The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

. .. . . . . . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . . . . . . . . . Good evening, I'm Jim Lara. On the news hour tonight, the news of this Monday, then the latest on the first military tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, plus a debate about closing it down. .

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drive and ingenuity that we'll never run out of, Chevron, human energy. Designed by the Archer Daniels Midland Company, the Atlantic Philanthropies, the National Science Foundation, and with the continuing support of these institutions and foundations. And this program was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you. The outgoing U.S. ambassador to Iraq claimed today, Iraqis are uniting against al-Qaeda. Zalme Khalilzad spoke at a farewell news conference in Baghdad. He confirmed the U.S. is holding meetings with Sunni insurgents. He said some of them and some tribal leaders

are coming around. Those have taken place, and they are continuing to take place. And I think one of the challenges is how to separate more and more groups away from al-Qaeda, how to turn them to cooperate with the Iraqi government against al-Qaeda. The ambassador also said violence in Baghdad is down 25 percent, at sense a new security crackdown began last month. But some of the violence has shifted elsewhere. One Southern town was put under curfew today, after two Iraqis were killed at a Sunni mosque. Another Sunni mosque was bombed in a nearby town, but no one was killed. Over the weekend, roadside bombs killed five U.S. soldiers, four of them in a single attack north of Baghdad. 75 Americans have died in Iraq this month. The U.S. Senate opened debate today on a war-funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan. It

sets a non-binding goal of withdrawing combat troops by April of 2008, a house version that passed last week mandates a pull-out by September of 2008. The president has promised a veto any timetable. But Republican Senator Chuck Hagel warned Mr. Bush in the new issue of Esquire magazine. He said, before this is over, you might see calls for impeachment. Today, a White House spokeswoman brushed aside that statement, she said, it's ridiculous. Iran threatened today to charge 15 British sailors and Marines with illegally entering its waters. Iranian forces seized the Britons on Friday in the Persian Gulf. They're being interrogated in Tehran. We have a report from Robert Moore of Independent Television News. It certainly seems that for the Iranians, the capture is part of a bigger game. President Ahmadinejad may be coming under pressure from militant elements to trade the Britons for

five Iranians being held by the Americans in Iraq. At every level now, the Foreign Office is trying to exert maximum pressure. Yesterday, Britain's ambassador in Tehran demanded access to the captured group of sailors and Marines. But instead, Iran's foreign minister who's at the UN in New York has repeated the claim that Britain had violated Iranian territorial waters. Iraq has now joined the international appeals for Tehran to free the Britain's immediately. Naval officers here say in private that the maritime border between Iran and Iraq can be confusing and ambiguous. But in this case, American and British officials say the two British patrol boats were easily within Iraqi waters. In other words, the Iranians either made a navigational mistake of their own or have been deliberately provocative. Over the weekend, the UN Security Council imposed new sanctions on Iran over its nuclear

program. Today, Russia and China urged Iran to drop its defiance. We'll have more on Iran later in the program tonight. And Australian prisoner went before a U.S. military court at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba today. David Hicks has been held five years. He's accused of fighting with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001. Also today, U.S. officials announced a man accused in bombing a hotel in Kenya has been transferred to Guantanamo. It's the first such transfer since 2004. We'll have more on the future of Guantanamo right after this news summary. White House officials defended Attorney General Gonzalez again today in the firing of U.S. attorneys. Justice Department documents now show Gonzalez attended an hour-long meeting last November. There, he approved firing eight federal prosecutors. Two weeks ago, the Attorney General said, I never saw documents. We never had a discussion

about where things stood. Today, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said that statement and the November meeting are consistent. He does not recall being involved in deliberations about who which U.S. attorneys might be asked to be replaced for the remainder of the term. But he does say that he'd signed off on the final list. In my reading of that meeting, was that was the final decision, the decisions had been made, the final plan had been in place, and they were asking the Attorney General for sign off. Perino also said the Attorney General still has to explain himself to Congress. Gonzalez has slated to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 17. But another Justice Department official, Monica Goodling, will not be answering questions. Her lawyer said today, she will cite her fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. David Stockman, the former budget director under President Reagan, was charged today in a securities fraud case. It stems from his time as Chairman and CEO of Collins and

