The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour this Martin Luther King Holiday, a summary of the day's news; Elizabeth Farnsworth's second report from the Middle East, this one on the Palestinian perspective; a state of the world conversation with tom Friedman of the "New York Times"; a report on government standards and efforts to have clean air; a conversation with the surgeon general about race discrimination in health care; and a favorite poem related to Martin Luther King.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: JIM LEHRER: Donor nations pledged more than $2.6 billion today to begin rebuilding Afghanistan. They did so at an international conference in Japan. Secretary of State Powell announced the U.S. Would commit almost $300 million this year, with more to follow. The United Nations has said Afghanistan will need $10 billion over the next five years. In Afghanistan, U.S. Army troops reported a series of incidents around their base at Kandahar. They said over the last few nights, they spotted people watching them from outside the perimeter fence. Gunmen fired on the base earlier this month, and U.S. Marines later found and destroyed tunnels and weapons. The marines handed over command to the Army's 101st Airborne Division on Saturday. The British government today played down concerns about U.S. Treatment of Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners. They're being held under tight security at the U.S. Naval station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Over the weekend some British newspapers and lawmakers sharply criticized conditions there. Today a spokesman for Prime Minister Blair said British citizens among the prisoners had "no complaints." On Sunday, the U.S. Military allowed reporters into the camp, as another flight of prisoners touched down. We have a report from Andrea Catherwood of Independent Television News.

ANDREA CATHERWOOD: Inside Camp X-ray, the number of suspected al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners held by the U.S. Military has swollen with the arrival of another plane load of detainees from Afghanistan. On board a military doctor sedated two prisoners because the U.S. Military say they were thrashing around inside their restraints. And under the tightest security, I watched as 34 prisoners were brought off the plane, blindfolded and masked in the same way as these men in photographs released by the U.S. Army. Here at Camp X-ray, they are photographed, fingerprinted and blood tested before being locked in an eight foot square caged cell. The prisoners, including three Britons, are unchained inside their cells, but shackled, hand and foot, by military police when they are let out to use the showers or latrines. But the base commander told me the prisoners are not ill-treated.

BASE COMMANDER: It's a work in progress. We're looking hard at ensuring that we treat these detainees in a humane fashion.

ANDREA CATHERWOOD: One prisoner we saw looked extremely young although the U.S. Military say they are not aware any are under 18. All are subjected to the searing heat of the Cuban sunshine by day and halogen flood lamps that light the camp up all night.

JIM LEHRER: Late today, another planeload of prisoners arrived at Guantanamo. In the Middle East today, Israeli troops seized an entire Palestinian town in the West Bank for the first time in 16 months of fighting. One person was killed and fifteen wounded in fighting with the Israeli forces. Palestinian Leader Arafat warned the takeover "crossed all red lines." Israel said it was further retaliation for the deadly attack last week on a Jewish wedding hall. We'll have more on the Palestinian perspective in a few minutes. Thousands of people returned today to their home in Congo, just days after a volcano erupted. Nearly half of the city of Goma was destroyed by fire and lava, and the danger is not over. Today, the lava set off an explosion at a gas station killing at least 30 people. They had been siphoning fuel. On the Enron collapse, a fired auditor has told investigators Enron and its accounting firm share the blame for keeping debt off the books. That word came today from Congressman Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania. He said David Duncan gave told his story after being fired by the Arthur Andersen accounting firm. He could testify before Greenwood's House Subcommittee later this week. Also today, the "New York Times" and others reported Enron's chairman sold company stock last year to repay loans. His attorney said Kenneth Lay acted to raise cash, and not because he was worried about Enron's financial health. This was Martin Luther King Day in the United States. Events around the country observed the birthday of the civil rights leader. He was assassinated in 1968. In Atlanta, his hometown, thousands took part in a parade. Others gathered at the Ebenezer Baptist Church there, where King had preached. Later his widow, Coretta Scott King joined President Bush at a White House ceremony. The President recalled King's "J Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: His most powerful arguments were unanswerable, for they were the very words and principles of our Declaration and Constitution. When he came to this capital city and stood before the figure of the great emancipator, it was not to assail or threaten. He had come to hold this nation to its own standards, to live out the true meaning of its creed.

JIM LEHRER: A new portrait of Dr. King was unveiled at that ceremony. It will hang in the White House.

JIM LEHRER: Now, the second of Elizabeth Farnsworth's reports from two neighboring towns in the Middle East, one Israeli, one Palestinian. On Friday, Elizabeth reported from Israel; tonight, the Palestinian perspective.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Since Friday, Israeli troops have fanned out through Ramallah, extending their reoccupation of the West Bank city, which was left to Palestinian control under the 1993 Oslo agreement. Israeli troops moved tanks to within 50 yards of Yasser Arafat's office, where he is under virtual house arrest. They also blasted a radio TV station they accused of broadcasting inflammatory reports, and raided the home of Marwan Barghouti and other Palestinian leaders. Barghouti, general secretary of Yasser Arafat's Fatah Party in the West Bank, said Israeli intentions are clear.

