The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, a summary of today's news, the latest on the search for Osama bin Laden, a Newsmaker interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell, a report on Oregon's resistance to one part of the terrorism war, a look at the coming to America of the French media company Vivendi, and a new book conversation with Haynes Johnson.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: US Special Forces tracked fleeing al-Qaida fighters in eastern Afghanistan today. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said they assisted opposition fighters in cave-to-cave searches in the mountains of Tora Bora. Osama bin Laden's whereabouts remained a mystery. At the White House, President Bush said he'd be found eventually. A note: Mr. Bush had four non-cancerous lesions removed from his face.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Osama bin Laden is goingto be brought to justice. It's just a matter of time as far as I'm concerned. We got all kinds of reports that he's in a cave; that he's not in a cave; that he's escaped and he hasn't escaped. There's all kinds of speculation. But when the dust clears, we'll find out where he is and he'll be brought to justice.

JIM LEHRER: There was word today Taliban leader Mullah Omar was hiding in mountains near his former stronghold of Kandahar, in the South. He could have hundreds of fighters with him, according to an opposition intelligence officer. The American flag flew over the US Embassy in Kabul today for the first time in nearly 13 years. US Marines hoisted the same flag that was lowered the day the building was evacuated in January 1989. US Envoy James Dobbins led the ceremony. He said the United States and the world had ignored Afghanistan for too long, and the Afghan people paid a great price.

JAMES DOBBINS: On September 11, the United States and the rest of the international community also played a great price. The United States returns to Afghanistan today at the head of a great international coalition, a coalition committed to rooting out terrorism and those who support it. But the United States also comes ready to join with the rest of the international community in assisting with the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

JIM LEHRER: Dobbins said an ambassador should be named in the coming months. The deputy Prime Minister in the new Afghan government, who is also minister for women's affairs, today urged Secretary of State Powell to make that ambassador a woman. Dr. Simar Samar is in Washington for meetings with US Officials. She also said she hoped women would be in the international peacekeeping force going to Afghanistan. Also today, British Prime Minister Blair said Britain will send up to 1,500 troops to Afghanistan to lead that peacekeeping force. He said it could be on the ground this weekend, when the interim government is to take power. Russian President Putin said today he expected the United States to consult Russia before expanding the war on terrorism beyond Afghanistan. In an interview with the "Financial Times," he said the top priority should be blocking terrorists' financing, and he warned against military action in Iraq. India today threatened to target guerrilla camps inside Pakistan, in response to last week's attack on the Indian parliament. Thirteen people died in the assault by five Pakistani gunmen. India claimed they were from the camps and aided by Pakistani intelligence. Pakistan denied involvement and said it would react forcefully to any Indian military actions. In the Middle East today, Israeli troops shot and killed three Palestinians. They included a leading member of the militant group Hamas. In response, Hamas and others vowed to defy Palestinian leader Arafat's demand for an end to further attacks on Israelis. He delivered it in a televised speech on Sunday. US officials welcomed the remarks but called for concrete actions. We'll talk with Secretary of State Powell about this and other matters in a few moments. Armed commandos stormed Haiti's presidential palace today in an apparent coup attempt. They killed four people before police recaptured the building and killed one of the gunmen. Another was arrested; the others fled. President Aristide and his wife were not at the palace at the time. The French company Vivendi announced today it will buy the entertainment assets of USA Networks for more than $10 billion. The deal was to improve the media company's reach in the United States. It will combine its Universal Studios with USA Networks' cable channels and TV production operation.

UPDATE - THE SEARCH FOR BIN LADEN

JIM LEHRER: Now, an update on the search for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan's Tora Bora Mountains. We have a report from Kevin Dunn of Independent Television News.

KEVIN DUNN: Captured al-Qaida fighters, many of them said to be foreign Arabs, were paraded in front of the world's press. The prisoners seemed still to be in shock after surviving days of relentless American bombardment. Some tried to shield their faces as their anti-Taliban captors made a deliberate attempt to humiliate them. They were presented as evidence of the success of anti-Taliban forces in subduing pockets of al-Qaida resistance. The parade over, they were led away for further interrogation. The al-Qaida fighters, some of them wounded, were earlier filmed in the Tora Bora Mountains immediately after their capture, but Osama bin Laden was not among them. The one fighter said he had seen him in the region about a month ago. So where could bin Laden have gone to? The most likely place is Pakistan. Some reports suggest he's already crossed the border. But it will be hard for him to remain undetected here as Pakistan's military is combing the area. He may try to flee further afield, to Yemen, where al-Qaida terrorists are known to have trained in the past. Or he may have fled to Somalia, where al-Qaida terrorists are in hiding. US Special Forces may already be in operation here, searching out al-Qaida cells.

JIM LEHRER: More now from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who said today the Afghan war is far from over. Kwame Holman reports.

KWAME HOLMAN: A weekend trip took Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld halfway around the world and part of the way back. After stops in three Central Asian republics, Rumsfeld flew to an air base near Kabul. First, he met with interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, who takes office Saturday. Then he spoke to US Troops from the Army's Tenth Mountain Division. DONALD RUMSFELD: The job we've got is to get after the rest of the al-Qaida leadership and the al-Qaida fighters and to get the Taliban leadership, and to stop them from committing terrorist acts in this country or any place across the globe.

