The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

MARGARET WARNER: Good evening. I'm Margaret Warner. Jim Lehrer is on vacation. On the NewsHour tonight: Our summary of the news; then, the life and legacy of Yasser Arafat; an update on the fighting in Fallujah; the controversial tenure of Attorney General John Ashcroft; and a Veterans Day conversation with author Joseph Persico on the end of World War I.

NEWS SUMMARY

MARGARET WARNER: Palestinians mourned President Yasser Arafat today. He died early this morning at a military hospital in Paris. Hours later, his body began the final journey home. We have a report narrated by Paul Davies of Independent Television News.

SPOKESPERSON: Mr. Yasser Arafat... (speaking French)

PAUL DAVIES: With this short statement, the French hospital confirmed that Yasser Arafat died at 2:30 this morning. A short time later, a hearse arrived. This was a moment the authorities here had expected and had planned for. At Arafat's headquarter in Ramallah, flags were lowered as people contemplated life without the man who came to symbolize the Palestinian cause and led his people for more than 40 years. Crowds gathered to salute their dead president-- scenes that were repeated in Gaza.

SAEB EREKAT, Palestinian Cabinet Minister: Arafat's legacy will be the one, the leader, the president that united the Palestinian people, the leader who kept the Palestinian national identity from extinction.

PAUL DAVIES: From the Israeli government, a different view:

YOSEF LAPID, Israeli Justice Minister: He was the godfather of al-Qaida, and now perhaps we have a new opportunity to start talk with Palestinians who genuinely want to have peace.

PAUL DAVIES: Yasser Arafat's chair was empty as the PLO leadership swore in the officials who will now lead them through this difficult transitional period. First, of course, there is Arafat's funeral. Bulldozers have been clearing the site in Ramallah where it's thought his body will rest after a ceremonial funeral in Cairo on Friday. The dead president will be buried in a concrete coffin that can be moved to Jerusalem if agreements with the Israelis can ever be reached.

MARGARET WARNER: The new Palestinian leaders include men who've supported and opposed peace with Israel. The Palestine Liberation Organization elected Mahmoud Abbas as its new chairman. He guided the secret negotiations that led to the 1993 Oslo agreement, and served briefly as Palestinian prime minister last year. Farouk Kaddoumi will take over as head of Arafat's Fatah movement, the main faction within the PLO. He rejected the Oslo Accord, and remains in exile. For now, the speaker of the Palestinian legislature will act as interim president of the Palestinian Authority until elections can be held in 60 days. Reaction to Arafat's death came from around the world today. In Jerusalem, Arafat's longtime foe, Israeli Prime Minister Sharon, called it an "historic turning point in the Middle East." He did not mention Arafat directly. In Washington, President Bush issued a statement expressing condolences to the Palestinian people. He added: "We hope that the future will bring an independent, democratic Palestine that is at peace with its neighbors." And in New York, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan directed his comments to the Palestinian people.

KOFI ANNAN: I think the best legacy that his people can leave for him is to engage constructively and peacefully with the international community and the Israeli government and people to make that dream a dream of two states living side by side in peace and reality.

MARGARET WARNER: We'll have more on Arafat's life and legacy right after this News Summary. In Iraq today, U.S. forces mounted a major assault into southern Fallujah, opening a second phase in the offensive that began Monday. Air strikes and heavy artillery pounded the area, and U.S. soldiers and Marines pushed south of a major highway dividing the city. Some northern neighborhoods were turned over to Iraqi troops, as U.S. forces moved on. U.S. commanders dramatically increased their estimate of the number of insurgents killed so far to 600. The U.S. Military also updated the allied casualty figures today. It said 18 American soldiers and Marines have been killed so far in the Fallujah assault, with 178 wounded. Five Iraqi soldiers have been killed, and thirty-four wounded. There was no estimate of civilian casualties. We'll have more on the Fallujah assault later in the program. In other parts of Iraq today, insurgents escalated their attacks. A car bomb exploded in central Baghdad, killing at least 17 people and wounded at least 20. Rescuers pulled the dead and wounded from a dozen burning cars. To the North, in Mosul, gunmen raided nine police stations, set cars on fire, and fought running battles with Iraqi troops. The U.S. Military denied reports that rebels now control parts of that city. This was Veterans Day in the U.S., and the nation paid tribute to all who have served in the military. President Bush laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns, at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington. He said tomorrow's veterans are fighting now in Iraq. "They are making us proud," he said, adding, "and they are winning." On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 84 points to close well above 10,469. The NASDAQ rose more than 26 points to close at 2,061. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to: An assessment of Yasser Arafat; a Fallujah update; Ashcroft's tenure at justice; and a book conversation.

