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JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, the news of the day, a look at where the search for Iraq's much- alleged weapons of mass destruction now stands, a report on NASA's coming attempt to find signs of life on Mars, a conversation about health care with democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, and a celebration of sir Edmund Hillary's conquest of Mt. Everest 50 years ago today. Major funding for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is provided by can you paint something beautiful with sunflowers, drive forever on corn? If you ask the right questions, nature will answer.
NEWS SUMMARY
JIM LEHRER: Another U.S. Soldier was killed in Iraq today. His convoy was hit by a rocket- propelled grenade just north of Baghdad. In all, nine U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq this week in attacks and accidents. The commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq blamed the violence today on those he called "enemies whose future is gone."
LT. GEN. DAVID D. MC KIERNAN: They were part of Saddam Hussein's regime. They were tied to him. The rest of the Iraqi population knows that they were thugs under his regime, and they know and if Iraqi population knows that they have no future in this country. That's who is attacking. That's who will we will destroy.
JIM LEHRER: General McKiernan confirmed the army's third infantry division would stay in Iraq until it's no longer needed to improve security. The division led the charge on Baghdad during the war, and had been scheduled to return home next month. In all, some 160,000 U.S. and British troops are now deployed in Iraq. There is no evidence Saddam Hussein was in a Baghdad house when it was bombed the first night of the war. A U.S. Army colonel investigating the site said today there was no sign of bodies or bunkers. The U.S. fired 40 Cruise missiles into the building the night of March 20, hoping to kill Saddam and his sons at the outset. The new Palestinian prime minister said today he is close to getting the militant group Hamas to stop attacks on Israel. Mahmoud Abbas said the group might agree to a cease-fire next week. Hamas said in turn, Israel must halt military operations in Gaza and the West Bank. Abbas met with Israeli Prime Minister Sharon again today. They were expected to focus on security and Palestinian statehood. Microsoft agreed today to pay $750 million to AOL/Time Warner. It's part of a settlement in an antitrust lawsuit against the software giant. The suit accused Microsoft of shutting out competitors to its international browser software. As part of the settlement, Microsoft will let AOL/Time Warner license that software for seven years. On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost nearly 82 points to close at 8711. The NASDAQ rose more than 11 points to close at nearly 1575. A 13-year-old Dallas boy won the national spelling bee in Washington today. Sai Gunturi is an eighth-grader. He beat out 250 other contestants by spelling a word that means indifferent or nonchalant.
SAI GUNTURUI: Pococurante, p-o-c-o-c-u-r-a-n-t-e, pococurante?
ANNOUNCER: You're looking at the 2003 national spelling bee champion.
JIM LEHRER: The winner gets $12,000 and other prizes. Bob Hope turned 100 years old today. The famed comedian remained at his Los Angeles home, but there were birthday celebrations around the country. Military veterans honored him for his years entertaining troops overseas, from the Second World War to the first Gulf War. Hope was last seen in public several years ago. He is in frail health and no longer able to communicate. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the so-far fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, looking for life on Mars, Kucinich on health care, and the Mt. Everest anniversary.
UPDATE -WHERE ARE THE WEAPONS?
JIM LEHRER: Margaret Warner has our Iraq story.
COLIN POWELL: What you're about to hear is a conversation that my government monitored.
MARGARET WARNER: A defining moment in the Bush administration's case for war came in early February, when Secretary of State Colin Powell shared phone intercepts and other intelligence with the U.N. Security Council and the world.
COLIN POWELL: Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.
MARGARET WARNER: At one point, he displayed satellite photos of facilities he said were being used to house chemical weapons.
COLIN POWELL: Now look at the picture on the right. You are now looking at two of those sanitized bunkers. The signature vehicles are gone. The tents are gone. It's been cleaned up.
MARGARET WARNER: And, he said, Iraq's weapons activity continues.
COLIN POWELL: We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors.
MARGARET WARNER: The intelligence was challenged by some skeptics in Congress and elsewhere.
SEN. ROBERT BYRD: The case that this administration tries to make to justify its fixation with war is tainted by charges of falsified documents and circumstantial evidence. This is not a war of necessity, but a war of choice.
MARGARET WARNER: But on the eve of war, President Bush repeated the charge.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH (March 17): Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.
MARGARET WARNER: When U.S. troops entered Iraq in mid-March, so did weapons search teams, working from a list of scores of suspect sites identified by U.S. Intelligence. But despite several early, promising leads, the teams came up empty-handed. One suspect site held pesticide instead of chemical weapons. Another held medicines and munitions, but little more. And senior Iraqi scientists, who surrendered or were captured, continued to maintain that Iraq no longer had any weapons of mass destruction. There's one piece of evidence the administration still cites: Three tractor trailer trucks found in northern Iraq. CIA officials say they are "strikingly similar" to the description of mobile weapons labs provided by a defecting Iraqi engineer. Yesterday, in a report posted on its web site, the agency said an examination of the trucks showed "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program." But, the CIA acknowledged, no actual weapons were found in them. At Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's suggestion, the CIA has begun a study comparing intelligence given to the president before the war with what's being gathered in Iraq now. And on Tuesday, Rumsfeld suggested for the first time that Saddam's regime may have destroyed its illegal weapons before the war.
DONALD RUMSFELD: It is also possiblethat they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict. And I don't know the answer, and I suspect we'll find out a lot more information as we go along and keep interrogating people.
