The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer; December 27, 2005

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jim Lehrer has been provided by. The cool day years when life was here. It wasn't always like this, believe me. I almost lost my shirt when my business hit the wall in 1984.

We didn't take a vacation for years. Our financial guy helped us find the way back, but it's been a long road here. We're not taking anything for granted. Smith Barney, this is who we are. This is how we earn it. Somewhere in Indiana, a farmer is getting to work. Somewhere in California, and Connecticut. And everywhere in between, others like him are getting to work, which is why every morning, Monday through Friday, millions are able to work. The American farmer is essential to the economy, and that's why we work to be essential to him. ADM, a resource for Black Nature, and by Pacific Life, and CIT. This program was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.

Kurdish and religious Shiite leaders in search of a governing coalition for Iraq, called today for a national unity government that would include Sunnis, the announcement followed a meeting between Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, of the Shiite Islamist alliance, and Masu Barzani, president of the Kurdish region. A preliminary count of recent parliamentary voting shows their groups in the lead. Thousands of Sunnis and secular Shiites, who trail in the voting, took to the streets of Baghdad and Bakuba again today, claiming election fraud. Iraqi police said today a mass grave has been found in Carbella, a Shiite holy city in the south. The remains were believed to date back to 1991. We have a report narrated by Penny Marshall of Independent Television News. The discovery was made on an Iraqi roadside in Carbella, more than 30 bodies were uncovered by workmen laying sewers. Evidence of a mass grave, say, locals' proof of the persecution of the majority Shiite population suffered on the Saddam Hussein.

It was after the first Gulf War in 1991 that the Shia population suffered its worst persecution. The Shia population urged by the Americans had risen up against Saddam, when the Americans had gone, Saddam's retort was savage. Thousands were killed, and it's believed today's mass grave could date from that period. The bodies have been removed by human rights activists for identification. Human rights organizations estimate that more than 300,000 people mainly Kurds and Shiite Muslims were killed during Saddam's 23-year rule. Adri... Adri... Adri... The former president is currently standing trial in Iraq for the murder of 147 Jews. If found guilty, he could face the death penalty. Also today, Iraqi police were again the targets of insurgents. Five policemen died in attacks in and around Baghdad, along with two civilians.

Another officer was killed outside Kirkuk, and two U.S. military pilots died in a helicopter accident in Baghdad. Rebels and Indonesia's Ache province formally entered their armed uprising today, it lasted 29 years, and killed at least 15,000 people. Peace talks resumed after last year's tsunami devastated the region. The rebels gave up their weapons and with them their quest for independence. In return, the government agreed to withdraw 25,000 troops and grant limited self-governance. The Russian parliament gave final approval today to tight controls over non-governmental organizations. A new agency will oversee their financing and activities. It will also have the power to shut them down. Backers of the bill said the government needs to monitor organizations that could be fronts for terrorists, but human rights groups said it's really a crackdown on outside critics. Also today, Russian prosecutors cleared police of any fault in the bloody ending of a school siege in Beslan.

Chechen militants seized the school in September of 2004. More than 300 people died when Russian special forces raided the building. The victims included 186 children. A regional panel has accused authorities of botching the rescue, a report from the national parliament is due tomorrow. On Wall Street today, stocks fell sharply over sliding oil prices and interest rate concerns. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 105 points to close at 10,077. The NASDAQ fell 22 points to close at 22,26. After 36 years, the Monday night football tradition has come to an end on ABC. The New England Patriots beat the New York Jets 31-21 last night. It was the final game in a series that began as an experiment in 1970. Next season, viewers will need to catch their football on Sundays or pay for Monday night games on ABC's cable partner, ESPN. That's it for the new summary tonight.

Now it's on to stem cell research, protecting civilian airplanes, Andrew Nachios, and rethinking Shakespeare. Now the fallout from an international scandal over stem cell research and findings of scientific fraud. Susan Dancer of our Health Unit begins with some background. In the annals of modern science, Wousafwan's rise to prominence was swift and has fallen from grace even faster still. In high-profile papers published in scientific journals, the South Korean veterinarian claimed to have made spectacular advances in human cloning and embryonic stem cell research. But now it appears that much, if not all of that work, was faked. And that Wang now stands accused of massive scientific fraud. Last Friday, a panel from Seoul National University in South Korea announced it had found deliberate deception in some of Wang's research.

Published in the journal Science in June 2005, that work had supposedly demonstrated the creation of 11 colonies or lines of embryonic stem cells, genetically matched to nine different people. The data in the 2005 science paper cannot be some air from a simple mistake, but can be seen as a deliberate fabrication to make it look like 11 stem cell lines using results from just two. The panel said it was continuing to investigate whether all 11 of the stem cell lines were completely faked. It also said it was looking into other aspects of Wang's work, including an August 2005 paper in the journal Nature, in which Wang claimed to have created the first cloned dog. For his part, Wang has acknowledged, quote, fatal errors in the 2005 science report. He's asked the journal to withdraw the paper. He's also quit his post at Seoul National University and at the helm of South Korea's new center for embryonic stem cell research.