Acman Corporation and Auto Parts Company. Stockman left the company just before it filed for bankruptcy protection in 2005. The federal charges include plotting to commit securities fraud, falsifying financial reports, and lying to auditors. There was a major political breakthrough in Northern Ireland today. The two dominant political parties announced a power-sharing deal after a five-year standoff. Jerry Adams of the Catholic Sinn Fane and Ian Paisley of the Protestant Democratic Unionists sat side by side for the first time, and they hailed the agreement. We must not allow our justified loathing of the horrors and tragedies of the past to become a barrier to creating a better and more stable future for our children. The relationships between the people of the Senate have been marred by centuries of the scarred, conflict, heart, and tragedy. In

particular, this has been the sad history of orange and green. The agreement takes effect on May 8th. A special UN envoy recommended independence for Kosovo today, his report said independence is the best safeguard against new unrest. Take Albanians make up the majority in Kosovo, and they support independence. Serbia's leaders oppose giving up the province. The UN Security Council will make the final decision possibly in April or May. The Smithsonian Institution announced today its top official has resigned. Secretary Lawrence Small quit over the weekend after criticism of his expenses. An internal audit found he spent $90,000 on private jet travel and gifts without approval. There were also questions about his salary of more than $900,000. That's more than double what he made when he started in the year 2000. The price of oil at a high point for the

year today amid growing concern about Iran and New York trading crude oil rose more than 60 cents to finish at nearly $63 a barrel. On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones industrial average lost almost 12 points to close at $12,469. The Nasdaq rose more than 6 points to close above 24.55. And that's it for the new summary tonight. Now the Guantanamo story confronting Iran and another kind of gasoline. Judy Woodruff has our Guantanamo story. More than five years after the naval base at Guantanamo Bay was designated as a detention and interrogation center for alleged enemy combatants, the first Guantanamo detainee case came before a military court on the island this afternoon. Thirty-one-year-old Australian David Hicks was arraigned on charges that he provided support for al-Qaeda terrorists

and the Taliban in Afghanistan during American air raids there in the fall of 2001. Hicks, who has spent the last five years on Guantanamo, was originally scheduled to go before a military commission in November of 2005. But proceedings were canceled. After the Supreme Court ruled the Bush administration's initial military commission process was unconstitutional. Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald was in the courtroom this afternoon and she joins us now. Carol Rosenberg was a long time coming and it took longer than expected. Tell us what happened. Well, as with many things at Guantanamo, it didn't exactly go to script. We had a three-and-a-half hour hearing that was supposed to be an arraignment, but David Hicks didn't enter a plea and they didn't read the charges. They waved all of that and we spent three-and-a-half hours mostly on procedures and getting a first look at David Hicks in two-and-a-half years. So was he charged? You said they didn't read the charges?

They waved the reading of the charges. They announced that he was charged with material support for terrorism, but because of procedural reasons, he didn't answer not guilty or whatever he might have responded. They got caught up in basically the rules of the game. How this was going to work as this is the first one of these U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War II. And they spent some time debating and discussing whether or not he could have a civilian attorneys and the two civilian attorneys who came to the table left. And by the time they got to the reading of the charges, some other issues had intruded and they waited until they get through some motions next time. So it was an arraignment without an answer to the charge. Why did two of his lawyers leave? Well, one of the attorneys who was sitting at the table was Josh Dreytel. I think he's pretty well known in New York as a pretty big criminal defense attorney. But the new rules for the commissions just came through Congress in late last year, and there still

had not an understanding about what allows a civilian attorney to sit at the table. And the Marine colonel, who's organizing the thing, basically said he hadn't signed the right paperwork and excused him from the room. So it sounds like not according to, at least not according to what you and others expected. Tell us about what David Hicks looked like, the atmosphere it's in the courtroom. Absolutely. This was the first opportunity to see David Hicks since two and a half years ago, when the last time they tried to have one of these trials before the Supreme Court ruled them illegal. And last time he had a suit, a tie, and almost like a military-style haircut, today he looked like Rip Van Winkle. He had his hair down to his back. He was wearing what looked like scrubs. It's a prison uniform in beige, top and bottom. He had shaved, but there was a bit of a, I don't know, five o'clock shadow. And the guy looked like he just walked out of a history. I can't say anything more than that. He looked

like a troubled character. Did he speak? And what did you make of that, of his demeanor? Yes. He was, he was clear. He was respectful. He has quite a strong Australian accent. He said, yes, sir. He was, he told the colonel he was shocked that he has, his defense team had been devastated. He has been working for the past two and a half years with these two civilian attorneys as well as the Marine Major Dan Morie, who's been assigned to his case. And in the course of this hearing, the other two people were disqualified. The Marine made it clear that the Marine colonel in charge made it clear he could come back. But right now, as of today, it's just David Hicks and the Marine Major at the table. So do we know where this goes from here, since he has not pleaded one way or another, guilty, not guilty? I suspect we'll all be back here in a couple of weeks. There's going to be motions hearings. The Marine Major, who is the defensive attorney for Hicks, is going to be,

having to file some motions on whether or not the, excuse me, is going to have to file some motions on, on, on how they want to proceed on this trial. And Carol, was this an orderly process? Would you describe it that way? Well, there was a script. The reporters were expecting a script. We expected a detaining to come in and to enter a plea and to, and for it to look sort of like a criminal trial that we know. But the fact of the matter is, all of these other ancillary issues got caught up in it. And so it was orderly, but it was not, according to what we expected the script to be. And so what was different? You said you expected it to be more like a criminal trial. What, what set it apart from that? They've never staged one of these before, since World War II. And then it was done under

