lindsey Graham and Charles Schumer to the release today of a Harriet Miers questionnaire; a report on the mental stresses caused by Hurricane Katrina; some scientific word on why this has been such a big hurricane season; and a Roger Rosenblatt essay on separating fact from fiction.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: There were growing fears today of a second wave of earthquake deaths in Pakistan. The estimated death toll is already 54,000, but UN officials warned exposure and infections could begin killing survivors. They said aid has yet to reach as many as half a million people, and they warned the lack of shelter is getting critical as winter sets in.

ROB HOLDEN, UN Disaster Assessment Team: The latest estimate that I have is that some ten or twelve thousand tent -- I think it's nearly twelve thousand tents now have been delivered. But we know that's only pretty much a drop in the ocean when we are requiring close to 200,000 tents that the Pakistani authorities have said need to be placed out for people to have adequate shelter.

JIM LEHRER: About 80,000 people were injured in the quake ten days ago. The UN now estimates more than three million were left homeless. We'll have more on this story right after this News Summary. Tropical Storm Wilma grew into a hurricane today. The National Hurricane Center said the storm would keep growing as it moves toward the Gulf. It's expected to veer northeast into Florida this weekend. Wilma is the 21st storm this season, tying a record from 1933. And we'll have more on what's fueling these storms later in the program.

In Iraq today, officials cautioned against assuming fraud in the vote on a constitution. The Election Commission plans to audit the results from Saturday's referendum. But one member said today the commission is simply doing its job. Sunni leaders charged the "yes" vote was padded in two provinces with slight Sunni majorities. The constitution won 70 percent approval there despite widespread Sunni opposition.

Two more U.S. Marines were killed in Iraq today. It happened in fighting near the border with Jordan. U.S. military officials said four suspected insurgents also died. Elsewhere, a U.S. soldier was killed in Mosul and eight Iraqis were killed across the country. The U.S. Senate received new information today on Harriet Miers and the issue of abortion. The Supreme Court nominee submitted background material.

One political questionnaire from 1989, showed Miers supported amending the U.S. Constitution to ban abortion, except to save the mother's life. Republicans and Democrats alike said the material raised new questions.

SEN. RICK SANTORUM: One piece of paper on how she feels about an issue doesn't tell me a lot. I'm more interested in judicial philosophy. I mean, I knew a lot of people here who I served with both in the House and the Senate who were candidly not pro-life, but their judicial philosophy was such that they were not going to be activists on the court.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: And the questionnaire means one thing: that Harriet Miers has to make clear to the American people her judicial philosophy, her ideology, on a whole range of constitutional issues. The questionnaire doesn't clear up things; it rather makes them even more confounding.

JIM LEHRER: We'll have more on this story later in the program.

The Bush administration promised new action today to control the country's borders. The secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, appeared at a Senate hearing. He acknowledged thousands of illegal immigrants are released each year for lack of space to hold them. He said they routinely disappear into the population.

MICHAEL CHERTOFF: That is unacceptable, and we are going to change that starting immediately. The key here is to change the amount of time that it takes to move people out of detention, get them back to their countries and also have additional beds so that we can detain people. That's not only important because we don't want to release them in the community when we've apprehended them, but because we need to deter people from coming across the border.

JIM LEHRER: Chertoff also made a pitch for the president's guest worker program. He said beefing up border patrols alone won't stem the flow of illegal immigrants. The U.S. Agriculture Department dropped plans today to close more than 700 Farm Service Offices. The plans generated widespread opposition in Congress. The Department has more than 2,300 county offices around the country to aid farmers with crop programs and loans. Officials had said they wanted to modernize the system and streamline services.

The European Union called for worldwide cooperation today to contain the bird flu. It said it needs help to stop a disease that spreads so quickly across borders. The appeal came as Greece and Macedonia reported possible cases of a deadly Asian virus. The disease has already been confirmed in Turkey and Romania.

Shooting erupted again today in the Russian city of Nal'chik. More than 130 people died there last week in a series of attacks. Chechen rebels claimed responsibility. Today, security forces sealed off parts of the city after new gunfire. They also killed a man who allegedly took part in last week's attacks.

Oil prices slid back today on word that Hurricane Wilma would miss oil fields in the Gulf. The price of crude in New York was down more than a dollar to finish just over $63 a barrel. On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost more than 62 points to close at 10,285. The NASDAQ fell 14 points to close at 2,056.

And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to continuing bad news from Pakistan; the Miers answers; Senators Graham and Schumer; Katrina's stress costs; here comes another hurricane; and a Roger Rosenblatt essay.

FOCUS - AID RESPONSE

JIM LEHRER: The race to prevent thousands of more deaths in the Pakistan earthquake. We begin with a report narrated by Katy Razzle of Independent Television News.

KATY RAZZLE: They survived the earthquake, but their plight is desperate. Ten days on, nearly a third of Pakistan's injured still haven't been reached by doctors. And when nightfall comes, with temperatures already close to freezing, they're left with very little shelter. The UN's relief agency, OCHA, and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies both say they've been given only a fraction of the money they need. It's an unusually slow response to a disaster they say.

More than 40,000 people died in the earthquake; more than that will die through the winter if supplies don't reach them. The most pressing need is for winterized tents.