He spoke briefly at a news conference last week in Seoul. I sincerely apologize for creating shock and disappointment. The question now is what impact the revelations could have on science in general, and in particular on the controversial fields of cloning and stem cell research. Much of the reason Wang's work gained so much attention was that it seemed to herald a new future of regenerative medicine when stem cells genetically matched to individual humans could be used to repair their damaged tissues and organs. In the US, Wang's work was also seen as politically charged. The president of the United States. That's because it was precisely the type of work that could not be carried out with federal funding. Under limits, President George Bush imposed on embryonic stem cell research. The president spoke about those limits at the White House last spring. Research on stem cells derived from human embryos may offer great promise. But the way those cells are derived today destroys the embryo.

The publication signs in nature are now conducting their own investigations into Wang's work. Those inquiries could shed light on how such a flagrant scientific fraud could have gone undetected in the first place. Rice Juarez has more on this story. How does fraud of this scale happen? And what does it mean for the scientific community? For that, we're joined by Donald Kennedy, editor of the Journal Science, where Dr. Wang's work was published last summer, for the record Mr. Kennedy also serves as an advisor to the NewsHour Science Unit. Laurie Zoloff, director of the Center of Bioethics Science and Society at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and Dr. David Skadden. He's a doctor and researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital. He's also the co-director of the Harvard University stem cell institute. And Dr. Skadden, if someone makes what in this case was meant to be a landmark work, not just incremental steps forward, but a really big breakthrough in science,

how does it get disseminated normally to the rest of the world and how can the rest of the world operate normally with confidence that the research wasn't faked? Well, usually what happens is this is reviewed by scientists who have expertise in the area. They carefully review the information, and then they actually give a feedback to the scientists who has provided that data to improve the quality of the report. It's then reviewed by editors at a journal, and then it's disseminated through the journal to the public. That allows both the lay public to then review it in terms of the interpretation by the press, but also then scientists to repeat the work. And that's really the critical step that validates it. The scientific method assures that it be repeated and replicated before it is regarded as fact. That's something that had not been done in this work, and still was regarded as, therefore, somewhat still unproven in the scientific community,

though warmly endorsed because it represented such an important breakthrough. At the outset, you said that scientists review the work. How do they review it? Do they just take the data and the written material that's produced by the original team and look it over? That's right. So the data is provided in a fairly complex format that usually is a set of studies that are commonly used by other scientists. And so there's a fair amount of similar language that's used in these kinds of reports. You then assess that information. You ask us to whether or not it's been validated with other independent experiments that usually is provided in the text that you review. And unfortunately, you don't have the opportunity to really see the primary information other than what's given to you by the scientist. But science is really based on trust, like most other human endeavors. And so when that information is provided, as long as it has the credibility of coming from a person of some reputation done with methods that are accepted methods, and where the details are sufficiently clear

that you feel this information makes sense and has the validity you anticipate for a series of studies that give multiple perspectives on the issue, you then regard it as something that is worthy of publication. And Professor Zolloff is that process that Dr. Skadden just described really the beginning of something rather than the end of it? It is indeed. And one of the things that ethicists can do as watchers of science and not scientists ourselves is ask the scientists to tell us what's true, what's real, what's story can be trusted. We need to begin with knowing and trusting in this story before we can think about what makes the science morally important, what direction should we take as we pursue this science, how should societies fund and support the science, what other questions, non-scientific questions, but thoughtful moral questions need to be asked about the endeavor, the nature, the goal, the meaning of the science, but without that core of trust about the facts, about what has happened, we can't know

if the science is morally good, if we don't know, if in fact if it's true. So it all begins with that truthful relationship. We can hope that with good codes and good oversight and good law and a good process, a good scientific process that the story is true and then we can do the kind of work that theoreticians and moral philosophers and politicians and policymakers and the public have to do in thinking through what it means for us, but without the core, without each scientist, the full integrity, facing his peers, or facing the test tube alone in the lab in the dark with nobody watching, without that moral gesture being completely honest, we really can't make our steps and our oversight have any real meaning. Now I want to say one thing before we start is we still don't know what really happened in those labs in Korea, we don't know the whole story and there's going to be much more revealed that will tell us about what went awry in the secrecy of those labs. That's just where I was going to go with Donald Kennedy