MARWAN BARGHOUTI, West Bank General Secretary, Fatah: I think that Sharon government has very clear plan. They plan from three points. First, to topple Mr. Arafat, to undermine Palestinian Authority, to crack down on the Palestinian intifada and the resistance and, of course, to reoccupy Palestinian cities. But this will not lead for security for Israel.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: It was a member of the armed branch of Fatah who killed six celebrants at a bat mitzvah party last week in northern Israel, wounding 30. Fatah said it carried out that attack in retaliation for the Israeli assassination a few days before of one of its leaders in Tulkarm. And so the bloody cycle of violence escalated. (Gunshots ) (sirens) Life has changed enormously throughout the West Bank in the year and a half since the most recent intifada, or uprising, began. Beit Jala, an old partly Christian village near Bethlehem, looks quiet on this cold January morning, but there have been intermittent firefights between here and Gilo, an Israeli neighborhood just across a narrow valley. We reported from the Gilo side of this divide on Friday. Palestinians say Gilo is an Israeli settlement built on their confiscated land. (Gunfire) Each town claims the firing originated from the other side. Some of the Palestinian shooting game from this house.

KHALID EL-MASSOU, Director, Inad Theater: This house was bombed by the Israelis' tanks.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Khalid el Massou is a director of a Beit Jala theater company.

KHALID EL-MASSOU: There's many houses that was damaged completely.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So did the firing come from right over there?

KHALID EL-MASSOU: Yes. The tanks was there and they bombed all the houses and all the area.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Who was doing the shooting?

KHALID EL-MASSOU: The people who wanted to defend... The people here. The people, they need to defend themselves.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Khalid's Inad Theater wasn't on the front lines of the shooting, but a tank shell hit it, destroying much of the structure. He and his group are rebuilding with help from the Swedish government and the Ford Foundation. He teaches classes and gives plays even now in the damaged theater. He's also spending a lot of time traveling through the West Bank to perform. On this day, we accompanied him to a school in Abu Dis, a village east of Jerusalem. He took steep back roads to avoid long waits at Israeli checkpoints turning a 15-minute trip into an hour's journey through small villages, including one where the shepherds of biblical renown witnessed the star that led them to the manger. (Singing in Palestinian) Khalid said he performs so that the children may laugh, diverting them from a conflict that has taken a terrible toll on young people. About 1,000 Israelis and Palestinians have been killed since the current intifada began. Three-quarters of those are Palestinians, and 20% were under 18.

KHALID INAD: My main goal is to be with children trying to change that situation, make it more light, more easier to make the children participate with me, to sing, to dance, to play, to forget for a while the sound of shelling, of bombing.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: He told the children a story about Nicholas, a five-year-old Beit Jala boy who lost his left arm to an Israeli shell. The point was to encourage the children to say they'd help Nicholas. (Applause) In Beit Jala the next day, Nicholas spent Sunday morning at church with his sisters. He is still in pain, they said, and very sad. He was wounded May 6 last year after the reoccupation of Beit Jala by Israelis. There was a firefight that day.

SAMAR ABU-GHANNAM, Nicholas' Sister (Translated): The neighbors had gathered in front of the house. I called him to drink his milk and have breakfast before going to church. My mother took his hand and they were approaching the house when a shell came between them. It hit him. He was thrown aside.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The shell tore his muscle and his arm had to be amputated. I asked Nicholas's sister if she was angry that Palestinian militants had used Beit Jala to shoot at Gilo.

SAMAR ABU-GHANNAM (Translated): No, we were not upset, because we knew our village was the nearest place where they could reach the Israelis and take some sort of revenge for what they were doing to the Palestinians.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Have you lost hope in the peace process?

SAMAR ABU-GHANNAM (Translated): I am not a big believer in the peace process. I pray to God there will be solutions. In my opinion, there is no solution.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And she's not alone in that skepticism said Kahlil Shikaki, who runs a research center in Ramallah that gauges Palestinian opinion on the peace process.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You wrote that in 1996, the Palestinian approval of Oslo peaked at about 80% and support for violence at 20%. What's happened since 1996 to those figures?

KAHLIL SHIKAKI: A tremendous transformation. All this has been reversed. Today, the belief that the peace process will indeed end up in a permanent settlement with the Palestinian state is almost 11% today. Support for violence has skyrocketed to almost 90% at times. It ranges today anywhere between 60% and 90%.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Shikaki supported the Oslo agreement, but criticized it as open-ended and thus easily subverted.

KAHLIL SHIKAKI: The Israelis, for example, continued to build settlements, continued to treat the Palestinians as occupied. Palestinians began to have doubts about the process. They began to see it as an Israeli effort to consolidate occupation rather than end occupation. That, of course, for the Israelis will be the continuation of the violence. This was seen as an Israeli concession for nothing.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Israeli actions have horrified Palestinians, too, Shikaki said. Images like this-- a father and son caught in a firefight in Gaza, the son killed apparently by Israeli bullets-- made the use of violence more acceptable here. Shikaki himself does not support armed tactics, but he said his research shows many Palestinians do condone attacks by groups like Hamas. That group claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Tel Aviv disco last June that we reported on Friday. Hassan Yosef is a West Bank spokesman for the political wing of Hamas.