FOCUS - ARAFAT LEGACY

MARGARET WARNER: Ray Suarez begins our look at Yasser Arafat.

RAY SUAREZ: To both his followers and his foes, Arafat was for more than three decades the symbol of Palestinian nationalism. He was one of the founders in the late 1960s of the violent Palestinian resistance against Israel. But 20 years later, he renounced terrorism and turned to diplomacy to try to achieve a Palestinian state. He talked to Jim Lehrer from his Tunis headquarters in 1989.

JIM LEHRER: Just so there's no misunderstanding again, you have... you no longer want to destroy Israel; is that correct?

YASSER ARAFAT: We said "two states solution." We knew that when we accepted 181. It is now their role. It is now the ball in their side. They have to reply. Are they actually accepting what we had declared or not? But when we are speaking about two states solutions, this means Arab Palestinian state and Jewish state, according to United Nations Resolution 181-- not only Jewish state. And for the Israelis, they have to go to hell. We are human beings. And we have the right to live as all other people are living all over the world. We are fed up to be rats, only for snipings and for killing in the air raids, in the fighting, in the naval raids, in the shelling, in the... through the assassination, as had been done last year with deputy, my brother, Ab Jehad... and you remember two years before, three years before, an attempt to kill me by one of the Israeli air raids here in Tunisia. We are all human beings, and we are looking for our new generations to live peacefully, freely in their land, as all other children all over the world.

RAY SUAREZ: The peace accord signed with the Israelis on the White House lawn in September 1993 brought him a Nobel Peace Prize, along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. But after the collapse of the Camp David negotiations in 2000, Palestinians launched another armed uprising against Israel, and the Israelis blamed Arafat for the violence. In the four years since, more than 3,000 Palestinians and nearly 1,000 Israelis have been killed in armed clashes and by suicide bombers. And in the last two-and-a-half years of his life, Arafat was isolated by the Israelis in his West Bank compound in Ramallah. His body will be returned there for burial on Friday, and Palestinian officials said they hope to turn the rubble strewn area into a shrine.

MARGARET WARNER: For more on Yasser Arafat, his significance and his legacy we're joined by Martin Indyk, U.S. Ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration; he's now director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor of peace and development at the University of Maryland. He's written widely on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Meyrav Wurmser, director of the Center for Middle East policy at the Hudson Institute in Washington. We hope to be joined momentarily by Rashid Khalidi, director of the Middle East institute at Columbia University and author of "Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness." Welcome to you all.

Shibley Telhami, what kind of a leader was Yasser Arafat?

SHIBLEY TELHAMI: Well, he was a man who propelled the Palestinian cause on a world stage, and he made it an international conventional wisdom that a Palestinian state is a necessity for international security. He's also the man, oddly enough, who legitimized Israel in the Arab world more than any other leader. He's a man who was married to the cause and the good part of that is he sacrificed himself for the cause, but the bad part of that was he found it very hard in the end to separate what's good for him from what's good for the cause.

MARGARET WARNER: What's your assessment, Meyrav Wurmser, of his life and his contribution?

MEYRAV WURMSER, Hudson Institute: I think as far as his contribution goes, he certainly was the most important player as far as putting the Palestinian national identity on the international map goes. However, I find him to be one of the more destructive forces all at the same time, a man that really amounted to a great paradox. There is no question that he was very much a symbol for his people of the liberation. He also became a great tool of their oppression, corruption. I mean, he turned their semi-state into rather than being an example of the best that it can become, a part of the Arab world with its corruption, with its dictatorship, with its very bad governance.

MARGARET WARNER: Martin Indyk, do you also see him as a paradox?

MARTIN INDYK: Yes, in a slightly different way. He's -- no doubt he will go down in history for what he did to put the Palestinian cause on the international agenda. But he in effect seared the cause into the consciousness of the world through the innovation of terrorism. And, in the process, he certainly achieved something for the Palestinians, but then the other side of it is the kind of tragic side is that he was unable to make the transition from this revolutionary struggle for the cause of Palestine to the statesman that would lead his people to peace with Israel and an independent Palestinian state. And the ultimate tragedy is that when he had the opportunity to become the president of the independent state of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, he missed that opportunity. And now instead of being buried in Jerusalem that would be under Palestinian sovereignty, he finds himself laid to rest in that compound in Ramallah, which became the symbol of his decline into isolation and in effect the kind of irrelevance in terms of the way in which the rest of the world treated him through the last three years.

MARGARET WARNER: Rashid Khalidi, I understand you're there in New York. I see you now. Thanks for joining us. We're just going around for the first time just basically... everyone's giving their assessment of what kind of a leader he was.