and wonder, sir, what have you been able to figure out so far and how this fraud got through and into the pages of your journal? It's not our happiest day at science, Ray. What we've done, of course, is to review the peer review process as we engaged in it with the wrong papers. It was a pretty rigorous process. I think I would not have chosen different reviewers or different editors had I to do it over again. We've had three cases of rather well thought of experiments in my time as editor-in-chief of science that turned out to be fraudulent. And in each case, I've had to try to point out to people that the peer review system is extremely good at detecting error or false reasoning or unjustified conclusions drawn from the data. It is not good at detecting very cleverly constructed fraud committed by very, very capable scientists

which Dr. Wang was and he is. So if people at the outset intend to deceive or feel that because things are not coming out the way they intended they are going to start fabricating results, it's harder to root that out, you see? Considerably harder, and in this case, as Professor Zhao says, it's very, very difficult for us to know at this point whether this started out as a plan to commit fraud or whether it evolved into one as some failures occurred in the experiment. I'm not trying to excuse it. I am trying to explain to everybody that as Dr. Skadden said, it all depends on trust at the end and the journal has to trust its reviewers. It has to trust the source. It can't go in and demand the data books. What it can do is to make sure that its process is as good as it can be. But you've already said that you wouldn't change much about the structure of the way peer review works.

Could there be, should there be, a closer collaboration between the reviewers and the work they're reviewing? No one had seen, for instance, the South Korean lab work in person. It was just pages sent, I guess, by fax or by email. Is there some way to really look at the work before it makes it into the pages of science? We can look at photographs to see if they've been through some kind of photoshop procedure that improves them. We can make judgments about the way conclusions are drawn from data presented. What we can't do is ask our peer reviewers to go into the laboratories of the submitting authors and demand their lab notebooks. Were we to do that? We would create a huge administrative cost and we would, in some sense, dishonor and rob the entire scientific enterprise of the integrity that 99.9% of it has. Dr. Skadden is there no way to build in tougher safeguards

so that once something is peer reviewed and makes it into journals and makes it into the daily use cast in the front pages of newspapers, there's a strong chance that it's true and you can believe it. Well, what are the fundamental aspects of science is that it needs to be replicated? And so if there is a major story that breaks, many laboratories rush to try to accomplish the same. When that has been accomplished, then it's really regarded broadly as a scientific fact and until then, it still is frankly something that needs verification. And I agree with Dr. Kenny, I think it's very difficult to ask a reviewer to be highly suspicious of the integrity of the material that's provided for them. In some ways, the example Dr. Huang provides a clear example of why there's such a tremendous disincentive for this kind of activity to happen. This gentleman's career in probably his life is ruined. As scientists, we clearly are called to this

to try to create new knowledge and to have it be so terribly corrupted is fortunately a rare event, but one that is very difficult to ensure against. Are you saying that, in fact, it was only a matter of time till Wang Wuzuk's problems were discovered that this couldn't have gone on for very much longer? I think that's absolutely right. I think that as laboratories have tried to reproduce this work, the problems would have become much more evident. A lot of effort has been made already by people to go visit his laboratories to understand exactly what he's doing that has distinguished his work from others. That would have become something that was patently clear as being incorrect and falsified. And fortunately, the process does eventually work. In this case, it unfortunately worked after this. I'd already been touted as a major breakthrough. Dr. Zolof, does this now cast into doubt all the legitimate work that's being done or much of the legitimate work that's being done in stem cell research? It would be a tragedy, if it did, because so much of the work

that's being done in slow and careful and thoughtful ways doesn't rely on somatic cell nuclear transfer and does rely, in fact, on the public's trust and optimism about the future. I think what it does is it calls us to even sharper attention and a sharper sense of irony about how we hear news and how we wait with perhaps more patience for results to be replicated. Interestingly enough, part of the puzzle of this case is that the lab was thrown open and many scientists had looked at it, had heard the papers and had actually gone and seen the lab piece by piece as the process unfolded. So it'll call us to even a greater attention to how that obviously happens. I want to also stress that it needs to re-examination, not only in the science and in the photographs and in the details, which are still yet to be uncovered, but in whether the ethical guidelines are so carefully constructed for this work in particular were followed, whether the donors were really given full and form consent, what really was the story at Ms. Maddy Hospital.

So there's much more story to uncover so we can fully understand the process. People have a right and have a duty on both sides of this argument about what's the right thing to do and how best to proceed and how ought we to act to learn the facts before we rush to a judgment. What we can know now seems fairly dreadful, but there is still more to understand. I think understanding that and still remaining optimistic about the best kind of science that can go on and as Dr. Kennedy said, in 99 percent of the labs does go on, is carefully reviewed, long discussions around how the peer review is submitted, how the publication ought to be written. We can still have optimistic thoughts about the process, about the scientific integrity of the individual researchers, and I think fundamentally about the stem cell research itself, which has excited, I think, for good reason, the hopes and the dreams and the aspirations of so many of our nation's best scientists.