MARGARET WARNER: In an upcoming issue of "Vanity Fair," Rumsfeld's top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, is quoted talking about the administration's public case for war. "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."
The debate has also generated controversy for the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was in Iraq today. The BBC reported that Blair's office rewrote an intelligence dossier to say, for example, that Iraq could activate its chem-bio weapons in just 45 minutes. Blair's office rejected the charge, but the BBC said a parliamentary committee has launched an inquiry into Blair's pre-war claims.
MARGARET WARNER: So was the intelligence about Iraq's weapons program wrong or oversold? To discuss that, we're joined by James Schlesinger, former secretary of defense and CIA Director during the Nixon and Ford administrations. He sits on the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Secretary Rumsfeld. Richard Perle, former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. He's also a member of the Defense Policy Board. Judith Yaphe, a 20-year CIA Analyst who specialized in the Middle East. She's now a senior research fellow at the National Defense University in Washington. And David Albright, who worked with U.N. Inspectors on Iraq in the mid '90s. He's now president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. Welcome to you all. So, Richard Perle, did either the intelligence or the administration readers of that intelligence overstate the state of Saddam Hussein's weapons program?
RICHARD PERLE: I think what drove the administration to the conclusion that we were right in our concern about Saddam's weapons was the work of the United Nations' inspectors who left in 1998. And when they left they detailed the holdings: Anthrax, VX nerve agent, and a variety of other weapons of mass destruction. And Saddam never accounted for them. He refused to explain what had happened to those weapons. They claimed they didn't exist. But they could not verify, they could not explain what had happened to them. So that was the fundamental basis for our belief that he had weapons of mass destruction, coupled with the evidence that he had a very large organization whose purpose it was to conceal those very weapons. And that included communications among members of those organizations hiding those weapons. So the case was very powerful indeed.
MARGARET WARNER: A powerful case or oversold?
JUDITH YAPHE: I think there was power in a sense that there was a pattern. We knew that throughout the '90s even when there were UNSCOM inspections that Iraq was trying to smuggle in components. For example, UNSCOM in 1995 found centrifuges in the Tigris and warehouses in Jordan taken from Russian missiles that were supposed to be destroyed. The point is there was a pattern of activity of trying to bring things in, of trying to rebuild, of trying to study, but I don't think we know yet what the state was. I would make one point, however, which is that... which is why these intelligence studies, the post mortems are so important. You do a post mortem as a matter of course after any major event to examine your sources, what went right, what went wrong, who could we rely on, whose information turned out to be totally wrong or self-serving or for whatever reasons. And in the process I think we need to look at who was telling us what and also when you say intelligence, that has to be broken down into component parts. So, yes, the CIA has to look at its sources, NSA, DIA, and also whatever the component intelligence component in the Pentagon was doing. I would like to know who set up what kind of intelligence and interpretation because I think that I'd like to know what those who are more professional were saying and those who may have had a different reason for looking at these items at the intelligence, what conclusions they drew and why were they different.
MARGARET WARNER: David Albright, does it look to you as whether it was the intelligence or the consumers of the intelligence that something was wrong here, that something fundamental has not been borne out?
DAVID ALBRIGHT: I think something wrong happened, some bad analysis was done. I think there certainly was suspicion in 1998 even about nuclear weapons. And there was a belief that Iraq would try to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program. But what happened over time is that I think there was a politicization that happened and that people particularly at high levels started selecting information that tended to benefit what they were trying to accomplish. And so I think that there probably was a wide variety of beliefs and analysis within the intelligence communities, but I do think that the policy makers chose information, presented it to the public and Congress. In that, they were overselling.
RICHARD PERLE: Do you have some examples of that? This charge is made all the time. I'd like to see some concrete examples.
DAVID ALBRIGHT: The example of where the aluminum tubes that were posited as only usable in the gas centrifuge program -- I actually learned about that case almost two years ago. There was a very intense debate about the use of the tubes, but it wasn't by any means certain what the actual use was, but when Vice President Cheney and Condoleezza Rice went out on TV, they sided clearly with the side that said these tubes are only for centrifuges and moreover, it shows that Iraq is close to nuclear weapons and we have to act now.
RICHARD PERLE: Some of us happen to think that the evidence was pretty impressive that these were intended for nuclear purposes.
DAVID ALBRIGHT: But many didn't think that. Centrifuge experts in this country didn't think that evidence was impressive.
RICHARD PERLE: And other experts thought it was.
DAVID ALBRIGHT: Well, then that division should have been presented; that's all I would say.
RICHARD PERLE: I think it was.
MARGARET WARNER: Let me get Secretary Schlesinger in this. What's your take on all of this?
JAMES SCHLESINGER: Well, I think that much of what has been said is right on the mark, as Richard has indicated. As we came out of 1991, 1992, there was an overwhelming body of hard evidence that they had been engaged in biological and chemical activities and indeed had tried for nuclear. There was a ton of analysis that was done, but in the period after 1998, we've been basically on our own.
MARGARET WARNER: Which was after the inspectors had left.
JAMES SCHLESINGER: And the inspectors had left, and there was a ton of analysis done. There were indicators that they were active in attempting to procure relevant materials. And as a result the analysis that was done was pretty good. But people in the intelligence community were very cautious, and they said this is what we saw in the early '90s, this is what we speculate to be true based on the additional indicators that we've had. I think that intelligence was quite good overall, and we must remember that overall intelligence includes the assessment of the fighting capacity of the Iraqi forces on which the intelligence was remarkably good and outside critics were remarkably bad.