HASSAN YOSEF (Translated): We in the political wing have no relationships to military decisions. But in general, what does the world expect from us? Isn't it our right to defend ourselves?

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Shikaki said anger is a natural byproduct of what he calls "the daily humiliations of life" here.

KAHLIL SHIKAKI: The Israeli tanks can move freely in this area. We cannot move about, we cannot move out from our offices in this direction going back outside the city of Ramallah. For the most part, most Palestinians have not been working for almost 15, 16 months. The impact of poverty on the majority of the Palestinians has been tremendous.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Israeli leaders had told us that the Palestinian rejection of the Barak peace plan at Camp David a year and a half ago showed that Palestinians don't really want peace. But Abu Ala, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament and a participant at Camp David, said 97% of the West Bank wasn't offered to thePalestinians, as Israelis claim. And he said there were other problems, too.

ABU ALA, Speaker, Palestinian Parliament: They want to keep blocks of settlements. They want security areas. They asked to control the international borders. They are putting the Palestinian people in cages like chickens.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Khalil Shikaki said partly as the result of this appointment with Oslo, leaders like Abu Ala -- Shikaki calls them "The Old Guard"-- are on their way out.

KAHLIL SHIKAKI: They're being marginalized because they've failed to produce a state, they've failed to produce good government and they have failed to produce an agreement with Israel. The intifada and the violence involved in it was the way that the young guard wanted on the one hand to send a message to the Israelis that they no longer have confidence in the peace process and that they now want to emulate Hezbollah methods. The public supports the violence of the young guard.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And this explains, said Shikaki, why Arafat is still confined to Ramallah by Israeli tanks. Prime Minister Sharon has said he won't ease the vice around Arafat's headquarters until he arrests a list perpetrators of violence. Some have been arrested, but Shikaki says Arafat can't confront them all.

KHALIL SHIKAKI: Arafat cannot risk such a crackdown because of the threat of civil war on the one hand and because, even if he is successful, and he gets back to a table to negotiate with Sharon, Sharon will see nothing but a very weak and humiliated Palestinian leader. Why should Sharon make concessions to that leader?

SARI NUSSEIBEH, PLO Representative, East Jerusalem: I think they've destroyed much of the structure of the Palestinian Authority.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Sari Nusseibeh, an oxford-educated philosopher, is the PLO representative in East Jerusalem.

SARI NUSSEIBEH: They've broken up its organization. It's split into separate parts now that are so divided from each other that there's no connection. There's no communication.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You mean because of the checkpoints?

SARI NUSSEIBEH: Because of the checkpoints and sieges, the isolation of president Arafat in Ramallah, and the inability of its various institutions to get together.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So with the future of the Palestinian Authority hanging very much in the balance, Shikaki said much will depend on what this man, Jibreel Rajoub, does. He's the head of the security force in the West Bank authorized by the Oslo agreement. He's close to Arafat, but he and his counterpart in Gaza are seen as potential heirs to the throne.

KAHLIL SHIKAKI: Their decision as to where to go, whether to support the old guard or suppress the Islamists and the young guard, or to throw their weight with the young guard is going to determine the future of the intifada and perhaps the peace process.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: For now Rajoub, like Arafat, is talking peace. He calls for international and especially U.S. help to stop what he calls the Israeli reoccupation.

JIBREEL RAJOUB, Chief of Preventive Security, West Bank: I think that we do need the peacekeeping forces. We do need a third party to judge, to supervise, to monitor what's going on because we are victim to the Israeli official terror, to the Israeli unilateral war and attacks against our people.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: He disputed Israeli claims which we reported last week that the Palestinian authority is building an alliance with Iran, as shown by the discovery of a ship laden with Iranian arms, the "Karine-A."

JIBREEL RAJOUB:I can assure you for two things. The first thing is that the Palestinian Authority officially have nothing to do with this ship. We are not involved officially, neither directly, nor indirectly, with this ship at all. The second thing...

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I'm sorry. Let me interrupt one second. Are you involved unofficially?

JIBREEL RAJOUB: Excuse me. There are some Palestinians who were on the ship and there were others who were involved. But this was not our policy. This just destructive harming our cause.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: He insisted the Palestinian Authority is trying to stop attacks on Israel, but said the Israelis must end the occupation to guarantee security.

JIBREEL RAJOUB: If they want to put an end to their fears and their concerns, which are mine also, they should immediately start seriously the process of reconciliation. Withdrawing their occupation, ending their occupation. This is the only way.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: In Beit Jala last week, Khalid el Massou told us he sings to keep his baby from crying when firefights break out between here and Gilo. There was shooting from Beit Jala again Friday night, so Khalid was singing.

JIM LEHRER: Those of you who missed Elizabeth's first piece from an Israeli village can find a transcript on our web site at pbs.Org.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, Friedman of the "Times": Clean air; fair health care; and a King Day poem.

SERIES - THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD

JIM LEHRER: The last of our New Year conversations on the United States in the world, with American commentators on international affairs. Margaret Warner has it.

MARGARET WARNER: With me is the foreign affairs columnist for the "New York Times," Thomas Friedman. He covered the Middle East as a "Times" reporter in the 1980s, winning two Pulitzer prizes and writing an award-winning book, "From Beirut to Jerusalem." His latest book is "The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization." He just returned from a trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Gulf and Brussels and is with us now.