WOMAN (Translated): I need a good tent. My children are sleeping here on just a carpet. We don't have a tent and we are living in the open.

KATY RAZZLE: The UN says it needs half a million cold weather tents. Thirty-six thousand have already reached Pakistan. Just over half have been distributed so far. Another 220,000 are in the pipeline, of which 100,000 will come from the Pakistan government. Agencies are hoping they'll source more, but they still estimate a massive shortfall.

LIAQAT HUSSAIN, Deputy Commissioner, Muzaffarabad: As the winter is setting in, our top priority and our most basic demand is the tents and the blankets and then the food comes.

KATY RAZZLE: Part of the problem is that the world simply doesn't have enough winter tents to shelter the three million who've been made homeless on both sides of the Kashmiri line of control. Agencies have been desperately contacting tent suppliers across the globe. Then there's the remoteness of this region -- half a million people still haven't been reached at all.

CHRIS McDONALD, World Vision: Physically getting those tents to people has proven difficult. In some of the areas, there aren't even any roads. They're very small tracts. One thing the World Vision has been doing is to get tents and other equipment by donkey to people up in the mountains, and even with some people carrying them on their shoulders.

KATY RAZZLE: The lucky ones, if you can call them that, are being airlifted to hospitals. So many of the injured are children and far too many, after more than a week of inadequate medical care, will lose limbs.

BOB McKERROW, Head of Delegation, International Federation of the Red Cross: Some of the people patients are requiring amputations, they have got advanced gangrene. We have a Red Cross hospital in Islamabad; we have only have got 100 people there but a lot of them are kids who have had feet amputated, legs amputated. One little boy this morning said, "I lost my leg, my mother, my father, I want to go back to the grave and cry on it."

KATY RAZZLE: The scale of the suffering is immense, but for some reason, perhaps disaster fatigue, perhaps geographical distance, the money pledged isn't matching what's needed. But the people here could be dependent on aid, say the agencies, for the next six months -- a long and difficult operation because of the lack of infrastructure and the rugged terrain. They say money is urgently needed and the international community must find it to save lives.

JIM LEHRER: And to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: For more on the aid effort, we go to: Iqbal Noor Ali, chief executive officer of the Aga Khan Foundation USA. The foundation works with the poor in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Mr. Noor Ali was born and raised in Pakistan and is now a U.S. citizen. And Nicolas de Torrente is executive director of the U.S. branch of Doctors Without Borders. The organization has 100 staffers working now in Pakistan.

And, Nicholas de Torrente, maybe we could begin by hearing what your people are telling you from the front lines. What progress has been made in getting people the help they need?

NICHOLAS DE TORRENTE: Well, as your report outlined, the scale of the devastation is really immense and catastrophic, and we're operating particularly in a very, very difficult terrain, mountainous areas with villages scattered in a large area in very, very harsh conditions, and that is making the relief effort very difficult.

And our teams are focusing -- first they focused on the referral areas in the low-lying areas in referral hospitals and treating a lot of injuries. And they've been trying and struggling to get out into the villages but have only, as your report said, have only reached a fraction of the people in need. And that is a very major concern that -- you know, hundreds of thousands ever people, perhaps, have still not received any assistance, are trapped in the mountains and cannot be reached -- have not been reached by the aid effort so far.

When we are able to reach villages -- and we have gotten by foot and by helicopter to some of them -- what is very striking is the extent of the damage and devastation of the houses and the number of injured people with severe wounds, fractures, spinal injuries on the one hand, requiring a lot of care, and lacerations and infected wounds on the other, so a lot of injured people and our teams have seen hundreds of them.

Again, they've only seen a fraction. That's the major emergency medical need at the moment, and it's very massive indeed. The second big need, also alluded to in your report, is shelter. People are out in the open. It's very cold. It's mountainous. It's windy. It's been raining. They've lost their homes. And they're sleeping out in the open or under corrugated iron they don't have -- they've retrieved some clothing, you know, clothing from the rubble and are -- and that is, again, they're exposed to the elements, and we've already seen people -- children die of hypothermia, and we're -- there's a very big risk here of further aggravation because of the lack of shelter in these harsh conditions.

RAY SUAREZ: Iqbal Noor Ali, I know that the Aga Khan Foundation is trying to get what help it can to these villages. Let's break it down to its essence. There was a lot of emphasis in our report from the field on the shortage of tents

IQBAL NOOR ALI: Yes.

RAY SUAREZ: -- and how people are trying to locate tents.

IQBAL NOOR ALI: Right.

RAY SUAREZ: And we saw one family in particular saying that after ten days, she's still sleeping out in the open. How does a tent get from wherever it is in the world to this woman in a hill village in northern Pakistan? Walk us through the process, how you would find her, and how the tent would get there.

IQBAL NOOR ALI: Well, as your report said, and as my friend Nicholas said, it is very difficult to get. We have distributed about 1,000 tents now. The need is enormous. They way it gets there -- our affiliate in the Aga Khan network that is providing the support is called Focus Humanitarian Assistance. They're a disaster preparedness, mitigation and prevention agency, so they had some stock. They've been trying to procure more. They've been looking as far afield as China and India and even Brazil and Egypt.