Professor Zoloff, gentlemen, thank you all. Now, a science unit report on new efforts to protect passenger planes from the threat of shoulder-launched missiles. A Newzara correspondent, Tom Bearden, has our report. Overseas attacks on commercial aircraft have convinced the U.S. government that portable anti-aircraft missiles like these may soon become a serious threat to the more than 7,000 passenger planes that apply America's skies. They estimate some 75,000 of these so-called manpads or manportable air defense systems are for sale on the worldwide black market. This is an actual launch tube from an actual manpad, and you can see the size and see what, how easy it is to conceal, and it's operated and fired by one man. Jack Pleger is with defense contractor, Northrop Crumman.

They're basically about 27 different terrorist groups that are identified here that are known to have these manpad weapons. State Department data reports that more than 40 civilian aircraft, ranging in size from small planes to multi-engine passenger jets, have been attacked by shoulder-launched missiles, that 25 of them crashed, killing more than 600 people. One example, in 2002, a freelance cameraman photographed these men at the end of a runway at the Baghdad airport, firing a manpad at a cargo plane, hitting its wing, and forcing an emergency landing. And last month, the threat got closer to home when two men were arrested at the Los Angeles airport trying to smuggle manpads into the United States. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, whose state is headquarters for defense contractor Northrop Grumman, was one of the chief sponsors of the legislation directing the Department of Homeland Security to develop countermeasures. The terrorists in other parts of the world have started using manpads as a way of causing terrorism,

creating injury, doing horrible things. And it's just a matter of time before they smuggle one of these into the U.S. and trying to use it. Homeland Security, which declined to talk to the news hour, is spending $100 million testing anti-missile systems. That has three defense contractors competing for a contract that could reach $10 billion. But some transportation experts question how serious the threat actually is, and how much money it would take to protect the entire passenger fleet. This Federal Express MD-11 cargo jet is the testbed for one of two airborne systems being considered. The pod bolted to the underside of the plane is the prototype of an anti-missile system called Guardian. The device is designed to confuse the infrared sensors that the missiles used to home in on the heat generated by a plane's engines. Northrop Grumman's, John Stanfield. These four sensors that you see around there so it provides 360 degrees coverage around the aircraft,

detect those missile launches, and then we take a laser and point it at the missile, and we divert the missile away from the aircraft, such that the missile doesn't hit the aircraft. This yellow piece of the system is a turret. The turret operates like R2D2 if you recall the Star Wars movies where you saw him, his little head spinning around. That's how this does it, but it does it very quickly, and then we point the laser at the missile and divert the missile away. Jack Pleger says he believes the technology will work. He points to these tests in the field where the missiles were diverted with the infrared technology. We're currently the only company in the world that's been able to build and produce an operational system like this. We are on about 300 airplanes right now, and we know it works, we know it's highly effective. But BAE Systems, Europe's largest defense contractor, says not so fast. They've installed their version of anti-manpads technology called Jedi on this American Airlines 767.

BAE says they've already delivered more than 14,000 infrared counter-measure systems worldwide, including systems for military helicopters. Jedi works on the same principles as Guardian, but the sensors are installed all over the plane instead of concentrated in a pod, and the laser head is smaller than Guardian's canoe-sized device. Steve Dumont is the project manager. When the system receives a handoff from the electrical missile subsystem right around the airplane, this small infrared tracker will then look to that source and start to discern whether in fact it's a missile. Once we achieve that high-fidelity understanding that it's a missile, this small aperture here is where that laser beam fires out and defeats the missile. BAE says this approach produces less drag than Guardian's pod, which means less fuel burned. That's a critical operating cost factor for airlines, a number of which are operating under bankruptcy protection. Northrop Grummon counters that their system would be faster to install

and more easily maintained. Both systems are pretty much hands-off for the pilots. Once the system is turned on, it automatically detects then misdirects the missile and simultaneously notifies the ground of the event. Both contractors say the lasers are strong enough to hurt the missile sensors but not human eyeballs on the ground. The laser actually emits a very high-powered radiation that gets into the optics or the eyeball of the missile seeker, dazzles it effectively and causes it to lose its track of the aircraft and fall harmlessly away. The Department of Homeland Security has set a price goal of $1 million per system per plane. A study by the Independent Research Company, the Rand Corporation, projected it would cost up to $11 billion to equip the entire U.S. fleet and another $2 billion per year for maintenance. The author of that study, Senior Engineer Jim Chao, says that's just too much. If you compare it to how much we're spending on transportation security as a whole,

which is a little over $4 billion a year, it's a significant fraction. And so then you have to ask the question, what are the kinds of threats are there against transportation security as a whole? And does it make sense to allocate this much money just on this one particular threat? Chao is not the only one that contends the price tag is too high, so does the executive vice president of the Air Transport Association, which lobbies for the airlines. We can't expand in the case of counterman pads technology as much as $150 billion, which is what we believe it would cost over the lifecycle of the program. In a technology that really just deals with one aspect of one threat, without taking into account, could we spend that money more prudently to do other things that deal with the man pads threat, but also deal with other threats that are out there. The airline pilot's association is skeptical of the threat posed by man pads. They say their relatively small warheads can damage a large plane,

