The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, the Supreme Court's decisions on the disabilities act: We have a Jan Crawford Greenburg explanation, followed by a debate on the impact. Charles Krause reports from Kosovo on the U.S. military mission there. Margaret Warner runs a discussion on the lingering right-wrong questions raised by the Kosovo action. And Kwame Holman summarizes the Senate debate on protecting the American steel industry. It all follows our summary of the news this Tuesday.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The U.S. Supreme Court today placed some limits on the Americans With Disabilities Act. In a series of rulings, it said the law did not cover people whose conditions can be corrected with medicine or such things as eyeglasses. The cases involved nearsighted pilots, a sight-impaired truck driver, and a mechanic with high blood pressure. We'll have more on the story right after this News Summary. President Clinton addressed the justness of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. He spoke today at stops in Macedonia and Italy. Betty Ann Bowser has our summary report.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Mr. Clinton's day began in Skopje in a driving rainstorm amid extremely tight security after an anti-NATO group threatened to disrupt the visit. The President and First Lady were greeted by Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov, whose face bears the scars of an assassination attempt. Calling the NATO action a just cause, Mr. Clinton thanked Macedonians for taking in hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees during the air war and for allowing NATO troops to use Macedonia as a staging area. He also announced $12 million in emergency food aid in addition to $72 million already earmarked for Macedonia and pledged to help the country, which broke away from the Yugoslav republic in 1991, recover from the effects of the war. And in the Stenkovac refugee camp, the President talked to about 10,000 refugees.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: We're proud of what we did because we think it's what America stands for: That no one ever, ever should be punished and discriminated against or killed or uprooted because of their religion or their ethnic heritage. And we are honored to be here with you.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Mr. Clinton also warned the remaining refugees not to return home until NATO has had time to remove land mines.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: We are bringing in the best people in the world to take those mines up. Every year the United States does more than half that work all around the world. It is hard work. It is dangerous work. You have suffered enough. I don't want any child hurt. I don't want anyone elseto lose a leg or an arm or a child because of a land mine. So I ask you, please be patient with us. Give us a couple more weeks to take the land mines up if the people here ask to you do that.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: But officials n the camp said most of the refugees will likely ignore the President's plea. Already about 170,000 have returned to Kosovo from Macedonia and Albania, in spite of aid workers' warnings. Then the presidential party went to a NATO staging area for KFOR, the Kosovo peacekeeping force where Mr. Clinton thanked the multinational peacekeepers for fighting for a principal.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: We don't want our children to grow up in a 21st century world where innocent civilians can be hauled off to the slaughter, where children can die en masse, where young boys of military age can be burned alive, where young girls can be raped en masse just for -- to intimidate their families. We don't want our kids to grow up in a world like that. Now what it rides on is not the precision of our bombs, not our power to destroy, but your power to build and to be safe while you're doing it and to protect the ethnic Kosovar Albanians and the ethnic Serbs alike. As long as they are innocent civilians doing nothing wrong, they are entitled to protection. And to try to show by the power of your example, day in and day out, those of you that are going into Kosovo, that people can lay down their hatreds. You need to think about telling your family stories. You need to think about how we can help these people get over this awful, grievous thing.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Then late this afternoon, the President flew to Aviano, Italy, to thank the Americans stationed there who flew and supported the air war.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Now that the conflict has been won, it is imperative that we and our NATO allies and the others working with us win the peace. No one thinks it will take hold without difficulty. As more and more light is shed on those burned villages and even more mass graves than we dared to imagine, we become more and more appalled by the dark vision of Mr. Milosevic, and more and more certain we were right to stop it. We have to win the peace with the same qualities with which you won the conflict, with determination and patience, with discipline and precision.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The President's trip covered five countries in eight days. Tonight he heads home to Washington for an early arrival tomorrow morning.

JIM LEHRER: We'll have more from and about Kosovo later in the program tonight. The Senate today turned away from setting quotas on foreign steel imports. It failed to stop debate on legislation that would have imposed monthly quotas on steel shipments, bringing them down to pre-1997 levels. We'll have more on the story later in the program tonight. An independent nuclear weapons agency may be the only way to assure security at the nation's top secret labs, so said former Senator Warren Rudman today. He chaired a special panel that looked at allegations of Chinese spying at the nuclear facilities. He and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson testified at a joint meeting of four Senate committees today. Richardson agreed changes are needed, but not a separation of the weapons program from his department. Rudman and Richardson had this to say.

WARREN RUDMAN: Because of the overwhelming weight of damning evidence of security failures and the profound responsibility that comes with the stewardship of nuclear weapon technology, it's time to fundamentally restructure in some way the lines of authority so that the weapons labs and their security are in fact job number one within a substantially, in our view, semiautonomous agency.

