The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

On Jim Lara, today's news, today at the court, first amendment decisions, the latest from Iraq, follows on China, and slave labor charges in China, all tonight on the news hour. . . . . .

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.. .. .. .. . . Major funding for the news hour with Jim Lara is provided by. The world's demand for energy will never stop, which is why a farmer is growing corn, and a farmer is growing soy, and why ADN is turning these crops into biofuels. The world's demand for energy will never stop, which is why ADN will never stop. We're only getting started. ADN, resourceful by nature. There's a company that builds more than a million vehicles a year in places called Indiana and Kentucky. One that has ten plants from the foothills of West Virginia to the Pacific coastline. What company is this?

Toyota, a company that along with its dealers and suppliers has helped create hundreds of thousands of US jobs, a company proud to do its small part to add to the landscape of America. And by Chevron, Pacific life, the new AT&T, the Atlantic Philanthropies, the National Science Foundation, and with the ongoing support of these institutions and foundations. And this program was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you. The US Supreme Court's Conservative majority issued a string of decisions today. All of the rulings were five to four.

In free speech cases, the court loosened limits on corporate and union-funded TV ads near election time. But it tightened curves on student speech when it appears to advocate drug use. The justices also blocked taxpayer suits over a White House program that gives funds to religious charities. And they sided with developers in a case involving water pollution permits and endangered species. Later, White House folks, Perino, was asked if the president now has the kind of court he wanted. I do think that it would not be a wise course to try to divine a pattern based on these decisions that came at the end of the session. I don't know of anybody who was actually describing this as a pattern when we lost, I think it was nine to zero, on an environmental case about two months ago. Well, I'll have more on today's decisions right after this news summary. In Iraq today, a suicide bomber attacked Sunni leaders who've turned against al Qaeda. He blew himself up inside a Baghdad hotel lobby killing four tribal leaders from Western Iraq

plus nine others. 40 other Iraqis died in other bombings. Also today, two U.S. soldiers were killed in Baghdad that made 14 American deaths in Saturday, 84 so far in June. Well, I have more on Iraq later in the program tonight. There was news today about two captives in Gaza, a video emerged showing kidnapped BBC correspondent Alan Johnston. He's been missing since March. And Hamas militants released an audio tape of an Israeli soldier seized a year ago. We have a report on both developments narrated by Jonathan Rugman of Independent Television News. The captors latest video is called Alan's Appeal. In reality, it delivers a chilling warning. The BBC journalist is dressed in what he says is a belt carrying explosives. And he warns the outside world not to free him by force. As you can see, I've been dressed in what is an explosive belt, which the kidnappers say will be detonated

if there's any attempt to storm this area. They say they're ready to turn the hideout into what they describe as a death zone. If there's an attempt to free me by force. Alhamdulillah, Zilmut Minyan, Johnston's kidnappers, known as the Army of Islam, are now using him to ward off a Hamas attack. After Hamas gave the group another deadline to release the reporter by tonight. At the weekend, a senior Hamas official suggested it would take just two hours to release Johnston by force. But for now, Gaza's new masters are still seeking a peaceful solution. And heard for the first time tonight, the voice of another hostage missing in Gaza. Gilad Shalit, and Israeli Army Corporal abducted a year ago today. In this tape released by Hamas, Shalit says he misses his family, who have confirmed that the voice, if not the wording, is his. And yes, I am Gilad. I am Gilad.

I have spent a full year in prison, and my health is still deteriorating. I need extended hospitalization. Thousands of Palestinian prisoners also have mothers and fathers, and their children must be returned to them. Hamas seemingly embarrassing its Fatah rival President Abbas, who is in Egypt tonight, meeting Prime Minister Omar to Israel. Hamas reminding both leaders that it runs Gaza, and can't be ignored. At that summit in Egypt, Prime Minister Omar de Greed, to release 250 members of President Abbas's Fatah faction. The two men were joined by the leaders of Egypt and Jordan, in an effort to boost Abbas. Al Qaeda's number two leader today, rallied Muslims worldwide to support Hamas. I'm in Al-Sawari, appealed for weapons and money for the Palestinian faction. He spoke in an audio message on the internet. A senior Hamas leader brushed aside the appeal. He said Al Qaeda is not the frame of reference for Hamas. Secretary of State Rice warned Sudan today