KWAME HOLMAN: After greeting the troops, Rumsfeld departed for Brussels, Belgium, to meet with NATO defense ministers and separately with their Russian counterpart. En route, he was asked about Secretary of State Colin Powell's statement yesterday that, "We have destroyed al-Qaida in Afghanistan."

DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, the first rule of war is that the President decides when something conclusive has been achieved. But the fact of the matter is, as Secretary Powell knows as well, there are still any number of al-Qaida loose in that country. That is why we are there. That is why we are chasing them. That is why we are bombing them. That is why we are working with Afghan forces to root them out of tunnels and caves. It is true that they're running and hiding and not dominating the country of Afghanistan as they had previously. It is also true that the Taliban is no longer a legitimate government of Afghanistan, if it ever was.

KWAME HOLMAN: The Secretary was asked about today's reports that Osama bin Laden escaped from the mountains near Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. Pentagon officials this afternoon said the intelligence trail on bin Laden has grown cold in the last few days.

DONALD RUMSFELD: That presumes he was there.

REPORTER: Yes it does.

DONALD RUMSFELD: Since we did not know with precision and we don't know if he's there now, it would be difficult to answer the question.

REPORTER: Are you saying you don't know where he is?

DONALD RUMSFELD: I'm saying that it is a question mark as to his exact location. There are people who continue to speculate that he may be in that area or may have been in that area, or that he may be somewhere else. My feeling is that until we catch him-- which we will-- we won't know precisely where he was when we catch him. There's a long mountain range between Kabul and Afghanistan, a portion of it is called Tora Bora. There is still fighting going on there. There are still people scrambling in the mountains looking for people. There are people going into tunnels, acquiring various types of materials and information.

KWAME HOLMAN: Beyond bin Laden, the secretary was asked if other senior al-Qaida or Taliban leaders-- such as Supreme Leader Mullah Mohammed Omar-- have slipped away.

DONALD RUMSFELD: We're still trying to sort out who we have and who we don't have and who's been killed. And it is not an easy process and we're aggressively trying to put some discipline into that process of listening to people that are of note and tracking down where they are, whether we have them, whether they're in prison someplace, whether they've escaped.

KWAME HOLMAN: Rumsfeld appeared again late today in Brussels, after a two-hour meeting with Russian Defense Minister Igor Ivanov. Despite Washington's announcement last week that it will withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic missile treaty-- a move opposed by Russia-- Rumsfeld said relations with Moscow on the Afghan war and other issues remain strong.

DONALD RUMSFELD: One way to characterize what has happened in the US-Russia relationship is the way President Bush did, that we're moving from mutual assured destruction to mutual assured cooperation.

KWAME HOLMAN: For his part, Ivanov called US-Russian cooperation against terrorism unprecedented.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the Secretary of State, no arrests in Oregon, a new French connection, and a conversation with Haynes Johnson.

NEWSMAKER

JIM LEHRER: Now a Newsmaker interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell. I talked to him late this afternoon from the State Department.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Secretary, welcome.

COLIN POWELL: Good evening, Jim.

JIM LEHRER: On Palestinian Leader Arafat's call for an end to violence against Israel, how do you read the effectiveness of that call so far?

COLIN POWELL: Oh, I think it's too early to tell. The very fact that he gave the call was important. We have been suggesting to Mr. Arafat for some time that he needed to make this call to the Palestinian street and do it in Arabic on Arabic media, so that the leader of the Palestinian people - the legal leader as well as the moral leader - would say to the Palestinian people, it's time to stop this violence, and for those of you who are trying to disrupt the peace process, it's time for you to stop. And we need to find a way to get the violence down and to get to the Mitchell plan through a cease-fire so that we can get back to negotiations, which will lead to a peaceful settlement. So I am pleased that he gave the call, and now we'll have to see whether that call is followed and whether he also takes the actions necessary to crack down on Hamas and PIJ and other organizations, which are determined that there be no peace process and which are a threat not only to Israeli lives but are a threat to Mr. Arafat and his ability to lead the Palestinian people.

JIM LEHRER: Do you believe he has the power to stop the violence?

COLIN POWELL: I believe he has a great deal of power. He's got tens of thousands of armed people under his authority as the leader of the Palestinian Authority. He also has moral authority. Now, does that mean he can stop every single shooter or bomb thrower? Probably not, but I think he can do a lot more, and that's what we are encouraging him to do and do it as soon as possible so we can bring this situation back under control.

JIM LEHRER: Some are suggesting that he's kind of between a rock and a hard place, that if his call is, in fact, heeded and the violence stops, then you and others will say, see, you could have done this earlier, you've been responsible for the violence up till now.

COLIN POWELL: Well, I will not. What I want to do is see what happens tomorrow and the day after, not go back and talk about what might have been done or happened in the past, and I hope it's a call that is taken seriously by the Palestinian people and that he acts on it with all his power, with all of his authority, with all of his resources. And if we can get the violence down and get a cease-fire in place, and get the negotiations started, we can do a post-mortem on what happened before some other time.

JIM LEHRER: What constitutes a cease-fire in this context?

COLIN POWELL: I think in this context a cease-fire is when the two sides are talking to each other, when they are responding together to go to points of friction, when they're going after together those who are determined to conduct acts of violence, those who are known to be preparing bombs, those who are known to be participating in this kind of activity, and both sides are working to stop this kind of activity, and when the actual number of incidents goes down significantly. We'd like to all see it, and we'd all like to see it go to zero. Zero is a hard goal to achieve, but I think if there were a significant reduction and 100 percent effort on the part of the Palestinian leadership and 100 percent effort with respect to knocking off the incitement and the images on television and the voices over Arab radio that stir people up, if we saw 100 percent effort, and something approaching that in the way of results, we'd have a basis to move forward.