MARGARET WARNER: Welcome, Tom.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN, The New York Times: Good to be here, Margaret.

MARGARET WARNER: First, your thoughts on Elizabeth's piece. And I'm particularly interested, of course, Osama bin Laden has wrapped himself or as tried to in the Palestinian cause. What do you think is the likely fallout in terms of our war on terror if this downward spiral that Elizabeth has been chronicling in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict continues?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: One of the things that really struck me from the trip I just took, Margaret, was it was really the replay of a trip I took about six weeks ago right after September 11. I didn't go to Afghanistan then but I went to Pakistan, the Persian Gulf and to Europe. On that first trip, what really struck me was the iron curtain of misunderstanding between America and the Arab-Muslim world today. There is still, or there was then, a widespread feeling that bin Laden didn't do this, that there was no proof and, if he did do it, maybe we deserved a little hit, you know, which people might tell you privately. Six weeks later, the Taliban have fallen, Afghanistan has been liberated by American troops. I went back to the same region. And what was really striking to me was the extent I heard the exact same thing. We have won the war. We have not won the hearts and minds of the Arab-Muslim world at all. There's still a lot of people there quietly rooting for bin Laden. Some of that is related to their own frustration with their own governments, we know. A lot of it is related to what we just saw as well. This is their way of getting a little bit of revenge on us for what is perceived to be our unwavering support for Israel. By not granting us our victory, in a sense, by not acknowledging that victory, this meat grinder of people that is being... Whose lives are being destroyed every day in this conflict is aired across the Arab world every night in news footage in a very tendentious way to be sure, in a way that often doesn't show the Palestinian provocation only the Israeli reaction, but it has an enormously corrosive effect on American standing in that part of the world. That's just a fact.

MARGARET WARNER: You have written frequently since September 11 that when the President called it a war on terror, it was really a misnomer, that terror is a tool, that it's really a war on what you called religious totalitarianism throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Explain what you mean by that.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: What I was really trying to highlight was what I call the circle of bin Ladenism. There are kind of three parts to this story. There is bin Laden. Bin Now Laden in my view, Margaret, is a combination of Charles Manson and Jack Welch. Okay. He is a cult leader with the organizational skills of an American corporate titan. You don't find these guys very often. This is a unique character. That's over here. Over here is what I would call "bin Ladenism." Why do people who wouldn't even maybe condone or endorse the mass murder that he did nevertheless have a little bit of support for him? That has to do with, I think, three interwoven factors that produce this bin Ladenism. One is authoritarian Arab-Muslim regimes. We have an Arab-Muslim world today that does not have a single democratically elected government save for Turkey from Morocco to the border of India - authoritarian government. These authoritarian governments because they are illegitimate and unelected need to legitimize themselves. And what they've done is strike bargains basically with the religious authorities, a bargain, which basically says, "You legitimate me and I'll let you kind of do whatever you want." That was Zia el Huk in Pakistan. And the same bargain is across the Arab-Muslim world. You have authoritarian governments, anti-modernist religious leaders who often indulge in anti-modernist religious education. That produces the third part of the wheel, which is poverty. So the three parts in this wheel all reinforce each other. The poverty reinforces the authoritarian government, the authoritarianism reinforces the anti-modernist religious education and the anti-modernist religious education reinforces the poverty.

MARGARET WARNER: But you've written again several times that the U.S. could go after bin Laden and his killers, but the U.S. cannot kill bin Laden's ideas, that leaders in the Arab-Muslim world have to do that. You're saying they're part of the problem. How do we get them to do that?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Well, the only way we're going to do it is with partners. You know, I've written many times that Saudi Arabia is a big part of this problem. They're also essential to the solution. It's impossible for me to imagine us solving this problem without the help of Saudi Arabia. They have too much religious legitimacy within the Islamic Muslim world and too much money. I mean, you go into schoolrooms and madrases, these Islamic schools in Pakistan -

MARGARET WARNER: As you have.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: As I have-- and there's a sign on the wall: "This room brought to you by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia." That's true from Morocco to Indonesia. So Saudi Arabia is part of the problem and they are also essential to the solution. We need partners. The reason I was so excited about Pervez Musharraf - the President of Pakistan's speech over the weekend is that he's the first leader who has really kind of broke out and said, "You know what? We have a problem. And it starts with me. I am the problem. My name is Pervez Musharraf and I am part of the problem. And the problem is that in the ruling deals we've cut with our people, in the case of Pakistan the military and the mosque alliance, and the kind of education we are providing," and basically said, "I'm going to break that cycle. We're going to offer a different alternative, progressive Islam and we're not going to have a military mosque alliance, but a military mainstream alliance." Whether he'll be able to pull that off, I don't know. But I think it was... It's a great opportunity for somebody to really lead a way out of this.