different sets of ground rules. I guess nobody in the room seemed to agree on how this would be, how this would proceed. And, and, and how it would be carried out. All right. Carol Rosenberg with the Miami Herald marching in a new territory there. Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, we turn now to a wider discussion of the usefulness of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, where 390 prisoners still remain, and which has long been a focus of international and domestic criticism. Defense Secretary Robert Gates reportedly proposed closing the prison in January, because he thought its poor reputation around the world would undermine the credibility of the U.S.-led detainee hearings, which did, as we said, begin today. Gates' proposal was reportedly rejected by Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, among others. And on Friday, White House spokesman Tony Snow said he doubted that Guantanamo would be closed before President Bush leaves office. So, is Guantanamo worth keeping open? We get two views now.

Neil Cartiol is a professor at Georgetown University Law School. He successfully argued the 2006 Supreme Court case, Hamdan V. Rumsfeld, which struck down the Bush administration's military tribunal system. And John U, he's professor at the Boles Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. He served in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel during President Bush's first term, where he was the primary architect of the administration's detention and interrogation policies. Gentlemen, thank you both for being with us. Let me first ask you, having just listened to Carol Rosenberg. John, let me come to you. What do you make of today's proceedings around David Hicks? Well, as the reporter said, it is the first time that the United States has run one of these military commissions since World War II. So, you can see that they're still taking baby steps, as it were, to try to figure out exactly how the procedures are going to go forward.

And we haven't really seen proceedings at the hit on the big issues on which people struggled over in Congress in terms of the kinds of rights that the defendant can have. On the other hand, I'm sure that in the end that the defendant will have, Mr. Hicks will have, the right to have civilian counsel there. It sounds like there's just some paperwork issues there, and that we haven't seen anything yet, which points to this being unfair in any fundamental way. Neil Cuttiel, how do you size up what happened today? Well, I think this is the start of a trial, and trials are always massive public events, and the eyes of the world are watching what happens to David Hicks and the eyes of the world. This is also the first trial since we've had the reports of Secretary Gates saying, let's close Guantanamo, stop these trials, move them to the United States, as well as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying the same thing. So, I think these trials are proceeding under fairly dubious legal grounds and very dubious international grounds, because there's a lot of condemnation about this trial system. It is a new fangled trial system.

We've never seen it before, and it's one that I think a lot of people believe is likely to get struck down by the courts. Well, let's talk about the bigger question of Guantanamo Bay itself, and this new system of justice, as it were. John, you were, as we said, the architect of much of the interrogation and tribunal language that came out of the administration, what was the original rationale for Guantanamo Bay? Why was it needed in the first place? Whenever you have a war, you're going to detain people. You're never going to have a war that's so clean that you're not going to capture members of the enemy, and in fact, that's the humanitarian thing to do is to capture members of enemy and detain them. The problem is that you need to detain them somewhere, and so the point about Guantanamo Bay was to pick a place that would be secure, would not be in the Afghanistan theater, so that it wouldn't be an invitation for more terrorist attacks, and quite honestly, they weren't to be brought back into the civilian justice system at

home. I think there was another desire that we were not going to take the detainees, who were caught in the war on terrorism, and treat them like regular criminal defendants with the same rights and our civilian courts as our own citizens or people in our country, and so that was another reason to station at Guantanamo Bay. So I think you're quite right, there are concerns abroad and at home about should we close Guantanamo, and Guantanamo is a symbol of the war on terrorism, you could close it, but you're going to have to have a facility somewhere, it may be that we put one in Afghanistan instead, that might make not as much sense. Neal Cuddyall, do you agree that originally there was a sound rationale to have a place like Guantanamo? I do not, and I think that Professor Yu, while I've great respect for him, I think misstates a little bit the original rationale, which he himself stated in a December 2001 memo. The rationale was not simply, let's not treat them as criminal defendants, it was, let's put them in a place where the Constitution doesn't apply, even our most sacred rights,

like the right of habeas corpus, the right against expos factos laws, that was the rationale, to put them in a legal black hole. That, I think, ultimately has been deemed, I think, irresponsible by the world's community, and I think courts time and time again have bristled at that suggestion. John, you was that part of the original thinking? Like I said, I don't think we're trying to put anyone outside the scope of the Constitution, but we're not talking about giving people, we're caught in the war on terrorism, the same rights that our own citizens or the aliens in our country get. Now, like this is not some fantasy made up by the Bush administration. This is something that had traditionally been the practice under the laws of war under Supreme Court president. And Neil did take this case as Supreme Court, and he successfully got this Supreme Court to say, we're going to review, extend the right habeas corpus to Guantanamo Bay, and the president in Congress just in last October passed to bill reversing that decision. So I think that you have, you know, both of the branches of government that are elected to make decisions on war,

