The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

GWEN IFILL: Good evening. I'm Gwen Ifill. Jim Lehrer is on vacation. On the NewsHour tonight: Our summary of the news; a report from Jerusalem on an assault today on Egypt's foreign minister; code orange, the nation's security on heightened pre-holiday alert; a science unit report on the Hubble telescope and the future of beaming pictures from space; families of 9/11 victims face a midnight deadline for filing compensation claims. And another of our campaign snapshots.

NEWS SUMMARY

GWEN IFILL: Security at the nation's airports, ports, and bridges was tightened today after the alert level increased from yellow to orange. In announcing the change Sunday, homeland security Secretary Tom Ridge called the potential for attack by al-Qaida the "most significant threat" since September 11. In New York City, hundreds of extra police patrolled landmarks, subway stations, and other key sites. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the security is not always obvious.

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: Whether you think you're being watched or don't think you're being watched, you are being watched. Our police department, along with help from the other security services, looks for suspicious things at access points and bridges, at tunnels, when people get together. And the fact of the matter is, we can go about our business and have our freedoms at the same time, to the extent humanly possible.

GWEN IFILL: New York has actually been at code orange since the color-coded system took effect in March of 2002. Elsewhere today, airports around the country carried out additional vehicle inspections and bomb patrols. And the Federal Aviation Administration also imposed tighter rules for private planes around the nation's capital. Late today, President Bush said the government is doing everything it can to protect the country. We'll have more on this story later in the program. A strong earthquake rippled across California today, killing at least two people. The 6.5 magnitude quake was centered north of Cambria, and shook buildings from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Several buildings collapsed in Paso Robles, and two bodies were found in the rubble. The town is near San Simeon, the castle built by William Randolph Hearst. The quake also knocked out power to about 10,000 homes and businesses. The foreign minister of Egypt was assaulted today in Jerusalem by Muslim extremists. It happened when Ahmed Maher tried to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque, one of Islam's holiest sites. People in the crowd shouted, "traitor!," Threw shoes and tried to strike him. Bodyguards hustled him away, and he was taken to a hospital. Officials said he was not injured. Later, Palestinian Prime Minister Qureia denounced the assault.

AHMED QUREIA: He came here to support the Palestinians, to bring the peace process back on track, and to help the Palestinians. This is part of his visit. Therefore we're shook and disappointed really about what he faced.

GWEN IFILL: Earlier, the Egyptian foreign minister met with Israeli Prime Minister Sharon. Egypt has been pressing Palestinian militants to agree to a cease-fire, but so far, the militants have refused. We'll have more on this story right after the News Summary. In Baghdad today, two Americans and an Iraqi interpreter were killed by a roadside bomb. Two other soldiers were wounded. Hours earlier, U.S. troops captured a former Iraqi general in Baqouba, just north of the capital. He allegedly recruited and directed insurgents. And a top U.S. general in Iraq said Saddam's capture has demoralized remnants of the old regime. Major General David Petraeus said senior Baath Party leaders have begun cooperating and turning in weapons. Russia offered today to write off two-thirds of the $8 billion it is owed by Iraq. A member of the Iraqi Governing Council said Russian President Putin made the offer during a meeting in Moscow. In return, he said, Iraq might revive Russia's pre-war oil contracts. The U.N. could begin nuclear inspections in Libya as early as next week. Chief inspector Mohamed ElBaradei confirmed that today. On Friday, Libyan leader Mohammar Gadhafi announced his country would give up weapons of mass destruction and open all sites to inspectors. Speaking in Vienna today, ElBaradei said he would lead the first mission.

MOHAMED ElBARADEI: I will visit Libya in the immediate future, with a team of senior verification experts, to take stock of the situation, to develop a comprehensive complete picture of all nuclear activities in Libya, to take whatever corrective actions that need to be taken.

GWEN IFILL: Also today, Pakistan said it is investigating whether leading scientists gave nuclear help to Iran and North Korea, and possibly Libya, too. One of those questioned was the founder of the Pakistani nuclear program. The country's information minister insisted the government did not authorize the sharing of sensitive technology. A federal judge ordered the military today to stop making troops get anthrax shots against their will. The judge, in Washington, ruled the president must sign a special order to enforce the vaccinations. Nearly 500 members of the armed forces have refused to get the shots. About 200 of them have been court-martialed. Tonight is the deadline for making claims to the September 11 compensation fund. As of today, more than 90 percent of those who lost loved ones had filed for compensation. In exchange, they agreed not to sue the airlines and others. Since the fund was created by congress, it's paid out nearly $1.5 billion. We'll have more on this story later in the program. On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained more than 59 points to close at 10,338. The NASDAQ rose four points to close at 1955. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to an assault in a Jerusalem mosque; the code orange terror alert; the Hubble Telescope and beyond; compensation for 9/11 victims; and a campaign snapshot.

FOCUS - MOSQUE INCIDENT

GWEN IFILL: A jarring incident at a mosque in Jerusalem. Margaret Warner has that story.