BILL RICHARDSON: I do have concerns about the creation of the autonomous or semiautonomous entity, especially if we're trying to solve the security and counterintelligence problems at the Department. If you're head of a Cabinet, you should have full authority; you should not have entities under you that might undermine you or have their own separate strength that does not allow you to do your job.

JIM LEHRER: The Senate authorized payment of $1 billion in back dues to the United Nations today. It also limited future U.S. contributions. The bill calls for reducing America's share of the U.N. budget from 25 to 20 percent, and cutting the U.S. portion of peacekeeping operations. It was approved by a 98 to 1 vote. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the Supreme Court's disabilities decisions, a Krause report from Kosovo, the lingering right-wrong Kosovo questions, and the Senate debate on protecting American steel.

FOCUS - DEFINING DISABILITY

JIM LEHRER: Those Supreme Court decisions on the Americans With Disabilities Act, we begin with NewsHour regular Jan Crawford Greenburg, National Legal Affairs Correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.

Jan, there were three cases; one, twin sisters who wanted to be pilots. What are the facts of that case?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: They applied for jobs with United Airlines. They went out for their job interview; they said they were qualified, but when United discovered that they had very poor vision, United declined to hire them.

JIM LEHRER: All right. The next one was a truck driver. What were his facts?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: He actually worked for UPS, United Parcel Service, but when UPS found out that he had high blood pressure that exceeded safety standards, it fired him.

JIM LEHRER: I see. And then there was a mechanic.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Right. The mechanic -- well, he also wanted to drive a truck, and for Albertson's, and when they discovered that he had very poor vision, they also fired him.

JIM LEHRER: Now, in each one of these cases these -- the four people in the three cases because there were twin sisters -- but each one of them claimed that they were discriminated against under the Americans With Disabilities Act. And what did they want done?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: They said that they were qualified for these jobs because they could use corrective measures to correct their impairment and that the companies at issue, United, UPS, and Albertson's, the grocery store chain, had discriminated against them by refusing to hire them or by terminating them.

JIM LEHRER: All right. Now, the court today turned them -- turned them down and ruled with their employers in all three of these cases. On what grounds?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: All right. The court sided with the employers and it said essentially that because they could correct their impairments, they were not disabled under the Americans With Disabilities Act. The court noted and referred to the definition of disability in the Act. According to the Act, disability or to be disabled means that you are substantially limited in a major life activity. The court said that because these people could correct their impairments to the point that they had average eyesight, not very high blood pressure and so on, that they were not disabled, not substantially limited under the law.

JIM LEHRER: Now, are there any other -- this was, of course, would be the court session on disabilities, on the American Disabilities Act. Are there any more cases pending, or is this it?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Well, they had one other case today under the Americans With Disabilities Act, a completely different case, and it looked at what states must do under a different provision of the Disabilities Act, and today the court said that states must for mentally handicapped patients or people put them in the most integrated community settings, instead of leaving them in state mental institutions. But they allowed the states some leeway in that case and said that in states it would be too expensive or would divert from their programs that they did have some leeway.

JIM LEHRER: So those are all the cases that were --

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: The four main cases that came down today, that's right.

JIM LEHRER: Okay. Well, Jan, don't go away.

JIM LEHRER: Now, the impact of the various decisions. Marca Bristo chairs the National Council on Disability and is president of the Access Living in Chicago. And Peter Petesch is an attorney who represents businesses and labor and employment cases. He filed friend of the court briefs in two of the disabilities cases decided today. Mr. Petesch, how significant are these decisions?

PETER PETESCH: Well, they're very significant. We believe that they reflect a sound principled approach, putting some reasonable limits on the pool of persons making demands under these laws. These decisions will enable employers to focus on a much more narrow pool of people, and finally let employers focus on accommodating persons who really do need protections under this law.

JIM LEHRER: What was the situation before? How will this change the world in which businesses and employers generally have to function?

PETER PETESCH: Well, the situation before was a mixed bag. There were decisions going -- running the gamut, interpreting just the threshold issue of who's even protected under this law. There was a perception among employers and certainly the organization that I represented, the Society for Human Resource Management, that perhaps the law was beginning to run amok in an over-broad application.

JIM LEHRER: Covering people that you didn't think should be covered.

PETER PETESCH: Covering persons who were perfectly functional with, for example, their eyeglasses, by taking a pill a day, and what we argued was that that ought to be taken into account -- their glasses -- their medication -- and similarly any adverse side effects of a medical regimen ought to be taken into account too in deciding whether someone is substantially limited. In other words, you should look at the person as they are and not, instead, imagine them as they might be without their medication.

JIM LEHRER: So essentially your side won today?

PETER PETESCH: I think our side won lock, stock, and barrel, but this decision should not be taken as a signal that employers should ignore their obligations under this law. Instead, they should be focusing on training employees not to discriminate against their co-workers with disabilities; they should be making reasonable accommodations for persons who truly need those accommodations in the workplace, and that's a substantial obligation. The Congress said that the law protects 43 million Americans. Had the court decided otherwise perhaps 160 million Americans would have been considered persons with disabilities today, which would be a majority of the working population.