agreeing that we weren't going to, and we're not going to give the same kinds of access to civilian court for members of al-Qaeda that we do to our own citizens. Mr. Cottigal, whatever the original rationale was, why do you believe Guantanamo should be closed now? Well, for the same reasons that I think Secretary Gates and Secretary Rice have said, Guantanamo is now- That they report- That they report- That the report- that Guantanamo is now in all betros around the neck of the United States. It is a place that it's a very powerful image. People detained for five years with no constitutional protections whatsoever. People being detained on an island, we have television shows about that kind of thing. I mean, it's something that I think is saying to the world, the United States believes in legal black holes. And by the way, this is a very untraditional thing for the United States, the kind of guardian of the rule of law to do, to warehouse people in a place outside of the Constitution entirely. So it's mainly for image reasons?

Well, I think Guantanamo has whatever the rationale was, now outlived its usefulness and become net harm to national security, rather than something that might promote it. And John, you, a net harm to U.S. security. You accept that? No, I don't. And I think the people who make those decisions have access to both the cost and the benefits. We can focus in the media and the public on the diplomatic harms, although I might add that many countries that criticize Guantanamo Bay have no desire to take their own citizens back from Guantanamo Bay are only too happy for the United States to have to detain them. But there are also benefits too. We are preventing people from getting back onto the battlefield. There have been people released from Guantanamo Bay over a dozen that have been recaptured fighting against us. And I think we have to only look at the, also last week, the transcript of the hearing for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the number four person al-Qaeda who we've captured, he had a lot of valuable information about pending terrorist attacks. If we're going to

take people like that and throw them into the civilian justice system, throw them into the same with the same rights that our own citizens have, I don't think we ever could have gotten that kind of information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Netanyahu, what about those points? And in addition to that, if you don't have a Guantanamo Bay, what do you do with these people who are accused of being enemy combatants fighting for al-Qaeda? First of all, I don't know anyone who's responsible who thinks you treat everyone at Guantanamo in the civilian justice system. I think most people believe the existing court-martial system is the way to try the military system that we use to try our own service members, which since 1916 has been allowed to hear terrorism cases as well. Now, with respect to detention, the question isn't, let these people go, as I think Mr. Yup puts it and put them on the battlefield, it's where you detain them. And I think detaining them at Guantanamo has been something that's powerfully hurt the United States image. The question is where? We could detain my military bases in the United States, we could detain them in some other

country, but let's detain them in a place where some law applies, either the law of some other country or the law of the United States. Right now, we're detaining them in a place Cuba, in which we argue, Cuban law doesn't apply and neither does the United States Constitution. This is fundamentally un-American. John, you, what about that last point about detaining them in a place where American laws apply? Well, first of all, American laws do apply. We are in a war. We have in the past held many, many prisoners abroad outside the United States. As recently as World War II, the Supreme Court had said, the normal review of the courts over detention doesn't run out there. That wasn't run outside the country. The second thing is, there's a whole statute that was passed by the President and Congress in October of last year called the Military Commission Act, under which Mr. Hicks is being tried, in fact, and that does provide for a system of procedures and rules and process. They're going to govern. They are different kinds of rules, and I think

that's what people find jarring, because they are not the normal rules of the civilian justice system we see on TV or on law and order every day. But they do have process, and they do have even review in the second highest court in land the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for convictions under these military courts. So I don't think they're on American. I think there is a fair process, and of course, we have to see how they work. We haven't even had the chance to have one full trial yet. If Mr. U really believes that these trials are going to be fair, then that's all the more reason to have them in the United States, where the federal courts can actually review what happens, and not have them abroad in some place where the Constitution doesn't apply. Mr. U says, well, we detained people in World War II in other countries, of course. But we said, in our briefs to the Supreme Court at the time, the government said, the law of those other countries protects these people. Here, the administration is saying, no law protects these people, not the law of Cuba, nor the Constitution. And it's part of the same failed policy. I mean, here we are, five years after 9-11, not a single person has been

tried in these things. The administration says that they'll be outside of the reach of the courts. They were wrong on that. They said that they could detain these people indefinitely. The Supreme Court said they were wrong on that. The administration said that they had no Geneva Convention rights. The Supreme Court said they were wrong on that. This is part of the same kind of thinking. We are going to have to leave it there, Neil Cuttyall, here in Washington, John Yu. Thank you both for being with us. Thanks. Still coming tonight, cars and ethanol, and the Iran standoff. Margaret Warner has our Iran coverage. Four days after Iran seized 15 British sailors and Marines in the Persian Gulf, and took them to Tehran for questioning, Iran showed no sign of backing down from its foreign

