The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight: Our summary of the news; then a look at reforming the way Congress goes about its intelligence oversight function; the coming of President Bush and Sen. Kerry to Davenport, Iowa on this same day; a debate about U.S. policy toward the crisis in Sudan; and a conversation about the photographic legacy of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose death was announced today.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: There was word today of new intelligence behind the latest terror alert. The Bush administration has acknowledged some of its information was up to four years old. It came from documents recently seized in Pakistan. Today, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, "There's another new stream of intelligence that came to our attention Friday as well." He did not give details. But in the New York Times today an unnamed senior intelligence official spoke of "very current" activity by al-Qaida. The alert is focused on financial centers in New York City, Newark, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. In Iraq today, heavy fighting broke out between Iraqi police and insurgents in Mosul. A hospital official reported at least 12 people were killed and more than 20 others wounded. Local officials said police confronted armed men roaming the streets with assault rifles and grenade launchers. They said the gunmen tried to attack a bank and government buildings. Four Jordanian hostages were rescued in Iraq overnight. A tribal group freed the men in Fallujah after local leaders learned of their whereabouts. The kidnappers escaped. Also today, Turkey confirmed the release of two Turkish truckers in Iraq. Yesterday, their employer agreed to stop delivering supplies to U.S. forces. Greece ordered its military to step up security for the summer Olympics today. An extra 35,000 soldiers will help guard railroad stations, borders and other areas; 70,000 troops were already on the job. In Athens, the head of the international Olympic committee welcomed the extra manpower. He spoke in an interview.

JACQUES ROGGE: It will not affect the mood of the games. They are necessary. They are needed. I commend the Greek government for having done everything that is humanly possible, and that is also what the world expects for something like the Olympic games but it will not affect the joy of the athlete and the joy of the public.

JIM LEHRER: The Athens games are scheduled to begin in nine days. Greece is spending a record $1.5 billion for security. Back in this country today, President Bush and Democrat John Kerry made Davenport, Iowa, the epicenter of their campaign, for a few hours. The president held a rally there on the banks of the Mississippi River. He vowed to win the state and the election. And three blocks away, Kerry held an economic summit. He focused on 26,000 factory jobs that Iowa has lost since 2000. We'll have more on this story later in the program. Voters in Missouri have endorsed a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. It won more than 70 percent of the vote in a primary election yesterday; 12 other states have similar amendments on their ballots this year. The government of Sudan staged mass protests today, against a UN resolution on the Darfur crisis. More than 100,000 people turned out in Khartoum. They condemned the UN for demanding that Sudan stop attacks on black villagers in Darfur. They also warned against military intervention by the West. We'll have more on this story later in the program. The price of crude oil fell sharply today. Oil futures in New York were down more than a dollar from yesterday's record high. Prices dropped on news the U.S. had more gasoline than expected. Also today, OPEC said it would increase output after all. And the Russian oil giant Yukos said it would not cut production, despite legal problems. There was good news from U.S. Manufacturers today. The Commerce Department reported factory orders rose 0.7 percent in June. It was the largest increase since March. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained six points to close at 10,126. The NASDAQ fell four points to closeat 1855. Officials in France announced today that famed photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson died Tuesday. His distinctive black and white photos ranged from everyday street scenes to major events and figures in the 20th century. They appeared in museum exhibitions, and in magazines all over the world. He was 95 years old. We'll have more on him at the end of the program. Between now and then, reforming Congress's intelligence functions, a big day in Davenport, and U.S. policy on Sudan.

FOCUS WHOS WATCHING?

JIM LEHRER: Kwame Holman begins our Congress story.

KWAME HOLMAN: The recently released 9/11 report concluded that several congressional committees with oversight of intelligence agencies, "lack the power, influence and sustained capability" to be effective. But House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss disagrees, and when he opened his committee's first hearing this morning on recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission, he reminded colleagues how much work the committee already has done to improve the nation's intelligence-gathering capabilities.

REP. PORTER GOSS: Including today's hearing, the committee including its subcommittees has held 62 oversight hearings on various aspects of the community intelligence community's performance and resources need of this Congress. I would note this is more hearings than the committee has held in any other calendar year. We have been busy.

KWAME HOLMAN: But the committee's ranking Democrat, Jane Harman, of California, said the committee should be doing more.

REP. JANE HARMAN: This committee appears to be moving in reverse. Today's hearing is entitled the lack of imagination and creativity. Maybe I lack imagination and creativity, but I cannot figure out why we are not marking up today, two bills, that have been pending in this committee for months. As you pointed out, we've had 62 hearings just this year on topics that are relevant to marking up legislation. So why isn't our committee moving faster?

KWAME HOLMAN: New York Republican Sherwood Boehlert jumped in and argued wholesale changes to the intelligence community cannot be made overnight.