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, I think it's unfortunate that the assessments that we tend to hear of Arafat are so colored by one version of the last few years. He's a man who's had a career that spans the better part of half a century. And the two major achievements that I think are to his credit should probably not be entirely dimmed by whatever maybe said about his last five or ten years. He was a person who more than any single other individual rebuilt the Palestinian national movement after Palestinians decided it was completely shattered by the catastrophe of 1948. More than half the Palestinian people were driven from their homes and lost everything they had. And they had no political center. Arafat and his colleagues gave them that. He then took a movement which was committed to extremist, maximalist, unrealistic programs and moved it to political compromise, moved it to a position where it was advocating a two-state solution, a Palestinian state and a small fraction, 22, 23 percent of the land that the Palestinians consider their homeland, side by side with Israel. Whatever has happened in the last ten or fifteen years, I think has to be set against those indubitable achievements.

MARGARET WARNER: Shibley Telhami, do you - and we heard an interview, and Professor Khalidi you didn't hear this, but in which Jim Lehrer interviewed him in Tunis in 1989, and he said he accepted the two-state solution. He accepted Israel's right to exist. Yet, many of his critics felt he never really did and that was behind his inability to make the deal and make the compromise as necessary. What's your view of that?

SHIBLEY TELHAMI: I believe he actually accepted them. I really do. I think problem even if you look back at the period that led to the collapse of the Camp David negotiations, history is going to pass judgment on what happened. And I think it's far more complicated that we're allowing ourselves to analyze in the short period after that. I think clearly he mismanaged it. But there were a lot of people who were responsible for the failure, as well, I think including on our side the American side also, the Israelis; I think, in the end, thebiggest problem that emerged was not so much how he negotiated and whether he didn't accept or accepted what was offered at Camp David. I think the biggest problem was that he at least believed, after the Intifada started, I think spontaneously...

MARGARET WARNER: The second one?

SHIBLEY TELHAMI: The second one in the fall of 2000, he did believe, because of the Palestinian weakness, there was a judgment that violence is an instrument that could help because he did believe that the Israelis were trying... they thought the Palestinians were helpless. By virtue of doing that, he sent a signal that was received differently by the Israelis. And that in a way shattered the entire package of Oslo. So in that sense that was a strategic mistake that contributed to an emerging assessment of him, both by the Israelis and everyone else, not, I think... I believe he was capable, I still believe he was capable of concluding a deal.

MARGARET WARNER: And that's how the Israelis saw him, is that right, Ms. Wurmser, that he had decided to use violence as a lever, even though he was publicly saying that he was committed to ending it?

MEYRAV WURMSER: No. It depends first of all what Israelis you're talking to.

MARGARET WARNER: I guess I should say the government in power at the time.

MEYRAV WURMSER: But I think that the opinion at the time was indeed this. Over time it had changed. People in Israel started realizing that Arafat was not using violence as a tactic. He was about violence. It wasn't something that he used as the last resort or as, you know, a change of course. He was about that. When we started reading Palestinian textbooks, when we started watching his speeches to the Palestinian people, when we look at the legacy that this man had left for his people, when we see these people well after Oslo yelling Jihad, we only know that one word, Jihad, Jihad, Jihad, Jihad, like we did...

MARGARET WARNER: Let me interrupts you. So, in other words, going back to Rashid Khalidi's point or assertion that he had made this major step, recognizing the need for two states, you think that was not really true, that he was still connected to the destruction of Israel?

MEYRAV WURMSER: That's exactly it. I think that he had made a tactical step in recognizing the state of Israel. He realized it will get him what he needed. I don't think he actually ever changed.

MARGARET WARNER: Martin Indyk, let me get your view on this. I mean, you dealt with him for a long time. You're a great student of that part of the world. You were certainly involved at the time of the Camp David Accords. I don't want to get into an argument about whether the deal was good or not, but what is your view about why he was unable to step up to the challenge and opportunity that that six-month period at the end of 2000 with both President Clinton and Ehud Barak so eager or ready to make a compromise, why couldn't he step up to that and do what had to be done?