JIM LEHRER: Do you think that Arafat and his folks can stop these young suicide bombers from doing what they've been doing?

COLIN POWELL: Not all of them, but they're being trained places, and we know the organizations that are recruiting them and giving them that training. And I think Mr. Arafat can go after those organizations.

JIM LEHRER: Is there any kind of deadline either officially or unofficially at work here, you must do something by a certain date if you want to get this thing resolved?

COLIN POWELL: No, there's no calendar deadline, one day, two days, three days. We'd all like to see it happen as soon as possible; that is our goal; it's been our goal from the beginning. The one thing that I'm sure of now, 11 months into the job, is that we're not going to get moving toward a process of confidence building between the two sides or negotiations under the provisions of UN Resolutions 242 and 338, land for peace, until the violence is brought down. There is no other way around it; there is no other plan that's coming. It's the Mitchell Plan, and it begins with the end of violence and the beginning of a cease-fire.

JIM LEHRER: Well, let's say there is an end to the violence. Are you confident that Israel will then take the steps that are required of it under the Mitchell Plan: settlements, curtail the settlements, et cetera?

COLIN POWELL: Yes, they've said so. They have committed to the Mitchell Plan from the very beginning. Just within the past few months Prime Minister Sharon has indicated his understanding of the need for a Palestinian state and would work toward that end as the negotiations continue. The Israelis are not happy with the situation the way that it exists. The violence has not gotten better in the course of Prime Minister Sharon's term. Israelis are dying every day, so they want to see a cease-fire. They're willing to do their part, I'm quite sure. They want to see the Palestinian people get to their jobs and see economic activity starting to move again. It doesn't serve Israeli interest to have the Palestinian people not earning a living, holding their revenues back. It doesn't serve their interest, but what they have to do is get some sense of security and the end of violence before they can begin serving that interest of seeing the Palestinian people start to enjoy a better life.

JIM LEHRER: Arafat says what Israel has been doing is occupying Palestinian territory; they are an occupier, a brutal occupation force, or those kinds of terms that he uses. How would you describe Israel's role in the Palestinian territories?

COLIN POWELL: Under the UN Resolutions that have been longstanding United States policy as well that the West Bank and Gaza are occupied territories, and that's what we're trying to work our way through - use these UN Resolutions and the clear directions given in the UN Resolutions to trade land, land that people now consider occupied, for peace, and at the end of this vision, at the end of this process, see two states living side by side in peace - Palestine and Israel - neither one threatening the other, both allowed by the other to live in peace and security - two peoples living side by side.

JIM LEHRER: Do you really think that's ever going to happen?

COLIN POWELL: It's a vision we must hold on to. I think it is possible. I think it is achievable. There have been steps in that direction over the years, and we must not give up hope. The United States will not give up hope. We will remain engaged. President Bush is determined to remain engaged. General Zinni, my special envoy, will remain engaged. And I look forward to him returning to the region after we've had him here for some consultations, and after the circumstances in the region make it appropriate for him to return.

JIM LEHRER: There are no plans right now for him to go back?

COLIN POWELL: He just got home.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah.

COLIN POWELL: And I'll be seeing him in a day or two.

JIM LEHRER: And that - his going back is dependent on what?

COLIN POWELL: His going back is dependent on I think some improvement in the situation so that he has two sides to talk to, and that's what we're trying to work on now. Prime Minister Sharon took a position last week with respect to dealing with Chairman Arafat, but he is still dealing with other elements of the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian leaders. And Mr. Arafat has given his speech now - long-awaited speech - and we'll see how that starts to play out. And General Zinni would have been coming back in December anyway, having been over there for several weeks. I would have brought him back under any circumstances sometime during December. He came back a little earlier than I might have otherwise brought him back.

JIM LEHRER: Is Israel, as far as you know, willing to reconsider this declaration of Arafat's irrelevance if, in fact, the violence does reduce, is reduced?

COLIN POWELL: I will leave that up to Prime Minister Sharon to decide. I don't want to put words or thoughts in their mouth. I think that they know at the end of the day to go forward, to get out of the difficult situation that both sides are in, there will have to be dialogue between the state of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Right now we continue to believe that Mr. Arafat has been chosen to be the head of the Palestinian Authority and he enjoys the support of his people. And that's why we will continue to work with him and deal with him.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Secretary, on the fighting in Afghanistan, is it essentially over now?

COLIN POWELL: No. As Secretary Rumsfeld has very clearly said, this is not over. There are still al-Qaida remnants out there. There are Taliban remnants out there, and we haven't got Osama bin Laden. So the war is far from over. I think one can make the case that the power of al-Qaida as an organization functioning, that part of al-Qaida in Afghanistan has been fractured, if not destroyed, even though there are many elements, individuals, and people out there that we want to go after. But they're on the run, and when you're on the run and when you're afraid to communicate and when you're looking at the sky, you're not running much of an effective organization any longer. But Don Rumsfeld puts it quite correctly when he says we've got keep chasing and do not think this conflict is over, but they're sure not who they were six weeks ago.

JIM LEHRER: Is there any fresh word today on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden?