REP. SHERWOOD BOEHLERT: People say we've got all the answers to all the questions. Now let's go forward instantly, reconvene Congress tomorrow, pass it and our problems are solved. That's not the way it works.

KWAME HOLMAN: But California Democrat Anna Eshoo also argued current congressional oversight isn't working either.

REP. ANNA ESHOO: But you have to go through twenty, thirty questions and jump through hoops and loops and ask the questions in a certain very specific way in order to secure information. And at the end of it, I think that the role, that the essential role that the Congress play in terms of oversight has really been diminished.

KWAME HOLMAN: That got agreement from one of those invited to discuss the 9/11 Commission recommendations. John Hamre, deputy secretary of defense during the Clinton administration, went on to list all of the problems he sees with congressional oversight.

JOHN HAMRE: The committees are too big, the staffs are too big. I frankly think cut the size of the staff in half and pay everybody twice as much. That would be a great accomplishment because there are too many people competing at too low a level for issues. Forgive me. I'll just offend everybody in the room and say you can't really do oversight when you come to town on Tuesday night and you leave on Thursday night. There's not enough of you here long enough to really guide the nation.

KWAME HOLMAN: Michigan Republican Peter Hoekstra took exception to Hamre's remarks.

REP. PETER HOEKSTRA: Saying that Congress only works Tuesday through Thursday, I think is an unfair characterization of what we do. Oversight is a function of how committed individual members are of doing their jobs. I think you'll frequently find that the Friday through Mondays are very, very effective days for oversight, especially for members of the Intel Committee as we rye try to visit and meet with folks in the intel community, either domestically or internationally. So cheap shot, not well taken by this member.

KWAME HOLMAN: Illinois Republican Ray LaHood also defended congress' efforts, and questioned another of the Commission's recommendations, creating a new national intelligence director.

REP. RAY LAHOOD: The idea that we have been sitting around on our hands for the last three years or the administration hasn't done anything is nonsense. And I think it's also a little bit silly to think that one person, whatever name you call them, intelligence tsar or whatever is going to come in and wave a magic wand and get people to communicate is a bit of folly.

KWAME HOLMAN: Hamre said he too is against creating a DNI, a director of national intelligence, but said it's likely to happen.

JOHN HAMRE: I think having the president endorsing a DNI, and having Sen. Kerry call for a DNI. means we are going to have a DNI. To be honest, if we pick it up on Monday, we are going to get a weaker CIA and weak DNI; that's not going to be good.

SPOKESMAN: My question is if the president hadn't come out for the so-called intelligence tsar, would you be here today promoting it even though you don't think it's a good idea?

JOHN HAMRE: Sir, I'm politically realistic.

SPOKESMAN: I know you are. But I'm asking you if the president hadn't done it, would you be here today saying it is probably not that good an idea.

JOHN HAMRE: Frankly I dodged it when I wrote my statement for you. And frankly, I ducked that because I'm pretty divided on the issue in my own mind.

KWAME HOLMAN: Congress already has held four hearing on the 9/11 Commission recommendations with nearly a dozen to go this month. Thus far, members have expressed strong reservations about making radical changes to the intelligence community and the way Congress oversees it.

JIM LEHRER: And to Gwen Ifill.

GWEN IFILL: So with so many committees meeting, and so many hearings underway, is all that activity good or bad for the U.S. Intelligence community? For that, we turn to two members of the House Intelligence Committee that met today: Republican Ray LaHood of Illinois, and Democrat Anna Eshoo of California.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. LaHood, we heard in the hearings today many things, among them that the Department of Homeland Security say they have to report to 88 separate congressional committees. The 9/11 Commission says that this congressional oversight system is dysfunctional is the word they use. Do you agree with that?

REP. RAY LAHOOD: I think there are too many committees. I think there probably is too much jurisdiction, and I think when the new Congress convenes next year, our leadership is going to have to come to grips with the idea that you can't have this many committees with oversight over intelligence and homeland security and domestic security, and it really needs to be whittled down to a much smaller structure, and it's going to be up to our leadership to really make this happen. Under the current structure, there are too many. I heard the president ask Secretary Ridge how many times have you been up to the Hill? And he said 144 times. Well, how on earth can these people, whether its the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, do their job if they're spending all their time up here, and it is a point well taken and we need to restructure.

GWEN IFILL: Anna Eshoo, what is your reaction to that?

REP. ANNA ESHOO: Well, there isn't any problem in my mind that the Congress needs to reform itself and its committee structure in dealing with this. This is the issue, the greatest challenge for our country today. I've been critical of how a smaller committee, the House Intelligence Committee that I serve on, how it has functioned relative to its oversight. But there is no question that we need to reform. It's not going to be easy. It is not going to be easy for the intelligence community. It certainly is not going to be easy for the Congress because it's territorial. It's about power. And so there will be a real usual and pull both on the intelligence community side and in the Congress as well.