to make good on accepting UN peacekeepers in Darfur. She spoke at an international conference in Paris, and she urged the leaders to support sanctions and keep the pressure on. Sudan has a history of agreeing to things and then starting to condition or change them or to backtrack and say, well, no, we didn't really agree to that. We didn't agree to that, and we've lost a lot of time. While agreements have been made that have not been kept, we can no longer afford a situation in Darfur in which agreements are made and then not kept. Sudanese leaders first agreed to a UN force last November but then reneged. Earlier this month, they agreed again in a move to avoid UN sanctions. In northern California today, hundreds of firefighters fought a wildfire in the Lake Tahoe resort area. State officials declared a state of emergency in the region. Some four square miles have been charred. The fire destroyed some 220 homes

and out buildings over the weekend. No one was hurt, but about a thousand people had to leave. Today, fire officials said the weather today and tomorrow could help. At this point, the fire is 5% contained. Like I said, we're trying to simply hit the hot spots. We've got 700 firefighters on scene. The air stream is moved or the wind is moved. More towards a north, northeastern lead direction, which is really advantageous for us because it starts to move it back into what's already been burned. The cause of the fire was under investigation. Robert Zellik went official board approval today to be the next president of the World Bank. He's a former U.S. trade representative and former undersecretary of state. Zellik will replace Paul Wolfowitz, who steps down from the bank on Saturday. Wolfowitz was forced out over a promotion and pay raise for a woman employee romantically involved with M. On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost eight points to close at 13,352. The Nasdaq fell more than eleven points

to close at 25-77. And that's it for the news summary tonight. Now, major decisions from the Supreme Court and what they may say about the First Amendment and Iraq update and James Fallows on China with a brief update on a slave labor story. A big day at the Supreme Court when I've all begins our coverage. Three of today's court decisions involve First Amendment issues and each was decided 5-4. In one case, the court ruled that Wisconsin right to life in anti-abortion groups should have been allowed to broadcast a campaign ad during the final two months before the 2004 elections. The ad asked viewers to urge Wisconsin's two senators not to filibuster President Bush's judicial nominees. Local broadcasters said the message violated campaign finance laws because of its timing because it mentioned candidates by name and because corporations and unions paid for it. But today, the High Court ruled these issue ads are legal.

As always, news are a regular martial coil of the National Law Journal was in the court. He walks us now through what turned out to be a very eventful day. Was this first case, a big blow to McCain find gold, the campaign finance law? I think most experts who are sifting through the decisions now feel that it marks or signals a huge change and how the court views these types of regulations by Congress. Tell me how. Well, what the court did here was it took a look at a provision of the 2002 McCain Find Gold Act. A provision that Congress used to try to close a loophole, a big loophole, used by corporations, nonprofit and for-profit, as well as unions, to get around the ban on direct contributions to candidates. These corporations and unions would funnel thousands of dollars into so-called issue ads. Some issue ads are genuine. Congress felt they just deal with a controversy.

Other issue ads are sham issue ads, and that's what Congress was trying to get at. They really were intended to advocate for the election or defeat of a specific candidate. They didn't use the magic words, but they did allow groups to get around the ban on direct contributions. The court had upheld what Congress said in 2002, a year later, and it found that the provision was constitutional. But it later said that there may be some cases where the ban on advertising before a primary and before a general election could hit a genuine issue ad and there would be a first amendment problem. Applied to that specific ad was constant right to life brought that case, saying this provision's unconstitutional as applied to our ads. It was applied by who was paying for the ad and as applied to the timing of the ad. The timing as well as the content of the ad.

The Chief Justice who wrote today's opinion said it's very difficult to draw a line between a genuine issue ad and a sham issue ad. But this is political speech, which is at the core of the first amendment, and we're going to air on the side of speech, not censorship. What the majority did hear was to come up with a new test for what is genuine and what is sham. The Chief Justice said Congress can't regulate these ads unless the government can prove there is no reasonable interpretation of the ad other than that it advocates the election or defeat of a candidate. And Justice Souter was the one who wrote the dissent and he mentioned a 2003 decision. He said that really nothing had changed since the court had upheld the constitutionality of this provision. He also said that even though the majority said it wasn't overruling that 2003 decision,