MARGARET WARNER: But as you pointed out throughout the rest of the Arab-Muslim world I mean, or rather in the world, the only two leaders to give speeches saying Islam is a religion of tolerance were George W. Bush and Tony Blair. You didn't hear that from any Muslim or Arab leaders.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: There's been a real dearth of leadership. These guys are scared. They're frightened. The truth is they're frightened of Osama bin Laden still. You haven't seen many American Muslim leaders give that speech either, and they live in America. I think they're frightened, too. I think that, you know, the reach of bin Laden is far and wide. And when you have these illegitimate regimes and these leaders know that their people are quietly rooting for bin Laden, you see, say one thing for bin Laden, Margaret; he's an authentic character. He's a Saudi millionaire who gave up a life of riches in Saudi Arabia to go live in a cave in Afghanistan and first fight the Soviets and then fight the Americans. I detest the man, but he is an authentic character. Well, you only defeat that kind of authenticity with another kind of authenticity, okay, and that is somebody has to articulate an authentic, progressive Islamic message, I think, you know to face up with that. These guys aren't ready to do to do that because they struck their bargains with these other mullahs and these other characters in their own country because they need them because they're unelected, they're illegitimate.

MARGARET WARNER: So then who is going to bring about what you've called this war within Islam, not a war against Islam by the West but a war within Islam, a war for enlightenment or reform?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: It can only come from Arabs and Muslims themselves. We can engage in the... One of the worst things about American policy toward that part of the world we really only talk to them about two things: Oil and Israel. Our basic policy is on Israel: Just be nice to the Jews. Just be nice to the Jews, and you can do whatever you want at home. Okay? That's one thing. And oil: Just keep the price between $22 and $28 and you can do whatever you want at home. And our view was what we don't know won't hurt us. What we discovered on September 11 is what we didn't know did hurt us because back in the gas station behind the pumps people were hatching plots directed very much against us.

MARGARET WARNER: Afghanistan where you've just been, what does the... What does the U.S. role have to be now to make sure that Afghanistan doesn't revert, as you said in your column yesterday, to "Mr. Bin Laden's neighborhood" again?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Well, you know, first of all you can't imagine how broken this place is. I mean, my wife asked me when I, you know, "What does Kabul look like?" I said it looked exactly like ground zero. Half of Kabul looks exactly like ground zero, not because of what we did, but because of what they've done to themselves through 22 years of civil war. My wife collects postcards. She said, "When you're in Kabul get some postcards." Where am I going to find postcards in Kabul? Well, sure enough, I went to the Intercontinental Hotel and they have a bookstore that's still open there, and I just grabbed all the postcards that I could and paid for them, came home and I-- when I got home, I discovered one postcard is of rubble. I looked on the back, it says the destroyed Afghanistan National Museum. Now when you are selling postcards of rubble, you've been at war a long time. And these people have been at war so long that they have destroyed this country. I mean, there is... It is nation building on the moon. That's what we are talking about. And so at two levels, what do they need? They need, first of all, someone to provide security. And what was striking about all the Afghan officials I spoke to there was whether it was the education minister, okay, or the interim president, everyone starts out by saying "We need security and we don't trust any of these warlords to provide it. We need you to come in and do that." And, secondly, they need money. But the two go together. The idea that you can just pour in money and stir and you get a resurrected country, not going to happen.

MARGARET WARNER: When they say we need you, do they mean we need you Americans to be part of the force?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Absolutely. Everyone wants us. They don't trust anyone else.

MARGARET WARNER: Not even the Europeans.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Not even the Europeans. I think that you can have a situation where you galvanize a force, where we have a lead role; we have maybe a symbolic role and others play a more visible role and we're in the background. I think our role could take many forms. But the idea that you'll have a sustained and credible force there without us, you know, listen to the report you had earlier, you know, Kandahar, people are already firing on the Marines there. I took off from Bagram military base, hitched a ride on an American military transport as we were leaving. And they told us people are firing tracer bullets at the end of the runway. This place is totally untamed outside the city. We went to Pakistan where we were at the American military base in Pakistan and we talked to the American pilots there, they told us we do not fly a mission from Pakistan to Afghanistan where we are not fired on over Pakistani territory by small arms fire. This place is wild. And the idea of pacifying it, you know, is going to be a huge, huge effort. I say it with a heavy heart because I don't want to send, you know, my neighbor's son to go do this. It's going to be really hard. All I know is if we don't do it, the place is going to go right back to Mr. Bin Laden's neighborhood. If we do do it, it still may not work.

MARGARET WARNER: Finally, just briefly but something you've written about and you have a lot of experience having lived in Beirut and Jerusalem, how do Americans learn to live now with a level of personal risk that we've never felt before?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Well, Margaret, I always think of when I lived in Beirut I had a Lebanese friend to used to tell me every time she traveled on a plane she carried a bomb in her suitcase because the odds of two people carrying a bomb on the same plane were much higher. And it's that kind of mind game that people played in a place like Lebanon. And we're going to have to do the same thing basically because we're not going back to normal. We're going to have to redefine normal. Either that or you become paralyzed and you basically sit at home in your basement. I don't want to do that. Now redefining normal is going to mean that we're going to have to go out and we're going to have to travel, and we're going to have to accept risk at one level, but I also think it means being smart about it. How many times have you been in line at the airport lately and you see someone raking an 80-year-old lady up and down with a metal detector? You sometimes have got to say, "Wait a minute. I don't think this lady is the person we're looking for." Okay? So at one level we have to be smarter and another level we're going to have to be personally much braver.