GWEN IFILL: So Mr. LaHood, we heard Anna Eshoo saying during the hearing for instance about how difficult it is to even get an answer when you ask the questions on these committee hearings. What is it tat the House and the Senate have to start doing right now to get some of the reforms that you are talking about that you say are needed?

REP. RAY LAHOOD: Well, you have to be able to ask the right questions. Sometimes some of these witnesses don't always give us the direct answers that we want, and it really is incumbent upon the members to do their homework. And you need members that are experienced, too. This idea of term limits where you only allow members to serve for eight years; the Senate just eliminated that. We need more than eight years because it takes you about four years just to understand the lingo and the language and all the sophisticated kind of messages that are being passed to you.

GWEN IFILL: Well, let me ask you this: One of the people who testified today said maybe you should cut the number of staffers in half and pay them twice as much. Is that the beginning of where you need to go?

REP. RAY LAHOOD: Well, probably what we need to do is cut the number of committees in half so that when people come up here, it can be substantive. They can really do their job and they don't have to worry about running from one committee to another.

But if you cut the number of committees, you cut the number of staff: But Anna is right about this. This is about power; its about staff; its about money; its about members ability to go back home and crow about the fact that they're on a significant committee. It is going to take the leaders of Congress to really set a course when where we have a much smaller group of members, a much smaller group of committees that have oversight so we can really dig into the issues that we need to get into.

GWEN IFILL: Miss Eshoo, if you were in the majority and you ruled the world, what would you do first?

REP. ANNA ESHOO: What would I do first? Well, certainly I think that homeland security needs to have a permanent committee. It should not be essentially this broad task force. It should be institutionalized both in the Senate and the House. I would pare the down the number of jurisdictions and the number of committees that these issues have to go to. Thirdly, I think that for the House Intelligence Committee, it is very important that it produce product. We've had many, many hearings in the last year and a half, some sixty some hearings. But what have we put out? Has there been a real thorough examination of the issues relative to the run-up to the war? These are tough things to do because there is a political overlay to it. But I'm very frustrated, not only in terms of how difficult it is to extract the information from the people that come up to testify, but also to not have a work product that has actually come out of these 60 some hearings. I think we should have subpoena power. That would certainly send a message to the executive branch, so I think that there are some very important reforms that need to be made. I've got my ideas. I'm going to fight hard for them.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. LaHood, what are your ideas?

REP. RAY LAHOOD: Well, in defense of the committee, I mean I was a part of the bicameral committee that studied what happened and we put out an 800-page report and we had a 12-month period of time when we really looked at what happened before 9/11; we put out a report. And I do think it can't be left unsaid that the chairman announced today that we are going to mark up some bills. After we hold these hearings which will be three more weeks of hearings for the next three consecutive Wednesdays, for the next three weeks, the chairman has made a commitment, Chairman Goss has said today that we are going to mark up a bill based on what we hear from the testimony and what members think is important and we'll consider the bill that has been introduced by the Democrats, the chairman has introduced his bill. The administration has their point of view and hopefully some of these things can converge and we can have some legislation that comes out of the House Intelligence Committee that makes sense in terms of what the 9/11 Commission recommended.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. LaHood, let's for a minute find out what you said through the ears of a regular person who is not a member of Washington. They heard you talking about marking up bills, about considering legislation, about eventually coming up with a solution. What confidence can a tax paying citizen of your district have that Congress sees this as an urgent concern that will get done more quickly than bills normally get done on the hill?

REP. RAY LAHOOD: Well, Gwen, the fact that we are here now in August, away from our so-called vacation, which most of us are back in our districts working, almost every committee member was hear-- was here today on a Wednesday when we had plenty of things scheduled in our districts which we cancelled; I think our committee is committed for the next four weeks to do what we have to do to get information on what the commission recommended, to hear from the commissioners and then to write a bill base on the recommendations of the commission, based on the recommendations of what President Bush and his team would like to have, and based on some of the things that all of us have learned over the last several months from the hearings that we've had. We're going to write a bill and we're going to incorporate a lot of things. We're here in Washington today and in IR working along with the rest of our committee to do the work that has to be done to implement some of the recommendations.

GWEN IFILL: Ms. Eshoo, if for instance Congress were to take on -- create a joint House-Senate Committee that would be the mega-committee to oversee all of this, would that committee, first of all would that work with turf wars being what they are, and secondly would this committee also have to have budget authority?