ministers' tough words yesterday. The Iranian authorities intercepted these sailors and Marines in Iranian waters and detained them in Iranian waters. The British government says they were in Iraqi waters. Tehran also ratcheted up its defiance this weekend over its nuclear program, saying it would cut back cooperation with the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, the IAEA. Tehran's announcement followed a unanimous UN Security Council vote Saturday imposing additional sanctions on Iran for refusing to halt uranium enrichment. Many in the West believe Iran's nuclear research program is aimed at developing weapons. Tehran maintains its strictly for civilian energy use. The draft resolution received 15 votes in favor. The draft resolution has been adopted unanimously. The resolution wasn't as tough as the United States originally wanted,

but it does ban Iranian armed exports and freezes the overseas assets of 28 people linked to Iran's nuclear program. Acting U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Alejandro Wolff. The reason we are doing this resolution is because Iran continues to refuse to comply. So, as you know, this resolution reiterates the same provisions as we had in 1737, suspension for suspension. As soon as Iran suspends its enrichment activities in a verifiable manner, the council will suspend its actions, and we will be able to address this issue politically again. So, it's not a high bar for Iran to meet. Iran's foreign minister rejected the UN's action. The Security Council is being abused to take an unlawful, unnecessary, and unjustify upon action against the peaceful nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yesterday, European Union Foreign Policy Chief

Javier Solana said the U.S. and Europeans are still ready to talk with Iran if it first suspends its nuclear activities. But Iran's nuclear program continues at three plants around the country, including one at Mushair with assistance from Russia. Construction there was suspended recently in a dispute over whether Iran is paying its bills. And for analysis of Iran's weekend moves, we turn to Abbas Milani, co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. He's also a professor and director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University. He left Iran in 1986. And Cliff Cuppchin, director for Europe and Eurasia at the Eurasia Group, a risk consulting firm. He served in the Clinton State Department, and has met officials in Iran several times in recent years. Welcome to you both, Professor Milani. First, let's take these in order. Let's start with the seizure of the British sailors.

What's behind that? Why did Iran do that? I think their decision has come at the conjunction of several patterns. One is their arrest of a number of Iranians in Iraq. The other one is the defection of a high ranking or the arrest of a high-ranking revolutionary guards. The regime was very worried about what these people might be telling the Western intelligence agencies. Secondly, the revolutionary guards use the same waterways that are the place where this incident took place for a lot of their illicit counterbanned activities. We know that the revolutionary guards are involved in sale of all manners of goods to Iraq and from Iraq to other parts of the Persian Gulf. So, for them, it was a chance to take a political stance and maybe exchange these 15 sailors for their soldiers and their operatives. At the same time, maybe disrupt what was

becoming a very disruptive action by Britain in those waters. Clifcupchins, that how you see it, that at least the revolutionary guard, one would like to do a swap, and two really didn't want these British sailors and Marines looking into what they were doing. Well, I actually have something of a different take. In the first place, I think it was a shot across the bow the day before the UN Security Council vote, scared who they could. Secondly, after President Bush's 10 January speech announcing the surgeon Iraq, which in my mind was really a search about a new speech about a new Iran policy, a very aggressive new Iran policy, we've been kidnapping and the president has reportedly authorized the killing of Iranians in Iraq. I think the Supreme Leader himself said enough stuff. We're going to head back, we're going to take some of our own two complaints this game. And finally, when I'm in Iran and I ask Iranian leaders what they really want, they tell me they want respect. And I say, oh, come on, what do you really want? The answer is

respect. And I think it's time the leader thought to get some respect. So, I think those are my three. Well, Professor, do you accept that that it's a bid for respect? And how do you think it will end? Do you think that Iran will play hardball here until it does get some kind of a prisoner swap? It depends on how the rest of the community, international community plays this. And it also depends on how the possibility of a negotiated settlement on the nuclear issue will evolve. There is talk that Iran has an offer to make. Ahmadinejad claimed to be coming to the UN the trip that did not take place because he says he has a new deal. And there is increasing noise in the background that Mr. Valayati, who is the chief advisor to foreign policy to the spiritual leader, is working on a new proposal on ending the nuclear issue. So, I think the Iranians clearly wanted to increase their cards by holding these 15, but they might have overplayed their hand. And

that too, I think, is part of a pattern that one sees in their behavior. Sometimes they underestimate the reaction that other countries will have to their belligerents and to their illegal actions. How do you think, Cliff Cupching, this incident connects to the nuclear standoff? And do you think the Iranians really thought that something like this would, if they did have another proposal to make that would somehow sweeten the atmosphere or improve the atmosphere for that? Well, I'm not sure the Iranians are interested in a suspension or any proposal. We keep hearing these rumors, you know, I'll believe it when I see it. I think they overplayed their hand as Dr. Melani just said. They certainly scared the Brits, the British. But moreover, they scared their allies, the Russians, and the Chinese. The Russians in cutting off aid to Bushair, the nuclear power plant that they're building for the Iranians. I think decided that