COLIN POWELL: No. We just don't know. He might still be in Afghanistan. He might have gotten out of the country. He might be dead for all we know. We don't have any fresh information.

JIM LEHRER: What about Mullah Omar, what about him?

COLIN POWELL: Same thing.

JIM LEHRER: Why don't we know where these guys are?

COLIN POWELL: You know it's not hard to hide in a country like that with rugged terrain, a place that you know well, and if you are doing everything to keep from being seen, heard, or detected in any way, and you're blending in with the population, it is not that hard to stay hidden. You could stay hidden in the United States in one of our big cities or even one of our rural areas without a great deal of difficulty.

JIM LEHRER: Are you satisfied with the "post-Taliban government" that is forming in Kabul?

COLIN POWELL: I'm very, very pleased at the results that have been achieved so far. A few weeks ago when we began the process of putting an interim authority together, we weren't sure what we'd come up with, but in a relatively short period of time under the strong leadership of Mr. Brahimi, the UN Representative, and a lot of people working on it, including Ambassador Jim Dobbins for the US, this interim authority did come together and will be moving to Kabul in the very near future, and to get ready for a more representative government that will be brought into place in another six months time, and then elections two years after that. That's quite a bit of progress just in the last month when you consider where we were about a month or so ago.

JIM LEHRER: You and the President and Secretary Rumsfeld have made a very strong commitment to the idea of getting al-Qaida and the Taliban possibly out of there and certainly getting Osama bin Laden. What's the state of our commitment to making sure Afghanistan survives as a viable nation when it all is said and done?

COLIN POWELL: Our commitment is just as strong and as the President and Don and I, all of us have been saying, it's not just al-Qaida in Afghanistan; it's al-Qaida wherever it is around the world. With respect to humanitarian relief for the Afghan people and reconstruction, that remains a commitment. I launched a reconstruction campaign here a few weeks ago at the State Department, and there will be a serious donors conference in Japan next month. The international community is united and doing everything we can to bring hope to the people of Afghanistan by not abandoning them once this immediate conflict is over.

JIM LEHRER: Speaking of the international community, Russian President Putin said today that he expects the United States to consult with Russia before any widening of the war against terrorism beyond Afghanistan begins. Is he expecting correctly?

COLIN POWELL: Well, we consult with all of our friends and allies as much as we possibly can, but the President retains his authority as President of the United States to do what he thinks is in the best interest of the American people for their national security. And so we have made no decisions with respect to the next phase of our campaign against terrorism, but you can be sure that we stay in close touch with our friends and with our allies. It's an important coalition but the existence of the coalition has not removed any authority that the President has. Without that coalition, though, we wouldn't have been able to do what we're doing now. We needed those members of the coalition to give us access to get into Afghanistan. We needed all those coalition members to go after the financial infrastructure of terrorist organizations -- the law enforcement exchange and intelligence and information exchange -- the coalition is very valuable, and where we have a common purpose militarily, then coalition members can join and we can all work together, but the President has never given up his authority to act as the President of the United States to protect the people of the United States, to protect our interest and the interest of our friends and allies.

JIM LEHRER: Finally, Mr. Secretary, the armed forces of India and Pakistan are on high alert, bad words flowing back and forth. How dangerous a situation is that tonight?

COLIN POWELL: Well, we are concerned, and we are in touch with both governments. We hope that India will share all the information that they have acquired concerning this - this tragedy in their parliament building in New Delhi with the Pakistanis, who have condemned the attack and are anxious to cooperate with us, with our FBI, and we're ready to cooperate with the Indians with our FBI to see what we can do to find out who is responsible, make sure we've got the right identity of organizations and then it's in the interest of both governments to go after those organizations as part of the campaign against terrorism. I think we all have to be very careful about this. We would not wish to see this escalate to a direct exchange between the two nations going after each other, as opposed to going after their common enemy, which is terrorist organizations that conduct these kinds of horrible, horrible attacks.

JIM LEHRER: Is there a real possibility they could go after each other?

COLIN POWELL: Well, that's what we're trying to make sure does not happen. I think both sides are acting responsibly at this time. The Indian government I think has worked hard to find out who is responsible. We're in touch with both governments, and I hope the degree of calmness that we have seen and degree of patience that we have seen sustains for quite a bit longer so that the situation doesn't become critical.

JIM LEHRER: All right. Mr. Secretary, thank you very much.

COLIN POWELL: Thank you very much, Jim.

FOCUS - OREGON OBJECTS

JIM LEHRER: Next, the controversy over part of the crackdown on terrorism. Lee Hochberg of Oregon Public Broadcasting has the story.

LEE HOCHBERG: During finals week at Portland State University, 20-year-old Mohamed Abou-Jamous had more on his mind than his studies.

STUDENT: Just add alem.

STUDENT: Alem?

STUDENT: Alem?

STUDENT: Alem.

LEE HOCHBERG: The 20-year-old engineering student from Lebanon fits the profile of 5,000 Middle Easterners the federal government wants interviewed as part of its terrorism investigation.

MOHAMAD ABOU-JAMOUS, Foreign Student: Am I going to be happy with it? Of course not. No one wants to be interviewed for nothing, for not being involved. I'm not here to practice politics or be involved with any such thing like what happened September 11.

LEE HOCHBERG: Abou-Jamous says he'll cooperate if asked for an interview, but says it seems wrong to target him for questioning based on nothing more than his national origin.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We're saying, "Welcome to America. You've come to our country, why don't you help make us safe? Why don't you share information with us?"