REP. ANNA ESHOO: Well, one of the recommendations today was that the intelligence committees have money power, not just authorizing, but not get into turf battles with appropriators. That'sgoing to be a tough battle in the Congress, no appropriator wants to give up the power that they have. But I do think that's something for us to examine. I want to add something to this. I'm always glad to be here with my friend Ray LaHood. And I couldn't mean that more. But I truly believe that we wouldn't be here considering the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission were it not for the fact that the Commission did the extraordinary work that it did. They brought the American people along on this. There wasn't any sense of urgency in the Congress to be taking up legislation. We've had a bill sitting around since April. There wasn't any rush to this. But the families of the victims, together with the extraordinary bipartisan unanimous decision of the Commission, and the bringing along of the American people, that's what created the real energy around this and the sense of urgency. So I'm glad that we're here today. I'm glad we are going to be having hearings. And we've got to bring rest of the Congress in on this because they're going to have to know what is being shaped and what is being offered and then make a decision. But it wasn't the Congress that did this.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. LaHood, Speaker Hastert, your Republican leader said today in an interview on CNN, that any action the Congress takes should be quick but not knee jerk. Can you tell us what that means and whether there is a middle ground of that kind even exists?

REP. RAY LAHOOD: Well, Gwen, what I think it means is what we are doing here for the next four weeks or the next three weeks now after today, but four weeks of hearings, two of which will be open; today's hearing was open. Next week's hearing will be opened. We may have one closed and another open hearing where the public can hear what we have to say. I don't think it will be knee jerk. I think we'll take what we have and try and mold a piece of legislation that follows what hopefully the president would like, what the 9/11 Commission would like and what some of us would like and come up with a bill. It won't be knee jerk. It will be deliberate. A lot of hearings have been held, a lot of activity has taken place. Now we need to fish or cut bait. And I think we are going to do a lot of fishing and I think we'll have a good catch at the end of the day with a good bill that incorporates the things that many of us believe are important.

GWEN IFILL: And finally, Ms. Eshoo, to use Mr. LaHood's terms, when you fish and then cut bait, what will the bait be cut, by the end of this year, by the end of next year, sooner, later?

REP. ANNA ESHOO: I think the Congress and its leadership is not going to let this go. They know that the American people feel very strongly about this. And so I think that there will be action on legislation. And my guess... and it's only a guess... is that it will be done before the end of this year. I agree with Ray that we should never do sloppy legislation. That would be hurtful to the country. But I maintain that we have lost and squandered an enormous amount of time over the laugh year, year and a half. We could have been really ahead on this but now's the time, now's the moment, and I welcome it.

GWEN IFILL: Anna Eshoo and Ray LaHood. Thank you both for joining us.

REP. RAY LAHOOD: Thank you, Gwen.

REP. ANNA ESHOO: It's an honor to be on the program.

FOCUS BIG DAY IN DAVENPORT

JIM LEHRER: This was a very big day in Davenport, Iowa, as the presidential campaigns came to town. Betty Ann Bowser has our report.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The bus of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry came first, rolling into the Mississippi River town of 98,000 last night. Then this morning, President Bush's motorcade arrived. The candidates had dueling events that overlapped in time today, and occurred just blocks from one another in Davenport, one of the quad cities that straddles the Iowa-Illinois border. John Kerry's event, an economic summit, started first at about 11:00 A.M. local time. The Democratic candidate invited a group of about 150 national and local business leaders. Sen. Kerry started by mentioning his opponent's close proximity.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: President Bush is just a few blocks from here. It occurred to me that he could come here for a great discussion about America's future if he were really willing to just turn the corner.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Kerry was poking fun at Mr. Bush's recent campaign speeches in which he has repeatedly said America has "turned the corner" on economic issues.

GROUP: Four more years! Four more years!

BETTY ANN BOWSER: A half hour later, President Bush greeted his invited guests, thousands of them, at an outdoor rally on the banks of the Mississippi River, where he once again invoked his familiar campaign theme.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: America has added more than 1.5 million new jobs since last August. Because we acted, Iowas unemployment right now is 4.3 percent. (Applause) When it comes to creating jobs for American workers, we are turning the corner and we are not going back.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Jobs and the economy were the main theme at Sen. Kerry's summit.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: We just announced the largest deficit in history. We've lost, in the last four years, 1.8 million private sector jobs in America, 25,000 of them right here in Iowa. Now some people get upset when you tell the truth and talk the facts. Some people say this is the best economy we've ever had. They say that if you think we can do better and you talk about doing better and you have a better plan and you lay it out, you're a pessimist. I think they're wrong.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: He then listened to comments from local business leaders, including Shirleen Martin, the head of a job training center.

SHIRLEEN MARTIN: We need the federal government to put investment back into the state of Iowa and to our country. I don't understand losing jobs to Europe. We have to keep our businesses healthy and we have to keep our work force healthy. If we do that, I believe our economy will be healthy. So I'm glad I have the opportunity. (Applause )

BETTY ANN BOWSER: At his rally, President Bush talked about health care.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I said we are going to strengthen Medicare to make our rural hospitals in Iowa get the help they need. We are giving better bonuses to physicians so we can keep good doctors practicing in rural America. In other words, we delivered on our promise to the people of Iowa! ( Cheers and applause ) The other folks talk a good game. We deliver.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Sen. Kerry was critical of the administration's approach to health care.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: We can make the cost of health care go down for all Americans, my friends. John Edwards and I have a plan to do this. The people on the other side have no plan. They've had four years. They have no plan, not only to provide coverage to the people who don't have it, which is important to America, but to lower the cost to everybody else.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: And both candidates raised the issue of Iraq and America's role in the world.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: After Sept. 11, we could not fail to imagine that a brutal tyrant whohated America had ties to terror, had used weapons of mass destruction, might use those weapons or share his deadly capabilities with our enemies. We saw a threat. Now I had a choice to make. Do I forget the lessons of Sept. 11 and trust a madman, or....