MARTIN INDYK: Well, you know, we were told throughout this period that the reason we needed to do the deal with Arafat, and the Arab leaders were particularly strong on this, was that he was the only one who would be able to make the compromises necessary to bring off the deal. And we operated on that assumption, but when it came to the crunch, it turned out that he wasn't prepared to do that. And there are some specific reasons at the time, I think, which is a little hard to go into at this time, but the more strategic reasons, I think, lie in the fact in something that Rashid said: He was a man who unified all of the factions of the Palestinians. That was his great claim to leadership. He was a consensus builder. He was never prepared to confront those, even those who bitterly opposed his way forward. It was against his very nature and against his politics. And at the same time, he was... he still saw value in using violence to achieve his objectives, even though I do think that his objective was a two-state solution by that stage. So when it came to the critical moment when essentially he had to make a choice, he had to decide whether he was going to stand up in front of his people and tell them that in particular the refugees were not going to be going home back to their homes in Palestine before Israel was created, but that instead they were going to get sovereignty over Arab East Jerusalem and the Haram al-Sharif, that instead of standing up in front of them and saying, this is a good deal, you should accept it, he preferred to punts, to listen to those people who whispered in his ear that President Bush would get him a better deal. And that in a sense is part of the tragic nature of this man; that he was in many ways all tactics, and he would make tactical calculations: Get up in the morning, check which way the wind was blowing and set his sail accordingly. And so at that critical moment when he had to make a decision, Shimon Peres used to say that history is like a horse galloping past your window and you have to decide whether to jump on or not; he had to make that historic decision at that moment -- not so simple to jump on a galloping horse out of a window. But that was the challenge that he had to face. And instead of facing up to it, being encouraged to do that, he decided to go with the consensus, not to break consensus, not to compromise on a critical issue for the Palestinians. And as a result, he missed the moment and his people are wallowing in misery as a consequence.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor Khalidi, I know you're trying to get in here. Go right ahead. What's your view of this, really again not about the ins and outs of the Camp David deal, but about him as a man and leader and why he couldn't make this leap?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, I think couldn't make the leap -- brings us to the kind of micro history which ends up with blaming the victim, the weakest party is being accused of all kinds of sins here. I think looking too obsessively at Camp David, looking too obsessively at that juncture begs the question of why we were in the last few months of a 96-month Clinton presidency for the first time in the history of the conflict opening up the hardest issues in the entire range of international diplomacy, Palestinian refugees, water, Jerusalem, borders, sovereignty. None of these things were touched in the first 90 months that President Clinton was in office. And during that period, when Arafat did exactly what Martin claims he did not do, when Arafat took a leap of faith, went along with Prime Minister Rabin, went along with first President Bush and Secretary Baker and then with President Clinton, assumed on faith the Palestinians would get a better deal, even though nothing was specified in Oslo, even though nothing was clear during the period when the Palestinians were getting much, much worse off over a period of several years from 1991 to 2000 -- the population doubled from two hundred thousand to four hundred thousands; tons of concrete are poured, roads, walls, new settlements; during that period, he was putting people in prison, to my mind doing things that were unacceptable to...

MARGARET WARNER: Are you saying... because we're almost out of time. We are almost out of time. Are you saying, in other words, that it wasn't a failure of leadership at all on his part?

RASHID KHALIDI: There were many failures of leadership on his part. The failures were not in the summer of 2000. There were failures all around in the summer of 2000. There was a failure of the entire peace process. And I lay that more at the door of our government and of Israel than I do at Yasser Arafat's.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, I'm afraid we have to leave it there. Thank you all very much.

FOCUS - TARGET: FALLUJAH

MARGARET WARNER: The battle for Fallujah. Lindsay Hilsum of Independent Television News is there with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

LINDSEY HILSUM: Gate to gate, door to door, breaking and entering, aware that any house may be booby-trapped or occupied by gunmen. The unit we are with has spent the past four days pushing south through the Jolan District of Fallujah. If they can't get open the gate any other way, they lay a charge and blow it. (Explosion) Everything is seen as a potential threat. Cars are detonated just in case they are car bombs.

SPOKESMAN: Go! ( Explosion )

LINDSEY HILSUM: This one burnt for half an hour or so. And they are having to fight, as insurgents leave an area and then creep back.

CAPT. BRIAN CHONTOSH, U.S. Marines: Today was the most resistance we had. Got across between some civilians and some bad guys.

LINDSEY HILSUM: What happened?

CAPT. BRIAN CHONTOSH: We shot a lot of bad guys and collected the civilians up really good, and brought the civilians back. And the bad guys, there's a couple dead, and there's a couple back there right now getting worked by our exploitation teams.

LINDSEY HILSUM: The unit's captured about 12 prisoners who have been taken away for interrogation. Amongst the civilians they found was a child who had been locked in a room. They also came across the bodies of five men who appeared to have been executed with a gunshot to the throat. We saw just one body lying where he had fallen. The unit leader says they have killed several insurgents.

CAPT. BRIAN CHONTOSH: Yeah, we've been finding a lot of weapons today. Today was the largest stockpiles of weapons... we found about six... six sights. Some explosives, a couple houses rigged to blow; cell phones, a lot of cell phones, so we're finding the usual mix, but in larger quantities today.