the practical effect of the new test was to overrule it. And it now would allow corporations and unions to once again fund the same kind of ads from their general treasuries that Congress had sought to ban in the 2002 law. In each of these cases we're going to be talking about tonight the same five, the same four in each case. And something else, Gwen, just to note, three justices in the majority, Kennedy Scalia and Thomas said they would have gone farther. They would have struck down the provision outright. The whole campaign violence there. Not the whole act, but that provision they would have just come right out and said, and yes, they would go farther. Okay, well let's move on to the second case because that was decided by the court today and it involved an Alaskan High School student named Joseph Frederick. Frederick unveiled a 14-foot-long banner reading bong hits for Jesus across the street from his high school during Olympic, during an Olympic torch relay five years ago. The school's principal suspended Frederick

and Frederick sued the court again five to four ruled against Frederick today. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the banner could be interpreted by those viewing it as promoting illegal drug use and that interpretation is plainly a reasonable one. Student speech versus General First Amendment rights. That's what we saw this boiled down to. Absolutely. Chief Justice Roberts said in his opinion and he quoted from prior student speech opinions, a very famous line, students don't shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. But he said, the special circumstances of the school environment and the government's interest in stopping student drug abuse allows schools to restrict student expression that reasonably appears to advocate drug use. So this was more about drug use than it was about free speech in some ways? Well, it's both but it was narrower than it might

have been. The majority, the court rejected a broader argument that the schools had made that they should be allowed to restrict any student expression that interferes with the school's educational program. In this case, Justice's Alito and Kennedy, who agreed with the majority, wrote separately to emphasize the understanding that this applied to student expression that advocates drug use. And that's at the far reaches of what the first amendment permits. So if a student were to wear a t-shirt to school that said something that was offensive or illegal in some other way, like under age drinking, that necessarily wouldn't apply in this case? Well, that's a good question. There are those who felt that the decision may be used by some schools to argue that policies against drinking, policies against drinking and driving, that many schools promote and that government promotes as it does with stopping drug abuse are very similar

and it may be that they will try to argue that that expression should be limited as well. What about religious expression? Something which is condoned by the society at large, but might not be by some set of students, administrators. I think that would be going a little too far. I think that the justices in the majority were very clear that they were talking particularly here about drug abuse. There was a dissent. Yeah, I was going to ask about Justice Stevens wrote the dissent. Yes, he did. And he felt that this banner was a nonsense banner and that the first amendment requires a much higher justification for restricting student speech than was evident here. He said no one's rights were intruded upon. No educational program was really interfered with. He said admittedly some students, including those who use drugs are dumb, but he said students don't shed their brains at the schoolhouse gate and they know dumb advocacy

when they see it. So he felt a higher standard was needed. And he also said that contrary views are important and he spoke of past student protests involving the Vietnam war and even earlier debates about the use of alcohol. And he warned that the court may be shutting off those contrary views that someday may be a majority view. I don't think I ever heard the court speak to dumb advocacy before. That's interesting. Well, finally, there was a third case. In one more split decision, the court ruled taxpayers do not have legal standing to challenge President Bush's faith based programs that help religious charities. The decision throws out a lawsuit from a group of atheists who argued that their taxpayer money was being used to promote religion. So how did freedom from religion? How did the establishment clause basically get into this? Well, freedom from religion, the foundation here wanted to get into federal court to challenge the Bush administration's use of federal tax dollars and programs to advance its faith based

and community initiative program. They argued that this program favors religious organizations over non-religious organizations in violation of the establishment clause. So this case was basically about getting in the courthouse door in order to prove that there had been a violation of the establishment clause. But that's not what the court was actually ruling on today. No, it was ruling on the rules for getting into federal court. Generally, taxpayers don't have what we call standing to challenge government expenditures. Otherwise, the federal courts would probably be inundated with taxpayer suits. But the court carved out an exception about 40 years ago for establishment clause challenges because of the importance of separation of church and state under our constitution. The question here was whether this particular suit fell into that exception and these, this foundation could go forward. Why didn't it, according to the court?

Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion here and he said that that special exception that the court had announced applied only to expenditures and programs that had been specifically mandated by Congress. This program and expenditure was a general appropriation to the executive branch for its day to day activities. There was no specific act by Congress. So the APS picked the wrong thing to challenge? Well, no, they just, they came into court in the wrong way. I mean, they probably thought they could get into court this way obviously. But there are other ways to bring establishment clause challenges. The decision doesn't end all establishment clause challenges, but it does narrow the kinds of establishment clause challenges that can be brought in federal courts. Yes, he did. He said he didn't see much difference between a specific mandated appropriation by Congress and a general

appropriation to the executive branch. It's taxpayer dollars. And the allegation here he said is taxpayer dollars are being used for religious purposes. He felt that was enough. They should be able to go forward and try to prove their case. I'm going to give you a task. Explain to, we lay people why something like standing really matters in a case like this. If you don't have standing, you cannot get into federal court. Our federal courts determine cases and controversies. Our federal courts are what we call courts of limited jurisdiction. I can't say, well, you know, I don't really like this law. I'm going to go ask the Supreme Court if it's right or wrong, constitutional or not. Standing is a requirement that makes you say, okay, I've been injured by somebody or something. I have a specific injury and there is a remedy for that injury. And if I don't have that, then I can't get into federal court.