MARGARET WARNER: Today's assault on Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Maher drew immediate condemnations from both the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers. A former ambassador to Washington, who as a young diplomat accompanied Anwar Sadat to Camp David, Maher has been working with the U.S. to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. For more on what happened today, we go to "New York times" correspondent Greg Myre in Jerusalem.

Greg, welcome. There have been a lot of conflicting reports about what happened today. What can you tell us about how this incident unfolded?

GREG MYRE: The Egyptian foreign minister, Mr. Maher, had just wrapped up some discussion with the Israelis. He went up to the noble sanctuary and went into the al-Aqsa mosque, and as he went in, he was immediately assaulted. People started shouting, "traitor!" And "go back to Sharon!" And people also threw shoes at him. He had an entourage that was jostled about quite a bit. And the incident only took a couple minutes before he was whisked out, but you could see in the pictures he looked very panicked and was short of breath. After they took him out of there, he was taken to an Israeli hospital for an examination. So no serious injuries, but the symbolism of this, an Egyptian minister being attacked by Palestinians at a very important Islamic religious shrine, had a lot of significance.

MARGARET WARNER: Well, as you noted, the al-Aqsa mosque is an important religious shrine. It's been a flash point before. Who has the security responsibilities there?

GREG MYRE: Well, the Israelis have security responsibility around the perimeter, and they go up to the gate. But the Israelis said that Mr. Maher requested that they not accompany him inside the mosque. And the Israeli police said they went into the compound with him, but not into the mosque. And so, when he went into the mosque, he had his own entourage. It's not entirely clear whether he had bodyguards or just members of his entourage. But there was nobody with weapons inside the mosque, and that's when the assault took place. The Israeli police did go inside after he became caught up in the melee, and they helped extract him from the scene, but they did not go into the mosque initially with him.

MARGARET WARNER: Is there an official group claiming responsibility for these... for this attack, and who are they?

GREG MYRE: What it appears to be, from some witnesses up there, is this small group called the Islamic Liberation Party. It's a group that really has not been involved in the violence or the politics here. They're very obscure. They're not involved in very much activity. What they are is a Muslim fundamentalist group that wants Islamic rule throughout the Arab and Islamic world, and they seem to feel this was an appropriate place for them to take action. But it's not a group that we hear a lot about. They've been a group that you just don't hear about throughout this past three years of fighting.

MARGARET WARNER: Egypt has been involved recently in trying to revive efforts to coax the really active radical groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas into some sort of a cease- fire. Was Maher's trip to Israel part of that?

GREG MYRE: In the larger sense, yes. Egypt has been trying to mediate between both sides. As you mentioned, they've been working with the Palestinian factions. This trip, though, today he met solely with Israeli officials: Prime Minister Sharon, the president, the foreign minister. So he was really just dealing with the Israelis on this trip. And that's part of the process of getting the two sides talking again. For a month now, they've been trying to arrange a meeting between the Israeli prime minister, Mr. Sharon, and the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia. They haven't been able to do that. It seems to be part of that effort to get the sides talking again.

MARGARET WARNER: And what was the outcome of today's meeting?

GREG MYRE: Well, nothing definitive. Nothing was announced out of that. The Israelis, though, are responding very favorably. They've been very supportive of the Egyptian efforts, both to get a cease-fire among the Palestinian factions, and they very much want to rebuild the strained relations or strained ties with Egypt. So the Israelis are supportive of what's going on here. They hinted that they would welcome an Egyptian-brokered truce. So the Israelis are sounding positive, but we didn't have any substantive or definitive results today.

MARGARET WARNER: The Israeli and Palestinian officials you spoke with today, did they feel this attack on Maher reflected any kind of widespread unhappiness at Egypt's role?

GREG MYRE: No, they didn't say that. I think the assumption was that this was a small group that carried out this action, and it didn't necessarily represent larger groups. Now, having said that, the Palestinian leadership is very much supportive of what the Egyptians are doing, as are the Israelis, so the leaderships on both sides are very comfortable with what the Egyptians are doing. Most of the other factions, even including the more extreme factions like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have been willing to go to Cairo and meet with the Egyptians. So there has certainly been... all of the main groups on the Palestinian side and the Israeli government have been pleased with the Egyptian role, so it seems we're talking about a small group that was responsible for today's actions.

MARGARET WARNER: Greg Myre, thanks so much.

GREG MYRE: Thank you.

FOCUS - TERROR THREAT

GWEN IFILL: Now, the heightened terror alert. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said yesterday the intelligence community has information suggesting extremists abroad are anticipating near-term attacks. He briefed President Bush this morning on the extra precautions now underway around the country. Afterward, he spoke to reporters at the White House.