AUDIENCE: No!

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Or do I take action to defend America given? Given that choice, I will defend our country.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: Statesmanship means something leadership in building alliances means something. There's a way to go about it and the fact itself that we have pushed people to the side who ought to be with us in this effort. The truth is, it is not just the United States of America that has an interest in not having a failed Iraq -- in not having a base for terror now, in not having an instability in the middle east. The world has a stake in that outcome. Nothing could underscore more the failure of diplomacy of this administration. They have never fully offered the kind of decision making, shared decision making, shared reconstruction, nor have they built the kind of climate in which other leaders could come to the table.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: In Iowa-- a state former Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore carried by barely 5,000 votes four years ago-- President Bush and Sen. Kerry are practically dead even in the polls. When the president finished his 40 minute speech he fanned into the crowd to shake hands and sign autographs. Meanwhile, Sen. Kerry's event continued, lasting in all nearly two hours.

FOCUS CRISIS IN SUDAN

JIM LEHRER: Now, the Sudan story. More than 30,000 African Sudanese have been killed by Sudanese Arabs in the western region of Darfur. Penny Marshal of Independent Television News recently traveled to refugee camps in neighboring Chad. We start with her report.

PENNY MARSHAL: A gray stallion lies dying on a desolate African road, exhausted, defeated, and starving. He has carried his terrified owners across the border into Chad, a ten-day trek, saved their lives and now they want to save his. But their final destination, Breijing Refugee Camp, has nothing to offer this dying animal or his traumatized keepers. Hundreds of refugees arrive here every day, an exodus far exceeding UN predictions, waging the humanitarian crisis is turning into a catastrophe out of sight of the rest of the world -- out of reach, too.

Our journey to the camp took us through flooded riverbeds, half overturned aid vehicles carrying supplies now stranded by the river, unable to reach their destination. Once we were forced to leave our vehicle and proceed on foot. The rains were only just beginning. The rainy season threatens to leave 100,000 refugees completely cut off. Two-year-old Kharmissa is one of them. Already hungry, ill and destitute, she'll find no respite here; nor will any of the other dying and sick refugee children whose mothers came here seeking help where there is none to be found, for the neat rows of tents on one side constructed by the UN to house 25,000 refugees are now dwarfed by vast numbers of unregistered, un-housed and unfed arrivals on the other-- 11,000 at the last count, rising by 300 a day. The situation is out of control.

JANE BEAN, Oxfam Relief Agency: The international community should be hanging their heads in shame because we need resources now to be able to save the lives of these people and all of these people's lives are at risk. They have no sanitation, they have no water. This is a malaria epidemic zone, the rains are coming. They're completely cut off, they have no shelter. There's 11,000 people sleeping outside with nothing to cover them. And if we don't do something fast, many of these people will die.

PENNY MARSHAL: Shanta walked here with her seven children. Now she sits with just these twigs and shelter with her surviving six. Her husband is missing, her brother was shot. She says she has been here for 14 days and received no food. At the official distribution center, women wait in vain. There is nothing to give them and no one here to explain when at all anything will come.

If the numbers had remained predictable, manageable, then there might have been something to offer them. But the aid agencies have been overwhelmed by the sheer scale of this, and by the speed with which it has developed.

NURSE: I'm going to ask if that hurts him.

PENNY MARSHAL: Medical help is only available for children and emergencies. There are three nurses, one for every twelve thousand.

SPOKESPERSON: We'd like to know whether they're taking their water from the well....

SPOKESMAN: Wadi.

PENNY MARSHAL: At the wadi, or riverbed, the children dig for water, and then they become sick, very sick as a result. Illness is everywhere. Measles, diarrhea, and epidemics are inevitable. Dead animals lie decomposing in the searing heat, human excrement everywhere.

SPOKESPERSON: The eyes are very well.

