The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight: The news of this Friday; then a update on the earthquake survivors of Pakistan a conversation and a debate about the decision to go to war in Iraq; and the analysis of Mark Shields and David Brooks.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The summit of the Americas opened today in Argentina, and protests turned violent. Late in the day, hundreds of people set fires and smashed store fronts in the summit city of Mar del Plata. They also clashed with police, who fought back with tear gas. Earlier, 10,000 demonstrators marched peacefully against free trade. And they branded President Bush a "fascist" and "terrorist." The president was one of 34 leaders at the summit. They'll discuss a U.S. plan for a free-trade zone that spans the hemisphere. The president deflected questions about the CIA leak case. At a separate briefing, he was asked repeatedly about Karl Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff. He remains under investigation. Mr. Bush would not say if Rove should stay in his job.

PRESIDENT George W. Bush: The investigation on Karl, as you know, is not complete, and, therefore, I will not comment upon about him and/or the investigation. I understand the anxiety and angst by the press corps to talk about this. On the other hand, it's a serious investigation, and we take it seriously.

JIM LEHRER: The president also dismissed questions about his sagging poll numbers. He said the way you earn credibility with the American people is to set a clear agenda that everybody can understand and get the job done.

Pakistani President Musharraf suspended a deal today to buy 77 U.S. fighter jets. They would have cost up to $10 billion. Musharraf said the money would go to earthquake victims instead, but he complained the world was far more generous after the Indian Ocean tsunami. He said that was because "it affected people from many countries of the world, especially the West, who were tourists there." We'll have more on the quake relief story right after this News Summary.

In Iraq today, insurgents killed 11 Iraqi troops and wounded 14 more in two attacks. The worst was north of Baghdad, where gunmen ambushed a checkpoint. And the U.S. military announced another American soldier died late Thursday, but it gave no details. That made 19 U.S. deaths this week, all but one in combat. Nearly 2,040 Americans have died in Iraq since the war began in 2003.

Riots in the suburbs of Paris spread to other cities today. Gangs of immigrant youths set hundreds of cars on fire, as the unrest entered its second week. We have a report from Juliet Bremner of Independent Television News.

JULIET BREMNER: This was the night the president appealed for calm. Exploding gas canisters brought firemen rushing to the suburb where they found this factory already engulfed in flames. Owners of nearby businesses watched in horror.

MAN: I think it's crazy and I think we probably should do something about it. People are sick of this.

JULIET BREMNER: All night the emergency services had raced from one crisis to another. This is a second major fire this evening. It's impossible to say where they're going to happen or when. It's typical of the kind of confusion that these tactics can cause. One moment, this was a quiet industrialist state, the next it was rocked by a series of explosions and the fire brigade still don't know what it is they're actually trying to deal with here.

In the morning light, a plume of smoke still hung over the suburb. By now, everybody knew they were dealing with another night of senseless destruction. Workers stared at the ruins of their factory. In the shadows of the tower blocks they are unrepentant. Groups of young men tell me the violence is the only way to get noticed.

MAN: They don't do anything about us. That's the only way they can hear about us, by, you know, burning cars, and, you know, fighting the cops.

JULIET BREMNER: On the same estate, Mustafa sympathizes, but thinks the vandalism is counterproductive.

It's us who is going to end up paying for it all at the end,' he tells us. In the cafes, they try to ignore the turmoil, a luxury the French government cannot afford.

JIM LEHRER: The violence erupted Oct. 27, after two teenagers were accidentally electrocuted as they fled police.

In U.S. economic news, the Labor Department reported today the unemployment rate dipped a tenth of a point in October, to 5 percent. Employers added 56,000 new jobs, just half what economists expected.

But it also turned out only 8,000 jobs were lost in September, after the hurricanes. The initial estimate was far worse.

On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones industrial Average gained eight points to close above 10,530. The NASDAQ rose nine points to close at 2169. For the week: The Dow gained more than 1 percent; the NASDAQ rose nearly 4 percent.

The man who stirred a debate over politics in public broadcasting has stepped down. Kenneth Tomlinson resigned Thursday from the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He alleged liberal bias in some PBS programs, but he faced allegations he tried to exert conservative influence. A report from an internal CPB investigation of Tomlinson is due later this month.

And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to: a Pakistan earthquake update; the never-ending war debate; and Shields and Brooks.

FOCUS FORGOTTEN VICTIMS

JIM LEHRER: The desperate effort in Pakistan to reach remote mountain villages hit by the earthquake nearly one month ago. We have a report from Jonathan Miller of Independent Television News.

JONATHAN MILLER: Nine thousand feet up in the foothills of the Himalayas we're flying into a valley unreached by international aid: the Badey Valley.

Two hundred here are killed by the quake; more than 400 still lie injured. Trapped in the valley by landslides, and it's already been snowing. The vicious cold is already killing, they say.