TOM RIDGE: It is the conclusion of the intelligence community, general consensus within that community that all the strategic indicators suggest from the volume, really, the level and the amount of reporting has increased. We've never quite seen it at this level before. And the sources we could point to that are credible and our ability to corroborate some of this information-- the strategic indicators suggest that it is the most significant threat reporting since 9/11. If you've got holiday plans, go. Don't alter them. This is... you know, if we simply responded to threats by pulling back from what we had intended on doing in the first place, if we alter our plans to go visit the family, go visit grandma, if we alter our plans to get on the airplane, if we alter our plans to go to one of those public celebrations, then they have won because they've dislocated activity, they've caused economic loss and they've made us act in ways simply by threatening us. And we cannot be burdened by that threat or fear.

REPORTER: Can you tell us about increased threats specifically at airports overseas, if that has been part of this, and what you...

TOM RIDGE: Well, there has been a stream of reporting over the past... actually for several months. And I think it's probably pretty obvious to you that they're always looking, one, to return to methods that they've used successfully before, and we know, tragically, they turned four airplanes into missiles. But as we've hardened... we've increased security in passenger aviation, from the curbside to the cockpit, you've heard me say many, many times before, passenger screeners and more technology and thousands of air marshals and hardened cockpit doors and trained pilots and crews, access to passenger name records of those who are traveling into the United States. So again, when we get information, be it venue specific, city specific, we share it with those who can act on it.

GWEN IFILL: Now, for some insight into what orange or high alert means, we are joined by: Raymond Kelly, the New York City police commissioner. Billie Vincent, the former security director at the Federal Aviation Agency. He now runs a security consulting business in Virginia, and Matthew Levitt, a former counterterrorism intelligence analyst at the FBI. He's now a senior fellow in terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Welcome gentlemen.

Commissioner Kelly, another year's end, another year end terror alert. As the police commissioner of the nation's largest city, what's the first thing you do when you're told about this?

RAYMOND KELLY: Well, obviously, we talk to our federal partners, and exchange information with them. We increase our presence on the street. We've done that since Sept. 11. We have operation atlas it's called here, where we put additional officers at sensitive locations both in uniform and in plain clothes. We have other groups of heavily armed officers that we move around the city on an unannounced basis, also at sensitive locations. We're constantly exchanging and looking for indicators, as I say, from our federal partners. We do put some officers on overtime. And it turns out to be a very expensive proposition for the city of New York, and other cities as well I'm sure throughout the country.

GWEN IFILL: If New York has been on level orange, code orange, since Sept. 11, what is the difference now with today's elevated alert, does this move you to code red?

RAYMOND KELLY: No. You might say the level orange is a relatively broad band where we do some adjustments inside that band. We redeploy officers, we do increase the level of presence that we have at some locations and indeed we cover locations that we hadn't been covering in the past. It clearly is an increase in security. But we've had heightened security in general since Sept. 11.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Vincent, as we talk about this latest threat, once again the question of how airlines would be used as a weapon is raised again. Is this something that should have been taken care of already? Why are we back to that again?

BILLIE VINCENT: Well, it will always be a problem. The security that we are now in the U.S., post 9/11 is far better than what it was pre-9/11. There are still holes in it. You will never be able to have 100 percent effective security. What you need is layered security, TSA has done a reasonably good job on that recently. But there's now and will always remain holes in the system. Getting a 100 percent effective system in all layers is virtually impossible. But taking all those layers and making them as effective as you can possibly make them, from a cost effective standpoint as well, cost efficiency standpoint, you will approach a reasonably high degree of probability of detecting and stopping a terrorist threat.

GWEN IFILL: For people who have been traveling heavily during this holiday season, beginning in Thanksgiving and now continuing through the holidays this week and next, what is going to be different at airports in particular?

BILLIE VINCENT: You're going to see an increased intensity of screening, probably more thoroughness. That has been the norm though for the last several months. But there will be some things that won't be obvious to a lot of passengers, like increased selective screening, that is selecting a certain number of people, both from a scientific selection standpoint as well as a random standpoint and giving those persons and their articles added screening. The same thing goes on behind the screens for baggage, cargo, and some of the other things that are not obvious to the normal passenger.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Levitt, when we hear Tom Ridge talk about increased chatter, that they have been picking up increased threats, credible threats, what does that mean?

MATTHEW LEVITT: Well, obviously we're listening in on telephones and reading e-mail and we also have sources on the ground, there are a variety of sources. But primarily we're talking about two different types of information. One is information that is relatively specific. Never specific to time, place and actual attack, like we see in the movies but clearly we have information about a terrorist plotting to use airplanes that are coming to the United States, this is not surprising; we've had several threats relating to the aviation industry over the past few months, for example, threats about terrorists wanting to bring explosives aboard airplanes and small electronic devices, and so there's information that is going to have relative amounts of specificity to it, maybe about an airport here, certain terrorists there, a relatively specific timeframe, but never like in the movies. The second is -- I'm sorry.

GWEN IFILL: Go ahead.

MATTHEW LEVITT: The second is this chatter. And clearly the U.S. intelligence community has picked up terrorist operatives talking about in far more vague terms a near-term attack, something that would meet or surpass what happened on 9/11.