PENNY MARSHAL: Salema is six months old. Her mother told me she's scarcely eaten for two months. This not the result from natural famine, but of persecution and war. It's extremely difficult to assess a conflict when we only have access to one side, but the stories we heard of the atrocities were consistent and harrowing. These four women told me they were raped by government troops. One lay too shamed and broken to show her face. Her village was burned. She was beaten unconscious; then they raped her. "They theft me for dead," she said. "She is with child," concerned the midwife. "We care for her." Shenilia is ten. She saw her father shot dead by the Janjaweed. "My mother is still alive, though," she added. That in itself was a surprise. Celeba another child was shot in the arm. "I thought they'd killed me," she told me. We heard of entire villages bombed, by helicopter gunships and other burned to the ground. Something terrible certainly drove them here to Breijing, where there is nothing to sustain them and no one to offer them comfort. But tonight not one aid worker remains on the site. They've been barred from entering camp now by the local police who want to maintain control. They hope to return soon. So as the rains come this evening and the storms come now every evening, the 34,000 refugees here are completely alone, beyond our reach with only just enough to keep them alive for the next few weeks.

JIM LEHRER: Margaret Warner takes the story from there.

MARGARET WARNER: Responding to the crisis, the U.S. Won a U.N. Security Council resolution last Friday, giving the Sudanese government 30 days to disarm and prosecute the Janjaweed militias or face punitive measures. But there is growing political pressure here for the administration to do more. Both houses of Congress passed unanimous resolutions urging the administration to label the ethnic cleansing underway in Darfur as "genocide." Several congressmen have been arrested while picketing the Sudanese embassy in Washington. And this week, a coalition of evangelical Christian groups called on the White House to take stronger action.

Is the Bush administration doing enough? For that, we're joined by Charles Snyder, deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa, who's helped shape the administration's Sudan policy; and Rep. Charles Rangel, Democrat of New York. He was arrested protesting outside the Sudanese embassy last month. Welcome to you both. Secretary Snyder, you got this resolution passed last Friday. What do you expect it to accomplish?

CHARLES SNYDER: I think it does several things. I think it makes it very clear to the government of Khartoum that it is not just the United States that thinks this is outrageous, but in fact it's the world community. I think the 13-0 vote says to them even their friends in Latin America, the Arab world and Far East as well as the rest of Africa are saying this situation has to be reversed right now. It has to be reversed in 30 days. We have to see action on the ground. This is not a case where words and the promise of compliance will work. There has to be a change on the ground as your introductory footage showed.

MARGARET WARNER: Congressman Rangel, is this the action you were looking for when you were protesting last month?

REP. CHARLES RANGEL: You know, that story that you just told is so horrific, for the first time, I can understand how six million Jews were killed. I never understood the indifference of human beings to see people who don't look like them or who are different from them to die. I appreciate all that Colin Powell and the State department and the UN are doing, but in my heart, it just looks like we got a million people drowning and what I'm doing is calling 911, trying to get through the bureaucracy to get some help. It's my understanding that if we do everything that we can, at least 300,000 people are going to die anyway because of the condition that they find themselves.

MARGARET WARNER: So you dont believe

REP. CHARLES RANGEL: And of course if we do nothing, then a million people could possibly die. If we can really take a preemptive strike or ask the UN to help us to strike against the country because they've killed tens of thousands of people, I don't know why the international community cannot just go in there and save these people and let the chips fall where they may.

MARGARET WARNER: So you don't think this U.N. resolution giving the Sudanese government the 30-day deadline, you don't think that's going to work?

REP. CHARLES RANGEL: You know, I'm a grandfather, and I guess I've become more compassionate in my old age. But if this was happening to one of my grandkids or anyone's grandkids and the word was that we got 30 days to get the monsters, the rapists and the murderers to stop doing it, I just don't see when you're dealing with human life -- I'm not talking about those that are appointed to office and they're restricted to what they can do -- but as far as I'm concerned, the silence of the churches in this, I just don't understand why those people that deal with a higher authority don't understand that the most precious thing that we can value is human life.

And Congress is not doing enough, our country is not doing enough, the international community is not doing enough. We have to save as many lives as we can. I just don't see how we can just say "You got 30 days" like do you in court and report back to us and we'll decide what we're going to do in terms of sanctions. People are dying.

MARGARET WARNER: Okay, Secretary Snyder, the government of Sudan has rejected the UN resolution. Today they mounted a demonstration in Khartoum with 100,000 people, apparently government inspired. What makes you think that the 30-day deadline will produce anything?

CHARLES SNYDER: Well, if we were counting on nothing but the resolution, I'd agree with the congressman; we are not doing enough. But the truth of the matter is we're much more than that. As you know, were leading the pledging, in fact, to do something on the practical side; we've already put $144 million of our own assets on the ground through AID's programs. We are going to go as high as $299 million. That's not enough. The Europeans are following in with us. We're taking practical steps on the ground.

The African Union, fledgling organization that it is, is trying to step up to the crisis. We are backstopping them every way we can. We've helped put the beginnings of the cease-fire monitoring mechanism on the ground. We, in fact, were the ones that dragged the rebels kicking and screaming, to some degree, to add us to get them to agree to the cease-fire in the first place. It makes any action possible by anyone. So we have not been standing idly by counting on this 30 days to create a miracle.