but that a single hit is unlikely to bring one down. Bob Hesselmine is a northwest airlines captain who also flies military aircraft. He's the chairman of Alpa's National Security Committee. I would say they are exaggerating the threat relative to things that are right now of dangers that we face, improvised explosives, seizing of our aircraft. Those are the things that we need to focus more attention upon. Right now, we are far more worried about people on our planes trying to seize a flight deck during flight. Then we are against a shoulder-fired missile where two or three shoulder-fired missiles coming at us from an airport. But Senator Schumer says a successful man pad attack on U.S. soil would devastate the U.S. economy, costing far more than any anti-missile system. You don't want to be in the what-if situation. What if you wake up one morning and planes have been shot down in coordinated way in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles first and worst the horrible loss of life, but people would stop flying for months and it would cause a lot more than $11 billion of economic damage.

Some transportation security analysts believe the government ought to consider a system that defends airports instead of individual aircraft. That's because man pads are only affected up to about 10,000 feet. Planes are vulnerable to them only during takeoff and landing. They fly too high otherwise. Proponents say airport defense systems would be far less expensive than trying to equip every airplane. Raytheon has been developing such a system for the Department of Defense for the past decade. Vigilant Eagle can provide a reliable cost-effective counter-man pads protection system. The technology has been classified until recently. This year's budget appropriates money to start testing their system. Michael Buhan is one of the chief developers. This is a high-power microwave and what we do is we put this billboard-sized array of high-power microwave amplifiers at the airport. When a shoulder-fired missile is shot at a commercial airliner around the airport, we basically form this dome of protection around the airport.

We have infrared missile warning sensors that sense the missile and tells this billboard-sized antenna to propagate a microwave beam at the shoulder-fired missile. And when the high-power microwave hits the shoulder-fired missile, it disrupts the guidance and it guides it harmlessly away from the aircraft. Buhan says Raytheon system would cost about $25 million per airfield. That defending 25 to 30 of the biggest U.S. airports would protect 70 percent of all take-offs and landings far more cheaply than the airborne systems. But Northrop Grumman and BAE say airport systems can protect the thousands of planes that routinely leave the United States. Most of our commercial carriers fly these airplanes out of the United States. And so if you protect an airport in the U.S., and you fly the airplane away from here to an international destination, you just left your protection behind. If you don't have something on the airplane that you carry with you

to provide the defense that's needed against these threats. Testing of the airborne and airport systems will continue for at least another six months with a decision anticipated by the fall of next year. Still to come on the news hour tonight, Andrew Nazios, and re-learning Shakespeare. Now a conversation with America's pointman in the world's hotspots. War and peace, floods and earthquakes, famine and AIDS, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Pakistan and Darfur, U.S. foreign policy has come to focus during the last four years on fixing broken things. But carrying on major reconstruction projects in the midst of insurgency and disaster has proven to be time-consuming and costly.

Congress has approved nearly $21 billion in reconstruction for Iraq since 2003 and $9.2 billion for Afghanistan since 2001. And spite of frequent reports of cost overruns and security-related delays, President Bush has defended the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq. In the space of two and a half years, we have helped Iraqis conduct nearly 3,000 renovation projects at schools. Train more than 30,000 teachers, distribute more than 8 million textbooks, rebuild irrigation infrastructure to help more than 400,000 rule Iraqis, and improve drinking water for more than 3 million people. The U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, has been at the center of these efforts, hiring contractors, negotiating with foreign governments, and coordinating humanitarian relief. The post-war projects in Iraq and Afghanistan are the largest U.S. aid efforts since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II.

USAID has also provided technical assistance for running elections in both countries. For the last five years, the agency has been run by Andrew Nachios, the grandson of Greek immigrants, and a former Republican state lawmaker from Massachusetts. On his watch, the agency's budget has grown from $7 billion in 2002 to $14 billion in 2004. Nachios' job includes international relief efforts in the war-torn Darfur region, and more recently, in disaster-stricken countries from Pakistan to Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Nachios has announced he will leave AID next month. And Andrew Nachios joins us now. Welcome. You have had a full plate in your years on the job. I wonder what you now looking back on, I think, as looking back on it, think of as the major challenge. Well, we had multiple challenges simultaneously. In Washington, no matter what agency you're dealing with, has trouble sometimes dealing with 10 crises at the same time with a limited staff and a limited budget.