By the way, when so many of the cases this term have turned on the rules of getting into federal court. That's why I ask the court. It's the ball game. It is the ball game. Marcia Coyle, thanks again, as always. My pleasure. Now do today's Supreme Court decisions add up to a shift in first amendment rights. Judy Woodruff has that part of the story. What signals does the court send with today's decisions? For that, we turn to Walter Dellinger, former acting solicitor general under President Clinton and now a law professor at Duke University. And Richard Garnett, associate professor at Notre Dame Law School, where he teaches on first amendment issues. Richard Garnett, to you first three decisions, three split decisions, five to four. Is there a common thread here as it relates to the first amendment? Are we learning something about this court and the first amendment today?

You know, one thread that seems to hold these cases together is that in all three, you had an older decision that the court had the option of either rejecting or reversing entirely or trying to live with. In several of the cases you saw some of the justices on the conservative side saying, look, we should take this farther. The cases you're asking us to work with, they were wrongly decided. Let's scratch them and move on. But in all of these cases, the court decided not to do that. And instead you saw what I regard as relatively narrow modest opinions, which stayed within the framework of earlier decided cases. So you might say that these three cases are consistent with a theme that some people have seen in the new chief justices thinking and writing, namely incrementalism. Is that what you're seeing Walter Dellinger or incrementalism? Well, we saw a little bit of incrementalism today, Judy, but I think when you look at the term as a whole, you're going to see that the court while not saying that it's overruling cases is effectively overruling cases

and doing so on the basis of in some cases the absence of Justice of Connor. I think the abortion case is from earlier in the term. And perhaps in the school race cases that are probably coming down on Thursday, you're going to see a court that whether it says it's overruling earlier cases is doing so in fact. Well, we hear Professor Garnett saying that they're doing this along pretty narrow definitions of the law. Well, that was true, at least in one of the cases today, the school case. One of the things we learned about the first amendment today was that the court is a little more deferential to the pre-speech rights of corporations and it is the public school students. And one important respect, the Chief Justice said in the campaign finance case that if you're trying to decide whether a corporate speech is permissible issue advocacy or whether it is the impermissible can be banned advocacy for the election of a candidate,

he says the court should give the benefit of the doubt to speech, not to censorship. And yet in the Bonghits for Jesus case, what was striking was that the opinion is actually quite narrow. It's protective of student speech because the opinion says that you can only suppress student speech if you're actually advocating illegal drug use. Well, what is the phrase Bonghits for Jesus means? Nobody knows. The Kid Mayor just wanted to get on television. But in that case, the court went the other way and assumed that this was an advocacy of illegal drug use. I don't think that an earlier court in Tinker would have thought this unprotected speech by the student. Do you see that distinction? Go ahead. Just briefly to what Walter said, I think it makes an important point about how today's student speech case actually was careful to be protective of core political and religious student expression. I mean, you didn't see a court here going as far as the government had asked

and as far as some people asked saying school administrators can regulate speech whenever it's important to curb offensive speech or to promote the educational mission of schools. As Walter says, the case is careful to make sure that core first amendment activities remain protected. And I think that's consistent with the campaign finance case. I mean, one reason why the Chief Justice can say that when in doubt go against censorship is after all in the campaign finance case, we are dealing with what by any measure has to be the core of first amendment activity. Election speech around election time. And what about Walter Dellinger's other point that the court upholding corporate interests in effect today? Yeah, my view and people reasonable people disagree on this. My view is that it's a mistake to draw a really sharp line between speech by corporations and groups and associations on the one hand and speech by individuals on the other. I mean, if we take seriously the marketplace of ideas and if we take seriously the role that groups play in that marketplace,

I don't see any reason to devalue the speech of a group like Wisconsin right to life. Let me add that I agree with Rick on that. It's important to note that the corporations whose speech is protected by the day's decision include not just big companies, but the Wisconsin right to life, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Sierra Club, groups both in certain labor unions, but non-profit groups as well have their speech protected. And surely it's a sobering thought that the Chief Justice said in his oral presentation, remember we're talking about Congress making it a crime for groups to criticize elected officials. That does have to go right near the core in the First Amendment. Richard Garnett, though to get back to your original point, it sounds like maybe we're stretching it a bit to try to say that we see some new philosophy emerging from this court when it comes to the First Amendment.