LINDSEY HILSUM: Some weapons, like these rockets and rifles, are gathered up and taken away to be destroyed; others, left where they're found, to be dealt with on the spot. Amongst the weapons: Those given by the Americans to the Fallujah brigade, the Iraqi militia who were meant to control the town, but then turned on their U.S. sponsors. A few blocks of plastic explosives ensured that this cache met the same fate as the others.

SPOKESPERSON: Check. ( Explosion )

LINDSEY HILSUM: The armored vehicles wreak their destruction too. The Marine attitude is that such force is necessary, and whatever's demolished now, they can always rebuild later. Insurgents may have pushed the people out of these houses sometime back. Still, it's strange to think that these are family homes where ordinary people lived, now abandoned to war. The soldiers are still going from house to house, but now they are staying in the houses and holding them. (Gunfire) The firefight is still going on. There's resistance in the surrounding areas. Later on, they hope to start patrolling to flush out the last of the insurgents, some of whom they say... (inaudible) (loud gunfire) ...and then came back during the day. American forces are consolidating their hold on Fallujah, hoping they've fatally wounded the insurgency in Iraq, not simply driven the rebels out of this town to set up in another.

MARGARET WARNER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight: An Ashcroft assessment; and a book conversation about Armistice Day.

FOCUS - CONTROVERSIAL TENURE

MARGARET WARNER: Ray Suarez looks at the tenure of Attorney General Ashcroft.

RAY SUAREZ: Attorney General Ashcroft was the first member of the Bush cabinet to step down after the president won a second term. He submitted his letter on Election Day resigning. A former senator from Missouri, Ashcroft was at the center of a fierce civil liberties debate over antiterrorism policies initiated by the Bush administration in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Now two professors from Georgetown University Law Center debate his time in office. David Cole is also an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is the author of "Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism." And Viet Dinh was assistant attorney general for legal policy under Ashcroft. He was the chief architect of the USA Patriot Act. And, looking back over those years, Professor Dinh, how will this man who was attorney-general at a critical time in the history of the United States be remembered, and what will he be remembered for?

VIET DINH: I think whether you agree or disagree with him, I think everybody has to acknowledge that he is among the most, if not the most powerful attorney general in history. Those who agree with him, like I do, applaud him for his effectiveness in transforming the U.S. Department of Justice from a reactive agency into a proactive, preventative agency with respect to the war on terror, while at the same time carrying forth the core commitments of the department by reducing violent crime, by reducing drug use amongst our teens, by increasing corporate fraud prosecutions, increasing prosecutions for trafficking of illegal persons and victims. So all the while that he maintained and advanced the core competency of the Department, he also transformed the Department of Justice from an entrenched bureaucracy, looking backwards at investigations into a proactive agency in preventing another terrorist attack on the American homeland.

RAY SUAREZ: Professor Cole, your assessment

DAVID COLE: Well, you know, powerful is not necessarily a good thing. Stalin is powerful. I think he is powerful, but that's in large part because he sought to sweep away any meaningful restrictions on his power and use the fact of Sept. 11 to do so. But this is an attorney general who treated dissent and criticism as if it was treason, who launched the largest campaign of ethnic profiling we've seen in this country since World War II, who sought... who treated judicial review and congressional oversight as inconvenient obstacles to getting the job done. And I think ultimately he'll be seen as a disaster, both from a civil liberties perspective and also from a national security perspective.

RAY SUAREZ: Professor Dinh, could you take on some of those specific points?

VIET DINH: Yes, I think that after 9/11, the charges of the Department of Justice was very simple. And it was given by the president to the attorney general at the National Security Council meeting on 9/11. He said very simply, "John, make sure this does not happen again." Those simple words underlie a very, very momentous charge, because obviously we live in a liberal, democratic society where targets and opportunity exist everywhere. What John Ashcroft did was try to get into place tools and procedures whereby we can discern the terrorist plot and then act to interdict those plots and disrupt them before they actually foment into actual attacks on the American homeland. That is a hallmark of his leadership and the transformation. I think it could have been done with a lot more authoritarian and more draconian methods, massive roundups, for example. We did not see that. We see targeted arrests of individuals using the full prosecutorial powers to their full effect. There was no question that the Department of Justice was very aggressive in prosecuting the violation of laws, including immigration laws, against those whom they suspected of terrorism. But it's not the Palmer raids or the mistakes of the past because here...

RAY SUAREZ: What are the Palmer raids?