MARGARET WARNER: Tom Friedman, thank you.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: A pleasure.

FOCUS - CLEARING THE AIR

JIM LEHRER: Now a clean air controversy. Tom Bearden reports.

TOM BEARDEN: Kerry Connor-McNiven has asthma. She takes medication every day for her condition and most of the time she does pretty well, but it's a different story when air pollution levels go up around her Connecticut home.

KERRY CONNOR-McNIVEN: On the days when there is poor air quality I definitely have more trouble than on days that the air quality is good.

TOM BEARDEN: Connor-McNiven says the attacks can be terrifying.

KERRY CONNOR-McNIVEN: Well, it feels like you have a large dog sitting right on your chest, and every breath is a struggle to move that dog up and back. And it burns to take those breaths in and out. And the dog gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

TOM BEARDEN: Dr. Thomas Godar is with the Connecticut chapter of the American Lung Association. He says the asthma problem is steadily getting worse.

DR. THOMAS GODAR, American Lung Association: We know there are about 175,000 in the state of Connecticut alone and about 87,000 of these are children under the age of 15. So asthma rates have doubled actually in the last 20 years.

TOM BEARDEN: Dr. Godar thinks air pollution is a major cause; so does Connecticut's Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal, and he says he knows who to blame: coal-fired electric power plants in the Midwest and South.

RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut Attorney General: This issue is a matter of life and death in Connecticut. The report done for the EPA shows that there were 299 deaths in 1999 and 6,000 asthma attacks, tens of millions of dollars in health care and other costs. This study draws direct links between the air pollution in the Midwest that is blown by the prevailing winds to Connecticut - nitrogen oxide, sulfa dioxide, causing acid rain, smog - that not only damages our lakes and rivers and trees but also causes severe respiratory problems in our citizens and very grave health problems.

TOM BEARDEN: Under the Clinton Administration Blumenthal and several other Attorneys General in Northeastern states filed 51 lawsuits against coal-fired plants, mostly in the Midwest. They claimed these plants were flouting the rules of the Clean Air Act. But now the Attorneys General are afraid the suits may be rendered moot because the Bush Administration may rewrite part of the Act. The specific rules being scrutinized are called "The New Source Review," abbreviated NSR. They apply to older plants that were exempt when the Clean Air Act passed in 1970. The rationale was that they only had a limited lifeleft, and that requiring expensive pollution controls was bad economics. It was assumed that the old plants would be replaced within a few years by newer facilities using the latest anti-pollution measures. But the New Source Review process was supposed to be triggered if an industry modified or expanded the plant and pollution increased. NSR would force the facility to install state of the art pollution control technology. But industry says that late in the Clinton Administration the government began to claim that routine maintenance triggered NSR. Scott Segal, a lawyer for the power companies, wants the law clarified so that cannot happen.

SCOTT SEGAL, Utilities Industry Attorney: The New Source regulations entered the law in 1977, and from the period 1977 till the middle of the Clinton Administration these regulations were singularly effective, effecting a 30 percent decline in major pollutants at the same time that coal consumption was going up by 70 percent. What we would like to see is the New Source Review program through clarification return to that period when it was "the" most effective environmental control mechanism. We'd like to see a bright line distinction between routine activities and major modification that could occur at a plant, and by so doing, we'd like to see more maintenance activities, and greater workplace safety, and greater environmental protection.

TOM BEARDEN: But environmentalists say what industry calls routine maintenance is actually reconstruction. Companies are extending the lifespan of the old plants and deliberately trying to avoid cleaning them up. Dr. Godar believes if NSR is weakened, there will be real consequences for public health.

DR. THOMAS GODAR: If you understand the healthcare costs to individuals who have asthma or emphysema and what it costs us in insurance costs alone just to maintain health in the presence of pollution. You'll understand that we're talking really about many billions of dollars, and so the cost to - to improve, for example, power plants that may be polluting is miniscule with respect to that.

TOM BEARDEN: Are Midwest power plants killing people in New England?

SCOTT SEGAL: Absolutely not. First of all, the science regarding the transport pollution from the Midwest to the Northeast is very suspicious and it oftentimes has been quite politically motivated. When folks in the Northeast talk about acute impacts related to air pollution, we may reasonably infer that those acute impacts are related to sources that are far closer than a thousand miles away.

TOM BEARDEN: Segal says most of the Northeast pollution comes from the area's cars and trucks. Brooke Suter is with Clean Water Action, which has taken the lead on the clean air issue in Connecticut. She conceived that cleaning up every power plant in the Midwest still wouldn't allow Connecticut to meet federal clean air standards.

BROOKE SUTER, Clean Water Action: If you were to put a wall up around Connecticut, we have enough pollution here in the states that we wouldn't have clean air. Also, if you took all the sources in Connecticut and put them off line, to transport pollution would be such that we wouldn't have clean air. And that's why it's important that these plants are cleaned up to modern standards on site of the stack because they would take care of both the local pollution problems and the transport pollution problems.