GWEN IFILL: But when you hear what are he was saying today, saying we have seen this code alert rise and fall over the past few years and when he says this is the most significant threat since 9/11, what do you read into that?

MATTHEW LEVITT: I think it's a question of the quality and quantity of the information. It suggests that there's for specificity, it suggests there are more sources that are reporting similar types of information independently of one another and therefore corroborating at least in part some of the threat information. Also, more than two and a half years now into this process of the war on terrorism, we've been interrogating so many individuals and going through so much information that we've collected, independently we're able to corroborate a lot more information. We're far better prepared today to go through this information and interpret it in terms of how we should affect our threat level than we were leading up to 9/11.

GWEN IFILL: Commissioner Kelly, shortly after this process began two and a half years ago, as Matthew Leavitt was explaining, there was a lot of concern expressed by local officials they didn't have enough information to go on, that when these terror threats were raised and lowered, they didn't know what they were supposed to do with that. Do you feel today as though you have enough information?

RAYMOND KELLY: Well, I think it's improved and I think we generally speaking have the information what the federal government has. I think that's one of the more profound issues as to just what we get as country a country. But I feel reasonably confident that the information that the federal government gets is passed along to local law enforcement agencies. Again, some of it lacks specificity, even the specific information that the federal government has, but I think it's enough for us to do our job relative to what they have.

GWEN IFILL: In New York what are you telling citizens to do?

RAYMOND KELLY: Well, the mayor has directed people to go about their business, he says, and other government officials have said that. The raising of the threat level is really for security forces, really for government, that we want the rest of the citizenry to go about their lives. It's our job, our obligation to be on a higher state of readiness, a higher state of alert. But we want people to go about their ordinary business but to be vigilant. And we say to them that we'd like them to look through the prism of 9/11, if you will, look at things and see if they are somewhat out of the ordinary, somewhat suspicious, we have a hotline in New York, it's manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. You can get it through our 311 number. And we've gotten a fair amount of calms and of course after the level is raised like this, we'll get more calls. We've seen that historically; calls have gone up. But most of them are thoughtful calls and we do respond to the ones that are of concern to us.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Vincent, it sounds almost like a mixed message. You should be very alert, yet go about your business, do your shopping, go visit grandma, as Tom Ridge put it. Is that a mixed message?

BILLIE VINCENT: No, not really. There is only so much the citizen can do, or the passenger of the airplane and so on, and that is so remain vigilant and if you see anything that's suspicious, report it. But this is a cooperative system. It works because everybody does their part. It didn't work pre-9/11 because, as Matthew just mentioned, there was a lot of chatter at that time and no one did anything because of the chatter.

GWEN IFILL: But is the weak link the aviation piece of this what happens at airport as broad? It's one thing that we now have a transportation safety agency, professionals at airports doing all the screening and checking, but what about in other countries where they might not have as rigorous a security apparatus?

BILLIE VINCENT: That's really not correct because in many other countries think have a better security system than we do, and they've had a better security system for many years. We had the bad system. I do 70 or 80 percent of my business internationally, and I just finished doing an around-the-world trip. I saw three major airports in the world, two of them had excellent, outstanding security. The third one always had weak security. The U.S. generally knows that. It's not that we're the best, it's spotty outside of the U.S. And there are some very good systems outside the United States, better than the U.S..

GWEN IFILL: And let me ask you about one other weak part which was exposed after 9/11 which is that communications among intelligence agencies, one hand wasn't talking to the other, has that improved as far as we know?

MATTHEW LEVITT: It's greatly improved, everybody admits there's still a long way to go. Changing bureaucracies is a very slow and painful process, but I think it's very clear that there is much better communication between the agencies, much greater use of the joint terrorism task forces, which incorporate under the FBI, not only other federal agencies but local authorities. There's a much greater emphasis on sharing information in a timely fashion, making sure that it goes through official channels, some of the information for example leading up to 9/11 was passed from the agency, the FBI, by word of mouth and only later followed up through official channels. I think a lot of effort has gone into making this more seamless is the word we want it to be. I think we're getting there slowly, but we're getting there.

GWEN IFILL: Is that why everyone from the president to Tom Ridge to everyone are so convinced today that this is al-Qaida?

MATTHEW LEVITT: Well, I think the quality of the information speaks for itself, I don't think there's much debate over the fact that this is al-Qaida. And I think that the unanimity of their message indicates that certainly at the highest levels there's a tremendous amount of consultation in general about the quality of information and also about whether or not and when to go up to an orange level, because, like you mentioned, we want people to be informed, people have made it clear they want to be informed, but we want to inform them in a way that is useful to them.

GWEN IFILL: Matthew Levitt, Billie Vincent, and Commissioner Ray Kelly, thank you all very much.

FOCUS - PICTURING SPACE

GWEN IFILL: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, looking deep into space; the compensation fund for 9/11 victims; and a campaign snapshot of Joseph Lieberman. Tom Bearden and our science unit have the space story.