LEE HOCHBERG: The Bush administration last month directed antiterrorism task forces nationwide to interview Middle Eastern men visiting the US on visas from countries linked to terrorism. The 5,000 are not suspected of any criminal activity, but the government directive said "They are able to provide information that could us assist our campaign against terrorism." US Attorney General John Ashcroft says they need to chip in.

JOHN ASHCROFT, Attorney General: Individuals who come here and enjoy the freedom of this country are asked responsibly to help protect the body politic, not just americans, but others who are here visiting.

LEE HOCHBERG: Texas, Florida, Michigan, and Illinois had the longest lists of those to be interrogated. But the interviews are most controversial in Seattle, Washington, and several Oregon cities where police departments refused to conduct them.

MARK KROEKER, Portland Police Chief: The mayor and I, this afternoon, have made a decision not to conduct the interviews requested by the US Attorney General.

LEE HOCHBERG: Portland Police Chief Mark Kroeker says asking questions of 23 Portland visitors violates their civil liberties.

MARK KROEKER: Some of the questions cannot be asked by Portland police officers without violating Oregon state law, pure and simple.

LEE HOCHBERG: That law is Oregon's so-called "Anti- McCarthyism Law." It bars police from collecting information about a person's political or social views or activities if that person is not suspected of a crime. Portland police have been sued before for allegedly violating the law, and they say asking some of Ashcroft's questions puts them at risk again.

JEFF ROGERS, Portland City Attorney: Asking that person things like, "Where have you traveled in this country in the past? What cities and landmarks do you plan to visit in the future? What activities do you plan to pursue in the future?

LEE HOCHBERG: Portland City Attorney Jeff Rogers says those are only a few of the questions that go too far. Another asks the person's current and previous addresses, if the person has ever been to Afghanistan, and why, or traveled elsewhere overseas.

JEFF ROGERS: It's kind of creating a file on people, and that would be fine if there was any reason to think that these people were involved in any way in terrorism, but the attorney general has assured us and everyone that these 23 people are in no way suspected of any crime.

LEE HOCHBERG: Portland police offered to do the interviews if the offending questions were removed, but the justice department refused. George Terwilliger was Deputy Attorney General in the first Bush administration.

GEORGE TERWILLIGER, Former Deputy Attorney General: There are people in our midst now, infiltrators, who are ready to commit acts of mass murder against the US civilian population. It is absolutely not an option but rather a responsibility of the government to investigate that.

LEE HOCHBERG: Oregon's Attorney General has now ruled state investigators can legally conduct the questioning, but he left local jurisdictions to make their own decisions. Portland's choice not to do it prompted a blizzard of criticism from around the country, including about 2,000 mostly furious letters and e-mails. The chairman of a House subcommittee on crime, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, told Ashcroft: Future funding for police may be inappropriate in light of that state's conduct - conduct inconsistent with the national war effort. But Portland Police Chief Kroeker insists his force is not unpatriotic.

MARK KROEKER: When people say, you know, "Are you being un-American?" I reflect on what could be more American than doing our best to abide by the law?

DEMONSTRATORS (Chanting): Portland police just say no to Ashcroft!

LEE HOCHBERG: Though the interviews are now being conducted in Portland-- the FBI agreed to do them-- some residents took to the streets to support their police department's stand for civil liberties.

DEMONSTRATORS (Chanting): Racial profiling, Portland says no! Racial profiling, Portland says no!

LEE HOCHBERG: And other Oregon cities that refused to interview say it's not just a matter of civil liberties. The government asked Eugene, home of the University of Oregon, to interrogate 40 middle easterners, more than any Oregon city. Its police chief answered that the questioning would undercut police-community relations. Many foreigners left Eugene in fear after September 11. Since then, Munir Katul of the city police commission has tried to assure that those who remain, like the owner of this Middle Eastern cafe, don't become targets of suspicion. He says sending police out to interrogate them would be destructive.

DR. MUNIR KATUL, Eugene Police Commission: It becomes a schizophrenic message that the community will be receiving. And people say, "well, what are you here..." If an officer comes, "What are you here today as? Are you here to profile me or protect me from hate crimes?" It's going to have a disastrous effect on any trust relationship.

LEE HOCHBERG: But federal law enforcers disagree.

GEORGE TERWILLIGER: You'd have to have your head pretty far in the sand in order to conclude that people from certain Arabic countries have not engaged in terrorist activity in the recent past, and therefore it is appropriate to look to people from that community for helpful information.

LEE HOCHBERG: Other cities like San Francisco and San Jose have said they, too, are reluctant to conduct the interviews.

FOCUS - FRENCH CONNECTION

JIM LEHRER: Now, building a new entertainment giant, and to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: Only a few years ago, Vivendi was a little-known French water utility company. Today, after completing two big deals in the last four days, it's a growing US and global media and entertainment power. The company, which already owned Universal Studios and the Universal Music Group, announced Friday it was acquiring a 10% stake in EchoStar Communications Corporation, the second biggest US satellite television service with about six million subscribers. In the deal announced today, the new Vivendi Universal Entertainment Company will add USA Networks, which includes the USA and Science Fiction Channel cable networks, USA films, which produced the Oscar- winning movie "Traffic," and USA's television studio, which produces "Law and Order" and the "Jerry Springer Show."