funding for the Iranians, building or navy reactors, is not the best advertisement if you want to break into the Asian and the European market. So, they said, okay, enough's enough. And I think nabbing five Brits is just going to make it that much worse for the Iranians in the Security Council as the nuclear issue proceeds forward. So do you think that the Iranians mean it when they say, and in response to the new sanctions, we are not going to, we're going to limit our cooperation with the IAEA? Well, the Iranians are smart. I mean, I like to say they're more kiss and jerry and than kiss and jerry. And what they did today is they did limit cooperation with the IAEA, but they broke a voluntary 2002 agreement that obligated them to inform the IAEA about new construction sites. So they didn't break their safeguards agreement. They didn't break the NPT, but yet they scared the West even further because they're going to do a lot of stuff having blinded the IAEA in Iran. Professor Milani, what sense do you have of what this new restriction that Iran has announced will do to the IAEA's ability to know what's going on with

the nuclear program? Well, you know, my sense of the regime is that, in fact, strategically, it is not very smart. Technically, it is a smart, as the captions said, but strategically, they keep getting themselves and the Iranian nation in very serious binds. And I think the response that the Russians have given, the response that Russia and China today announced that the Iran should comply, have all indicated to them that they are in a very, very serious bind. And I think an increasing number of the leaders within Iran are beginning to openly and under the current circumstances, it is truly incredible that they would openly talk about it, but they're openly talking about the wisdom of going down the path of confrontation, going down the path of non-negotiation. And those hints, I think, are things are hopeful signs that maybe the regime does indeed, after all of these years of having

promised and not delivered, changes mine and wants to find a negotiated solution to the nuclear problem. Cliff Cuppchin, how do you read what's going on in Tehran? And what impact have the existing sanctions that we're put on in December and also the U.S. has been using its leverage with international banks to squeeze Iran further? What impact has that had, both economically and politically? Well, certainly, biting. The Iranian oil sector is flat as far as production goes and poised to decline. Both the Iranian oil minister and the deputy oil minister have said that. For the average Iranian business, it's much harder to get a Western bank guaranteed loan. I mean, my concern is that we're hitting a lot of Iranians. We're not hitting the right ones. We're not hitting Ahmadinejad's constituency. So while things are getting tighter, while Dr. Melani is correct, dissent is increasing. Though I would note that most of the dissent

is about Ahmadinejad's economic policy and about his style, not about the substance of his nuclear or foreign policy. I haven't seen that yet from the conservative Iranian establishment. So I think there is taking a bite. There is a bite that's being taken out of the Iranian economy. I don't see any sign that it's changing the prize, Iranian nuclear policy. Do you, professor, see any sign that would seem to be pretty much a consensus in Iran, toward Iran's right to pursue this, has been lessened or weakened? I know you said there's some questioning about the way Ahmadinejad is handling his relationship with the West. But in terms of really turning away from that gold, do you see any sign of that? I think if we take the political elite in a larger meaning, not limited to only those who are at the center of power today, and include people who were once in power. People like Mr. Bessad and Abavi, who was the person that signed the release of the hostage agreement with the

United States. If you consider the people who were formed the first government of Iran, the freedom movement, many of these people, including both of these organizations, have declared that Iran needs to rethink its priorities. Iran needs to accept the UN resolution and stop this confrontational attitude. These ideas, these rather daring positions, I think what I've been unimaginable a few months ago, and I think the professor is absolutely the right Ahmadinejad has allowed these people to become more forceful and more forthright, because his ignorance and his endangering of the system and of the country is becoming more and more apparent to not just his opponents, but many of his supporters, including, I suspect, the most important supporter he has, that's Mr. Harmony, this spiritual leader. Supreme Leader. All right, Abbas Milani and Cliff Kupchin, thank you both. Thank you.

The president toured a mini-auto show on the White House lawn today, part of his push to promote alternative fuels. Detroit's big three automakers displayed their latest designs for what are called flexible fuel vehicles. The cars run on alternative fuels such as E85, 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. After a private meeting with the CEOs, the president said it was important for Detroit to build more flexible cars to reduce dependence on imported oil. I found it very interesting that by 2012, 50 percent of the automobiles in America will be flex fuel vehicles. That means that the American consumer will be able to use gasoline or ethanol, depending upon obviously price and convenience. If you want to reduce gasoline usage,

like I believe we need to do so for national security reasons as well as for environmental concerns, the consumer has got to be in a position to make a rational choice. The president is called for a big boost in the use of ethanol. Federal law requires more than 7 billion gallons of gasoline consumption come from renewable fuels by 2012. The president's goal is even higher, 35 billion gallons a year by 2017. But reaching that goal will be difficult. Fewer than 1 percent of the 170,000 fuel stations in the U.S. pumped the E85 blend. Tom LaSorda is CEO of the Chrysler Group. There's about 1,100 pumps available today for ethanol fuel, and we said that needs to be increased across the nation. Not to every station that's out there, but at a level that is competitive, where consumers can drive, let's say, two miles to get that kind of fuel.