TOM BEARDEN: At first glance, the image doesn't look like much: Smudges of light on a black background. But to astronomers, it was a revelation. This 1995 image, called the "deep field," is a picture of a tiny piece of the night sky taken by a genuine time machine, the Hubble space telescope. The points of light aren't merely stars; they're incredibly distant galaxies, vast collections of billions of stars. Why call Hubble a time machine? Because the light it's seeing from these galaxies has been traveling toward the earth for some ten billion years. So this picture shows the universe not as it is today, but how it looked back then, the earliest image of the universe anyone had ever seen. Astronomer Steven Beckwith says the deep field is crucial evidence of how the universe grew.

STEVEN BECKWITH: It's the same as studying a person, as a person evolves from birth to maturity. If you want to understand that evolution, you have to look at the different stages and compare the different stages. The big bang theory predicted it and explained many other observations. But no one had actually seen that happening with the light from stars and galaxies before the Hubble deep field.

TOM BEARDEN: Beckwith is now in the process of traveling back even further. Sometime in February, the Space Telescope Science Institute, which he heads, will release a final image of the so-called "ultra deep field." Light from that image is so faint and so distant that Hubble will have to orbit the earth 412 times, an extremely long time exposure to collect enough light to make an image.

TOM BEARDEN: So, over that 400 hours, you're collecting photons that began their journey billions of years ago--

STEVEN BECKWITH: About 14 billion years ago, a little less than that. The universe, we believe, is 13.7 billion years old, and we hope to look back 13 billion light years.

TOM BEARDEN: In the decade since its flawed optics were corrected, Hubble has given the world images such as new stars forming from clouds of pre- stellar dust, and old stars dying in pinwheels of glowing gas. Hubble's controllers are busy 24/7, since there are nine times as many experiments that want to use the telescope as can be accommodated. But Hubble is closing in on the end of its planned service life. It is supposed to be decommissioned in 2010. Hubble was designed to observe and record both the visible and the ultraviolet ends of the light spectrum. Scientists and engineers are now building Hubble's successor, called the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb is designed to view both visible and infrared light, which is the part of the spectrum that best shows the oldest and farthest-away galaxies. As space scientist John Trauger put it to an audience at the jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, scientists hope Webb will be able to see the universe's first light.

JOHN TRAUGER: It will look at fields like the Hubble deep field, but it will now see things that are hidden in dust.

TOM BEARDEN: Trauger's lecture drew a more-than-respectable crowd on a chilly and drizzly Thursday night, testimony to the reaction that millions of people have had to the often spectacular images Hubble has produced.

CAB BURGESS: The ones that show the births of stars really get my interest-- just wondering what's really going on there, you know? Is there the touch of God or something? You know, it seems really kind of mystical.

RANDY HALE: They hit me as an artist. I've always... I've got them on my computer. I look at them all the time. They're just amazing to me. They look like they have life in them to me. I mean, you know, gives you hope about the universe out there.

TOM BEARDEN: Webb, which is named after NASA's second administrator, is supposed to launch around 2011, folded up to fit inside an unmanned European Ariane rocket. It will be sent to a point about a million miles further from the sun than the earth. Once there, it will automatically unfold a massive, flexible, multilayered sun shield the size of a tennis court. Then the secondary mirror. Then the main light collector, the primary mirror built in 18 individual segments. Engineers at NASA's optical testing lab are now fine tuning controls for the segmented mirror. The project's senior scientist says it will be the biggest mirror in space.

JOHN C. MATHER: It's about 20 feet across, so it's huge. It's way, way bigger than the Hubble which is only 2.4 meters across, or about seven feet. We wanted it to be bigger yet. But when we found out how much work it takes to make those mirrors, we said, okay, we don't want to wait that long and we don't have that much money, so we'd rather have one sooner and have it now and working.

TOM BEARDEN: The theory is that after the Big Bang, the brand- new universe was composed of only light elements like hydrogen; the first stars forged heavier elements in the nuclear fusion of their cores. When they grew old, they often exploded, casting those elements out into space, where they formed new stars, and eventually our sun and planet Earth. Scientists believe the very elements of which human beings are made came from ancient stars. Alan Dressler, at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, says Webb should be able to see back to the time when the heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen were being formed.

ALAN DRESSLER: We know the universe didn't start with that material; the stars made it. We want to see how the first generations of stars were born, how they made the materials that would allow planets to be built, and then provided the raw materials for life to start. This program even includes looking at the nearest few hundred stars to the Earth to see if they have Earth-like planets themselves, and whether there's life on those planets as well.

TOM BEARDEN: But while many scientists look forward to Webb, many others are worried about losing Hubble, particularly those experimenting in the ultraviolet spectrum, which Webb doesn't see. Others worry that there might be a long gap between the demise of Hubble and the launch of Webb. Webb's launch date has already slipped twice. Mike Shull at the University of Colorado is worried that such a gap could seriously damage the entire field of study. He's concerned about the future of students like Catherine Boone, who's about to launch her first telescope experiment aboard a small rocket.