For more on the deal, we're joined by Jim Stroud, a media analyst with the Carmel Group, a media consulting firm based in Monterey, California; and David Bennahum, a writer and contributing editor at "Wired" Magazine.

Well, the married companies are vast and have properties ranging from Ticket Master to Houghton-Mifflin Publishing. They kept the water company, their theme parks. Jim Stroud, what did these two big companies want from each other? What made this marriage happen?

JIM STROUD: What made this marriage happen was that Universal and Barry Diller really wanted a distribution platform for their studios, their movies, and the cable side of it really gave Vivendi and its films a distribution platform to get into the US market? They had wanted to get into the US market for quite a while. This gives them a great distribution platform for that.

RAY SUAREZ: So Vivendi had the entertainment products themselves and USA had a way to get them to people's eyeballs?

JIM STROUD: That's correct. To really take a good look at what Vivendi has done over the last two weeks, it's very important also to include what they've done with EchoStar and their $1.5 million investment in EchoStar because that gives them another way to get their distribution and five new channels on to the EchoStar platform, which has six million subscribers. So I think in total that this is a very good avenue for Vivendi to make its mark into the US market where it's already well known in the European markets.

RAY SUAREZ: David Bennahum, you've got a company now that includes the machines, the way people get various kinds of entertainment and also the companies that produce the things they listen to and see. A good fit?

DAVID BENNAHUM: It's a good fit but it's not going to get them all the way to where they have to be. The problem that they're facing right now is that they're competing with a bunch of media giants in the United States specifically AOL/Time Warner, ABC, Disney and Viacom that are just leaps and bounds ahead of Vivendi in terms of the next generation of integration when it comes to media. And what that means specifically is that we're really moving into an era where traditional media, which is ad supported, is increasingly shifting into a direct marketing and pay-per- view environment. And that has a lot to do with owning cable networks and owning other kinds of methodologies for actually marketing directly to consumers like magazines is another way to do that, for instance, Time Warner has a lot of magazine properties. All of these help media companies get into relationship with consumers and sell to them directly, which is increasingly important as we move into an era where advertising on TV is less and less effective. So you've got a company like Vivendi doing a very traditional deal to get access on to cable networks when cable networks themselves are being increasingly cluttered and devalued as we get more and more channels on these things.

RAY SUAREZ: But you compare the new Vivendi to a big company like AOL/Time Warner, could it be that Vivendi is sort of looking down the road beyond the conventional media giant package with its use of vote-a- phone to use wireless broadband to deliver content, using satellites instead of cables? I mean, could it be that it's ahead in some areas while it's still much smaller as you mentioned?

DAVID BENNAHUM: I don't think so. I mean in the cases you're mentioning satellite is a very hard two-way medium and it's very hard to transmit up to a satellite. Compare that with Time Warner's digital cable system, much more effective in terms of sending signals back and forth from consumers. The same is true with wireless networks. They're very far behind the traditional Internet and fixed line networks. So you've got a situation where they have increasingly higher barriers to penetrating those kinds of technologies and those kinds of assets. They're increasingly locked up by the top three media companies. How does Vivendi get into that? How does Vivendi compete with something like AOL, which has a tremendous database of consumers? How does it compete with cable networks that have subscriber lists and actually know where you live and eventually will be able to market directly to you? This is clearly where everything is heading. The gap between someone like a Vivendi and even for instance a Newscorp and some of these other players is widening not decreasing. And these deals aren't pushing them further. Yes it's a toehold but by no means is it a serious beachhead into this country when you look at it on the bigger scale.

RAY SUAREZ: Jim Stroud, how do you respond to David Bennahum's skepticism?

JIM STROUD: Well I certainly think it could be a much bigger beachhead than David first mentioned. EchoStar is in talks and has announced a merger with DirecTV, which would make it the number one multi-channel video provider in the country with over 17 million subscribers. The irony of this deal is it may indeed put the EchoStar DirecTV deal in jeopardy. EchoStar has told the FCC it is not a content provider. With this deal with Vivendi it has made them a content provider and made them vertically integrated. That may put the much bigger deal of the EchoStar DirecTV deal in jeopardy. But, again, if EchoStar gets its hands on DirecTV it's a great way to get into millions of home in the United States. That's something that Vivendi has clearly wanted for years.

RAY SUAREZ: People at the top of both USA and Vivendi were excited and had gone some distance in inter-active TV. What is interactive TV?

JIM STROUD: Interactive is any number of things. It can range from being able to interact with your television to get more information on an advertisement or commercial to being able to record any program on your digital video recorder like a TIVO or replay TV. It can also be where you can switch camera angles from your own television set while watching a sports program. In other words you could be matching an NFL game and watch it from the 50-yard line or switch and watch it from the end zone. There's any number of applications on interactive TV. That's another aspect of the Vivendi buy-in to EchoStar and that they're going to launch Canal pluses, which is a subsidiary of Vivendi's middle wear system on to the EchoStar platform and give them a real interactive channel and presence in the United States.

RAY SUAREZ: David, entertainment products were once thought to be fairly parochial, based in one country, pop songs that worked in France didn't necessarily work in Romania and vice versa. And neither worked in the United States. What is the new thinking around companies like Bertelsmann, Vivendi and American-based giants that are trying to get a foothold in Europe? Is culture more movable, more borderless than it used to be?