MARGARET WARNER: But are you saying then though that you do think that perhaps the consumers of the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction misread it -- or were too quick to connect the dots in a way that they wanted to connect, whether consciously or unconsciously?
JAMES SCHLESINGER: I think that Secretary Wolfowitz had it right. There were bureaucratic reasons that they centered down on weapons of mass destruction as the only common reason for going ahead. But there were more powerful reasons to go ahead. If one thinks back to 9/11 and thinks in what shape the United States was at that time, we have repaired our relations with Russia and China, and we have scored two decisive victories in the Middle East that have made a major impression in the region. Those are powerful reasons to go ahead, and one should not focus exclusively on weapons of mass destruction.
JUDITH YAPHE: There are a couple of misconceptions here. One is that intelligence shapes policy. It doesn't. The second one is that policy uses intelligence. That doesn't happen either. So you can have the best, most accurate intelligence available, but the people who are in charge of the government, the president, the National Security Council, the advisors, they have to decide if they want to use it or not, believe it or not or discard it.
MARGARET WARNER: Judith Yaphe, there were a number of stories saying people in the intelligence community, particularly the CIA felt pressured by the Defense Department and the administration to not skew the intelligence but to present the case for war. Do you have former colleagues who felt that way?
JUDITH YAPHE: Well, I don't want to exactly go down that road. I don't believe in betraying confidences or talking out of the schoolhouse, but I think that it is pretty widely known that there is a high level of uncomfortability in terms of politicization is a difficult word. I think that there was a lot of and analytic integrity. I think Jim might appreciate this given what his position once was as the director of Central Intelligence, there's good news and bad news. It's good news to have a director who is trusted by the president, is a friend of his and is appointed. I'd use dead examples. For example, Bill Casey and Ronald Reagan -- there's a danger if you have someone who is a professional but... and knows the business and what you can do but is not trusted by the president -- someone like Richard Helms and Richard Nixon, so the question is how much will you be trusted, how useful but how close to policy should intelligence be? I'm of a school that says that director of central intelligence shouldn't be sitting in making the policy. He is out there to provide intelligence. It's the policy maker who decides what the issue should be and where the policy goes.
JAMES SCHLESINGER: There probably was pressure, but that pressure was firmly resisted within the intelligence community.
MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let's let --
JUDITH YAPHE: I wouldn't want to go that far, Jim.
DAVID ALBRIGHT: I would disagree.
JUDITH YAPHE: That's still....
DAVID ALBRIGHT: Because mistakes were made.
RICHARD PERLE: There were a lot of mistakes made including among intelligence analysts who ignored whole bodies of material because they were pursuing a theory, and the material was inconsistent with the theory. And this charge of politicization which is aimed at the Department of Defense is totally without merit. What I think we're talking about here is the fact that four people-- four people in the Defense Department-- were asked to review material that had been collected by other intelligence organizations with a view to seeing whether there were connections in there that had been missed in previous examinations. That is not politicization. That is not pressure. And the fact is that they established beyond any doubt that there were connections that had gone unnoticed in previous intelligence analysis. And the analysts who had failed to notice those connections went to the press and started complaining about politicization, and there was none.
MARGARET WARNER: You wanted to jump in here.
DAVID ALBRIGHT: It's on a different....
MARGARET WARNER: Let me ask you a question because believe it or not, we're lm out of time. Do you think that part of the problem David Albright could have been too that it relied a great deal on defectors who themselves, many of whom, had a political agenda, i.e., there were they were Iraqis
DAVID ALBRIGHT: There seemed to be in the last couple of years more of a reliance on human defectors and the INC produced a lot of them. We had been reviewing INC defector information for years and often found it deeply flawed. And we knew that a lot of those people and they do have an agenda. It was regime change, very much opposed to inspections because inspections work, no regime change, and they skewed a lot of information. We would see that when we evaluate their information. Some would be almost ludicrous technically.
JAMES SCHLESINGER: But the CIA resisted the information from the outsiders and particularly from the INC. The thing to bear in mind is that the intelligence review that Secretary Rumsfeld referred to has gone ahead and it has reviewed all of the intelligence that has come in and the CIA analysts were very cautious in what they said. They said, "this is what we know. This is what there are indicators but they are no more than indicators."
DAVID ALBRIGHT: Traditionally I agree with that. But I think there was another set of players that were accepting this information in the last couple years much more than in the previous ten years.
JUDITH YAPHE: Politicization is when a policy maker, a policy prescriptive office does its own intelligence analysis. To me that is politicization.
RICHARD PERLE: That's complete nonsense. I mean you're saying that senior officials can't, if they're not satisfied with the product they're getting, go out and look for other intelligence.
JUDITH YAPHE: Why aren't they satisfied with the product?
RICHARD PERLE: Because it was deficient. That's why. The intelligence we're talking about now.
JUDTIH YAPHE: No, Richard.
RICHARD PERLE: Was a stubborn refusal.
JUDITH YAPHE: I will stubbornly say no.
RICHARD PERLE: Can I finish
JUDITH YAPHE: Please do.
RICHARD PERLE: To recognize that Saddam Hussein's intelligence apparatus had links with a number of terrorist organizations, and that has now been established beyond a doubt.