MICHAEL SHULL: We could live with a year gap, but if it were three or four or five years, that would be a disaster.

TOM BEARDEN: Why?

MICHAEL SHULL: Well, if you stopped doing science for three or four years, just like if you stopped practicing a sport, you know, the field would no longer have the vigor; new students wouldn't go into it.

TOM BEARDEN: Dressler is sympathetic but pragmatic.

ALAN DRESSLER: I think in order to make those new telescopes a reality, it's going to be necessary at some point to turn the Hubble space telescope off and go on to other things. So it will mean a loss of some capabilities for a while until those capabilities are improved for the future.

TOM BEARDEN: Those who worry about losing Hubble have even more immediate concerns. In the past, Hubble has depended on shuttle launched servicing missions to make fixes and install improved instruments. The final planned servicing mission was to have occurred next year. It was supposed to install the cosmic origins spectrograph, an instrument designed by Shull's colleagues to help him to search for dark matter, the mysterious substance now thought to hold the whole universe together. A distinguished panel of scientists has called for yet another servicing mission to extend Hubble's life to 2020, but the space shuttle "Columbia" accident has thrown everyone's plans into disarray. NASA officials say very clearly that in the future, shuttle flights must be planned to allow the vehicle to reach a safe haven at the international space station, or to be able to make repairs in space. The problem is, shuttles can't reach Hubble's orbit and still have enough fuel to reach the station. And astronauts can't yet repair the shuttle in orbit. Ed Weiler is NASA's chief of space science.

TOM BEARDEN: So is talk of an added servicing mission premature?

EDWARD J. WEILER: In my opinion, it's very premature, because right now my major goal is to make sure we get another servicing mission. Talking about whether we have one five or six or seven or eight years from now is a bit premature.

TOM BEARDEN: Servicing missions are expensive, $600 million to $1 billion, not even counting the cost of launching the shuttle. Supporters of the Webb Telescope are worried that efforts to prolong Hubble's life might siphon off money from Webb and other science programs.

TOM BEARDEN: Is there a potential for a turf war here?

ALAN DRESSLER: It's not surprising that people who are as passionate about what they do as scientists want to hold onto the tools and the ability to do the things that they love to do, and feel they're making progress. And it's also not surprising that they tend to be more passionate about the things they do than perhaps what their other astronomer colleagues are doing. So it does look like a bit of a turf war between different groups.

EDWARD J. WEILER: If the shuttle could fly safely for the next 20 or 30 years, and we had the money to pay for it, you could probably get good science out of Hubble for 20 years.

When do you judge that good science isn't good enough because it's taking money away from something that might produce great science? That's an awfully difficult line to draw, and that's why we have broad community advisory groups, because I don't want to make that kind of decision.

TOM BEARDEN: The decisions now being made about Hubble, Webb, and all the other instruments now on the drawing boards will greatly affect the direction of astronomy and astrophysics in decades to come. The ironic reality is that for astronomers to have the tools to look at galaxies billions of years in the past, they also have look closely at decisions made here on Earth in the very near future.

UPDATE - COMPENSATING VICTIMS

GWEN IFILL: The 9/11 compensation fund, and to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: Midnight tonight is the deadline for applications to the Sept. 11 victims compensation fund. We get an update now from the program's special master, Kenneth Feinberg. Welcome back to the program.

KENNETH FEINBERG: Thank you.

RAY SUAREZ: We're now in the last handful of hours. Are you still getting applications at this point?

KENNETH FEINBERG: Right up to this moment. We now have about 2750 applications for death claims, that's about 93 percent of all eligible families. And we've also have about 3300 injury claims. So we have almost 6,000 claims in the fund.

RAY SUAREZ: Now, you've said, certainly in the past couple months that you had wanted to get that number as high as possible. Why was it important to you to get that total over 90 percent?

KENNETH FEINBERG: I want the Congress to be vindicated for passing the law, I wanted to try and make sure that as many families as possible benefited from what Congress did and what the administration has been supporting. I realized that the lawsuit route, as an alternative, would be unsuccessful, at least very, very protracted and uncertain, and I just was worried that many families in grief would not file, and we made every effort, successfully, thank goodness, to get those families into the program.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, there was a point well into this two plus-year window when still fewer than half the affected families had filed and you hit the road and started to do sort of one on one marketing. What did you tell them, and did it work?

KENNETH FEINBERG: I told them that the date was approaching, I told them that it was extremely unlikely that Congress or the administration would extend the date of the program, the deadline. I also asked families that had already been in the fund, received their awards, been satisfied with the way the program worked, to go back home and tell neighbors and friends and relatives, do not let this program expire without your filing. And I think all of these factors came into play, and it worked.

RAY SUAREZ: Early on, you were pretty confident about the rough justice, the overall justice of the way this thing had been structured. As time wore on, as you saw individual cases and got a more fine grained understanding of what the payouts would be, were you just as confident, today, are you just as confident that this was the way to do it?