JIM LEHRER: Ms. Bristo, how do you see the impact of this.

MARCA BRISTO: This is a profound and negative impact on millions of Americans with disabilities. We who worked so hard on this law understand disability discriminate and understand that it goes beyond how you function, the way people think about you, the way -- the myths and stereotypes that they carry without regard to your ability to use a wheelchair or take medication is a great deal of the reason why this law was passed in the first place. So we believe that today's decision in a very ironic way underscores the need for the law even more than ever before.

JIM LEHRER: In what way?

MARCA BRISTO: Well, for example, under today's decision we have concern that many people who face the most profound stigma, people with epilepsy, people with psychiatric disorders who have taken steps to treat their disabilities through the use of medication are now being told that if they're discriminated against because of those

myths and stereotypes, not because of anything real in their performance or their ability to do the job, they checked their rights at the door. We believe that essentially many Americans with disabilities have lost their day in court. This is a profound setback and one that, with all due respect to my fellow guests here today, the law's definition has two additional prongs to it, not just the functional limitation, but whether or not people are regarded as having a disability or whether they have a history of having such a disability. When you look at that, which is how, in fact, disability discrimination occurs, the numbers of people with disabilities impacted are way greater than the 43 million that Congress based their findings on.

JIM LEHRER: Well, let's be specific. Let's take -- these cases are easy to understand, unlike a lot of legal cases. The two -- the twin sisters who wanted to be pilots, and they were not allowed to be pilots because of their sight problem; they were near sided. Are you saying they should be included under this?

MARCA BRISTO: In my understanding, though I don't know the people and I'm not a lawyer, the women had been pilots. They weren't trying to become pilots. They had been pilots at another entity and proven their qualifications to serve that purpose. It was the policy that the airlines had that denied them their ability to perform the essential functions of the job. They had already proven it. And that is what I think is such a shame here. People are being denied the opportunity to have their day in court.

JIM LEHRER: What about that, the denial of their day in court, whether or not the court comes down and says okay these two women should or should not get the job, they will not even be able to get to court now?

PETER PETESCH: Well, the court addressed that in a number of ways. Number one, the court said that employers do have a right to set certain physical standards for employment. For example, in the Supreme Court arguments in these cases, some Justices use the example of a baseball team wanting Ted Williams, who had absolutely superior eyesight, to see a baseball and to see a pitch coming sooner than any other hitter could and that enhanced his job performance. But what the court also did was it left -

JIM LEHRER: I'm not sure I follow that. That he somehow was -- what was the point of that?

PETER PETESCH: The point of that was an employer like a baseball team or United Airlines, with these pilots, could set certain physical standards without necessarily being considered as discriminating.

JIM LEHRER: I got that. It's the Ted Williams thing that lost me but we're wasting time on that. Right. Go ahead.

PETER PETESCH: But what the court also did was to discuss the other prong that my fellow guest raised and that is regarded as having a disability. And if an employer engages in a stereotype or an incorrect assumption that a person is in fact substantially limited when they really aren't and when they can perform the job, then that person still may be protected under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

MARCA BRISTO: Please tell us how these women had been able to successfully perform the function of serving as pilots elsewhere. I think it begs the issue and I'd like to come back to Congress and what their intent was. There were millions of Americans with disabilities who used corrective measures, eyeglasses, hearing aids, medications, wheelchairs, prosthetic devices. Does it mean that those of us who seek the highest level of independence through those tools give up our rights? To us, the goals of the Americans With Disabilities Act included equality of opportunity, economic self-sufficiency, inclusion and independence. The court has worked directly against our ability to achieve that. And why should that be important to all Americans? We have the highest unemployment rate of any segment in the American society. It is costing this country enormous dollars. And we finally, finally have begun to address that through the presidential task force on the employment of people with disabilities. So just as the nation is beginning to take a step forward to try to really remove the barriers that keep people with disabilities out, this tool, the one that levels the playing field, is rebuilding that shameful wall of discrimination that George Bush said and promised us was coming tumbling down.

JIM LEHRER: Jan, did these decisions in any way speak directly to the issue of day in court for people who, even though the court said it may not include -- may not cover these folks -- do they have any place to go if they felt that other -- or is it over for them?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Well, there were -- two of the Justices dissented and in one of the opinions today, the court said, well, simply because you can correct your disabilities doesn't mean that you can't ever sue. If you can't fully correct your disabilities or if you wear a prosthetic device but it still impairs your major life activities -

JIM LEHRER: Or you feel discriminated against because of that -

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: No, then you would still be out. It has to limit. And the key point the court made today was that it has to somehow substantially limit you in a major life activity.