JUDITH YAPHE: No, that was not the issue. I'm sorry.
MARGARET WARNER: Do you think it was deficient?
RICHARD PERLE: On the weapons we were basing judgments largely on the discrepancy between what the United Nations documented and what Saddam was able to explain. He couldn't explain what had happened to large quantities of weapons and it was reasonable to assume that because he couldn't explain, they were hidden, especially since we observed a lot of activity of a hiding nature, people talking about moving things and the like.
DAVID ALBRIGHT: But the inspectors never said... they said it's unaccounted for. The administration made a jump to saying if it's unaccounted for it's there. That's a decision. The inspectors didn't make that decision as a body.
RICHARD PERLE: When you're responsible for protecting the country you have to make a judgment. You can either say, well, it's unaccounted for so let's pretend it doesn't exist or you can say it's unaccounted for and it would be dangerous to ignore it. The administration did the latter. It was the right thing to do.
DAVID ALBRIGHT: But it was wrong.
JAMES SCHLESINGER: On the question of politicization I have never yet seen a senior government official who does not make his own interpretation of the evidence that comes in, and that is what he should do. The community presents the intelligence on the basis of his own experience, his contacts with foreign leaders, he comes to his own judgment.
MARGARET WARNER: That has to be the last word. Thank you all four.
JUDITH YAPHE: Well said, Jim.
MARGARET WARNER: Thank you. Continued later.
JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight: Is there life on Mars?; Kucinich on health care; and a breathtaking 50th anniversary.
FOCUS - DESTINATION MARS
JIM LEHRER: NASA is about to launch its search for signs of life on Mars; Jeffrey Kaye of KCET-Los Angeles reports.
JEFFREY KAYE: It's been nearly six years since the pathfinder rover, named "Sojourner" rolled onto the surface of Mars to send back pictures, weather reports and geological data. Now, the next generation of rovers is scheduled for another geological field trip. The teams working on the Mars rovers' expeditions are building on experience gained during that 1997 pathfinder mission. However, this project is much more complex; the rovers more sophisticated. Joy Crisp is the rover project scientist.
JOY CRISP, Mars Rover Project Scientist: We cannot do things the way we did on pathfinder, which was just jump in and go at it. You know, we really need to give it thought ahead of time, because it's complicated. We have a short amount of time each day to come up with what the rover should do the next day. And we want to make really good choices. We don't want to be doing it just on the fly.
JEFFREY KAYE: NASA's planners got a sobering dose of reality in 1998 with two unsuccessful Mars missions. An orbiter was destroyed because of a miscalculation. A lander failed to transmit radio signals back to earth. Firouz Naderi heads NASA's Mars exploration programs at JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
FIROUZ NADERI: It seems that we pushed too far in '98 in terms of what we were trying to accomplish with how much resources we're trying to accomplish. So that gave us a chance to sit back and reassess the Mars program, and be somewhat more measured about how we would go about doing this.
JEFFREY KAYE: If things go as planned, in January, three weeks apart after a seven-month trip, twin robots will parachute from their respective spacecraft at two separate sites. They'll bounce to a stop encased in airbags. After they're unwrapped and unfolded, they'll drive off their mother landing crafts to explore the Martian terrain. The $800 million missions are being managed for NASA by JPL, which is near Pasadena, California. Here, engineers and scientists have been running tests on duplicates of the machines that will land on Mars. The rovers are in pursuit of signs of ancient life.
FIROUZ NADERI: So we're looking for life, and it's difficult, you know, to just stumble on it, so you look for water as a proxy for life. The grand strategy for Mars exploration... we call it "Follow the Water."
JEFFREY KAYE: Water is a condition for life as we know it. Many scientists believe that what is now a dry, dusty planet was once very wet. One of the landing sites, the Meridiani Plateau, has minerals commonly associated with water. The other, the giant Gusev Crater, halfway around Mars, may have once held a lake. Scientists think the lake was fed by water flowing through a massive channel.
JOY CRISP: What it looks like is that water ponded in that crater, and should have deposited lake deposits, water lane deposits. And for us on Mars, that's, for Mars scientists, that's a gold mine. If we can find water-lane sediments, that would be an important find.
JEFFREY KAYE: Why?
JOY CRISP: Because that may be an environment that could have harbored life.
JEFFREY KAYE: The rovers themselves are solar-powered, mobile geologists. Each is a 375-pound, six-wheeled lab, loaded with gear designed to photograph, collect, analyze, and grind Martian rocks. Rick Welch, the flight system chief engineer, helped design the rovers. During the missions, navigators on earth will be guided by panoramic images the rovers transmit.
JEFFREY KAYE: So what's it doing now?
RICK WELCH, Flight Rover Chief Engineer: Right now, it's going to do a sun find.
JEFFREY KAYE: Locating the sun helps orient the rover.
JEFFREY KAYE: This is the panoramic camera...
RICK WELCH: That's correct.
JEFFREY KAYE: ...At the top, and it does a lot more than just look for the sun, right?
RICK WELCH: Right. Those cameras can be used for all of our big science panoramas, and there are four cameras that are up there. They're in stereo pairs. Just like a human eye has two, to be able to determine range to objects, there are two science cameras, which have filter wheels in front of them that provide the color imagery for geology. And then the ones nearer to the center of the mast, the navigation cameras, they have a wider field of view and are better for planning our mobility and traverses on Mars.