And I think it's a major challenge that every agency currently faces. Shelter is the number one need, followed by blankets and medical supplies and medical assistance. The scale of the disaster, as has been described, is enormous. Just reaching these people before winter's completely closed down the roads and any access is a major challenge.

We have four helicopters at our disposal that have been doing their best, despite the weather, running four sorties each a day trying to take relief goods to these people, food, medical assistance. We have 30 doctors in the area. UNHCR has set up now a medical facility in Muzaffarabad as a triage center, so they do triage there and bring the rest to Islamabad. It simply isn't enough. The remoteness of the area, the ruggedness of the area, for those of us who travel there, know under normal circumstances just how difficult it is.

So the need is enormous, and I hope what we are hearing about the lack of response is not long lasting because the need certainly is long lasting.

RAY SUAREZ: Nicholas de Torrente, in the first days after the earthquake, horrendous reports came from the field of doctors and villages doing surgery with no anesthesia, no antiseptic, no sterile water available, even. Are the very worst of those conditions at least starting to be mitigated somewhat? Is help getting to people that at least stabilizes them until proper medical care is available?

NICHOLAS DE TORRENTE: Well, I think that in the accessible areas, Muzaffarabad, sort of major towns in the lower lying areas, there is medical assistance is being organized, but under very harsh, difficult conditions. We have to also understand that many of the health facilities themselves have been destroyed. Two out of the three hospitals in Muzaffarabad have been destroyed, for instance, and that is posing a major problem.

So, you know, in these areas, yes, things are getting better. In the villages, I think still we have a major problem. Again, a lot of the villages have not been reached, and there is very little help, if any, that has been made available to the population. So it's still very tough. And the transport issue is a big one because of course we -- even with our doctors, we can treat people and we can do dressings and we can do immediate first aid, but if they need an amputation, if they need more surgical care, they need to be brought to a referral facility, and there, the lack of helicopters, the lack of transport is posing a major problem because we cannot do surgery at a village level in a tent. That's just not possible.

RAY SUAREZ: Mr. Noor Ali, when the tsunami occurred around the Indian Ocean rim, the world seemed to open its pocketbooks.

IQBAL NOOR ALI: Yes.

RAY SUAREZ: Is something different happening this time? And if it is, why?

IQBAL NOOR ALI: I think perhaps it's just too many disasters, one following the other, but, you know, one doesn't control nature. These things happen. And unless we are prepared to step up to the plate now and help these people, as the report said, we'll lose many more lives in the aftermath of the earthquake than the earthquake itself has taken, which is big enough right now.

But even beyond that I think we also need to think about the multigenerational effect this is going to have on those poor families. So beyond the immediate relief we have to think about reconstruction and make a commitment to that because when a poor family loses its breadwinner, they have fallen back into poverty by several generations.

So this is going to be a long-term effect on that area which is important strategically, and in the part of the world that has been unstable. So bringing stability over the longer term is also going to be part of the challenge, as is the immediate challenge of saving lives and saving people who might otherwise die.

RAY SUAREZ: Very quickly before we close, Mr. de Torrente, Doctors Without Borders made worldwide headlines by asking people to slow down the contributions after the tsunami. Is it different this time?

NICHOLAS DE TORRENTE: Well, I think that the immediate emergency needs in the aftermath of this earthquake are bigger than they were in the aftermath of the tsunami -- the number of injured and fractured that we're seeing, injuries that we're seeing, the fact that the health facilities have been devastated -- the fact of the difficult terrain and inaccessibility. You know, we feel that the emergency needs here are greater.

So, you know, the key thing is to be able to give resources and efforts based on need. And that is what the -- in a way, the current system of funding international humanitarian aid is not providing. We've tried to take a step in that direction by asking people in the aftermath of the tsunami to stop giving and we've asked people to support our efforts overall so that we can respond to emergencies, even the ones who don't make media headlines, like the nutritional crisis in Niger or the ongoing situation in Darfur, you know, and to respond where the needs are, when they occur, and to not have to depend on the fluctuations of media interest or political attention and that's what's really needed. We need to fund emergencies on an ongoing basis, because they occur; they can strike at any time and occur wherever around the world.

RAY SUAREZ: Nicholas de Torrente, Iqbal Noor Ali, thank you, gentlemen, both.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight: Answers from Miers and from Senators Graham and Schumer; Katrina stress; why the hurricanes; and a Roger Rosenblatt essay.

FOCUS SUPREME QUESTIONS

JIM LEHRER: Gwen Ifill has our Miers story.

GWEN IFILL: While a candidate for the Dallas City Council in 1989, Harriet Miers responded to a series of abortion-related questions from the group Texans United for Life. Question one: If Congress passes a human life amendment to the constitution that would prohibit abortion except when it was necessary to prevent the death of the mother, would you actively support its ratification by the Texas legislature? Her answer: Yes. Question two: If the Supreme Court returns to the states the right to restrict abortion, would you actively support legislation that would reinstate our 1973 abortion law that prohibited all abortions, except those necessary to prevent the death of the mother? Her answer again, yes. And question three: Will you oppose the use of public monies for abortion except where necessary to prevent the death of the mother? Her answer: Yes. The questionnaire was included in material provided to the Judiciary Committee by the White House in advance of Miers' confirmation hearings.

In response, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, the committee's only woman said: The answers clearly reflect that Harriet Miers is opposed to Roe v. Wade…This raises very serious concerns about her ability to fairly apply the law without bias in this regard.'

But Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said today critics are distorting Ms. Miers' record.

ALBERTO GONZALES, Attorney General: Unsubstantiated rumors, false allegations, and distorted facts can be spread with impunity by those who don't take the time to check the facts, as well as by those who affirmatively seek to mislead. I urge the Senate to exercise discipline in its consideration of judicial nominations.

GWEN IFILL: No dates for the confirmation hearings have been set.

GWEN IFILL: Now for more on the state of the Harriet Miers nomination, we are joined by two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee: South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham and New York Democrat Chuck Schumer. Welcome, gentlemen.

Both of you have met with Ms. Miers by now, and you have heard what she had to say about abortion, especially in these latest documents. What is your reaction to that, starting with you, Sen. Graham?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: I didn't talk to her about abortion. I talked to her about her resume and her qualifications, and I really didn't ask her about the right to privacy issues, and in terms of the questionnaire, here's a sort of challenge to the media: I bet you 80 percent of the Republican Conference in the Senate would have probably answered those questions just like she did.

GWEN IFILL: What about that, Sen. Schumer, in reading her answers to those questions, did they raise any red flags for you?

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: Well, certainly they are some cause for concern, but what's of greatest concern is that nobody knows where Harriet Miers stands on virtually anything. Less than a year before she filled out that questionnaire, she sent $1,000 to the Democratic National Committee.

When she saw me at about 1:30 yesterday, she said that she had no opinion of Griswold or Meyer, two of the seminal cases that established the right to privacy in the Constitution. She then went to Sen. Specter and according to him said, yes, she does support those cases.

And then three hours later the White House put out some memorandum saying no, she doesn't, and Sen. Specter misinterpreted it. Sen. Specter is a darned good lawyer; I don't think he did misinterpret it, although I wasn't there.

So we seem back and forth, up and down; this is serious stuff. A nominee for the Supreme Court has a lot of say over so many aspects ever every one of our lives. We have to know what her judicial philosophy is, what she thinks, and I can't recall a nominee who comes before us with as little a record and is saying as little -- and excuse me for this one more minute but in my interview with her she refused to comment on so many things. John Roberts was far more full in his answers in my first meeting with him.

GWEN IFILL: Sen. Graham, even though you didn't ask her about abortion, and you listened to what your colleague just had to say, does it matter that she have an answer on these privacy issues at this point?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: I think the fact that she's pro-life doesn't matter because no one's ever held it against a nominee for being personally pro-choice. There's no doubt that Ruth Bader Ginsberg was personally pro-choice. I think if you look at Harriet Miers' answers to those questions and the way maybe even going to church, one can pretty much figure out that on the abortion issue she's pro-life.

There's the politics of abortion; then there's the job of the judge. The question is, would she overturn Roe v. Wade based on a personal agenda, or would she look at the facts, understand as a standing precedent of the court, and have an analytical view of whether it should stand or fall? That's the question, and I believe the way she's lived her legal life, she would not take a personal agenda and replace a standard of how do you overturn precedent. I feel comfortable with that idea that she would not take a personal agenda.

GWEN IFILL: All right Sen. Schumer.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: In my interview, I had no reason to assume that one way or the other she said so little. She didn't even say, "I won't let my personal views interfere." But Lindsey is right in this, I completely agree, it's what her judicial philosophy is. But when I asked her, when she would overturn cases, does she consider Roe v. Wade settled law -- John Roberts had said it was a little more than settled law -- you couldn't get an answer out of her. Now that may be as she sort of indicated to me she's sort of new, she's not a constitutional lawyer, and I don't think that should be a prerequisite to be a Supreme Court Justice, that she needs to sort of study these cases and bone up on them.

But I'll tell you this, if her answers are as limited as they were in my interview with her, when it comes to the public hearings, I don't see how anyone can vote yes or no for her because no one is going to know much about what she's about.

GWEN IFILL: Sen. Graham, as you know many of the objections which have been raised so far about Ms. Miers have come from members of your own party.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Right.

GWEN IFILL: Let me ask you about that, but also another issue that she raised, a distinction she drew in her answers to questions on the questionnaire and that is about flag burning when she was a member of the Dallas City Council she said she voted against flag burning but that a judicial decision might be different. Does that reassure you? Does that raise questions for you? And do you think that will speak to the people in your caucus who have problems with her?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Well, that's acknowledging there is a difference between politics and judging, as Judge Roberts said. What happened in the conservative world, people were disappointed that the president did not pick someone from a blessed or sanctified list. There is an effort by the left and right to get the president and Senate to bend to their will on judges.

The politics of judging is getting destructive for the court and for the country at large. Conservatives were upset that he didn't pick someone they liked.

Well, the question is: Did he pick someone that he knew to be qualified and will she over time pass the test of the qualifications? Ten of the last thirty-four justices were never sitting judges. You can be a good job without ever having been one before in terms of a Supreme Court Justice.

The criticism from the right was over the top. It was I think premature. It's prejudging a lady who's lived a good life in the law, and that's why I've been pushing back. I think it's unfair to ask her to give up her day in court before the date has ever even been set.