MARCA BRISTO: Let me use a perfect example of who will now be cut out. The prime author of the Americans With Disabilities Act who was a Congressman then, Tony Coelho who has epilepsy; Tony testified before Congress on his efforts to become a priest and how the Church, once they learned that he had corrected epilepsy, said no, we don't want you. In the work -- in the private sector, if that we to have occurred yesterday, there was something that Tony and millions of other people with epilepsy could have done about it. Today they cannot.

PETER PETESCH: I'd have to disagree with that because what the court said was that if that employer says we don't want you because you have epilepsy, based on the assumption that that person couldn't do the job when in fact they could, they may still be regarded as having a disability and therefore protected under the law. So once again, employers are certainly not safe in engaging in ignorant stereotypes about disabilities or conditions that may potentially be a disability.

JIM LEHRER: All right. We have to leave it there. Thank you all three very much.

PETER PETESCH: Thank you very much.

FOCUS - RESTORING ORDER

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the work of peace in Kosovo, a still-alive Kosovo debate, and the Senate takes up steel imports.

JIM LEHRER: Charles Krause has the Kosovo peace story. It's about the efforts of one U.S. Army unit.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Yesterday afternoon, U.S. forces entered Skopje, a tiny farming village far from Kosovo's principal cities deep in the American sector. Responding to reports of reprisals and revenge, GI's belonging to one of the Army's elite rapid reaction battalions were rushed in to secure the area. And 11 days after U.S. KFOR forces first entered Kosovo, yet another U.S. peacekeeping mission was underway.

LT. COL. JOSEPH ANDERSON, U.S. Army: There's been everything from larceny to arson to threats of use of force to use of force, shots fired to include people being killed.

CHARLES KRAUSE: 82nd Airborne Task Force Commander Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Anderson whose men took control of Skopje yesterday says the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo is clear.

LT. COL. JOSEPH ANDERSON: To come in and establish law and order, protection and secure key facilities and networks that are critical to the infrastructure of this country.

CHARLES KRAUSE: From the very beginning, KFOR troops have tried to remain evenhanded. They've taken weapons from both Serbs and Kosovars. They've patrolled both Serb and Albanian streets and neighborhoods in Kosovo's cities and they've now begun to establish at least presence in the vast rural areas where thousands of Kosovars were killed and whole villages were destroyed. For KFOR, the first priority was and remains security, making Kosovo safe for both the hundreds of thousands of Albanians who fled and for those Serbs who, so far have chosen to remain. U.S. troops now control the principal border crossing between Macedonia and Kosovo where every car is searched for weapons. For the most part, there's little resistance; indeed, most of those crossing the border are Albanian Kosovar refugees who seem to welcome the increased security.

STAFF SGT. MICHAEL FITZPATRICK, U.S. Army: There's all kinds of reactions. I mean there's people who come in -- I've had people walk up crying and they've been crying as they're walking up. I've had people cross over - you know -- past the booths there, and they get down, and they're kissing the ground. And, basically it's just - you know -- people are really joyous about it, they're going home. And that means the sooner they go home, the sooner I go home.

CHARLES KRAUSE: But it's in the cities where hostilities between Serbs and Albanians are most apparent. And it's here in cities like this Urosevac where the peacekeepers must rebuild trust and confidence if Kosovo is ever to escape its history of ethnic hatred and religious violence. Urosevac is Kosovo's fourth largest city, a farming and light manufacturing center located in the American sector. When U.S. troops first entered Urosevac last week, there were still remnants of the retreating Serb army, as well as Serb paramilitary units responsible for most of the worst civilian atrocities. But the balance of power was shifting quickly. As both U.S. KFOR forces and armed KLA commandos entered Urosevac, it was the city's four to five thousand Serbs who were suddenly fearful. Hundreds waited at the city's train station, desperate and determined to leave. Others sought help from the Americans, begging for food and water and asking for protection.

INTERPRETER: Why are they doing this? If this issupposed to be peace and now they are chasing them out of their homes. Should they leave or should they stay?

SERGEANT: They're going to have to do what they feel is right for them and their family. I can't give you that kind of guidance.

SPOKESMAN: The right security for the whole city.

SERGEANT: We can't post a guard at every single apartment.

SPOKESMAN: We'll notify UNHCR of the plight of these people up here. There is nothing we can do.

SPOKESMAN: The relief agency is moving so slow.

SPOKESMAN: But CARE and UNHCR and other agencies have a responsibility for this city.

CHARLES KRAUSE: U.S. Army Civil Affairs Sergeants Kevin Neil and Danny Green are specially trained for conflict resolution and confidence building. But during those critical days last week, even their best efforts were not usually good enough to reassure the Serbs.

INTERPRETER: She wants to stay but she's scared.

SERGEANT: I understand. We need to know what she's going to do. Does she want to go become into the apartment or not?

SERGEANT: We can talk to the commander and go back there to reoccupy.