Well, it is a cliche to say time will tell, but I guess I'll say it anyway. Walter is right that in the abortion case, the partial birth abortion case from a few weeks ago, I think it's pretty clear that the change in personnel yielded a change in outcome. And it is true that in a number of the sort of hot button cases from this term, it appears that the conservative side for lack of a better word is winning, but of course we could go through the court's cases this term and come up with somewhere the result was different. And it might well be the next term, there's a different menu of cases that yield sort of different rulings. I wouldn't want to fight the idea that there has been a shift. I don't see anything like a seismic shift, it seems to me to use the word I used before that we're seeing incremental steps. We're seeing a reluctance to extend dramatically some of the precedents from the Warren and Burger Court areas. And specifically with regard to the First Amendment. That's right.

What do you say? Well, in some sense, the First Amendment side one in the campaign finance cases and lost in the application of the school case. We come out even, I think in the other case that Marcia mentioned, it's importance is easily understated. The decision that the group cannot get into federal court to challenge the faith-based initiative. I think that's an important decision, and in my view, correct because it really transforms the role of courts. And in a very aggrandizing way to say that courts can decide controversial issues, even where there's not a lawsuit to be resolved. This was the case of ACOS and Agnostic. That's right. And they brought the suit as taxpayers, but everybody agreed that their tax bill would not change $1 or $1 penny by the outcome. And indeed, it seems to me not necessarily at all a conservative doctrine to say that courts ought to resolve, ought to do the job of resolving actual cases. But the court doesn't have any special warrant to proclaim what the Constitution means for everybody else.

And would therefore have to make up a lawsuit where no lawsuit actually existed. Professor Garn, you have a thought on that one? Yeah, Walter and I disagree. I mean, I'm sorry, we agree about the merits of this case. And just to add, in some other countries, their courts are expressly given the power to render advisory opinions. They're given the power to decide outside the context of a particular case whether a law accords with the Constitution. In our Constitution, though, it's a bedrock requirement that the Supreme Court, the federal courts generally, have limited powers. And those powers extend only to deciding real cases where people actually got something to fight about or something to stake. So today's ruling doesn't mean that the administration has sort of a blank check to run around establishing churches. But what it does mean is that these very important constitutional questions need to be decided in the context of a case where the litigants are fighting over an actual injury to one of the parties. Any thoughts, Walter Delger, down the road, what we should look for from this court when it comes to First Amendment cases in particular?

Well, I think this court is going to continue to be a fairly strong First Amendment, First Amendment court. But what we really see in the court is the gap that is widening between the five and the four. The absence of Sandra O'Connor, who had a lot of practical experiences, a state legislature, a state senator, knew a lot about life and came up with some often pragmatic bridging ways of dealing with issues. That's gone. And we see a really solid and growing doctrinal gap between the five and the four that it is somewhat unsettling. We're going to have more to talk about when this court ends its term in just a few days. And we can ask that question among others. Walter Delger, Richard Garner, thank you both. Thank you. And to our Iraq update, it's from John Burns, Baghdad Bureau Chief of the New York Times. We reported earlier among the four sites that suicide bombers hit in Iraq today was the lobby of the well-known Mansour Hotel, where the blast killed some Sunni tribal leaders who have been cooperating with US forces in Anbar Province.

Tell us about that. Is there any doubt that they were the intended target of this bomber? No doubt whatsoever. There was a meeting of Anbar Province tribal shakes in this high-rise hotel. Not, I have to say, a very well-guarded high-rise hotel. And it seems that the lessons too often here are learned after the event. I've been to the Mansour Hotel many times, and I've never felt particularly safe there. I've never felt that the vehicles entering, all the people were sufficiently checked. Be that, as it may. These Anbar shakes were cooperating with the United States have made an enormous difference in what was the most dangerous province in Iraq. West of Baghdad and by overwhelmingly Sunni, I was out there today at the capital Ramadi with General Odiano, the operational commander of US troops here. And it's gone from being the most dangerous place in Iraq with the help of the tribal shakes to being one of the least dangerous places.