GWEN IFILL: So Sen. Graham when we hear the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, today talk about baseless claims and innuendo and distorted facts spread with impunity, he's talking about Republicans?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Well, I don't know what he's talking about, but some of it has happened on our side—bottom line --

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: It happened to him.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Yeah, but it did. And I'm trying to stand up consistently. John Roberts was the model to how I think you answer what's in bounds and what's not. Senator Schumer may ask questions, and he may not get an answer, and he'll decide whether or not that's important in terms of how he votes.

But he's right about this: because Harriet Miers hasn't been a judge, I think it's important that she share her philosophy with us, not how she'll rule, but the big legal concepts of our day, put it out on the record, say personally I'm pro-life but I won't let it dictate how I decide a case; I'm a committed Christian but I'll give people of different faiths, people without faith a fair day in court because I love the law and understand being a judge is bigger than my personal beliefs about life. We'll see what happens.

GWEN IFILL: Sen. Schumer.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: Let me give one example, Gwen.

GWEN IFILL: Okay.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: When I asked John Roberts did he believe the Constitution had a right to privacy, he said, "Yes, I did, and here are some cases." He would take it up to a certain point, but you knew where he felt, and that's a reasonable--

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Absolutely.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: Judge -- Ms. Miers, when she came in, she said she wouldn't even discuss whether she supported Griswold, which is a fundamental privacy case of settled law.

GWEN IFILL: Well, let me

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: And as I said with Sen. Specter, he said she did indicate she believed in a right to privacy, and then the White House put out something saying no she didn't; that was overstating it.

GWEN IFILL: Well, let me ask you something else

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: This is an easy question to answer yes or no, whether you agree or disagree with how the person asks it.

GWEN IFILL: Well, let me ask you something I asked Sen. Schumer because she also -- in the section of the questionnaire when asked about judicial activism, a pretty open-ended question, she could have gone in a lot of directions, she talked about how the court should pay attention to precedent, starre decisis was the term that came up in the John Roberts hearing, and, in fact, her answer was not so different from what John Roberts said. So if her answer is not so different, why isn't it acceptable?

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: Well, that's one answer. I asked her about that question in our meeting it only asked an hour and I only hope to have another and she sort of gave the answer John Roberts did, a little different, but then when I asked her to elaborate on it -- what would it mean in this situation or that situation -- you sort of didn't get much of an answer.

Again, I don't think she has to answer those questions two weeks after being nominated in a private meeting with a senator, Democrat or Republican. I think she does have to answer that question by the time the hearings roll around. And then, let the chips fall where they may.

GWEN IFILL: Sen. Graham, I want to ask you about another section of this, which is the question of qualification. In her questionnaire today, she said that she identified only eight cases that she tried which actually went to verdict that weren't settled, and she said only three cases in which she represented which went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court didn't accept any of them. You're a lawyer, Sen. Schumer is a lawyer, what do you think about her experience that would prepare her for the Supreme Court? What does this questionnaire tell you about that?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Well, I think what you need to look at is how does he compare to other people who have gone from practicing law to the Supreme Court? Justice Rehnquist was never a judge. He was an assistant attorney general in the Nixon administration, had been in a private law practice before that. Ten of the last thirty-four justices were practicing lawyers.

Her practice has been very robust in the area of civil litigation. She's represented some of the major corporations in the country. But the bottom line is she's got to fill in the blanks, as Chuck has said. She's got to fill in the blanks of does her law practice and her advising the president and working with him as governor, does all this equate to being within the ballpark of qualified?

I think we need to give her a chance to make that case. We need not prejudge her, and we can't ask her to decide cases in committee to get on the court. So I'm just asking for a little bit of patience, and I do believe, given what I know, she's going to make a very fine nominee.

GWEN IFILL: There was one paragraph in response to these questions today about Harriet Miers' White House experience, Sen. Schumer. Did you see that? And what did you make of it?

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: Yes, I was extremely disappointed in that. In the questionnaire -- which was a bipartisan questionnaire put together by the 18 members of the committee, so it clearly didn't have a slant overall -- one of the questions was about to talk about her activities in the White House. Now, I know that the president believes that certain things are privileged, and let's lay that argument aside and accept it for a minute. There are still many other things she did in the White House that aren't privileged. Any time she talked to an outside group, that's not privilege by definition.

And she gave virtually no answers about her five years in the White House. Now, that experience is the most dispositive, more than being, you know, a civil corporate litigator on what kind of judge she would be. She has to be more forthcoming than that. And, frankly, I found the questionnaire as a whole disappointing in terms of not answering questions, in terms of not being clear. I don't know if the vagueness was accurate or not. But a number of us hoped to go back to her and say, "look, these answers were not adequate, could you fill them in a little more." We're not out to play gotcha. We're not out to say, ah-hah! You didn't answer the questions, you're out. But we certainly need answers to these questions.

GWEN IFILL: Sen. Graham, do those questions have to be answered not necessarily in the way that Sen. Schumer's suggesting but in any way in order to mollify those in your party who are so concerned about her nomination?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: I'm not really worried about the criticism coming from political pundits. I've been home for a week in South Carolina; no one came up to me and wanted her to withdraw. Everybody I talked to in the conservative world in South Carolina has a lot of faith in the president and believes that she deserves her chance to make her case.