VIET DINH: The Palmer raids was after World War I and the red scare whereby there was a massive round-up of aliens suspected of communist sympathies and plans against the United States. That was a preventive round-up, if you will. Here the difference is a strategy of preventative prosecutions whereby the attorney general and the Department of Justice used the prosecutorial discretion to their fullest extent in order to prosecute violations of law against those persons who would have terrorist intent. There need not be terrorist laws, but because there is no constitutional, legal or moral duty to violate the laws in the United States, if they do violate, we can put 'em in jail. That's what John Ashcroft did.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Professor Cole, you're shaking your head. Why?

DAVID COLE: I think John Ashcroft essentially repeated the Palmer raid. I think you can call them the Ashcroft raids. But Attorney General Palmer was lambasted for rounding up 5,000 foreign nationals in the wake of a series of terrorist bombings in 1919. John Ashcroft announced right after 9/11 that he was going to use every law within his power, including immigration law, to lock up suspected terrorists, keep them off the streets and prevent the next terrorist attack from occurring. What do we know about that campaign? At this point we know based on government figures that they locked up over 5,000 foreign nationals in prevented detention anti-terrorism measures. Of those 5,000, exactly zero have been convicted of a terrorist crime. He is zero for five thousand for all these people locked up. He also called in 80,000 people for special registration simply because they were Arab and Muslim. How many of those people have been convicted of a terrorist crime? Zero -- zero for eighty thousand. He called in 8,000 for FBI interviews because they were from Arab and Muslim countries. What's the record there? Zero convictions for terrorism. So I think you see a round-up of exactly the same size if not larger than the Palmer raids. The same result. The Palmer raids they found no actual terrorists. And the same thing is true here with respect to the foreign nationals who were targeted.

RAY SUAREZ: Professor Cole, using the examples that were given... first of all, is he right no one has been convicted of a crime related to terrorist or nefarious activities in the United States, and was that ethnic profiling, as Professor Cole suggests?

VIET DINH: There have been plenty of convictions. The Lakawana cell was broken up and they pled guilty. The Portland cell was broken up. They either pled guilty or were convicted. A number of other important cells were disrupted and convicted. Approximately 300 persons have been convicted or pled guilty to terrorism-related charges. With respect to the interviews themselves, they were not an instance of profiling because these were basic investigative interviews that were entirely voluntary in nature. After 9/11, what we found is that we need to gather information relating to the plans of al-Qaida. If a robbery happens on a street, then what you normally do is knock on the doors around the neighborhood. What the Department of Justice sought to do was recreate the metaphorical neighborhood by looking at individuals who are from countries where al-Qaida's are active, who will fit the profile whereby they would have the same characteristics that they would obtain information about al-Qaida and sought their help voluntarily. And a lot of that turned up very good information, which led to the prosecution and disruption of significant terrorist...

RAY SUAREZ: Well, let me stop you right there, Professor Dinh, because while you defended the attorney general's legal theories under which you did that and the methods that he used, wasn't he at times rebuffed by courts and eventually by an inspector general of the United States for some of those same methods and points of view on how to handle this problem?

VIET DINH: First of all, the inspector general was very, very clear, and by the way, that report was authorized and required by the U.S. Patriot Act in order to accumulate allegations of abuse. It did find that with respect to the immigration detentions, that in the aftermath of 9/11, a number of these individuals were held beyond the statutory and regulatory period that were permitted -- I believe it is 30 days. For that the Department of Justice has apologized for that. And I think that is also a good mark of John Ashcroft's leadership. He did not sweep that under the rug. But he said point blank, those are mistakes; we will undertake procedures in order to prevent their occurrence. The same thing happened in Detroit. The Department of Justice, after finding out an investigator exceeded the bounds of his authority and potentially violated the rights of a terrorist defendant, the Department of Justice did a full-blown investigation, went into court and said we admit error, threw out the conviction and threw out the prosecution. That's a proud day for the Department of Justice because it reaffirmed that they were protecting freedom through law rather than in spite of law.