MARGARET WARNER: But I mean, if people look at the tape we just saw and we saw boxes and boxes of aid, of food or medicine, whatever was just sitting by the riverbed, I mean why can the US or UN not mount some kind of an operation to at least get in there with humanitarian aid now?

CHARLES SNYDER: There is a 90-day emergency humanitarian plan under way under Jan Eckland of the UN. It's not just an American plan, it's a global plan. One of the thins we've done is we've even reached out to the Libyans, and have now got a route open from Libya down into Chad to address the refugee problem there. We are leaving no stone unturned in this effort. This is a huge logistics problem. This is an area as big as the central part of the United States from the Ohio Valley down to New Orleans, in which there are very few roads, very few air fields, and frankly in which the government does not have many resources of an airlift and road transport variety. All of that has to be put in place, and we are in the process of supporting the African Union to do that, as well as demanding that the government, rather than digging a hole deeper, at least turn around and help us help their own population. This is going to take dramatic action on our part and we've begun to put the wheels in motion to do that. The 30 days is merely part of the political process. It says to Khartoum, we are going to hold you responsible but in the meantime, we are still taking every action we can.

As the secretary himself has been engaged in phone calls on almost on a daily basis with Kofi Annan, the Sudanese vice president and others, heads of state in Europe and foreign ministers in Europe rallying everybody to this cause, because we take the pictures you've shown seriously, at the beginning of this and mean to see that they change dramatically. We picked 30 days because there has to be a deadline. The truth is we're acting now.

MARGARET WARNER: Congressman Rangel, I take your point that you don't think enough is being done, but do you think that the unanimous congressional resolutions, the protests by yourself and others have had an impact on this administration to get it to act more quickly than it might have?

REP. CHARLES RANGEL: Yes, I do. I don't mean to be overly critical of the State Department. They have to work within the confines that they have and certainly I think the secretary of state and the deputy secretary are perhaps doing all they can with restrictions that they have. All I'm saying is that if the world knew that six million Jews were about to be killed, you know, we always are talking about the horrendous things that have happened. This is anopportunity for the world to say, yes, you may have to put your 30 days and your 90 days limits, but if every church, every synagogue, every mosque would send a message out, and again I would hope that my country, the beacon of humanitarianism, would provide that type of outrage and say were going to do something about it.

Now just maybe State Departments, members of Congress, cant do that much, but Im telling you that if you knew a million people were going to die you know, the older I get, the more I think that someone is going to ask me just what the hell was I doing when I knew these people were about to be raped and murdered.

MARGARET WARNER: Let me

REP. CHARLES RANGEL: The thing is the rainy season, if that comes in, no matter what commitments we get, tens of thousands if not a million people will die because we can't get to them.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let me ask you about the letter this week that came from a large group of evangelical churches to the White House saying essentially what you're saying. Given how important that group is to the president's political base, do you think that's going to have a galvanizing effect?

REP. CHARLES RANGEL: I hope so. We all react politically, but I would hope that most of the people in the United States and the world, they really don't know what's going on there; its not a front page news story. And thats why Im glad the secretary and I, that Congress, and those that do little bits get arrested, lie on the ground, take to the floor of the House, go to our churches, ask our rabbis, ask our priests, ask our ministers, what is the church doing?

There is no question in my mind that if the world felt as strongly as the secretary does, that we would be able to get the type of international support... it's not just pressure on President Bush or Democrats. It's pressure on the world to say this is happening on our watch.

MARGARET WARNER: Secretary Snyder

CHARLES SNYDER: The congressman is absolutely right on that point. I think the real value of what he and others are doing is exactly that. It says it is not just the diplomats, its not the people in the pin-striped suits. It's the American public thats outraged by this. And that's a very important message for us to be sending. It reinforces the diplomatic message we are sending; it reinforces the practical message were sending to the Europeans to say to them we need your help. Africa needs your help. We need to do this together and we need to do it now. And in fact the images that are being telecast, the images you showed earlier, but also the images of the protests in the United States feed that. It makes this a very human but very real and immediate crisis.

MARGARET WARNER: Secretary Snyder, let's just take the next 30 days the advent of the rainy season as the congressman mentioned. What is the U.S. Government's estimate of how many more people are likely to die just in that 30 days?

CHARLES SNYDER: To tell you the truth, we don't have enough NGOs on the ground to give a real accurate estimate. You saw the numbers that Roger Winter and others have been using: ten thousand, thirty thousand. We don't know enough yet. That's partially the government of Khartoum's fault. We are saying to them we need to get the experts on the ground if we are going to stop this and they need to start doing that now. I think if we get more human rights monitors on the ground in addition to that, we'll start to provide security in the camps and well stop these horrific numbers. The congressman is right; if everything goes wrong, we can get 300,000 people in very serious condition very quickly here. We need to change the dynamics. That's what we are trying to do, change that so we can drive the number down.