I've been in our Senate caucus today with Republicans, not one senator was affected by this. So this is a lot of beltway buzz that's not going to win the day. But at the end of the day, I do believe it's important that she share with us the job she had in the White House, any writings that are not clearly attorney-client privilege should come before the committee. I want to know what she thinks about detention and interrogation policy at Guantanamo

Bay.

GWEN IFILL: Have you communicated that to the White House?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: I've communicated that to her. There's a fine line here. Nobody should want the general counsel to the president to be deterred from giving good legal and political advice by having it revealed in a confirmation hearing.

But there are plenty of opportunities I think where she has expressed herself, privately and publicly, that would give us a window into how she believes the executive branch relates to the Congress. And that's important. She's had a wonderful job in terms of understanding how our Constitution works. She's been in a unique position to understand how it works by representing the executive branch. She should share those experiences with us as much as possible.

GWEN IFILL: Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Chuck Schumer, thank you both very much.

FOCUS STORM STRESS

JIM LEHRER: Now a report on the mental health struggles for some of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Susan Dentzer of our health unit reports. The unit is a partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

TROY LYNN SMITH: I'm feeling more than overwhelmed. I feel just numb inside. All I know is I have tears and I thought I was all cried out.

SUSAN DENTZER: This is Troy Lynn Smith and her mother, Bessie Smith. Their Dallas hotel room is miles away from their damaged homes in New Orleans. Nearly two months have passed since they escaped the flooding sparked by Hurricane Katrina. Both Smiths told us that terrifying experience is close at hand, manifested in nightmares and other signals of post-traumatic stress.

TROY LYNN SMITH: I was dreaming that the water was here, having a nightmare. I can't even hardly lay down and take a nap without dreaming about water, this water, water, water.

SUSAN DENTZER: Bobbie Smith said she'd been re-traumatized just the night before we spoke to her by a late September storm blowing through Dallas.

BOBBIE SMITH: It started lightning and thundering, and then I heard all of this water and I jumped up. I said, "Lisa, get your clothes, we got to go."

SUSAN DENTZER: Demetra Donaldson is a counselor with Telecare, a mental health services provider. She met Bobbie Smith and her daughter several weeks ago.

DEMETRA DONALDSON, Telecare Counselor: She was telling us how, you know, they had to ride on the air mattresses through the water. Gasoline got all over their bodies and in their hair and their hair fell out when they got here. She just was almost in a "give up" type of state. And so her story for me was just like, I need to help her.

SUSAN DENTZER: In the days up to and following Katrina several hundred thousand evacuees came to Texas. About 25,000 of those, including the Smiths, came here to Dallas.

Along with providing shelter and emergency medical care, the city mounted an aggressive disaster mental health response. Dallas psychiatrist Peter Polatin coordinated the plan based in part on one he helped develop after 9/11. He quickly organized a psychiatric MASH unit to treat evacuees at Dallas's convention center.

DR. PETER POLATIN: There were a lot of fairly severely psychologically traumatized people who had witnessed terrible events. They'd seen dead bodies, they had seen violence. Some of them had been victims of violent activities.

SUSAN DENTZER: Psychiatrist Alan LaGrone of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center ran that psych MASH unit in Dallas. HE says that in addition to those troubled by the hurricane and its aftermath, there were also thousands of evacuees with preexisting mental illnesses. Sometimes, those were severe ones like schizophrenia.

DR. ALAN LaGRONE: We saw people who were chronically mentally ill who had been suddenly off their medications. They'd been off of them for a week or two, and suddenly they were starting to have symptoms come back, and they were starting to become psychotic, hearing voices, suicidal or whatever.

SUSAN DENTZER: The goal of mental health responders was to stabilize all these people, get them on medication if needed, and keep them from ending up in psychiatric hospitals. One who was helped that way was Robert Thompson, who's suffered from paranoid schizophrenia since age 18. Now 50, Thompson is currently living at a group home for the mentally ill in Dallas. He told us how he made it from his former group home in New Orleans' devastated Ninth Ward to the city's now-notorious Superdome.

ROBERT THOMPSON: I got my medicine and I had my swimming trunks and I put it in my pocket and I started swimming. I had to swim or drown. So I can swim pretty good -- I must have swam maybe for maybe 30 minutes.

SUSAN DENTZER: After about a week at the Superdome, Thompson, too, was evacuated to Dallas. He arrived badly shaken and delusional. The psych unit at the convention center replenished his antipsychotic medication and steered him to Dallas Metrocares Services, a community mental health agency.

SHANA WATTS, Dallas Metrocare: I guess I'll see you next week.

ROBERT THOMPSON: Okay.

SUSAN DENTZER: Shana Watts is Thompson's Metrocare's caseworker.

SHANA WATTS: When he came here about three weeks ago, he was telling us stories that people were jumping off bridges, that people were getting killed, that he saw a several months lady pregnant jump off a bridge, which I knew through news reports is not true. He was having symptoms or he might be suffering from post- traumatic stress syndrome from seeing everything that went on.

SUSAN DENTZER: Watts says Thompson has since improved markedly by being in a stable environment and getting new medication. Thompson told us he likes his new group home and plans to stay in Dallas and look for work.

ROBERT THOMPSON: I thank the people taking me in and treat me like they treat me in Dallas and helping me out with clothing and food and stuff like that. They nursed me back to health and I appreciate it very much.