The Detroit CEO's say alternative fuels will help improve overall gas mileage. Both the president and the automakers have opposed legislation that would mandate higher fuel economy standards, known as cafe standards. Rick Wagner is the chief executive of General Motors. If the goals are to reduce the growth and the consumption of oil, to reduce oil imports and improve the environment, the opportunity is first of all and ethanol and biodiesel. In Brazil, where President Bush visited earlier this month, most gasoline contains ethanol. But Brazilian ethanol comes from sugar cane while U.S. ethanol comes from corn, partially subsidized, and the favorite of politicians from farm states. Ethanol can be made from other sources such as wood chips and switchgrass. The president has said he'll back funding research for those efforts. For more on ethanol and flex fuel vehicles, I'm joined by Robert Denine of the Renewable Fuels Association, a National Trade Association for the U.S. ethanol industry.

For the record, the Archer Daniels Midland Group, or ADM, sits on the association's board of directors, and ADM is a corporate funder of the news hour and the largest producer of ethanol. Robert Bryce is managing editor of Energy Tribune magazine. He's written several books on the energy business and joins us from Austin, Texas. Bob Denine, let me start with you. Today we heard from the chiefs of some of the largest car companies on the planet, and they were advocating a flexible fuel approach as a way to get us out of our current challenge with oil. Why? Well, look, ethanol today is a blend component in gasoline. Ethanol is used in 46 percent of the nation's fuel, and we can continue to grow that market, and we will, and we should. But if you're going to make a more meaningful impact on the nation's gasoline market, you're going to have to be able to produce ethanol in much larger quantities. You're going to have to have a larger market, more flexible fuel vehicles on the road,

capable of utilizing those vehicles, and a wider distribution for that fuel. But if we're ever going to reduce our dangerous dependence on imported oil, we need to start making the steps today so that we can be there and having more sustainable energy future. Robert Bryce, you heard Bob Denine here in Washington talking about ramping up production capability or ramping up a consumer capability of buying the stuff. Will those things get us to wear the president and the car executives said we ought to be? No, they won't. And it's, you know, what is interesting to me in writing about the energy business and following this issue is how so much of this push for ethanol is, is, is caged in terms of national security and imports and so on and so forth. The reality of the ethanol business now in America is that a lot of this rhetoric is simply being used to propagate more subsidies for this industry. This is, you know, the creation of corn ethanol is simply, it borders on fiscal insanity. We're making subsidized motor fuel out of the single most subsidized crop in America.

That's corn. Second, when you look at the contribution now that corn ethanol is making and ethanol overall to the American oil mix, the ethanol industry produced about 5 billion gallons last year. That's the equivalent of about 200,000 barrels a day of oil equivalent. That's 1% of America's overall energy consumption. If you took all of the corn in America array and converted all of that corn into ethanol, you'd produce about the equivalent of about 1.3 million barrels a day of oil equivalent. That's equal to about 6% of America's total oil consumption. There is this idea somehow that in the renewable fuels association and these other ethanol boosters that America can solve its oil imports and become more energy secure with ethanol, I think it's largely just a canard. This is just cover for propagating more subsidies for this industry. If I can make one other factual correction about what the president said, he said,

by 2012 that 50% of the vehicles in the U.S. will be flex fuel. That's not correct. What I think he meant to say was that half of the vehicles now that the big three will be building will be capable of burning E85. But right now there are something like 250 million vehicles in America, only about 6 million of them can burn E85. What do you mean, how do you respond? Ray, I don't think anybody has said that ethanol is a panacea. That ethanol is going to replace every gallon of gasoline, crude oil that we use in this country. But it is a start. And the fact of the matter is the investment that this nation has made in ethanol is absolutely paying off. Every dollar that the taxpayer has spent to invest in every renewable technology has returned $4 in economic activity throughout the entire economy. Look at what this industry is doing. Last year alone, the five billion gallons of ethanol that we produced created 160,000 jobs. It stimulated more than $46 billion in gross output. From an environmental standpoint,

the five billion gallons of ethanol we produced last year reduced greenhouse gas emissions by some 8 million tons. Ray, that's the equivalent of taking 1.2 million vehicles off the road. It's not everything today, but it is a great foundation for what we as an nation can do with enough commitment. The great ethanol industry that's here today is going to allow for investment in salicy, ethanol conversion technologies. The ethanol industry you see today will be unrecognizable from the industry you'll see five years from now with new feedstocks, new more efficient technologies, and new markets like E85. But if we don't start today with a real commitment, we're never going to get there. Well, the brunt of Mr. Bryce's attack was on the money. Absent those subsidies, would this make any economic sense for farmers for fuel, the big oil-producing companies that are also part of the supply chain for getting E85 into your local gas station? There's no question, but the incentives that are available to oil companies