KENNETH FEINBERG: Absolutely. The most important element for me was to make sure from day one that the program was applied consistently, so that bankers and stockbrokers or busboys or dishwashers or waiters, whatever their station in life, that each individual family got a fair shake, and that no one get an advantage because of bias or whether they had a great lawyer or no lawyer. That was very, very important to me and to the members of the staff. And I think we've done that just as we knew we had to, if the program was to be perceived as fair.

RAY SUAREZ: So what ended up being the sort of swath of paths, what was the range in money that was paid out in individual cases?

KENNETH FEINBERG: The range in death cases ranges from a low of $250,000 to a high of almost $7 million. But the two figures to really focus on, the average payment, tax-free, for a death claim, is about $1.8 million. A more important number, I think, that tells you a lot about the fund and how it works, is the median award, half the people got more, half the people got less. That's about 1.5 million. In other words, I tried to exercise my discretion fairly to bring down the high end awards, bring up the low end awards, to try and have relative narrow gap between the high and the low, and I think we did that.

RAY SUAREZ: There was some gray area cases that presented some interesting challenges, for instance a lot of people who worked in that area were here in the country and working illegally -- not the kind of people who would find it easy to put together a paper trail for your application process.

KENNETH FEINBERG: Very difficult, they're all eligibility, I thank the attorney general of the United States and INS, they issued a ruling that those folks, like everybody else, the families were eligible, foreign claimants eligible -- how we locate those people, with applications in Spanish and in foreign, other foreign languages, how we reached out to them to give them a comfort level that they would not be deported, that the families would not be imprisoned or sanctioned, and as of today we have just about all of them in the fund.

RAY SUAREZ: Was there an evolutionary process for you in learning how to deal with the families and learning how to deal with what was brought up to the surface by the very act of filing? Was there something that you didn't understand about this very well, in October of 2001 that you understand better now?

KENNETH FEINBERG: I think so. I underestimated the raw emotion at the outset. The, I was the visible figure, the target for all the family frustration, anger and disappointment. And I learned as the program evolved the importance of dealing with individual families. These group meetings were valuable to promote the program. But where we really made progress, as I said earlier, Ray, is when we went and met with individual families, processed their claim, and then those families could go back into the community and tout the benefits of the program.

RAY SUAREZ: At this point, some people still have made public and made clear to you their intention to use the courts instead of using this congressionally mandated payout process. One consistent argument is that nobody gets blamed, nobody has to say I was wrong or I did a wrong thing if they use the special masters program. And these people want something more than just the money, it appears.

KENNETH FEINBERG: Oh, I think that's right. I haven't had any family tell me if they've decided to sue the airlines, none of them say it's the money. They say we want accountability. We want to find out in a lawsuit who is to blame for 9/11. I tell those families, with all due respect, you're not going to get that answer in a lawsuit. There is an independent commission, there are House and Senate Intelligence Committees, that is where there will be answers to who is to blame and the allocation of blame, if any, in this whole 9/11 situation. I also tell them, by the way, that if you really think a lawsuit is going to give you those answers, there are 73 people suing, they'll get the answers, you don't have to be the 74th, and you would be well advised in my opinion to come into the fund, but the lawsuit route has not been accepted by more than, as you say, a handful of people.

RAY SUAREZ: Now, if you haven't filed up until this moment, you don't have to have a completed application ready by midnight, do you?

KENNETH FEINBERG: You certainly don't. I will take my midnight tonight just about anything in the way of an intention to file. The first few pages of the application form, just send in, faxed to me, just send in the name and address, the name of the victim, the claim, and for purposes of beating the deadline, we will bend over backwards to accept your claim in a timely fashion.

RAY SUAREZ: But even with all the efforts you've made, do you expect that there are going to be some people who wake up tomorrow morning and that's just it for them?

KENNETH FEINBERG: That's the frustration. There will be some people, fortunately a very few, they didn't sue, they didn't come into the fund, they are paralyzed with grief or fear, they do nothing. Fortunately after two years doing this, we've got that down to a very small narrow group of people, and we will try and get them in right up until midnight tonight, all our offices are open all over the country. And we'll stay open until midnight.

RAY SUAREZ: And very quickly, an assessment program begins, I guess starting tomorrow of how this all worked?

KENNETH FEINBERG: This program, unprecedented and unique as it may be, I've learned two things. Only in America, only in America could there ever be a program like this, and this program was a justifiable compassionate and generous response by the American people to this horror. And I think it's as important for the American people as it is for the individual families who are benefiting under the program.

RAY SUAREZ: Kenneth Feinberg, thanks for joining us.

KENNETH FEINBERG: Thank you very much.

SERIES - CAMPAIGN SNAPSHOT

GWEN IFILL: Now, another of our snapshots from the Democratic presidential campaign. Tonight, remarks made recently by Senator Joe Lieberman to workers at a manufacturing company in Newark, Delaware.