JEFFREY KAYE: Cameras mounted on the front and back are also used for driving. Crisp, who is geologist, says the robots are designed to operate much as human field researchers do.
JOY CRISP: And there are things like, on the end of the robotic arms, there's a microscopic imager which is like a hand lens, which is like a hand lens that a geologist uses. So when I'm out in the field, I usually will take a rock hammer with me and crack open a rock to get a fresh look at the interior, because you can see the mineral shapes and textures better that way, and then look at it close up. And you can identify, oftentimes, you can identify minerals that way. On the rover, we have a rock abrasion tool on the end of the robotic arm. And that is like a rock hammer, so it gets us inside the rock, about a half a centimeter, grinds away the outer part of the rock, and gets at that interior, and then we can look at it with a microscopic imager. There are also chemical analyzers and mineralogical analyzers on the end of that robotic arm that tell us what minerals are present and in what amounts.
JEFFREY KAYE: The rovers are programmed to move slowly and cautiously, during what engineers hope will be 90-day life spans.
RICK WELCH: When it's doing autonomous navigation, because it has to take images and actually sense the terrain and actually determine whether there's a hazard out there, it will actually take up to a minute to determine whether it's safe to take its next step, and then it moves in small steps just like the "Sojourner" rover did on Mars. So, actually, in a given day, we probably won't drive more than, say, twenty or thirty meters in a given day. And that makes for the total mission that we may get several hundred meters away from the landing site.
JEFFREY KAYE: "Caution" is the watchword, not only of the latest mission, but of NASA's Mars exploration program. Despite enthusiasm for the latest Mars expedition, there are some in the space community who say NASA could be doing even better planning. There are calls to make the U.S. space exploration program more focused on the eventual goal of landing human beings on Mars.
LOUIS FRIEDMAN, Planetary Society: We should be headed toward doing robotic outposts at Mars, to building the infrastructure necessary to support human missions.
JEFFREY KAYE: Louis Friedman is executive director of The Planetary Society, an international organization that promotes space exploration and research. Friedman, an engineer who once headed JPL's Mars program, says NASA should be working methodically to send humans to explore Mars.
LOUIS FRIEDMAN: For example, a goal on this very Mars mission, or at least the next one, could be the survey of two, and selection of two or three candidate landing sites for humans on Mars. And that, then we could begin to choose those places, based on scientific and technical considerations.
JEFFREY KAYE: But NASA's mission is more modest. The space agency has no stated goal of landing humans on Mars. One reason for caution, says Naderi, is the mixed record of Mars missions.
FIROUZ NADERI: Two-thirds of the missions that we have sent to Mars, have not been successful, so the batting average is only about a third; good in baseball, but not good in planetary system.
JEFFREY KAYE: Difficult or not, Mars is turning out to be a popular destination. NASA currently has two orbiters mapping the planet, and plans at least four more Mars missions over the next eight years. In addition, a Japanese orbiter should reach Mars in January. And on Monday, the European Space Agency is planning to launch a Mars-bound spacecraft and lander.
JIM LEHRER: After several delays, the first rover launch now is scheduled for June 8.
SERIES - CANDIDATES' RX
JIM LEHRER: Now, another conversation with the Democratic presidential candidates on health care, and to Ray Suarez.
RAY SUAREZ: Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio outlined earlier this month a universal health-care plan he's termed "Medicare For All." The Kucinich plan would be a government-run program that eliminates private health insurers, and buys prescription drugs in bulk at a cost of $2.2 trillion a year once fully implemented by 2013. In order to pay for the program, Kucinich proposes a 7.7 percent tax on public and private employers, and removes $245 billion in business tax deduction. Congressman Kucinich, welcome to the program.
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Thank you very much.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, we gave some basic outlines. Would the country ramp up into full coverage, or is this something that would be phased in over time?
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, it would have to be phased in. The fact of the matter is, though, when you consider that the current health-care system, which is market-based, excludes so many people from health care, when you understand it's 41 million Americans don't have any health insurance, millions more who have health insurance can't get the kind of services they need, this health care system is failing most of the country. And my plan, which is guaranteed universal health care, single- payer Medicare for all, is a step in a direction of finally bringing some healing to the health of this nation, and I'm proud. And I'm the only candidate who has actually offered this kind of a plan.
RAY SUAREZ: And the total price tag is? And how would you pay for it?
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, it would be paid for... when it's fully phased in, the cost would be $2.2 trillion. And it would be paid for by 7.7 percent tax paid by employers. Actually, employers right now are paying 8.5 percent, so it would save employers money, besides guaranteeing a healthier work force. Currently, there's over a trillion dollars in the health care system from local, state and federal sources. Today, Americans are paying for universal health care. They're just not getting it. They're not getting it, because insurance companies are guaranteed to be able to jack up the price of health care with the paperwork transactions they have. You know, with the handling of Medicare, about a 3 percent cost for administration, the private sector, the cost of administration is something like 18 percent, which means that there's a massive amount of money that's in that system that is taken out as profit that can in effect go to the benefit of the health of the nation, and that's what my plan will do.
RAY SUAREZ: Employers listening to this program might recoil a little. They hear you talking about a 7.7 percent tax, a loss of the tax deduction that they get for employer-provided programs. But are you saying that they might end up breaking even in the end?