TOM BEARDEN: Bob Slaughter is with the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association. The members of his association run oil refineries, which are also subject to NSR. He says changing NSR is vital to the U.S. economy.

BOB SLAUGHTER, Refiners Trade Association: People want to pretend that environmental programs, environmental progress comes free. It's extremely expensive. The refining industry has spent billions of dollars in the last couple of decades, will spend billions more in this decade on environmental improvements. We're heavily regulated; we will continue to be regulated. We have to make our plants cleaner. We are doing that. We have to make improvements in our product; we're doing that as well. But we do need to know what the rules are, and because of the great cost of these programs, they have to be imposed efficiently, and with some flexibility, so that we can determine where we can get the biggest environmental benefit at the least cost to not only the operator but also to the consumers in the form of the price of our products.

TOM BEARDEN: Administration officials say that proposed changes are still being reviewed and that criticism of the plan is premature. Blumenthal says he and other Northeastern Attorneys General will sue the administration if there is any weakening of the New Source Review regulations.

RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: The issue is much broader than simply the Northeast against the Midwest or other parts of the country, because the Air Quality Act, if it is undercut or eviscerated by the rollback in these rules, will have grave consequences for our whole country. It will imperil other parts of the country that depend on this federal statute and it is really a matter of law enforcement. We are involved in enforcing the law against these Midwestern power plants.

TOM BEARDEN: The administration is nearly five months past its own deadline for NSR revision. Some observers expect a decision at any time.

CONVERSATION

JIM LEHRER: Next, a Martin Luther King Day conversation. One of the issues that concerned Dr. King was discrimination in the nation's health care system. On Friday Ray Suarez talked about that and other matters with the outgoing Surgeon General of the United States.

RAY SUAREZ: As Surgeon General, David Satcher has been the nation's top doctor for four years. He focused attention on issues ranging from obesity to depression. He's also had to deal with one of the biggest public health challenges in recent history: Anthrax-tainted letters and resulting deaths. His term ends in February, and he's just announced that he'll head a new center at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. The center will focus on a range of health issues particularly those affecting poor and minority populations. Dr. Satcher, welcome.

DR. DAVID SATCHER, Surgeon General: Thank you, Ray. Good to be with you.

RAY SUAREZ: So when your term ends in a couple of weeks, you're going to do yourself a favor and take a little break or are you heading right to the new National Center for Primary Care?

DR. DAVID SATCHER: Well, I'm going to take a little break immediately after my term ends, and then for a six-month period between March and September-- I don't begin at Morehouse School until September-- for a six-month period, I will be a senior visiting fellow with the Kaiser Family Foundation, who will really have an opportunity to reflect and to write on some of my experiences in government.

RAY SUAREZ: So as you sift through your time as surgeon general, what would you identify as some of the high points of your term?

DR. DAVID SATCHER: Well, clearly, you know, we did a major report on mental health, and I believe the response of the American people to that report and to the report on suicide prevention has really been amazing. It's led to several follow-up reports and activities and, of course, we contributed to the world health report on mental health that came out recently.

RAY SUAREZ: And if you had to... From the particular vantage point of a Surgeon General talk about how well policy and politics and medicine and science live together, did you learn some lessons about that as well?

DR. DAVID SATCHER: Yeah. I think in order to do good public health, you really have to deal with all of those things. Now, the Surgeon General's responsibility is to communicate with the American people based on the best public health science, but sometimes you really have to fight to get things through the politics of Washington in order to bring the best public health science to the American people. I think we've been very fortunate, in most cases, of being able to do that, but you really have to deal with the environment.

RAY SUAREZ: Your new center will focus on issues especially affecting poor and minority-- underserved populations. This has been a long-term interest of yours, hasn't it?

DR. DAVID SATCHER: It has been and it actually, Ray, goes back to my childhood when, at the age of two, I suffered a very severe illness-- whooping cough and pneumonia-- and really came very close to death. It was that experience and the difficulty we had in getting care. We didn't have access to any hospitals. People died at home. But that experience and the memory of that sort of led me into medicine with the view that I wanted to be like the physician who came out to the farm to see me, and I wanted to make a difference for people who didn't have access to care.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, you'll have a chance to do it now. Looking over the health goals for black Americans, for Latinos, for poor populations, what are some of the things that Americans should really be paying attention to?

DR. DAVID SATCHER: Well, I think there are a few things. Number one, I think we have set as one of the goals for "healthy people 2010," the elimination of disparities in health among different racial and ethnic groups in this country. I believe that's critical for all Americans because I believe that to the extent that we respond to the health needs of the most vulnerable, we actually do most to promote the health of the nation. So disparities or lack of access to care that many people experience in this country, those things need to be eliminated and we can do that as a nation.

RAY SUAREZ: Are a lot of the diseases that we see disproportionately affecting poor and minority Americans? Are they lifestyle things - hypertension -- heart disease, high rates of emphysema, diabetes, obesity?