INTERPRETER: She says will you go and secure us that we'll be okay if we go home?

SERGEANT: We cannot have a soldier at every apartment in every house. Basically all we need her to know right now because we don't have time to continue, we have many other problems. Does she want back in the apartment to stay or leave?

SERGEANT: We're getting ready to walk away. You can walk away with us and we'll go back to the house or walk away and -

CHARLES KRAUSE: The family decided not to go with Neil and Green. The next morning, they left for Serbia.

CHARLES KRAUSE: There are still people waiting at the train station to leave this place, Serbs. Are there going to be any Serbs left in the city by the time this is over?

SGT. KEVIN NEIL: There are always going to be some people staying. Some people are going to tough it out.

SGT. DANNY GREEN: We think we've got -- out of an estimated population of 4700 -- I think we've got less 500 left.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Serbs?

SGT. DANNY GREEN: Everyone that I've seen -

SGT. KEVIN NEIL: A very rough guess.

SGT. DANNY GREEN: Everyone that I've seen is 60, 70 years old and older and -- old men and old women, they've lived here all their lives and they realize that they may die here, but this is their home. It's unfortunate that we've seen some of them get roughed up. And there's also a population of Rumens or gypsies that are left here. I don't have an estimate on their population, but you can see at the train station that some of them are trying to leave. And since most of them were pro-Serbian, the Albanians are glad to see them go.

CHARLES KRAUSE: The other side of the story, the atrocities committed by the Serbs and the Albanians continued suffering was also evident in Urosevac last week at the hospital. But when Neil and Green first visited, their concern was security.

SPOKESPERSON: They would like you to protect the hospital.

SERGEANT: That's what we were going to suggest.

SPOKESPERSON: From which moment you can start to work here?

SERGEANT: Immediately. But first of all, before we allow our soldiers to come in, when they come here, they need to search the entire hospital to look for any arms or bombs or booby traps.

SPOKESPERSON: Yes, you're free to do -- yes.

SERGEANT: That's something our commanders -- Sergeant Green will be with them the whole time to make sure they are not de-sanitizing anything or destroying any medical equipment or anything like that.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Restoring public services like water, electricity and health care, is a priority for the peacekeepers second only to security. What Neil and Green found at the hospital was probably not very different from the other hospitals which remain in much of Kosovo.

SERGEANT: They have a lot of gunshot, a lot of mine victims, amputations. There was one girl in there who had an amputation of her leg and she is probably going to lose a hand. But the worst thing is she lost a brother. Her brother was killed in the mine because they were running and playing. She's 13. Another girl beside her had her foot amputated and lost an eye. I'd expected things like women dying of childbirth and children getting sick with pneumonia and things like that. But the number one cause of death while they were fighting was starvation. And that really took me by surprise. We saw some cases in this hospital where it almost looked like something out of Auschwitz or Dachau as far as people emaciated.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Still Urosevac has become something of a model. It's viewed as an early success story by the U.S. military. Over the past several days, Urosevac has clearly begun to come alive, shaking off years of violence and hostility and three months of NATO bombing and outright war. But despite the beginnings of recovery here and elsewhere in Kosovo, the situation is still tense, and the biggest perceived threat to security has now shifted from the retreating Serbs to the ascendant KLA.

SOLDIER: Give up your weapon.

CHARLES KRAUSE: In the American sector, U.S. troops have been stopping, searching and disarming KLA guerrillas for most of the past week. Hours before the KLA formally agreed to disarm in stages over the next three months, there was a tense confrontation not far from the American garrison in Vetina that could be read as an ominous sign of things to come.

SOLDIER: We need to look at your vehicle.

INTERPRETER: He says they have no weapons.

MAN: No, no, no.

SOLDIER: Tell him that all his weapons and all his ammunition are coming with me.

INTERPRETER: He said "I don't have weapons."

SOLDIER: Tell him I'm taking that, too.

INTERPRETER: My brother just died at war gave me this -- has gave all this. He died in war and this is -

SOLDIER: Tell him I'm going to check his vest. Tell everybody to get out of the vehicle.

CHARLES KRAUSE: After searching the KLA soldiers and their car , the KFOR American troops found guns, ammunition, and hand grenades. President Clinton's promises today that the United States will ensure Kosovo's safety and help the Kosovars rebuild their lives will in many ways depend on the U.S. Army and the other KFOR peacekeeping forces now in Kosovo. What seems likely is that this war torn and still violent land will require an international military presence for years if not decades into the future.

FOCUS - A JUST WAR?