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, let's look at it this way. Every employer out there understands they're at the mercy of the insurance companies as well. As the premiums go up and the co-pays go up, the deductibles go up and the range of services are contracted, employers are having more tensions at work over health care than almost any other issue. My plan would result in employers being greatly benefited, because it would enable them to pay actually less than they pay now, 7.7 percent as opposed to 8.5 percent. It would assure a more productive workforce because the workforce would be healthier, because when they needed health services they'd get it. And it would end the employers being held captive by the insurance companies. So this ends up being a real benefit for our economy, for the employers, and certainly for those millions and millions of Americans who are desiring to have a health-care plan that will meet their needs. But with the private sector running health care in this country, not much of a chance that will happen.
RAY SUAREZ: During your campaign you've been saying you want to take the private industry out of health care and take the profit motive out of health care. If you do that, how do you answer those concerns that are often raised during universal care debates about maintaining quality for those people who are getting the care now?
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, the fact of the matter is that quality is not always related directly to price. I mean, there are many people right now paying a high premium for their health care and are not necessarily getting the quality of care. They're not improving the access to care for those people. My plan would assure the greatest quality of all, because we'd be focusing solely on building up the present system, providing the broadest range of services available, making sure that people could get mental health care, makingsure that people could get prescription drugs, making sure that people could get preventive medicine. And all of these things will be included in one system with a single payer. This would enable Americans to achieve higher quality of health because, first of all, they have more access to it; and secondly, because it's all handled by one institution, the government of the United States.
RAY SUAREZ: But with a plan like yours, the 40-plus million people, who at one time or another during the year don't have health care coverage, are undoubtedly better off. But what do you say to the other 220 million to reassure them that they don't have to lose something in order to get their fellow citizens covered?
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Every American family knows that the insurance companies are ripping off the American people with respect to health care. The fact of the matter is there's discussions in American homes every day where somebody's sick, they need to go to a hospital, and then people have to think, "well, do we have the money for someone to be able to get well?" And you know, in this country, with so many resources, it's absolutely immoral that anyone should be deprived of health care because they don't have the money. The fact of the matter is, that no family, no matter how well- off you are, can be assured that you'll have enough money to cover a sickness in the family. As a matter of fact, only universal health care will protect those American families who want to hold on to their home, who want to hold on to the ability to have a college education for their children, who want to make sure that if something happens and they're out of work they still have basic health care coverage. This is the only way that we'll make sure that our people are truly protected. And that's what it's about. Health care ought to be about the people. You know, we provide police protection at a local level, fire protection, city services are such that people understand that there's... that government means something; there's a reason for government to exist. And I contest that health care is the fundamental reason and cause for the existence of government itself, because health care is something that is a basic right in a democratic society. So my plan responds not only to that hope, but it responds to the fact that our system of health care is failing the American people. And I want to see guaranteed universal single-payer health care for all, and that's what the Medicare For All plan is all about.
RAY SUAREZ: But if you're elected and you start to try to sell this plan, don't you have to radically change the terms of the debate given where it's at now in the Congress and the kind of plans that people are proposing today?
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, I'm the only candidate, it's true, who is willing to say, "Look, the private sector market-based health care excludes too many people, drives up the cost of health care, makes it impossible to get the care they need. That's why we need single-payer health care managed by the government." I mean, that's what works. The other candidates are saying, "Well, if we only give tax cuts or tax breaks to employers, that's going to help the system." You know, and they don't provide for people out of work, or their coverage is limited. We've already talked about proposals like that. They don't take us anywhere except keeping the same rotten system in place, which is denying people the health care they need. My plan, on the other hand, will make sure that everyone is covered at all times, universal coverage, highest quality of care, making sure not only our children, but our elderly, are covered, providing a prescription drug benefit so our senior citizens aren't reduced to splitting their pills in order to keep their prescriptions lasting because the costs of them are going up so high. You know, this is a requirement of compassion in our society. I mean, what do we have a government for, if not to truly meet the needs of our people?
RAY SUAREZ: Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, thanks for being with us.
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Thank you very much.
JIM LEHRER: We'll hear from more of the Democratic candidates next week.
FOCUS - TOP OF THE WORLD
JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, hiking to Mt. Everest, the top of the world, 50 years after it was first accomplished. Kwame Holman begins with some background.
KWAME HOLMAN: Towering 29,035 feet, it is the top of the world. And it was on this day at 11:30 A.M. In 1953 that Edmund Hillary and his Nepalese sherpa guide, Tenzing Norgay, made history, becoming the first climbers to conquer Mount Everest, as seen in the "National Geographic" documentary "surviving Everest." It took 16 days via the southeast ridge route. After raising his ice axe on top of the mountain the Nepalese call Sagarmatha, or goddess of the universe, Tenzing was elevated to godlike status among the sherpa people. And Hillary, a beekeeper from New Zealand, became a mountaineering icon. Since that day 50 years ago, 10,000 climbers have tried to summit the mountain many call "The Big E," but only about 1,200 men and women have succeeded. The mountain was named in 1859 after sir George Everest, the British surveyor general of India who originally called it "Peak XV" when he recorded its location. In 1924, George Mallory and a British team set out to be the first to reach the highest point on earth, but he and another climber vanished near the summit. Mallory's body was discovered in 1999 on a rock ledge 2,000 feet from the summit. More than 175 mountaineers have died trying make the treacherous trek to the top. The worst single loss came in May 1996 when a storm on the mountain claimed a dozen lives. 83-year-old sir Edmund Hillary, knighted by queen Elizabeth in 1953, was in Nepal for the 50th anniversary celebrations this week.