DAVID COLE: Look, first of all, the inspector general found massive abuses. He found that people were locked up on no charges at all; that people were held where there was no evidence that they were dangerous; that people were locked up for long periods of time after their cases were resolved; that people were beaten. And what was the attorney general's response? The day after that report was issued, we make no apologies. So I don't know where Viet got the apologies. His official response is we make no apologies. The inspector general also found that none of these people were found to have any connection to terrorism and also found that people were picked up on such information as a tip received by the Justice Department that there were too many Middle Eastern men working at a convenience store down the street. So they go down to the convenience store and arrest the men because there's too many Middle Eastern men; no evidence that they're involved in terrorism whatsoever. And I stand on the figure. Not one person who was locked up as a foreign national in preventive detention by John Ashcroft over 5,000, not one of them was convicted ofa terrorist crime. The only convictions that Viet pointed to are convictions of citizens, people who were not subjected to preventive detention. These suspected terrorists that John Ashcroft labeled the suspected terrorists turned out to have nothing to do with terrorism whatsoever. Viet says 300 people have been indicted in connection with terrorism investigations. That's something that John Ashcroft frequently says. What he doesn't say is that most of those people are not indicted on anything to do with terrorism. What he doesn't say is that a Syracuse research department that looked at Justice Department figures found that the median sentence imposed on persons convicted for crimes in cases that the Justice Department labeled as terrorism was 14 days. Now, 14 days is not the kind of sentence you get if you're convicted of terrorism. It's the kind of sentence you get if you're convicted of some completely petty crime. And it doesn't prevent terrorist attacks from occurring if you put someone...

RAY SUAREZ: You opened by saying that this was a powerful and effective attorney general - does this go... do some of these things go to the question of his effectiveness?

VIET DINH: Absolutely. First of all, it's not 5,000. There's somewhere north of 1,000 that was prosecuted for immigration violations. Listen, we can remove these people from the streets by touching on the immigration violations, so be it. We don't have to go after them on terrorism charges. This is the first time, by the way, that I have ever heard David Cole claim a criminal conviction is sentenced too lightly. And I want to note that for the record. But I think those figures point out the underlying success of the strategy. The strategy from day one has been very clear: We will not wait to build a capital sentencing case for terrorism because we may miss and then more lives will be lost. What we will do is simply use all the law at our disposal, immigration charges, theft charges, credit card fraud, whatever it is, in order to remove these people from the people they would do harm. And I think those statistics, events rather than failure, show that strategy to prevent terror.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, there are many other things that John Ashcroft did over the four years, but he himself when he resigned said the centerpiece was protecting the homeland in the war on terror. That's where a lot of this conversation went. Professors both, thank you very much.

VIET DINH: Thank you.

DAVID COLE: Thank you, Ray.

FOCUS - ARMISTICE DAY 1918

MARGARET WARNER: Finally tonight, another in our series of book conversations-- a particularly timely one-- and to Terence Smith.

TERENCE SMITH: Each year on the 11th day of the 11th month, the nation honors the service performed by its military veterans, those who came home and those who did not. This morning at Arlington National Cemetery, the president paid tribute to the veterans still with us.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: These are the hidden heroes of a peaceful nation, our colleagues and friends, neighbors and family members who answered the call and returned to live in the land they defended. Our veterans are drawn from several generations and many backgrounds. They're Americans who remember the swift conflict of the Persian Gulf War. And a long Cold War vigil, the heat of Vietnam, and the bitter cold of Korea. They are veterans in their 80s who served under McArthur and Eisenhower and saved the liberty of the world. And still with us in the year 2004 are a few dozen Americans who fought the Kaiser's army and celebrated the end of the Great War on this day in 1918.

TERENCE SMITH: It was the armistice that ended World War I on Nov. 11, 1918, that gave us this date to honor veterans of all wars.

With me now to look at that extraordinary day is Joe Persico, author of the newly published "11th month, 11th day, 11th Hour: Armistice Day 1918 World War I and Its Violent Climax."

Joe Persico, welcome.

JOSEPH E. PERSICO: Good to be here.

TERENCE SMITH: Tell us the story of what happened on that day 86 years ago today.

JOSEPH E. PERSICO: Nov. 11 is known that the war would end with a ceasefire at 11:00. In the trenches, there was a pulsing tension as each man hopes to avoid the melancholy distinction of being killed in a war that has been decided-- allied victory, German defeat. And yet, in those final hours, final minutes, even, the generals are sending men out of the trenches into the face of the enemy with appalling losses. Some 10,900 men on this last day are killed, wounded or missing, slightly more even than D-Day.

TERENCE SMITH: More than D-Day, the assault on Normandy a generation later?

JOSEPH E. PERSICO: With this vital distinction: The men who stormed D-Day and lost their lives gave them in a crusade of an allied victory. The men who died on Nov. 11, 1918, are dying in a war in which victory has already been decided.

TERENCE SMITH: Why on earth would commanders send their troops up and out of the trenches if they knew that the armistice, which I guess had been signed at 5:00 in the morning?