JIM LEHRER: Now, the enduring questions of right and wrong raised by the Kosovo mission, and to Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER: In his trip to the region today, President Clinton reasserted a moral justification for the war just ended and for the peacekeeping mission now underway. To discuss the ethical dimensions of all this, we're joined by three religious thinkers: Father J. Bryan Hehir, professor of the practice in religion and society at the Harvard Divinity School, he's written widely on the ethics of military conflict. Reverend Jim Lawson, pastor of Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, and chairman of the Fellowship Reconciliation, a worldwide interfaith group. He also hosts a religious talk show on cable television. And Rabbi David Saperstein, head of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, he's also chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Welcome all of you. The President today said on several occasions that NATO was right, that it was a noble endeavor to go to war against the forces of religious persecution, genocide, forced migration. Do you, Rabbi Saperstein, as a religious thinker, do you endorse that basic concept?

RABBI DAVID SAPERSTEIN Margaret, my religious tradition in the mainstream -- as I understand it -of the Christian tradition argues that there are moral uses of force. They should be used only as a last resort, we should pursue peace in every way, but there comes a time when we need to use force for self-defense, for protection of innocent people, for moral values that are so sacred that if deeply threatened we have to react. Amongst those would be the use of force in a case of genocidal activity such as ethnic cleansing. I think the President had a right when he talked about just cause and used that just war terminology, it is a helpful construct. This effort at eviscerating the presence of this group with all the force aimed at them, the massacres that went on, the removal of the entire presence is genocidal activity. It was justified to respond.

MARGARET WARNER: Reverend Lawson, how do you see it? Do you think it was a justified use of military power to stop religiously based persecution?

REV. JIM LAWSON: No war is just. War is still a sin. It is an evil. You cannot overcome one evil with another evil. Certainly from the perspective of Jesus, violence, war and hatred are always unfair, unjust ungodly. In the case of the Kosovo war, we have to remember that in all the wars of this century, it is the women and children who do most of the suffering, become mostly the victims of it, more so than those men who make the decisions to go to war. And there are alternatives to the bombing of Belgrade and Kosovo that the United States never examined and never permitted to come to the surface. This included letting the United Nations be the central international figure handling it, rather than NATO, which could thereby bypass it. In addition, it must be said that we never declared war. And from my point of view of the United States, all wars that we fight, where we the people have never been declared it, are unjust wars. And in addition to that, when we ourselves are not being attacked it is an unjust war.

MARGARET WARNER: Father Hehir, where do you come down on this question?

FATHER J. BRYAN HEHIR: I think that all wars are tragedies but not all wars are sins. Secondly, that makes it possible to distinguish morally right uses of forces -- use of force under certain limited conditions from morally wrong uses of force. Thirdly, I actually think I'd have to differ with Dr. Lawson in the sense that the argument that if you use force in self-defense it's right, but if you use force in defense of others, it's wrong doesn't seem to me to ring true with at least a good part of the Christian tradition where it was originally thought, for example, by St. Augustine that if you used force to defend someone else, it was morally superior to using force to defend yourself. So that in any case it seems to me there was a reason to use force. I think it's possible that other diplomatic initiatives could have been tried ahead of time, as has been indicated, but I also think that in the end, there was here a policy and a personality in Mr. Milosevic that had demonstrated that there was systematicallyplanned destruction of human beings and that needed to be stopped in some form or other.

REV. JIM LAWSON: Of course that ethnic cleansing increased once the bombing began. The year before the bombing on April 20th, only 2,000 people, ethnic Albanians, had been killed. Immediately with the bombing, this escalated radically.

FATHER J. BRYAN HEHIR: I think I would distinguish a couple of things. I think there is no question that there was an escalation in the evacuation and liquidation of the Albanians after the bombing started I do not think that [a] that the bombing caused that to take place. I do think there was a mistake in the strategy that there was no preparation for how rapidly Milosevic would increase what he was already doing -- namely carrying out ethnic cleansing. So there was a problem with the strategy, but it was not primarily a moral problem. It was primarily a problem that the strategy in the beginning was not effective.

MARGARET WARNER: Let me get Rabbi Saperstein back in here. Would you go so far as the President today and in several -- including his interview with Jim ten days ago -- he seemed to almost be saying that the world -- not only it was right to do it -- but almost has a moral obligation whenever it can, whenever it has the means, to actually step in in situations like this -- again, when it's religious and ethnic conflict in another country.

RABBI DAVID SAPERSTEIN: I believe that he's right on that. In Leviticus, it says we shall not stand idly by the blood of our neighbor. We are required to intervene on the behalf of innocents. In the Jewish tradition there is a law about the pursuer. You see a guilty person pursuing an innocent person, you must intervene. I believe that this is an extraordinary moment in human history, Margaret. In the 1990's, we have seen some of the only uses of military force by world powers for overwhelmingly humanitarian causes in Somalia, in Bosnia, in Kosovo,. We didn't intervene for economic benefit; we didn't intervene because of an ideological battle with an ideological enemy. We didn't intervene to expand our land. We intervened for humanitarian causes. It should be done sparingly. We should seek out all other options. But in this sense I think it was a moral use and I'm glad that America is setting a pattern in saying the civilized world should not stand by idly when it sees genocidal activity.