DR. DAVID SATCHER: I think that those disparities that we see relate to lifestyle, but they also relate to a lack of access to care. Some of them have familiar patterns of inheritance, but for the most part, we're talking about a combination of lifestyle, problems with early access and early detection of problems. For example, in the case of diabetes, we know, for example, that by changing lifestyles, we can prevent the onset of 50% to 60% of Type II diabetes, which is over 90% of the diabetes we see in this country. We also know though for people who get diabetes if they were detected early and treated aggressively, we could prevent complications like end stage renal disease and blindness and the need for lower limb amputation. We can prevent most of those complications by early detection and treatment.

RAY SUAREZ: What if you correct for access? Instead of comparing all blacks with all whites, let's say, you compared people who all had life insurance, who all had similar incomes and education levels, would a lot of these disparities go away?

DR. DAVID SATCHER: Well, to a great extent, many of the disparities would decrease dramatically. But you know, we also have studies showing that even for the higher socioeconomic group there are still disparities, but they're greatly reduced. We believe that some of these are multigenerational to the extent that some experiences that people have as children, especially girls who grow up to be women, of course, affect the outcome of their pregnancies. So if a child was exposed to environmental toxins, even though that child grew up to finish college and become a lawyer, that child is Hispanic or African-American still suffers from the experience that they had as a child. And that impacts upon infant mortality and maternal mortality.

RAY SUAREZ: So this new center that you'll be heading up will be a clearinghouse for information in research on just these kinds of questions?

DR. DAVID SATCHER: It will. And the good thing about it, Ray, is that it will be associated with a network of centers throughout the Southeast, for example, looking at what goes on in communities around these centers, but, also, how we can improve access to care and the quality of care that people receive. We also will relate to a national network of centers in time. And so we're going to be looking at how can we improve lifestyles in communities, but also how can we improve access to health care and the quality of care people receive, regardless of their location, but also regardless of their race or ethnicity.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, you grew up in the deep South during the years that Dr. King was trying to change the country's view of race relations. You were still a student when he was killed. How far are we from reaching some of the goals he articulated 40 years ago?

DR. DAVID SATCHER: Well, we've made a lot of progress since I was a child. I was 12 years old when the Montgomery bus boycott started, and I remember going into town and not being able to buy ice cream. You may say, "Well, that's no big deal," but what it did to you as a person to feel that you were shut out was very significant. But I think because of the work of Dr. King and many others, many of those barriers have been broken. But in medicine and in public health, we also have dreams. And those dreams relate to eliminating disparities in health and health care, making sure that everybody in this country has access to quality health care. That's an extension of Dr. King's dream, but it's really critical for the future of this country.

RAY SUAREZ: Is it all about money at this point or is it something a little bit more challenging than simply being able to write a check?

DR. DAVID SATCHER: I think first and foremost, it's about commitment. I really believe that as a nation, we need to make a commitment to universal access. The fact that one out of three Latinos in this country is uninsured, one in four African Americans are uninsured and the fact that so many people live in communities where they don't have access to care, as a nation we ought to make a decision that we're going to work to eliminate those barriers to care. And I'm convinced that we can do it if we make that commitment.

RAY SUAREZ: The outgoing Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. David Satcher. Thanks for talking to us.

DR. DAVID SATCHER: Thank you, Ray. It's good to be with you again.

FINALLY - FAVORITE POEM PROJECT

JIM LEHRER: And finally tonight, a holiday reading from the favorite poem series, the project by then-poet laureate Robert Pinsky asking americans to read their favorite poem. Tonight's reader is from Atlanta.

HOWARD MICHAEL HENDERSON: My name is Howard Michael Henderson. Most people call me Michael. I was born and raised here in Atlanta. And I try to consider myself to be somewhat of a renaissance man. There's a lot of things that interest me in life and I try to do a little bit of it all, and try to give back as much as possible as I have received out of life. I went to Morehouse College during the '60s and we were always taught to question, not just to accept things. One of the good things for me, I guess, is the fact that Martin Luther King was a graduate of Morehouse and it also gave us a sense of... We had something to fight for, to make a better life for our parents, for ourselves and for our children. You have to understand, I was born in 1943, and so I remember drinking from the colored water fountains. I remember sitting on the back of the bus because of my color. I remember when the buses were crowded of having to get up and let a white person sit in my seat. One of the reasons for wanting to read Langston Hughes is because although the poem was written I guess about 50, 60 years ago, it just tells me as much as things have changed things still remain the same. I look now and see the current attacks on affirmative action. I look and see the young kids, and it just tells me we're going around in circles. Children are our future, and if you expose a kid, say, in the sense of "Merry-Go-Round," for example, you say, "Well, there's no room for a kid that's black," then we're going to continue to have the hopelessness that we have here. And if we don't save our children, we don't save ourselves.

Merry-Go-Round by Langston Hughes

COLORED CHILD AT CARNIVAL

Where is the Jim Crow section On this merry-go-round, Mister, cause I want to ride? Down South where I come from White and colored Can't sit side by side. Down South on the train There's a Jim Crow car. On the bus we're put in the back- But there ain't no back To a merry-go-round! Where's the horse For a kid that's black?

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major developments of the day. Donor nations pledged more than $2.6 billion to begin rebuilding Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, U.S. Army troops reported a series of incidents around their base at Kandahar. And Israeli troops seized an entire Palestinian town for the first time in 16 months of fighting. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you, and good night.