And it's extremely important to the entire American Enterprise here. So the bomb that killed one very prominent shake and four or five others among the twelve who died was an arrow aimed at the heart of the American Enterprise here. When this policy was announced, there were doubts or concerns in some quarters about what you might call accountability. In other words, how reliable were these Sunni tribal leaders whom the US was now helping to arm? And where would the weapons end up and might they be turned against American forces? What are your sources inside and outside of the military telling you so far on that score? They're not worried about it today. In a Ramadi, I talked to Colonel John Charlton, who is the American officer directly responsible for dealing with the tribal shakes out there, for recruiting thousands, actually, of Iraqi policemen from amongst youngsters who are sent by the tribal shakes.

Some of whom, doubtably many of whom may previously have been among the enemy among the Sunni barthist or nationalist insurgency in Anbar. He's not worried about it at the moment. He has some worries about it in the longer term. The fact that they have to be fairly carefully watched with the performance so far of those police officers, he told me, has been irreproachable. And it has brought the number of attacks down in Ramadi from something in the order of 30 to 40 a day, down to about one a day, and no bombs, no roadside bombs, and central Ramadi now for some weeks. This is a state that was barely imaginable as recently as four or five months ago. And so where have the al-Qaeda linked insurgents gone? Are they in hiding, or have they gone elsewhere? Well, first of all, they took a pretty good hiding from the first brigade combat team of the third infantry division, many of whom I have to say are now in their third tour here. They went out there, and they took them on, along with Marines who are stationed in Anbar.

They gave them a pretty good hiding, and that encouraged the tribal shakes, if you will, to change their position, cause correction, to begin to see the American Enterprise here is something that is perhaps something that they should decide with. Now the question is whether this can be replicated in other parts of Anbar, and that's why General Adiano flew there from Baghdad today. It's about 100 miles west of Baghdad. To take a look at how things have gone there, and to see what lessons can be learned, and exported, if you will, to the new tribal centers like Diala, the province to the north, and northeast of Baghdad, and to the provinces immediately to the south, which have become the principal al-Qaeda, tribal areas, and Iraq other than Baghdad itself. How do General Adiano and other commanders propose to do something like this in more mixed areas that is to arm Sunni leaders without having those weapons then used in the civil conflict against Shi'at? Margaret, that's a very smart question, that's exactly the problem. The government of Nori Kamala al-Maliki, the Shi'at-led government, has been happy to go along with the Salvation Council, the awakening, as it's also called amongst the tribal shakes in Anbar, because it's an overwhelmingly Sunni province.

It's a Sunni issue in areas where there is a conflict between Sunni and Shia, obviously, recruiting large numbers of Sunnis through the tribal shakes into the police and giving them weapons, poses potential problems for Mr. Maliki, who's worrying about, first of all the Shi'at sectarian interests, but secondly about an effect fueling a civil war. So, General Adiano, we talked about this down in Ramadi today, and they recognize that that's going to be difficult, not impossible, but difficult. And it's not at all clear that you can export the whole of the Anbar experience to the other and to the approaches of sudden approaches to Baghdad, but it's so remarkable a change that there are some lessons that can be learned. And one of them is, go after Al-Qaeda hard, hit them really hard wherever you find them, and then try and change the balance of advantages it's calculated by tribal leaders on both sides, both the Sunni tribal leaders and the Shi'at tribal leaders.

Pinin' here in Iraq is intimidation led. If the American forces manage to get on top of Al-Qaeda, then you'll begin to see a swing in all of these areas, whether they can do that or not remains to be seen. But General Adiano told me today that he thinks 90 days will be the point at which the President offensives in these areas around Baghdad, where it'll be possible to tell the degree of success and to begin to move Iraqi forces in behind them. So there's quite a long way to go yet to see whether or not these, these offensives can finally begin to turn the tide here. John Burns of the New York Times, thank you again so much. Thank you, Margaret. Finally tonight, two takes on China, the first an American journalist inside look at China's rapid march to industrialization. Jeffrey Brown has that story.