SIR EDMUND HILLARY: Well, what can I say? It's been a wonderful morning, and we say our thanks to you, and our thanks to Nepal.
KWAME HOLMAN: Hillary's affection for the sherpa people led him to help build hospitals and schools, and bring other improvements to the isolated villages of the Solo Khumbu region of Nepal. While the 27,000 tourists who visit the base of Everest every year provide a source of revenue for the region, concerns have been raised about their environmental impact. At a press conference this week, Hillary suggested the mountain be closed to new expeditions.
SIR EDMUND HILLARY: Just sitting around in a big base camp and knocking back cans of beer, I don't particularly regard as mountaineering.
KWAME HOLMAN: Hillary also said he hoped he could one day again climb the mountain he conquered five decades ago.
SIR EDMUND HILLARY: I'm hoping in years to come, despite my advanced years, that with the use of a bit of oxygen and a good helicopter pilot-- and we do have a good helicopter pilot-- that we will return back up to the Kumu area.
KWAME HOLMAN: Two U.S. Expeditions were expected to try for the summit today.
JIM LEHRER: Now, some 50th anniversary perspective from Stacy Allison, the first American woman to reach the top of Mount Everest. She did it in 1988. And Bill Allen,editor-in-chief of "National Geographic" Magazine, which has just published a special issue on sir Hillary's achievement. Bill Allen, why was what Edmund Hillary did considered so extraordinary?
BILL ALLEN: One thing that really stands out is that it was the magic of Everest. It was the failures to conquer Everest, as it were, that really gave it its mystique. Human beings are always associated with looking at the highest, the deepest, the widest, the longest; and this was one of those things. You can't go any higher on this planet. You know, it's the highest stage in the world and the dramas are always bigger if they're on Everest.
JIM LEHRER: Now, what did Hillary bring to it that nobody else did? What was special about him?
BILL ALLEN: He was extraordinarily conditioned. He made a wonderful selection of grandparents to give him the genetics that he could possibly stand that. He was determined, and he had a wonderful-- the ideal-- climbing partner in Tenzing Norgay. Tenzing was the most experienced climber that they had on the entire expedition. And Hillary was an ox of a man, so strong that he could just by his own strength of will and his muscular strength force his way up.
JIM LEHRER: In looking back on it, does it seem like a natural thing that Edmund Hillary would have been the first one now? When you look at all the people who tried before he did and then he did it?
BILL ALLEN: Well, it's very difficult to say because here's someone who is so self-effacing, that it really doesn't seem in character with a swashbuckler who would work their way to the top of the world's tallest mountain. Here is someone who measures his own life as much by who he has helped as how high he has climbed.
JIM LEHRER: Stacy Allison, you did your number in 1988. Why? Why did you want to go to the top of Mount Everest?
STACY ALLISON: For me, there were a couple of reasons. First of all I wanted to know if I was mentally and physically tough enough to make it to the top. I wanted to know what it would be like to stand on top of the world. Of course....
JIM LEHRER: Excuse me. You were already a climber? I mean you already did this kind of thing.
STACY ALLISON: Yes, I had climbed for 12 years all over the world. I was a very experienced, very technical climber. And we had been trying to get the first American woman to the top for about nine years, I think, before I attempted the mountain. It got to the point where I thought also, well, why not me? I mean, you know, we better get somebody to the top. Why not me?
JIM LEHRER: Okay. Now, you got to the top. What was it like? Describe it.
STACY ALLISON: Standing on the top is very exhilarating. It's purely emotional. You worked so hard, so long....
JIM LEHRER: We're showing a picture of you by the way that was taken at the top while you're talking. Keep talking, okay. The audience is seeing you stand there.
STACY ALLISON: I felt a swell of emotion rise from my feet all the way up to my head, and I wanted to hug somebody. This is an experience that you want to turn around and you want to share it with someone. Unfortunately when I turned around, there was no one there for me to share it with. I initially stood on top by myself -- 15 minutes later, a sherpa stood on top with me. His joy was a joy for me to watch.
JIM LEHRER: Who was he? He was your guide, somebody who was with you?
STACY ALLISON: He wasn't a guide. He was a sherpa. This was his first time on the top of Everest. Our expedition was a group of climbers. We hired 26 sherpas, some of them were base camp cooks. Some of them helped us carry loads of food and equipment on the mountain. Now back in 1988 the climbers actually set the route themselves. We set all the ropes and ladders on the mountain. We set up all of our camps and from what I understand, of course, that has changed today where the sherpas do the majority of the work and the climbers come to base camp with all the route primarily fixed, all the camps set up for you.
JIM LEHRER: Was it a... was it a fearful excursion up the mountain? I mean, were you afraid? We know... you've told us what it was like at the top. What was it like getting there?
STACY ALLISON: The Khumbu Ice Fall the first 2,000 feet out of base camp is... climbers refer to it as the mouth of death. It's a glacier that flows down the mountain. It drops over a cliff, a 2,000- foot cliff. It flows like a waterfall about three or four feet down the mountain a day. Huge ice towers can tumble down without warning, huge crevasses or slots in the ground. You have to get over the crevasses; you have to get up and around the huge towers. That was the most dangerous, frightening part for me. I felt like a deer during hunting season with my ears alert and constantly looking around. The rest of the climb is fairly easy. I'm talking about technically easy. Again, one of the most difficult parts is just human physiology -- what your individual physiology is like when you go higher on the mountain.