But the president has doubled, nearly doubled AID's budget. And so we've had a lot more money than we've had at any time in the recent past. President Bush has actually 21 foreign aid initiatives, the most since Jack Kennedy, and this has been the largest increase in official development assistance in 45 years. But has the job changed since 9-11? No, it certainly has. We've had to do long-term development, which we've been doing for a very long time. We have to deal with the crisis of HIV-AIDS in Africa, and the president has dramatically increased spending through his initiative, working with Ambassador Randy Tobias. And then, while all that's happening, we had the genocide take place in Darfur, the Nivasha Peace Accords between North and South Sudan, so instead of doing humanitarian relief in southern Sudan, we're now doing reconstruction. And then all of this is happening, we had the war start in Afghanistan, and then Iraq. I was going to ask you about that.

Is there a distinction that you draw between the kinds of work you have to do because of wars and the kind of work you have to do because of disasters? Well, there are different phases in this. One is we have a term we use fragile states. Fragile states are countries that are moving into failed states that are collapse. Once they collapse, then you have to do humanitarian relief just to keep people alive. And then some countries come out of it like Afghanistan, which is what we call a recovering state. And so there are some countries in the category of Zimbabwe sliding fast into catastrophe, and then there are countries like Somalia, which has not had national government in 15 years now, and then there are countries like Afghanistan and Iraq that are recovering. So, and then there are countries that are doing very well, like a Ghana or a Mali or a Mozambique, that are models of reform, of good governance, of democracy, and we're trying to actually catch up with their leaders who are way out in front of us, and they keep asking us for more help. We're trying to do that. We're trying to like Jordan, for example, where King Abdullah is one of the most reform-minded people in the Middle East.

Let's you've mentioned Afghanistan. Let's start by talking about that. You've had your critics on Afghanistan. There's a schools and clinics program, which has come under some criticism by the Inspector General. And they have said that there were supposed to be $73 million in schools and clinics, and that only out of that money that has been spent only 140 schools in clinics have been built. It's why is that? Well, that was for one six-month period, I think, a year and a half ago. You have to look at the whole four-year period. We've been there since early 2002, and we've built actually 700, rebuilt or built 700 clinics in schools. What happens when these reports are done is people take the report and forget about the time period that the report was focused on. Was it accurate for that time period? It's a way where we focused on something other than health clinics and schools. The president asked us to build a road from Kabul to Kandahar and reconstruct it. As a road we built 45 years ago, but hasn't been maintained for 45 years in the middle of a war zone.

He gave us 13 months to do it. It was requested by President Karzai as a central part of his reconstruction program. We took our resources, we put them in that road, we did it on time and below budget, and now we're extending that road out to Harat. We've done 343 kilometers of rural roads along in the same way. We've done several lawyer-jurgers, two national elections, a Constitution-writing exercise. We've done huge agriculture programs, where we've reclaimed half a million acres of land for irrigation. And we've reclaimed huge areas of the country that were arid that are now being irrigated successfully. So all of these things are going on at the same time. But we're actually back on track in the schools in Kandahar because we've put new focus on that earlier this year. Let's talk about Iraq. Another report. There's a reconstruction gap that's been happening in Iraq. Things have not been getting done at the wait.

The cost they were supposed to be getting done at. I'm not speaking English, but you know what I mean. I know what you mean. Things aren't getting done the way they're supposed to. What is your response to that? The first thing is, of the $20 billion that has been appropriated, $5 billion was given to AID. The rest of the defense department spending for the most part. And I'm not an expert. I'm not critical. I just don't know what defense has done with. You have to ask someone else. But of the $5 billion we've spent, $4 billion has been spent and dispersed already. There's about $5 billion in contracts and grants to NGOs, UN agencies that we're working with. Has it been spent well? It has been spent well. The only problem we've had in Iraq, which is not only problem, but the most serious problem, is the security costs have gone up. No one can seriously say that we're expecting NGOs or UN agencies or contractors to go out and do work in Iraq and not protect the people who are for them. How much of those costs gone up and how much of the effort do they, how much of the effort do they suck up? When we started, there was no security costs. In fact, in most areas of the world, we have no security arrangements

in any of our contracts and grants. But to add them in as the insurgency is targeted at our facilities. When you're, we've invested over $2 billion in electricity and water and sewage and those facilities, they haven't blown up the facilities themselves. They've blown up the power, the pure to go to the electricity or the power grid getting to it, taking away the electricity once it's produced. You mentioned Sudan and Darfur. Two U.S. Senators wrote an op-ed today in the Washington Post, Senator Barack Obama, Senator Brownback. Republican and Democrat, and they both said that they fear that now violence, which is settling in in Darfur, are blocking any efforts towards humanitarian aid. Do you share their concerns? Well, I'm certainly concerned about it, but that's been going on for three years now. It's certainly there's been a little bit of uptick of that this past fall, but we're still able to deliver our assistance. We are not facing a crisis in the camps and the death rates in the camps are well below the emergency level that would cause us all to be alarmed.