DAVID BENNAHUM: Well, certainly we're seeing that effect. And it's increasingly important to create content that is borderless because as we move into these interactive environments you start to really cheapen the value potentially of traditional advertising and marketing so you need to begin to aggregate more and more of what's actually valuable which is human attention. And so the question is how do you capture someone's attention across different cultures and monetize it with enough scale that you can derive significant revenue. That requires a universal so to speak entertainment. You're going to see an increasing push towards entertainment that can work in multiple cultures, that doesn't really speak to differences as much as it speaks to commonality because if you don't do that your product doesn't have the necessary scale to generate a return on the investment that you're going to have to have in this increasingly fragmented and diversified media world.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, now at the top of the newly married company are two cross-cultural partners, Jean Marie Messier and Barry Diller. Are they going to live comfortable inside the same tent?

DAVID BENNAHUM: You know, it's a great question. You've got two very strong egos obviously and you look at someone like a Ted Turner at Time Warner, you know, that had a tremendous influence and ego and the sort of duels that have happened there. You look at other media companies people like Rupert Murdoch who have equally large egos, and the history of these things is littered with all kinds of ego clashes. If you factor in that variable, who knows how this is going to work out? There's a chance there will be friction and it won't be smooth-sailing management handover.

RAY SUAREZ: Jim Stroud, do you think they can divide the responsibilities in such a way that they can co-exist peacefully? These are two pretty head strong guys by reputation.

JIM STROUD: They certainly are two head strong guys. When you throw in another third head strong guy in Charlie Ergen with EchoStar, the best way to describe Vivendi's move over the last week is a gamble. I think it's a gamble. They're betting on getting into the American market in a very big way with their agreements with EchoStar and USA Media. I think the three of them together know the potential for this market. That's why they're all willing to stake their reputations and their names on this deal is because they see a big potential. But whether it works out or not, that remains to be seen.

RAY SUAREZ: One last quick question. Is there any regulatory barrier to this? There used to be pretty tight regulations about selling these sorts of properties internationally. Is this going to have any problems in Washington or in Paris or anywhere else?

JIM STROUD: I don't necessarily know if the Vivendi-USA deal will have any real government hurdles or legal regulatory issues to overcome, but I definitely think that this puts a real question mark on the EchoStar- DirecTV deal because again from day one EchoStar is not vertically integrated and now they are. I think that the FCC may well require full disclosure with what's going with EchoStar and Vivendi before moving forward on the EchoStar/DirecTV merger.

RAY SUAREZ: Jim Stroud, David Bennahum, thank you both.

CONVERSATION

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, another of our conversations with authors of new books, and to Gwen Ifill.

GWEN IFILL: The book is "The Best of Times, America in the Clinton Years." The author is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and NewsHour regular Haynes Johnson. Haynes, welcome.

HAYNES JOHNSON: Thank you.

GWEN IFILL: When you wrote this book and you came up with the title, "the best of times: America in the Clinton years," were you being sardonic? And obviously, this was before September 11.

HAYNES JOHNSON: Yes, it was finished seven months before September 11 and it was a Dickensian title. It was an ironic title. "It was the best of times, the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness," and I think that's what, to me, spoke about what the '90s-- the boom years, the bubble years-- really were. They had all these things, both good and bad in them, and they ended on September 11. That was the final crash.

GWEN IFILL: It all ended. You've been traveling a lot with this book, talking to people about it around the country since September 11, and have you... You say in this book that, basically, we all got fat and happy during the Clinton years.

HAYNES JOHNSON: We didn't pay attention.

GWEN IFILL: Didn't pay attention. Is that still so?

HAYNES JOHNSON: No, on the contrary. It's astonishing. I've been in 21 cities now, traveling around the country, all over the United States and people are absolutely focused. There's an apprehension in the background. They want to know what's happening. They're following the news in a way that we weren't doing at all. And they have lots of questions. "Where are we going?" Nobody can answer them exactly. "What's it mean, how did we get here, what should we be doing, and how long is this going to go on and how much has my life changed?" And they're looking back. It's very interesting, Gwen. They're looking back on the period, the boom years, the bubble years, the Clinton years, the age of whatever foolishness and the best of times, and they're saying, "What happened to us?" "Why did we allow that to happen?" And I think if you take the lessons of it, if we learn why we allowed ourselves to go to sleep, as it were-- cut off the news and get in scandal and diversion and entertainment-- and be diverted from the great issues, then it's going to be a positive thing. We're going to learn from it.

GWEN IFILL: You wrote a book about Ronald Reagan you called "Sleepwalking Through History."

HAYNES JOHNSON: That's right.

GWEN IFILL: How did that period of history compare to the period of history you talk about in this book?

HAYNES JOHNSON: It led very much into what we're talking about now. There's no distinct... You don't cut a knife right through the page of history and say, "this is the new history and that's the old history"-- although September 11 may be one of those moments-- but the '90s really followed on the '80s, where we're going into privatization, capitalization, mergers and acquisitions, deficit economy-- turned out not to be, but the boom-- and then we had this little recession at the end. But they set the way in defining what privatizing and looking at Wall Street as being the font of great boom stuff, you know? It was, "Gold was going to be here-- luxury!"

GWEN IFILL: Dot-com boom.

HAYNES JOHNSON: Well, and that was just on the horizon. And that really... When you got into the '90s and we got this roar of success and we really believed-- or people believed, at least-- that we repealed history. We repealed the market forces; it only went up. It was much like the 1920s-- "it's never going to go down, it only goes up."

GWEN IFILL: But you also write that people were still feeling this sense of distrust and unease underneath the surface during this time.