Made in China, three words that appear on so much of what we buy these days from the highest end of high tech to the cheapest of low tech bubbles. What's behind those words and what are the implications for China and for us? The writer James Fallows is exploring those questions in China in a series of reports for the Atlantic magazine. His first article is called China Makes the World Takes. He joins us now from Shanghai. Well, Jim Fallows, the first thing that comes through in your article is just the enormity of it all. A hundred million workers, factories and even cities that barely existed not so long ago. Give us some sense of what you've seen. There are many things which are surprising to visitors to China, but in a way they're not surprising because you're prepared to think that everything is out of scale here. I was really finally sort of taken aback when I went down to the Pearl River Delta north of Hong Kong, especially the city Shenzhen, where I spent most time just how vast the manufacturing economy is. The way that Europeans must have felt when seeing Chicago or Detroit or Pittsburgh a century ago is the way that I felt in seeing this, where almost as far as I can see for miles and miles,

there are tens of thousands of little factories. There's one I saw, there's one I saw the outside of. I couldn't get in where one quarter of a million people go to work each day and simply to feed these people. The caters of the canteen have to slaughter 3,000 pigs every single day to feed them. That's the biggest one, but there are a lot of other ones, too. And who are all these people and what are their lives like? I think there is an image in the United States of these truly slave labor sweatshops in China, and certainly there are some of them. There's this hideous scandal going on now in China, dominating the news here about genuine slave labor and some of the older primitive factories in the North of the country. In the South, where most of the things that we get in the United States come from, it's a quite different story. The factories are all relatively recently built over the last five or ten years, has been the boom. And the typical person who works there is often a young woman who's come from the provinces, from Sichuan province, or someplace else remote.

She comes from a farming or rural family where people have basically no cash income. And she goes to work in one of these factories that are producing, you know, radios, TVs, notebook computers, everything else you buy in the United States. Her life is she typically spends maybe three or four years in this factory town. She makes about $125 to $135 US per month. She works 10 to 12 hours a day. She lives in a company dormitory, which is pretty crowded. She gets three meals a day at the company store. She goes home once a year to see her family with a couple day bus ride. And at the end of three or four years of this, she's basically been able to save enough money by Chinese standards that she can go home. And she's on a different plane of life. And so it is a very arduous situation as manufacturing booms tend to be. But it essentially is a way that peasant people by the tens and probably hundreds of millions have been gotten under a different plane of life. Now, we hear so much about outsourcing what you've been able to do is try to put a human face on it and take a look at how U.S. and international companies get matched up with factories over there and why? Tell us a little bit about that. I think it's important to keep in mind one difference between this and the previous Asian boom we heard about in Japan. In Japan, you often had purely Japanese companies going head-to-head with high-end American companies.

In China, essentially, you have the American companies coming here. And the typical pattern I try to describe in the article involves a matchmaker. I've chosen one named Liam Casey, who is a young Irishman. He will take an American, let's say, either established American company and you can name almost any of them, or a startup American firm that has something they want to make and they think they need to get it to market quickly. And the fastest place on Earth now to make most things electronic is China. It's not simply that it's cheaper here and it is cheaper, but it's the place now on Earth where you have the densest concentration of suppliers and subcontractors. And people who bring the part over that afternoon, you can get things retooled in 24 hours. So I was describing a hotel in Shenzhen, the Sheraton four points where you have this constant flow of people coming in from the US and Europe and they have specs in mind. They have brand plans. They have something you want to get to market six months from now or for the Christmas rush next year.

And people like this Liam Casey match them up with one of the thousands of little factories that surround this area that will do what they want. And so you see every day this ballet of thousands of purchasers and thousands of suppliers coming together and the outcome goes to the Hong Kong airport and has shipped out every day in these vast air freight flights or from the containers that leave the Shenzhen and Hong Kong ports by the thousands every day. Another colorful place you describe and it sounds like an astounding site is the is an electronics market. There's a place in downtown Shenzhen called the SEG Electronics Mall which is like nothing I have seen in my life. It's a great big cavernous place, the size of big conventions that are seven floors tall. And essentially you have all of the electronic components on Earth piled into there. Somebody estimated to me there were hundreds of millions of capacitors that were in this one place. And what was astonishing is not not only that you see all of the guts and components of anything electronic in their most dissembled form.

It would be as if you could see every tiny bone of the human body in one place. But just the volume and kind of atomization of it. You'd have a little mom and pop operation from the countryside where woman is sitting there with 10,000 Ethernet cables around her. And she's selling Ethernet cables. There's this kind of very small scale dispersed economy that somehow gets coordinated and pulled together and ends up in the computers we use every day. Now of course this relationship, the whole idea of outsourcing is this very controversial stuff. You say in the article that you've changed your mind about a key point. And you write so far America's economic relationship with China has been successful and beneficial for both sides. Explain your thinking. Yes, in my argument there I do play some stress on this so far. And to just summarize the main points, has this arrangement been good for China. It certainly has been.