The problem in Darfur is we need a political settlement, and AID doesn't do political settlements. That's the State Department functions, the UN function. We certainly support the money, and I have to tell you, I have to deal with Bob Zellick all the time, the Deputy Secretary of State. This is something he's focusing attention along with Dr. Rice, and I think they're doing a very, very good job under very difficult circumstances. I had two experts here yesterday talking about the anniversary of the tsunami, and they said that this was a very good, well executed effort at a relief and reconstruction at the best they'd seen. Is there other lessons to be learned from what happened and how things were executed in Indonesia and Sri Lanka that could be applied to other disaster areas around the world? Well, this may sound a little self-serving, but the President put one agency in charge, basically, of the strategy for that us. We're experts at this, we've done this for years, decades, very successfully around the world, and he gave us a lot of money. He gave us AID, got $650 million to do this,

and we had a very useful alliance or coordination effort with the military. We don't have, AID has 2,200 direct-tier career employees with a $14 billion budget. The Defense Department has a million or so soldiers and airmen and sailors. They have a lot more logistical capacity than we have. We do well, we hire private contractors to do most of our logistics, but to have them on the scene in the tsunami, combined with our technical expertise, has been very successful, not just in the tsunami, but also in the Pakistan earthquake. And finally, you have been quoted in the Financial Times, I believe, saying that you believe that the system for financing aid in the United States is dysfunctional. You can tell me whether you said that, but I'm curious more for your larger view now that you're leaving this office on what the U.S. is doing, right? What it should not be doing, right? Whether it should be overhauling the entire system. Well, from the 1960s until the early 1990s, mid-1990s, there was a rule at OMB in the White House,

which was, we only had one foreign aid agency that say AID, all money goes through them, so we don't have every federal department doing it. For reasons that are understandable historically, in the mid-1990s, Al Gore gave an instruction to all federal departments to sort of get involved in foreign aid. And he did that because there was a fear that, because of lagging interest in Congress and among the American people for aid, the program would go away. I know why he did it was very legitimate, but it now has almost every federal department doing it. Many of them don't have particular expertise in working and developing countries in very remote areas of the world, where there is a very fragile and weak institutions, there is a high risk of corruption, there is conflict going on. There are two-thirds of the countries AID worked in have had conflicts in the last five years. And most domestic agencies have no experience in how you do that kind of work. And so you think what should happen? Well, personally, this is my opinion. I think we should go back to the system that predated the 1990s, where we had one foreign aid agency

and all money went through that. That's going to be very difficult to do now because there are a lot of interest in the city in having everybody do foreign aid. Okay, well, good luck at Georgetown. Thank you very much. Thank you. Breathing new life into Shakespeare's plays, Jeffrey Brown has our report. When the actors of the Globe Theater Company came to Pittsburgh recently, they brought a sense of interactivity 1600 style due to come to 12th night when we were here before. Preparing for a performance of Shakespeare's measure for measure, actors dressed on stage. He or as in Elizabethan Times, males played all the roles. And they exchanged banter with members of the audience. I want to be very close to the action. Exactly. This five city U.S. tour is part of a grand now 10-year-old effort to reimagine Shakespearean theater.

At the heart of the experiment is the recreation of the historic Globe Theater on the south side of the Thames River in London. The original Globe was built in 1599 by and for the Chamberlain's men, William Shakespeare's company of players. It was located here across the river from official London in an area of brothels, bear baiting, and other body entertainments. The rebirth was the brainchild of American actor Sam Wanamaker, who insisted on a design and materials as close as possible to the original. In this open-air theater, the show goes on rain or shine, scenery is minimal, and some audience members called Brownlings stand throughout the performance. Some close enough to reach out and touch the actors. The man charged with making the globe a living breathing theater was Mark Rylands, who became the Globe's artistic director in 1995 after founder Sam Wanamaker died.

I carry an electric torch in my back pocket and with this, I located the wreck. The English-born American-raised Rylands was already a well-known Shakespearean actor and even while running the company, he's continued to take on numerous roles, male and female. In measure for measure, he played the Duke of Vienna. Back or death, haste still pays haste and leisure answers leisure, liked of quit luck and measure still for measure. Rylands is also eager to pass on what he's learned. During the Pittsburgh run, he held a master class for students at Carnegie Mellon. The purpose of being musculous, not to be, isn't it? You can't move at all. You know, and there's a muscles that just work, the purpose is to have muscles that are flexible and are strong. She speaks. Yet she says nothing. Despite some early skepticism, the globe experiment has been a success with both critics and the public

two and a half million people have shown up since Rylands arrived. He recently announced he would step down from his post at the globe at year's end. On stage at Pittsburgh's O'Reilly Theatre, he talked with us about his unique decade-long experience. It occurred to me in thinking about you and about the globe theatre, that it's an unusual situation in that, in this case, it's the theatre that's the star. Is that right? Absolutely. So how did you deal with that? Well, I'm lucky to do with any story. Pay attention to them. I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, even if you live here, or Marlon Brando, where to come back and act on the stage, more people would be there because of the theatre than because of any actor we had on the stage. Did it take some relearning for you as an actor with how to deal with this very different kind of theatrical space? Yeah. Primarily with sound, our culture is very visually oriented now and we've lost a lot of appreciation of speech.