HAYNES JOHNSON: That's right.

GWEN IFILL: How did that, then, lead us to where we are now?

HAYNES JOHNSON: The uneasiness was because we knew things weren't quite right. Not about terrorism, although I do end the book on terrorism, I mean, no foresight on my part. I talk about the Taliban and the fundamentalists and that America faced the fundamentalist attack possibility in the future, and it was going to be happen somehow or another. We shouldn't have been surprised by that. But the uneasiness was somehow, with all the good things that we had, we weren't together and people were looking at the great disparity in incomes in the country, because while people were dot-com millions... You're probably a dot-com billionaire.

GWEN IFILL: I don't think so.

HAYNES JOHNSON: (Laughs) well, at least not now. Nobody is now.

GWEN IFILL: If we were once.

HAYNES JOHNSON: Right, but they were looking at this as a way to sort of cash in and so forth, but you knew that the huge disparity-- the reality of the times-- was that there was a greater difference between the very top and the very bottom and the very top and the middle, and people were struggling on their own and holding their own. And so there was a sort of uneasiness. And then there was this spectacle of tawdriness and sleaziness and scandal, and I'm afraid our business contributed to it. I mean, we loved it. We went big on the "all-O.J., All-Monica, all-Gary Condit, all the time" to the exclusion of other things. And I think people understood that this wasn't quite right.

GWEN IFILL: You coin a lot of interesting phrases in this book, some of which you attribute to others, like one called "Pax Americana," which a scientist describes as "we can do anything we want, but we aren't doing it."

HAYNES JOHNSON: Yeah. That, in a way... That was a wonderful fellow at Cal Tech. He was a great physicist. He was telling me what all the wonders of science were doing. That was part of the times, too. This great revolution in science and technology and medicine-- extraordinary going on-- and yet we had in our hands all the... We could do anything we wanted, but we weren't figuring out what it is we wanted to do with all the great things we had -- all the treasures, a country at peace, no cold war, Russia was alone-- no Soviet Union-- all the "-isms" in history had faded into the past, and so it was the greatest opportunity for the United States to make long- term... deal with the country, deal with the world. We didn't do it.

GWEN IFILL: Do you... Did you find in your travels, as you talk to people about this book and other things since September 11, that people... that that kind of disattention-- I just made that word up-- that kind of lack of attention...

HAYNES JOHNSON: It's a good word. I like it.

GWEN IFILL: ...Has led us to where we are now, where we were so baffled that there was anyone out there who could hate us so much?

HAYNES JOHNSON: I think that the reason that we didn't pay attention to the threats of terrorism... After all, the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, we had the ship go down, the "Cole"-- didn't go down, but almost did-- we had embassies attacked, Americans died. All... We had all these things we had. We had reports gathering dust about the terrorist threat and so forth, and the reason I think that we were so sure of our power and our technological prowess, that no matter what happened outside our borders, we were invulnerable. We were invincible, and it couldn't happen to us. It was distant. And, in that way, it was sort of like Pearl Harbor-- what happened on September 11-- the shock that it could happen to us, it happened here, and I think the same thing happened to the United States.

GWEN IFILL: How about the cynical America that you write about, the folks who believe that government and politics are meaningless and irrelevant, does that still exist?

HAYNES JOHNSON: No, and I think one of the... There are so many opportunities we have now. If we learn the lessons of what mistakes we made in the past, particularly in the last decade and the good years, and the feeling about government, that it was irrelevant... You and I know that the cynicism... People were voting less and less, didn't believe in leaders and institutions... And you found this process, now people think, "Yeah, public service means something. It means firemen, it means policemen, it means nurses, it means emergency workers, it means people who are trying to find out whether anthrax spores... 'How do they go?' And we need money for health, to build up on diseases and so forth." And I think the role of government... We now see we need government. Government is also the military. It's also providing for our security and leadership, leadership who can tell us, "This is what we have to do now in a crisis." So I think that there's been a fundamental change there. It may be transitory, but we have the opportunity now to knit back the society. And I think those are the positive things that I hope take place out of this book.

GWEN IFILL: So the lost opportunities that you wrote about...

HAYNES JOHNSON: Squandered, yeah.

GWEN IFILL: Squandered opportunities, because of laziness or inattention or whatever, you think that we have... We're in a unique place now to get them back?

HAYNES JOHNSON: I do. Maybe I'm naive and a romantic-- you've known me for years-- I'll confess to being those things, but I really believe this is such a fundamental, searing experience for people. It's forced people to look within them, and if a country can do that... We're a great people. I'm not ashamed to say I'm absolutely, unabashedly proud of this country. We've always risen to crises in the past. We're not very good in looking at the long-term, and if this forces us to think -- "we've got to educate ourselves differently, we've got to pay attention to the world differently, we've got to be more aware of events around us and the problems we face, we've got to learn foreign languages"-- then the world will be better. If we don't, we repeat that history of the past.

GWEN IFILL: Haynes Johnson, thank you for the book and thank you for joining us.

HAYNES JOHNSON: Thanks, Gwen.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major developments of the day: US Special Forces tracked fleeing al-Qaida fighters in eastern Afghanistan. The American flag flew over the US Embassy in Kabul for the first time in nearly 13 years. And on the NewsHour tonight, Secretary of State Powell said Palestinian leader Arafat has the power and the moral authority to crack down on Hamas and other militant groups. We'll see you online, and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.