JIM LEHRER: You mean your ability to breathe at high altitudes, that sort of thing.
STACY ALLISON: Your ability to function and function well. Certainly there's high altitude sicknesses, edema, cereal edema, pulmonary edema where your lung and brain fills with excess liquid. It's debilitating and deadly if you don't get off the mountain. Your heart rate... I don't think my heart rate was under 90 when I was on the mountain and certainly when I was exerting myself it was well over 100, and then the daily stress, day after day after day of stressful situations.
JIM LEHRER: How many days were you... did it take you to get up there?
STACY ALLISON: Twenty-nine days. It took us 29 days before I stood on top.
JIM LEHRER: How many days did it take you to get down?
STACY ALLISON: I went from 26,000 feet to the summit and all the way back down to 21,000 feet in one day.
JIM LEHRER: Oh wow! Go ahead and finish.
STACY ALLISON: Go ahead.
JIM LEHRER: I was just going to ask Bill Allen, Stacy Allison did in 1988, there have been 12 Kwame said in the set-up piece there was been 1200 people or more who have done it total since Edmund Hillary and his guide did it. Why do people still want to do it now?
BILL ALLEN: It's a way to test yourself, to test whether you are tough enough, whether your mind is tough enough, whether you're physically fit enough to do this. There's also something that when people look at you from then on, it's always, "this is Stacy Allison, comma, the woman who was the first to climb Everest, period." It's like winning a Nobel Prize. You're forever afterwards known as a Nobel Laureate. You're forever afterwards known as someone who cried Everest.
JIM LEHRER: Is that true with you, Stacy Allison? Has it changed your life since you did that?
STACY ALLISON: It certainly has opened up doors for me, yes. I mean, I've done a lot of things that I would not have done if I had not climbed Everest. You bet.
JIM LEHRER: Do you feel that's your identity now?
STACY ALLISON: (Laughing).
JIM LEHRER: I'm not... that's not a facetious question.
STACY ALLISON: It's a very good question. To my immediate friends and my family absolutely not. It's not my identity. However I'm a motivational business speaker. When I go out and I'm presenting in front of an audience, in front of a corporation, that's my identity. That is who I am, and why I'm in front of these people.
JIM LEHRER: Do you think people, Bill Allen, will continue to do this forever as long as Mount Everest is there and it will be there forever, there will always be people who want to go to the top?
BILL ALLEN: Absolutely. I don't think that there's any question about that. There are only a few challenges that are left on this planet. That is one. It is always going to be there. Going to the deepest part of the ocean is another. It's just something that human beings are looking for challenges, and there are some people who are able to rise to the occasion and meet it.
JIM LEHRER: Do you share Hillary's concern that too many people means a despoiled environment there on the mountain and around the mountain.
BILL ALLEN: There's a chance of always doing that in the same way that the national parks in this country are being loved to death. But I think there are also efforts through the sons of Hillary and Barry Bishop on our staff who is on our staff, they're going up to clean up that. I think there are a lot of efforts to clean up the stuff from the previous expeditions on Everest.
JIM LEHRER: Mr. Allen and Stacy Allison, thank you both very much.
STACY ALLISON: Thank you.
BILL ALLEN: Thank you.
RECAP
JIM LEHRER: And, again, the other major developments of this day: Another U.S. soldier was killed in Iraq. His convoy was hit by a rocket- propelled grenade just north of Baghdad. The coalition ground commander in Iraq confirmed the U.S. Army's third infantry division would stay in Iraq until security improves. And Bob Hope turned 100 years old. Tonight's edition of Front Line World features two war stories, one from northern Iraq, another from Vietnam among other things. Please check your local listings for the time. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening with Mark Shields and David Brooks among others. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.
Series
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Producing Organization
NewsHour Productions
Contributing Organization
NewsHour Productions (Washington, District of Columbia)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/507-445h98zx68
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Episode Description
This episode's headline: Where are the Weapons; Destination Mars; Series - Candidates' RX; Top of the World. ANCHOR: JIM LEHRER; GUESTS: RICHARD PERLE; JUDITH YAPHE; DAVID ALBRIGHT; JAMES SCHLESINGER; REP. DENNIS KUCINICH; STACY ALLISAON; BILL ALLEN;CORRESPONDENTS: KWAME HOLMAN; RAY SUAREZ; SPENCER MICHELS; MARGARET WARNER; GWEN IFILL; TERENCE SMITH; KWAME HOLMAN
Date
2003-05-29
Asset type
Episode
Topics
History
Technology
War and Conflict
Nature
Science
Military Forces and Armaments
Politics and Government
Rights
Copyright NewsHour Productions, LLC. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode)
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01:03:49
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Producing Organization: NewsHour Productions
AAPB Contributor Holdings
NewsHour Productions
Identifier: NH-7639 (NH Show Code)
Format: Betacam: SP
Generation: Preservation
Duration: 01:00:00;00
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Citations
Chicago: “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” 2003-05-29, NewsHour Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed January 5, 2025, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-445h98zx68.
MLA: “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” 2003-05-29. NewsHour Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. January 5, 2025. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-445h98zx68>.
APA: The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Boston, MA: NewsHour Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-445h98zx68