JOSEPH E. PERSICO: 5:00 in the morning to go into effect six hours later. Well, the reasons are not very admirable, one of which was to be punitive. The head of the allied forces, Marshal Foche, had seen his country, France, laid waste, essentially, as the battlefield of World War I. Foche instructed his people to keep the sword to the back of the Hun to the very last minute. Another reason was rather political, and that is our commander, the head of the American expeditionary forces, Gen. John J. Pershing, thought this conclusion of the war at this point was premature. He wanted to see the Germans driven back into their fatherland. He wanted an unconditional surrender. He wanted this signed in Berlin. And he said at the time that if we stop now, the Germans will never believe they were beaten, and with rather chilling foresight, he says, "We'll just have to do it all over again."

TERENCE SMITH: But some commanders, you write in the book, chose not to obey that broad order.

JOSEPH E. PERSICO: Well, the only word that the commanders were given was essentially, "cease-fire at 11:00." Not told what to do when they knew the cease-fire was approaching, which left them in kind of a decisional no-man's- land. And the commanders fall into two groups: There is the aggressive school, which see a fast-fading opportunity for victory, glory, even promotion. And they're sending the men out of the trenches to take ground that they could walk into the next day. And there's a more humane group of generals who just tell their men, "hold fast. Let's wait out the end of the war." There's no point in any of my men dying to take territory that will be meaningless as soon as the armistice takes effect."

TERENCE SMITH: If the armistice was signed at 5:00 in the morning, why was it made effective only at 11:00? I mean, why that gap?

JOSEPH E. PERSICO: Well, it's a rather curious mechanical explanation. The negotiations had been going on for three days, and Marshal Foche, the allied commander, delivered an ultimatum. He gave the Germans a deadline. "You have 72 hours. Andif you don't sign and we don't have an armistice at that point, this war will go on." That turns out to be the 11th month, the 11th day, the 11th hour.

TERENCE SMITH: Oh, I see. Talk about the carnage in this war, which reading the book, I mean, it's... the numbers are hard to reckon with.

JOSEPH E. PERSICO: Well, it's very hard to see them in a sense that we can grasp. There were something like nine million deaths in World War I on all sides. And it was a bloody conflict with very little rationality behind it to a point where you can say essentially that these casualties, whether they were Tommies, the British trenches; the French stretches; American doughboys; German common soldiers. You can say that nine million men died essentially in vain.

TERENCE SMITH: Well, when you look at it when it's all over, when it's good-bye to all that, what did it accomplish?

JOSEPH E. PERSICO: Well, the legacy of these massive casualties is essentially cemeteries and the seeds of another even bloodier world war, World War II.

TERENCE SMITH: Was that the fault of the... of the soldiers on the field or the politicians at the peace table in Versailles?

JOSEPH E. PERSICO: Well, the attitude... during the war, the attitude was on each side-- "if we just hang in long enough, victory will be ours; why give up at a peace table what we can win on the battlefield?"-- which perpetuated this conflict for four long years. I love the way the poor British Tommies put it. They used to sing to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne," trying to find some reason for the suffering they're undergoing. "We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here." It never gets much more sensible than that.

TERENCE SMITH: There were some major historical figures, later historical figures who were on the battlefield as soldiers.

JOSEPH E. PERSICO: There was Adolf Hitler.

TERENCE SMITH: Right. Who was a soldier.

JOSEPH E. PERSICO: He was a corporal in the German army. Harry Truman. McArthur, who was the army's youngest general at that point. George Patton. I think it's interesting that Hitler is recovering from blindness induced by gas attack at the end, and he goes hysterical when he finds that Germany is beaten, and he later writes in "Mein Kampf" that it was at this point, and he swore that the dishonor of the German surrender must be "erased, eradicated, and, therefore, I shall devote my life to that."

TERENCE SMITH: Finally, you also tell the story of numerous ordinary soldiers. How on earth did you get their stories so many years later?

JOSEPH E. PERSICO: Well, there is a wealth of personal information or diaries. There are journals, there are memoirs. I went to our National Archives in Washington and found this stuff which is very satisfying. I worked at the Imperial War Museum in London, and here again, you have ordinary soldiers, strikingly articulate, really placing you in those trenches, is what they're writing about.

TERENCE SMITH: Well, Joe Persico, thank you so much for telling us about it.

JOSEPH E. PERSICO: My pleasure.

RECAP

MARGARET WARNER: Again, the major developments of the day: Palestinians mourned President Yasser Arafat as his body headed home. He died early this morning at a military hospital in Paris. And in Iraq, U.S. forces mounted a major assault into southern Fallujah, opening a second phase in their offensive.

MARGARET WARNER: And again to our honor roll of American service personnel killed in Iraq. Here, in silence, are 20 more.

MARGARET WARNER: We'll see you online, and again here tomorrow evening with David Brooks and Tom Oliphant among others. I'm Margaret Warner. Thanks for being with us. Good night.