SUSAN DENTZER: Even now, clinics run by organizations like Metrocare's are seeing hundreds of troubled patients, both those with illnesses predating the hurricanes and those traumatized by events.

JAMES WAGHORNE: I know you just got out of the hospital.

SUSAN DENTZER: Clinic outreach workers like James Waghorne are visiting apartments and hotels to find other evacuees who also need help.

JAMES WAGHORNE: We want to make sure that they know about our mental health services, a network here reaching out to them, and they can get care and we'll actually transport them to and from our clinics.

SUSAN DENTZER: The costs for treating many of these patients may be picked up by Medicaid under an emergency plan drawn up by the federal government. Still, the long-term expense is certain to strain mental health resources in a state where they were thinly stretched to begin with.

DR. ALAN LaGRONE: As a state, we are forty-eighth or forty-ninth in per capita funding for mental health care. The number is about half of the average of what the other states are providing.

Long after the broken bones, long after the infections have all been cleared, this population is going to have chronic mental health problems, either exacerbation of preexisting conditions or development of new conditions because of the stress of what they went through, period.

DR. PETER POLATIN: We're hopeful that there will be funds from FEMA and elsewhere that will cover some of this, but there is no question that we're going to have to ask people to volunteer and to provide services.

SUSAN DENTZER: Those services may have to include therapy for at least a while for people like Troy Lynn Smith. She told us news she'd gotten that very day about the flooding at her New Orleans apartment only increased her feelings of despair.

TROY LYNN SMITH: Water to the ceiling -- it just hurt my heart. I had so many things that I treasured that were precious to me. I'm not crazy, you know. I don't think I need medication, but I would like to talk to somebody and just tell them what I felt and make the pain just go away.

SUSAN DENTZER: With the help of the mental health community in Dallas, Smith and others now hope to get back on the road to better mental health.

FOCUS HURRICANE SCIENCE

JIM LEHRER: And now, where are all of the hurricanes coming from? Jeffrey Brown has our story.

JEFFREY BROWN: Arlene in June, Katrina and Rita in August and September, and now Wilma in October. It's been a storm season for the record books, and one that has raised many questions about why so many hurricanes and, especially, why so many very powerful hurricanes?

We explore that with two experts in the field: Christopher Landsea is a meteorologist with the hurricane research division at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Judith Curry is a climate scientist and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She recently co-authored a study on this subject in the journal Science. Welcome to both of you.

Starting with you, Christopher Landsea, are we in fact in a particularly intense period of hurricanes?

CHRISTOPHER LANDSEA: Oh, without a doubt. This last season has been extremely busy with 21 storms; 12 have become hurricanes already. But it's not just been this year or even last year. It's been over the last 11 years since 1995, we've seen a very busy hurricane era.

JEFFREY BROWN: And what explains it?

CHRISTOPHER LANDSEA: Well, two things: first we see changes in the ocean that gets slightly warmer waters by about a half degree Fahrenheit or so, both in the tropical Atlantic and the Caribbean, but also we see changes in the atmosphere that allow the hurricanes to become stronger, less wind sheer disrupting the storm circulation

JEFFREY BROWN: Ms. Curry, do you agree that we're in a particularly intense period and, if so, what causes it?

JUDITH CURRY: Well, absolutely we're in an intense period. And it's not just the North Atlantic. It's globally. I mean, that was the focus of our study, was to look at the trends in global hurricanes, and what we found was over the last 35 years that there was basically a doubling of the most intense hurricanes, the category fours and fives, not just in the North Atlantic but in all of the ocean basins where we have hurricanes.

In terms of what's causing it, it's very complex. It's associated with temperature increase, surface temperature increase in the tropical oceans, and that is -- depends in complex ways on natural and forced variability. I don't know how much you want me to talk about that right now.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, you raised in your paper the question of global warming, and I know that's been on a lot of people's minds. To what extent is that a factor?

JUDITH CURRY: Okay, first in our paper, we didn't say anything at all about greenhouse warming. It's a global increase in tropical sea surface temperatures. In the subsequent press releases and press conferences, everybody is asking us the question about is this greenhouse warming? And the answer is partially the warming is associated with greenhouse warming and the burning of fossil fuels. To what extent, you know, that's debated by scientists. Nobody is arguing that increase is 100 percent due to greenhouse warming, but clearly a portion of it, very likely up to 50 percent or 60 percent, of that increase that we've seen over the period is associated with greenhouse warming.

JEFFREY BROWN: Let's start with that question, Mr. Landsea. What's your response on that?

CHRISTOPHER LANDSEA: Well, we certainly see substantial warming in the ocean and atmosphere over the last several decades on the order of a degree Fahrenheit, and I have no doubt a portion of that, at least, is due to greenhouse warming. The question is whether we're seeing any real increases in the hurricane activity. And the study that the authors Judy Curry and Peter Webster and company have done, you know, they are very well renowned scientists in field, and anything that they're putting together needs to be taken seriously.

But I think it's a little more complex than what they're suggesting. For example, for the Atlantic this is the only part of the world we've been flying into hurricanes for 60 years. And so if you go back another twenty or thirty years we'd see for the Atlantic, instead of a trend up, we've seen instead a cycle of activity -- the 40s, 50s, 60s were busy, 70s 80s, and 90s were fairly quiet, and the last 11 years, as I mentioned, are very been busy, so instead of a trend we've seen a cycle on the Atlantic.