At this point, we are not going to be able to save everybody but we can sure as hell save a lot of people. But it is going to take a lot of action on our part and continuing pressure, not diplomatic pressure, but the kind of public pressure in Europe and here and frankly in African capitals.

MARGARET WARNER: Thank you Secretary Snyder and Congressman Rangel, thank you both.

CHARLES SNYDER: Thank you.

REP. CHARLES RANGEL: Thank you Secretary and thank you for the program.

FOCUS IN MEMORIAM

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, remembering photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, and to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: Henri Cartier-Bresson spent more than half a century capturing images of people around the world and inspired generations of photographers that followed him. He has often been called "a founding father of photojournalism." Joining me now to tell us more about his significance is Phillip Brookman, curator of photography at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.

And when someone is called one of the great photographers of the 20th century, I guess I have to ask well, did he really change the art form? Did photography look different because he practiced it?

PHILLIP BROOKMAN: I think that Henri Cartier-Bresson not only changed photography, but he also changed how we see the world through his photographs. The most important transition that took place really is in the 1930s when Cartier-Bresson got his hands on a little camera, small portable like and was able to take the camera out into the street, out in the world. And by doing that, he entered into a whole new world and had access to, really, material that many photographers hadn't really looked at before. Most photography was done in the studio or done with large cameras that took a long time to set up. So Cartier-Bresson was able to capture a slice of life, the decisive moment, as he called it stopping time and seeing really what was happening kind of behind the doors of reality.

RAY SUAREZ: Show us some of these photos.

PHILLIP BROOKMAN: Well, one of the pictures I like a lot this is one here, which is a photograph of children, I think it's in Seville, made during the Spanish Civil War. And here, you know, you see a wall that has been destroyed, one imagines really destroyed in the war. And yet you look through the wall and you see the world of children and here the children are playing in the midst of war, in the midst of the rubble of war. And I think it is that kind of dichotomy between, you know, the seriousness of everyday life, of the war itself and world of children, which is something entirely different

RAY SUAREZ: It seems to me he looked a lot to common life but he didn't condescend to it.

PHILLIP BROOKMAN: No, I think Cartier-Bresson was really interested in life he himself is from a very wealthy family. He was interested in painting from a young age and yet the minute he discovered photography in the early 1930s, you know, he really went out into the world and just embraced it completely. This picture I like a lot, looking through a doorway here. A lot of the images made at this time in the 1930s were made looking through doors and it gives you the sense that you are privileged to see something that's really hidden away behind the streets, you know, and that little camera gave him the ability to go back and look and see what was happening.

RAY SUAREZ: Lets see some others.

PHILLIP BROOKMAN: This picture here is one of Cartier-Bresson's best known photographs: A Man Leaping Across a Puddle. Here you see almost a man taking flight. It looks almost like he can jump right off of the world. What I like about this, you know of course, is the composition, the perfect symmetry of the man reflected in the water but also the tension that he creates between what's real, you know, the real world that you see around, the puddle, the fence behind, and the surreal scene of, you know, this kind of out of focus man leaping off the ground and just positioned there. It's not just the reality that is depicted what Cartier Bresson himself saw, but it's the reflection, the atmosphere. It's the way you can almost smell the water here in this picture, that he was really interested in.

RAY SUAREZ: Show us an example of the photojournalism and explain why he is given so much credit for being a trailblazer there.

PHILLIP BROOKMAN: Well, after World War II, Cartier-Bresson became a photo journalist. I think in the 1930s he was most interested in the life of the streets, the feeling of the streets, the unreality of it. He was very connected himself to the surrealists during that time. During World War II in the French museum he was captured by the Germans, put into prison. He escaped numerous times and then joined the French underground. After that experience, he became himself more interested in current events, in the events of the world and his work became more journalistic.

RAY SUAREZ: For example?

PHILLIP BROOKMAN: I think one of his great journalistic stories was the funeral of Gandhi in India, and he covered it. Here you see the masses of people, you know, kind of climbing to see the funeral pyre. This was the kind of thing he went on to do more and more, you know, following World War II. In 1947, with Robert Capa and other photo journalists, he founded one of the great photo agencies, Magnum and really was interested in helping photographers take control of their own work in both making it, supporting themselves to make it and then in distributing it.

RAY SUAREZ: Phillip Brookman, thanks for being with us.

PHILLIP BROOKMAN: You're welcome.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the other major developments of this day: White House spokesman said there was new intelligence behind the latest terror alert; thats in addition to the older documents found in Pakistan. And in Iraq, heavy fighting broke out between Iraqi police and insurgents in Mosul. At least 12 people were killed.

JIM LEHRER: And again, to our honor roll of American service personnel killed in Iraq. We add them as their deaths are made official and photographs become available. Here, in silence, are seven more.

JIM LEHRER: We'll see you online, and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.