And you can argue that the most effective anti-poverty effort of the last half century has been this factory boom in China where many, many, many tens of millions of peasants have sort of gotten the leg up through these factory jobs. For American companies, surprisingly and again in contrast generally with Japan, it's American companies that are reaping the overwhelming share of the benefit of the manufacturing done here. The Chinese have a concept which I won't go into all the details of but essentially it estimates that if you pay a thousand dollars, let's say a laptop computer that's bought in the United States and every bit of it is made in China, only well under a hundred dollars of that total thousand stays in China. Most of the rest days with the American designer, the American brand, the American retailer, the American service technician. So for the companies it's been a large source of profit. And significantly it's mainly American companies that are driving this outsourcing and not Chinese ones. Then for the balance of society in the United States, this is a more problematic issue certainly. The actual jobs in China would not themselves be done in the US just because they are so labor intensive and low skill.

But clearly if China weren't available, there'd be a different manufacturing pattern in the US. What I ended up arguing the article is number one, in the long run, as China becomes richer, much richer and tries to move up the value chain. This can be problematic for the US. But number two, China itself is not really doing anything wrong in this encounter. If we don't like the way our distribution of jobs in incoming the United States is working out, if we don't like the kinds of technology we're able to promote, that is our problem and our responsibility in not China. So China, as far as I could tell, is playing on the whole a pretty normal and unobjectionable role in the process. And thus the key two words you said so far in terms of who benefits? Yes, and then the so far is the Chinese are trying as hard as they can and who can blame them to move up from this very low value work, to be able to do more of the profitable work themselves, to have the brands of computers. Right now Intel and Microsoft and Apple and others, they make tremendous profit for their brand name.

China would love to replicate that. They're trying to bring in here more of the high-end design process, the industrial design and the other things where the actual money goes now goes to American firm. So that's something where Americans need to keep ahead of them. And also there is the question of as a traditional bulwark of American middle income that is relatively low-skilled but high-paying manufacturing jobs, as that is eliminated inevitably, the US has to find some ways to have a different source of a fair income distribution internally. But I think it's important in times of talking about the China menace to say that at least until now, as far as I've been able to determine, at least until now, it's not been a China menace but a fairly symbiotic relationship economically. All right, and we will try to keep up with you as your reports continue. James Fellows is in China for the Atlantic magazine. Thanks very much for talking to us. Thank you very much, Jeff.

And to the second China story, a coda, as James Fellows mentioned, China has been preoccupied with allegations of slave labor at a bright brick factory in central China. We have a brief report on that from John Ray of Independent Television News. China's children and China's shame. It's two centuries since the world abolished a slave trade, but right heading that to the heartbroken parents of Shanks, he province. My son was a good boy. This woman says all he wanted was the word. Each photograph is a missing son. Each mother and father convinced their child as being kidnapped and sold into slavery and each blame their rulers. I hate them so much, he tells me. We came to find our children and have already been hidden away. For months, no one listened to their stories until this. Secretly film pictures of a brick factory in the bleak world of child labor and of casual brutality.

No one is here willingly, no one here is paid a wage, and they're worked to the point of exhaustion. These brick factories were less places of work than places of sustained torture and those imprisoned here, talk of working from dawn to midnight of meager rations of bread and water and of regular beatings. This boy was freed last month to scare to tell us his name to traumatize to utter more than a few words. He shows us the scars and his back and the burns on his ankle. He says he was hung from a tree and beaten to the Chinese. This has come as a profound shock, not just because it happened, but because it's all been reported by state-controlled media, a sign of the Beijing government's frustration with endemic local corruption. So police now pose as liberators, but communist carters colluded in the slave trade.

A handful of junior officials have been arrested. Others are in denial. This local party leader tells the parents we're with, they should have taken better care of their children, so we leave these desperate mothers and fathers where we found them, handing out photographs of their children, searching for lost sons. And again, the major developments of this day, the U.S. Supreme Court, loosened limits on political ads by corporations and unions near election time. It tightened limits on student speech. And in Iraq, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a Baghdad hotel lobby, killing 13 people. The targets were Sunni tribal leaders working with the United States. And again, to our honor roll of American Service personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we had them as their deaths are made official, and photographs become available here in silence are 20 more.

We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening.

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