REV. JIM LAWSON: But we are standing by. The Turks are committing ethnic cleansing against the Kurds. We are doing nothing about that. The Indonesians are engaged in ethnic cleansing against East Timor. We are doing nothing about that. So, I do not believe that in this case of the Balkans our motives are altruistic.

RABBI DAVID SAPERSTEIN: But Reverend Lawson, the argument that you cannot do everything everywhere should not be used to justify that you shall not do anything anywhere. That seems to me to be a very difficult moral argument to make.

REV. JIM LAWSON: But can you not establish the processes in international law whereby indeed internationally much more could be done about all of these instances? In the case of Indonesia and the Turkish government, they are our allies, and therefore we are implicated in the ethnic cleansing that is going on at this moment.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Gentlemen, let me get Father Hehir in now on another point that the President raised today. He seemed to be saying that if -- as he put it -- the credibility of the principle for which NATO went to war; that is to stop this religious and ethnic persecution still hung in the balance and it depended on whether or not the post-war Kosovo became a place of reconciliation where these two groups live together or became a place of just revenge and further religious persecution. Do you think there is, in essence, another moral test for the rightness of this conflict?

FATHER J. BRYAN HEHIR: Well, I think to some degree there is although I would not say that the second test can invalidate the first one. In other words, I think you have to judge the military intervention on its own grounds. I think there was reason to do it. I must confess I do not think that the United States has done it in every occasion where it should have. We failed miserably in Rwanda, which was a much larger taking of life than the one in Kosovo. But I do think it was the right thing to do. I think secondly the so-called winning of the peace will bear upon people's conception of how you can intervene effectively. In other words, one of the problems with intervention in the internal affairs of another state is the question of what is morally just and not just to do, and then secondly, what you can do effectively. And I do think that this is a very complicated question we've only started to examine. There are ways in which we may intervene in certain circumstances, I think, simply to stop the killing. That could have been done in Rwanda and was not done. There is secondly, beyond stopping the killing, the building of some kind of civil society -- a much larger and more complicated task. That's what the President was talking about today. And then thirdly, when you seek to build civil society in some of these states that have been collapsed and failed states, you really have to deal with the political economy of the country and not just with its constitution or stopping the killing. This is a very large order, and I think we're going to have a debate in this country about whether we're willing to do any one of these three things . But I think there are clearly times when we ought to do one, clearly stop the killing and there are other times when we should do a good deal more. And I do think we are capable of doing it.

MARGARET WARNER: And, Rabbi?

RABBI DAVID SAPERSTEIN: Well, Margaret, I think there is one other issue on which the three of us would agree and that is on the just means parts. The way this war was waged was really problematic. Just means should correlate with the just cause. It should have been aimed, the means we used should have been more directly aimed at actually stopping the ethnic cleansing as early as possible. It wasn't. We used this high level bombing, on the assumption we could not put our soldiers at risk. And in doing so, it violated as I understand the Christian imperative to actually protect civilians, non-combatants and the Jewish imperative to leave intact as much as possible the civilian infrastructure so that normality of life could resume on all sides after a war. If the lesson we draw from this is that this strategy of this high level bombing is the way we should project our force when we intervene, then I think we may have learned the wrong lesson from here. We need to learn you do intervene sometimes, but you do it in the most limited manner in a way most directed at stopping the evil involved. And I think part of that message has been obscured and lost.

REV. JIM LAWSON: Well, also part of the message is that we've lost the notion that in going to war over the Balkans the NATO countries actually broke international laws in relationship to attacking other countries. We bypassed the United Nations and we bypassed the Geneva Accords over and over again.

MARGARET WARNER: But Reverend Lawson, in a word, if reconciliation were to be brought to Kosovo, would that change your view at all as to whether this war corrected a moral wrong?

REV. JIM LAWSON: Well, my contention is that war never corrects a moral wrong. And my contention is that the suffering -- especially of the women and children in the Balkan area is not worth what may be the reconstruction down the road. Such a reconstruction in the light of the history of the Balkans will be, in fact, a several generational effort.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Gentlemen, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you all very much.

FOCUS - DUMPING STEEL

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, a vote on protections for the steel industry. Kwame Holman reports.

KWAME HOLMAN: It's generally accepted that today's revitalized American steel companies produce some of the best quality steel in the world and at the most competitive prices. But the domestic steel industry has suffered recently. Foreign steel producers, unable to sell in the suffering Asian market, shipped their steel, much of it lower quality, to the United States and sold it illegally at rock bottom prices.

SEN. RICK SANTORUM, [R] Pennsylvania: We have seen the levels of steel rise as far as imports into this country two, three, four, five times the amount from some countries in the past two and a half years, and it continues.