We had to really rediscover and begin to rediscover a love of eloquence and a love of good speech. And because we don't have an electric lighting system which now in modern theatres and certainly in film, focuses the audience's attention on characters and where the director wants you to pay attention, we had to learn also how to give and take focus as actors to each other, both with our stillness and our movement and our silence and our sound. What about relearning how to interact with the audience? Because they're in the same light as you are, right? Yeah. We have to learn to be able to look an audience member in the face and speak with them not to them for a while. It's nice about the theatres that if it rains or if an airplane flies over or a pigeon comes and lands on the stage, it's very present and everyone knows it's only happening at that moment and everyone is part of the same world. So I'm more and more came to think of the audience as fellow actors. As fellow actors, part of the play.

Often I would make them part of the play, so if I'm playing Henry Five at Lavasion Court when I have to come out and speak to a lot of soldiers and say to them that I think we're going to die, but I think that this is what is required at the moment from fate. It's better rather than play that to a few extras up on stage in my back to the audience, once better just to speak with the audience as if they are the soldiers and say, will you come with me or will you not? So they get it direct, live and direct. What about those times where they got so involved? I guess you had experience where they threw things at the stage at the actors. They did. Well, I partly encourage that, I think. It's partly my fault. I feel there's too much reverence for Shakespeare. So I did say the audience, I want them to do whatever they want to do and if they want to throw things they can. If they didn't like a character, then they could express it. Yeah, they threw purple sprout in, which is a kind of green vegetable at the French in the Henry Five. And the actors got very upset with it.

But then one of the actors said, you know, what do you expect from the British? The guy paying the king of France. And then the actors treated it. It became part of the play. In the beginning, I think most people were expecting that the globe would be a kind of theme park, sort of a Disney Elizabethan stage. But what convinced you or when did you know that it could be more than that? I don't know. I don't know if I was certain. It always seemed to me logical that a theater artist as great as Shakespeare was probably going to have a pretty great theater. And if you could find out honestly and faithfully what it was like, you were probably going to be on the winning side. I think it's challenging all kinds of things out of architecture. You mean, it is challenging the way we do theater today. I think we've had 100 years of very, very intellectual appreciation of Shakespeare. And that's been fantastic. But the notes and the intellectual appreciation in universities of Shakespeare.

And the kind of taking, putting the arm around him and making him a literary genius, which of course he is. But that wasn't his intention. His intention was to write stuff to be heard and played. And what the increased intellectual understanding and don't get me wrong, I enjoy that side of it a lot. That has thrown into shadow. The visceral, sensual, physical appreciation of the plays. I think I think the globe is really will revive. A lot more of those skills amongst the actors, the use of music, dance, jokes, humor. And this kind of vulnerability, the irreverent, generous whip that such a character of Shakespeare is writing. Was it an interesting experience for you to play a woman? Oh yeah. Yeah. Why? Well, it's very challenging. And you know, you're going to play a woman in front of a lot of women. So he's like playing a bank in front of a lot of bankers

or a murderer in a prison in front of a lot of murderers. People who really know what he did. So it is to be a woman. Yeah. It was quite pleasant in a way, because I got to look at women without and watch them, and it was quite fun to confine my body and use my body as much as I could in a different way. So you're leaving after 10 years of getting this thing, going, bringing it into being, are you satisfied with what's been created? I'm very satisfied. I mean, just feel so privileged, so lucky to have been alive and be an actor at that time in that place. You know, you think of all the actors who have not had that opportunity, to give or to live a keen Irving. None of them had a globe theater. It's an incredible thing that Sam want to make and his friends hand it to my generation. It was one of those great things of an older generation doing all the work and handing it to the next generation and saying, here, you have this.

You play with this. All right, Mark, where are your lines? Thanks for talking to us. Thanks, too. The Globe Theater Company will end its U.S. tour this week with performances of measure for measure at St. Anne's Warehouse in Brooklyn. Again, the major developments of the day, Iraqi Kurds and religious Shiite leaders called for a national unity government that would include Sunnis and rebels in Indonesia's Ache province, formally ended their armed uprising after 29 years and at least 15,000 deaths. We'll see you online, and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Gwen Eiffel. Thank you, and good night. Major funding for the news hour with Jim Lara has been provided by. Each person has a unique way of seeing the world. That's why Pacific Life offers portfolio optimization for its variable products,

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