to blend ethanol have helped to build this industry. But you know what, there is no free market for energy any place in the world. And if we're going to move our nation's economy, at least a bit away from just hydrocarbons and more towards carbohydrates, more towards renewable fuels, we have to have incentives in place to allow that to happen. But the investment that the taxpayer is making is being met by additional investments from private industry. And as our industry grows, you see a lot more capital coming into this industry. And more importantly, you see a lot more intellectual capital coming into the industry as well, that's absolutely revolutionary, revolutionizing the ethanol industry today. How about that, Mr. Bryce, the idea that, yes, there's a subsidy, but it's a necessary sort of seed corn to get the whole thing going, if you'll excuse the metaphor. It's expensive seed corn, Ray. Let me take one point that Mr. Denine made about greenhouse gas emissions. I simply don't buy it. If you look at the net energy gains,

or lack of net energy gains in corn ethanol, it's very much an open question as to whether corn ethanol produces any new net energy at all. There are credible studies that say, in fact, it has a negative net energy balance. If it is just merely break even, and many studies, including studies done by the GAO and the Congressional Research Service, estimate that the greenhouse gas emissions from corn-based ethanol are no better than the greenhouse gas emissions from gasoline. So that is simply a non-starter. Mr. Denine mentioned cellulosic ethanol. Look, this is the equivalent of vaporware in the software industry. We've been talking about cellulosic ethanol for decades. And let me just jump in there. It would be made from waste products, fibers, the leftovers from a lot of agricultural things, the things that we would throw away otherwise rather than the brain itself. And President Bush mentioned switch grasses, which is another item that is constantly brought up as one of the potential feedstocks. Look, it's a great idea, but the problem is that

these plants don't give up their sugar easily. Scientists have been trying to solve this for years. So this idea that suddenly we're going, you know, the problem with Mr. Denine's reasoning, I think, is what is the ultimate goal here? Is it a 1% reduction in America's oil imports? Is it 2%? What is the end goal? And that's where the ethanol industry can never say exactly what it is. Well, let me get a quick response from both of you on just that question. Sure. With conservation, tougher, corporate average fleet efficiency standards or cafe, get you to the same place where you're using corn to make gasoline would get you. Well, I'm not sure it's a neither-or situation, right? I think we need both. We need to be doing everything we possibly can to reduce our energy use through more conservation, but we also need to be doing everything we can to wean ourselves from our dependence on petroleum because of the energy security impacts that that dependence has, because of the environmental implications of oil use, and because of the economic benefits of producing value-added products from our own renewable feedstocks. It's not just vapor, it's real, it's here,

and we need to be doing more of it. I don't know what Mr. Bryce's solutions are. He seems to want to stick his head in the sands in Saudi Arabia and just ignore the problem. We don't want to ignore the problem. Let me get a quick response from Mr. Bryce on what his solutions are. Well, a couple things. One is, what's interesting to me, Mr. Suarez, about why the automakers are on board on this, is that by building E85 vehicles, what they are allowed to do is artificially inflate their cafe numbers. They are actually able to artificially inflate their fleet efficiencies, and that is why they're so pro E85. Last month, US News and World Report estimated that between 2001 and 2008, this cafe credit loophole that they're exploiting is actually resulting in the US burning something on the order of 17 billion gallons of additional fuel than they would otherwise. What are my solutions? It's always the same issue, Mr. Suarez, and Mr. Deneen, it's always the same thing. If we want to reduce oil consumption,

the solution is simple, but politically difficult, and that's a motor fuel tax. It was the solution after the first air boil embargo in 1973, and President Nixon didn't want to do it. The other hard solution, which the automakers clearly don't want, is federal mandates to force them to make more efficient vehicles. They don't want it. Thank you, sir. Thank you. And again, the major developments of this day, the outgoing US ambassador to Iraq, claimed Iraqis are uniting against al-Qaeda. He also said violence in Baghdad is down 25% in recent weeks. The US Senate opened a debate on a war-funding bill that caused for combat troops to leave Iraq by April of 2008, and Australian David Hicks went before a US military court at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on terror charges. A reminder, you can download audio versions of our reports and listen to them on your computer, iPod, or other MP3 player,

to do so, just visit the online news hour at PBS.org. We'll see you online and again here. Tomorrow evening, I'm Jim Lara. Thank you and goodnight. Major funding for the news hour with Jim Lara is provided by the world's demand for energy will never stop, which is why a farmer is growing corn, and a farmer is growing soy, and why ADN is turning these crops into biofuels. The world's demand for energy will never stop, which is why ADN will never stop. We're only getting started. ADM, resourceful by nature. And by Chevron, Pacific Life, the Atlantic Philanthropies, the National Science Foundation, and with the continuing support of these institutions and foundations.

And this program was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you. Good evening, I'm Jim Lara. On the news hour tonight, the news of this Monday,

then the latest on the first military tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, plus the debate about closing it down. The standoff over Iran's nuclear program.