JEFFREY BROWN: Ms. Curry, how do you address that? I mean, I I'm sorry o-

JUDITH CURRY: First, I agree with what Chris says. I mean, there have been ups and downs in the temperature record over the last 100 years. You've seen the hurricane activity correlate fairly well with the ups and downs in Atlantic Sea surface temperature. But what you're seeing in the last 35 years, this is a period where we've had the -- seen the biggest signal associated with greenhouse warming.

Over half of the addition of greenhouse gases in the post-industrial age has occurred since 1970. So this is a period where we're seeing the greatest forcing associated with burning of fossil fuels. There's a lot of cyclical variability in all the ocean basins associated with natural variability, El Ninos and some decadal and even longer variations.

But underlying that, you still do see this trend of warming that is global, and it appears to be associated, at least in part, with greenhouse gases.

JEFFREY BROWN: And, Mr. Landsea, you're putting more emphasis on the natural cycles you referred to, but what causes those?

CHRISTOPHER LANDSEA: Well, with the Atlantic hurricanes in particular, they're due to changes both in the ocean as well as the atmosphere. Just changing the ocean where it's a little bit warmer isn't sufficient. What you have to do is also get less wind sheer disrupting the hurricanes. And where we've identified this is a natural psyche they'll goes back and forth, there's kind of a feedback between the ocean and the atmosphere working together. And it may be different from the mechanisms of global warming.

When we look at the theory of what global warming suggests hurricanes will change is in the order of about 80 years or so, near the end of the 21st Century even if we have say, a three- or four- degree Fahrenheit warming of the tropical oceans, we're looking at about a 5 percent increase in winds and about a 5 percent overall increase in rainfall. That's a fairly tiny change a long way in the future.

And what it implies for today, even if they're off by a factor of two, is the hurricanes like Katrina and Rita may have been stronger due to global warming but maybe by one or two miles per hour. At least this is what the theory and the numerical modeling suggests to us today.

JEFFREY BROWN: But for the layman, when we see something like Katrina, should we think of it in terms of some larger pattern, or does each hurricane have certain factors that contribute to how large it's going to be?

CHRISTOPHER LANDSEA: Well, that's true in both aspects. The hurricane intensity depends on not only the warmth of the ocean but if it's warm through a fairly deep layer, how much moisture it's accessing in the lower levels of the atmosphere, and how much wind sheer is disrupting it. We know on these longer time scales, twenty-five to forty years busy, twenty-five to forty years quiet, we see changes in both the ocean and atmosphere that either promote more hurricanes in the busy period or diminish them in the quiet periods.

JEFFREY BROWN: And, Ms. Curry, another layman's question just to help us understand this, how good is the data? We're talking about going back thirty, fifty years here. Has the technology advanced to help us understand these things? Do you have enough history there to understand it?

JUDITH CURRY: Okay, you never have as much data as you would like, and it's never as high a quality as you'd like. But this is a relatively clean data set compared to some of the other climate data records that have been in the news in recent years. Relative to the paleoclimate data record, the hockey stick, this is much cleaner, relative to atmospheric temperature trends, this is much cleaner and there certainly have been variations in terms of what different weather services, how they've classified the storms, but we're looking at satellite data sets, the basic weather satellites. You don't see any big jumps in the way it's been processed.

So I think the data is pretty good. I hope that Chris and other hurricane researchers will collaborate with climate researchers to reprocess this data set and try to work out any in-homogenates in the data set, but since the signal was so large, especially of the strongest hurricanes, that I don't think that our result is going to change in any big way as a result of reprocessing the data.

JEFFREY BROWN: You wanted to jump in on this data question?

CHRISTOPHER LANDSEA: The methodology of the study, I have no problems with that. It's the data that I am concerned may be biasing the results. At the start of the study in the 1970s, while there were satellites peering down on the earth, there was no objective way to take a satellite picture of a hurricane and say what the winds were.

It wasn't until the mid-70s that is a technique was even invented, and it wasn't until the mid-80s before it was used globally and used all hours of the day and night. So I'm afraid that the changes in the satellites themselves, they're more numerous, they're giving more information. The techniques have changed. I'm concerned that that's giving the big jump in the number of Category fours and fives that may be artificial.

JEFFREY BROWN: Either way, very briefly, do you see this period continuing?

CHRISTOPHER LANDSEA: Unfortunately, yes, it's probably going to continue another ten to twenty years of busy hurricane activity.

JEFFREY BROWN: Okay, Christopher Landsea and Judith Curry, thank you both very much.

CHRISTOPHER LANDSEA: Thank you.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Our earlier discussions ran longer than planned so we'll re-schedule the Roger Rosenblatt essay soon.

Meanwhile, again, the major developments of this day: UN officials warned exposure and infection could kill large numbers of earthquake survivors in Pakistan. Tropical Storm Wilma grew into a hurricane on a course toward the Gulf Coast of Florida. And Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers submitted background material to the Senate; it showed her opposing most abortions as a political candidate in 1989.

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

JIM LEHRER: Tonight's edition of Frontline on most PBS stations looks at the question of torture of Iraqi prisoners beyond Abu Graib Prison. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.