KWAME HOLMAN: Today, Pennsylvania Republican Rick Santorum led a charge of steel state Senators hoping to slap quotas on steel imports to give domestic producers a chance to rebound. Republican Mike DeWine is from Ohio, the state that now produces more steel than any other.

SEN. MIKE DE WINE, [R] Ohio: It is estimated, Mr. President, that 10,000 steel workers have already lost their jobs, and the independent steel workers predict job losses of as many as 165,000 if steel dumping is not stopped. Mr. President, it is time for the United States Senate to take action.

KWAME HOLMAN: West Virginia's two Democratic Senators also joined in urging that their colleagues do what the House did overwhelmingly in March: Approve quotas on foreign steel, limiting imports to pre-crisis levels. But Delaware's William Roth, chairman of the Finance Committee, warned against taking that action.

SEN. WILLIAM ROTH, Chairman, Finance Committee: If we decide to go down the path of quotas, we must also keep in mind that the price ultimately will be paid by the American consumer. By raising the average price of products made with steel, the quota constitutes an artificial tax on ordinary Americans, regardless of wealth or income. Keep in mind that the tax will not be insignificant. According to the Institute of International Economic Study, the bill will at most save 1,700 jobs in the steel industry, but will do so at a cost of the economy of about $800,000 a job.

KWAME HOLMAN: A parade of farm state Senators followed Roth to the floor, predicting their constituents would be harmed if steel quotas are levied.

SEN. DON NICKLES, [R] Oklahoma: Well, if we put in arbitrary quotas on what we are going to import, a lot of other countries are going to retaliate, and they have a right to do so under the WTO. We are going to be violating the trade laws that we've agreed to, and there's going to be a response. And Senator Grassley just mentioned the biggest response is going to be against agriculture.

SEN. CHARLES GRASSLEY, [R] Iowa: Agriculture is perhaps the most vulnerable sector of our economy to foreign retaliation, and our trading partners know it. Retaliation is not a thing of the past. It is a hard-ball tactic that frequently is used as an instrument of national policy.

SEN. KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON, [R] Texas: I want to vote for this bill, but I can't. I want to because I think part of the steel industry has a legitimate case, but I can't because voting for this bill would make it worse than the relief that they seek.

KWAME HOLMAN: Today's scheduled vote was only the first step in determining the fate of the steel quota bill. 60 votes were needed to move ahead to full debate and West Virginia's Rockefeller urged his colleagues to do that.

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER, [D] West Virginia: Please, this is the motion to proceed. We traditionally are fair about these things. If there's a complex subject, steel is only produced in 16 states in a major way. A lot of people have a lot to learn, and we are not voting on the quota bill. We are voting on the motion to proceed to simply talk about it.

KWAME HOLMAN: Delaware Democrat Joseph Biden, for one, was convinced to go along.

SEN. JOSEPH BIDEN, [D] Delaware: I'm going to vote to proceed, in the hope that between now and the time we vote on this bill, that the administration and others understand there's a need for an answer. This is not the answer. I would vote against the bill but I will vote to proceed.

KWAME HOLMAN: It was Majority Leader Trent Lott who agreed to allow supporters of steel quotas to bring the procedural vote to the floor.

SEN. TRENT LOTT: But don't fool yourself. This is not an inconsequential vote. Don't be saying, "oh, we can vote for this on a motion to proceed and then you can vote against it later on." In order to go forward, the proponents have to get 60 votes today, but only 51 tomorrow. So I urge my colleagues, don't say, "well, I'll give them the procedural vote." What you may be giving them is something that would be very dangerous, because then we could be voting on the substance itself.

KWAME HOLMAN: Despite the overwhelming support the steel quota bill received in the House, President Clinton said he would have no choice but to veto it if passed the Senate as well. Commerce Secretary William Daley tried to preempt today's vote by lobbying Senators on the Hill yesterday, promising a full investigation of steel dumping and threatening tariffs against violators.

CLERK: Mr. Coverdale, no.

KWAME HOLMAN: But as Senators cast their votes, it became apparent quota supporters would not reach the 60 votes needed to proceed.

CLERK: Mr. Smith of Oregon, no.

KWAME HOLMAN: In fact, they failed even to attract a majority.

SPOKESMAN: On this vote the yeas 42. The nays are 57. The motion is not agreed to.

KWAME HOLMAN: Senators Moynihan of New York and Roth of Delaware called today's vote a major reaffirmation of 50 years of American trade policy. Steel state Senators said they would regroup and try to devise another way to help the steel industry.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Tuesday: The Supreme Court ruled the Americans With Disabilities Act did not cover conditions that could be corrected. In the Balkans, President Clinton told U.S. troops they should be proud of the American role in Kosovo. He urged Kosovar refugees not to return until land mines had been disarmed. And the Senate authorized payment of an overdue debt of $1 billion to the United Nations. We'll see you online, and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you, and good night.