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: I'm here as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president. You're going to have a very important primary here in Delaware on Feb. 3, one week after New Hampshire. So it's going to be a critical moment in the presidential campaign. And I wanted to talk to you about where our economy is. I mean, we've had a tough three years under George W. Bush: 2.9 million jobs lost, 2.6 million of those in manufacturing. We're bleeding manufacturing jobs. If we don't make things in this country, we're not going to have the economy we want, but more important, we're not going to be able to protect and grow the middle class, which is the heart of America. We Democrats, all nine of us, all agree that we need a change. America needs new leadership of its economy and new leadership in the White House to give us a fresh start. But we've got different approaches to how to do that, and the approaches are real important to the security of your jobs, and your kids' ability to live a good life that you want them to in the future. Some of the candidates, Howard Dean particularly, wants to repeal all the tax cuts of the last three years, and that would include repealing all the middle class tax cuts and all the tax cuts to business that help business invest and create jobs. To me that's wrong. I'm the only one of the Democratic candidates who has actually gone beyond the tax cuts now and recommended a new tax cut for the middle class, because the middle class is paying a larger share of the cost of government, and the highest-income businesses are paying a smaller share. So I'm about new ideas. I'm not George Bush. I'm not Howard Dean. I'm Joe Lieberman. I'm an independent-minded, center-out Democrat who is committed to keeping America strong on security, strong on values, restoring economic growth, pro jobs, and being a fighter for social justice, social progress in this country, which is what our values call on us to do, and what the American dream is all about.

MAN IN AUDIENCE: Talking about tax cuts for the middle class, the reality is, the top 10 percent of wage earners pay 64 percent of U.S. income taxes. Does that seem fair to you?

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: What doesn't seem fair to me is the allocation of taxes paid by the top 2 percent particularly, and that's part of what I want to turn around. So I am proposing the tax reduction for 98 percent of the income taxpayers, which is what my proposal is. I want to pay for it by raising taxes on the top 2 percent -- because if you look at-- I said it briefly before-- but to me this is not only important for the middle class that really is under pressure today, more than I've ever seen in my adult life, but also, it's to help ease that pressure. But it's also fair, because if you look over the longer term at who's paying the cost of government, the highest income people again-- I talk about the top 2 percent people making over $200,000 a year or more-- they're paying less. Corporations are paying less, in that case mostly because of loopholes, and the middle class is paying more of the cost of government, more of the higher percentage, and that's not right.

MAN IN AUDIENCE: I was kind of offended when Al Gore threw his support behind Dean instead of you, with you being... well, he chose you last time for vice president running. What's your feelings on that? I mean, have you talked to Al Gore at all to see exactly what he was thinking? As a registered Democrat, I'm kind of on the borderline with Al Gore, and I'm just trying to see how you feel on that.

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: You're a good man. (Laughter) Let me state for the record, we have never met each other before. I did not ask for that question. Look, it happened. I was surprised about it, first because I heard about it from the media; secondly, because in supporting Howard Dean, Al Gore is supporting somebody who has taken positions totally opposite what the Clinton-Gore administration took. But the kind of person I am, when I face a situation like that, I bet not unlike a lot of you, I double my determination to keep fighting for what I believe is right, and going even with more determination toward the goal that I have. You know, it's one thing to be angry about-- and there are a lot of reasons to be angry-- but ultimately you've got to take your anger and channel it into better ideas to bring people together, to make the future of the country better.

MAN IN AUDIENCE: I know you agree with the war on Iraq right now, a continuation of the Gulf War, but if you become president, would you continue this good offense makes a good defense?

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: You should always reserve the right to strike, to defend your security against somebody who is prepared, who is about to strike against you. But I thought it was a mistake to declare it, because it unsettled our allies and agitated our enemies. It's something you keep inside, ready to use. You reserve the offense for when you think diplomacy and nothing else will help you protect the security of your people. But I want to just take your sentence and use it one other place. I've thought about terrorism a lot. When I first came to the Senate in the early '90s, I did a series of hearings and investigations on it, and that was an area where people... all the experts said to me that when you're dealing with terrorism, the best defense is an offense. And they meant particularly intelligence. We let our human intelligence capacity drop for too long. And why do you want to do that? For the obvious reason. We want to be watching, listening to, infiltrating every conceivable terrorist group that's out there, so that we will know what they're planning and stop it and them before they strike. And in that sense, I do believe that the best defense remains an offense, and particularly an intelligence offense. Thank you all, it's been a really interesting discussion. Happy holidays to you.

GWEN IFILL: We'll have similar campaign snapshots of other presidential candidates in the days ahead.

RECAP

GWEN IFILL: Again, the major developments of the day: Security at the nation's airports, ports, and bridges was tightened after the alert level increased from yellow to orange, the second highest level. A strong earthquake rippled across California, killing at least two people. The foreign minister of Egypt was assaulted in Jerusalem by Muslim extremists. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Gwen Ifill. Thank you, and good night.