MAN (Translated): The most important things are medicine, warm clothes, and food, and we've had none of them. The small children are really suffering in this freezing cold weather, and there's nothing to protect us. Poor people are dying here.

MAN (Translated): It's too cold here. Children are dying. For six months, you can't get to the markets, and no one can get in. We get 15 feet of snow. We can't even contact each other. It's just too cold.

JONATHAN MILLER: The winter tents will do for now, but what they need are new tin roofs, hammers and nails, to rebuild houses fast. They don't want to leave, and soon it will be too late to go.

Even with sophisticated instruments, it's too dangerous to fly through mountains like these in this sort of weather. It won't be long now before the Chinooks are grounded and 27 days on from the quake 40 villages still unreached.

Pakistan's President, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in the devastated Kashmiri city of Muzaffarabad today visiting survivors at a new camp on the feast day of Idu'l Fitr. He told me that almost a month on from the quake, Pakistan is still desperate for outside help.

PERVEZ MUSHARRAF: I only hope that the international community doesn't think that this is all that they have to give. So I am hoping that on the 19th of November, we call a conference, and that is a conference on reconstruction and rehabilitation.

I only hope that the international community comes up to the same level, or near what assistance tsunami or Katrina got.

JONATHAN MILLER: So the line of control is going to be open at five points on Monday. Now, this is a big, historic moment. Could this earthquake, in the end, be a catalyst for peace with India?

PERVEZ MUSHARRAF: I am hoping so. But you don't clap with one hand. I have always been saying that, yes, this is an opportunity; it's an opportunity of a lifetime.

JONATHAN MILLER: You can't celebrate Id when you've only just buried your dead. Large swaths of northern Pakistan are in mourning, 73,000 killed, at least as many injured, more than three million homeless. In Masjid Hamanwali, Muzaffarabad's oldest mosque, they said their Id prayers in the ruins. Everyone here has lost someone.

FOCUS WAR PLANS

JIM LEHRER: Now, that debate that won't end over the decision to go to war in Iraq. Ray Suarez begins.

RAY SUAREZ: In recent weeks, criticism has intensified over the Bush administration's Iraq policy, both in the run-up to the war and its aftermath.

A former top-level foreign policy insider claimed the vice president and other administration officials hijacked some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security, including vital decisions about post-war Iraq.

Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson was Colin Powell's chief of staff at the State Department and close friend and adviser for 16 years. Two weeks ago he spoke to a Washington Public Policy Institute.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON (Ret.): What I saw was a cabal between the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

RAY SUAREZ: In an interview this week, Wilkerson repeated his charge that an alternate decision-making process had evolved run by the vice president and his allies at the Defense Department in the first Bush term.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON (Ret.): This is the first time that so much power has been concentrated in the office of the vice president.

While the formal process was engaged -- that is to say, everyone debating and dissenting and so forth and so on -- the informal process was making the decisions.

There was a labyrinth out there of people who sopped up information, manipulated information, handed information, and built information, I think in some cases, that supplemented, augmented, helped this alternative decision-making process to realize its decisions rather than those that might have been flummoxed or stopped or halted or still in debate in the formal process.

RAY SUAREZ: How did this work in practice?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON (Ret.): Well, with regard to Iraq, it was centered in Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feif's office. Other people were sprinkled throughout the government.

RAY SUAREZ: Wilkerson says a faction of the Central Intelligence Agency was aligned with the vice president's office. At times, this group was in conflict with CIA Director George Tenet, the DCI.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON (Ret.): And so, you would get one part of the agency, the official part, if you will, with the DCI as the mouthpiece of that official part, saying, "Wait a minute. I don't think that ought to go in the president's state of the union address; that's not right. We don't have firm evidence that Iraq is seeking uranium from the country of Niger, so it shouldn't go in there."

Then you would have this dissenting body in the agency report up the chain to the vice president's office and back in it would go, into the state of the union address.

RAY SUAREZ: Isn't this just an appropriate outgrowth of the cabinet process?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON (Ret.): I don't think a president, if he's a wise man, is ever going to trust the critical decisions that send men and women to die, and kill other people too -- we forget that sometimes-- to just a small entourage.

It's got to suffer the debate, the dissent that's going to inevitably be there, the exposure to a wider body, to his entire cabinet, if you will, to everyone who has an opinion to offer in there.

RAY SUAREZ: At a press briefing this week, Secretary Rumsfeld maintained the administration's decision-making process was open, and he dispute the idea of a cabal when asked if one existed.

DONALD RUMSFELD: Of course not -- my goodness gracious. The President of the United States makes these decisions, and he did it in open meetings and discussions that went on at great length, and that's -- that kind of a perspective, obviously, is looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

We know -- anyone who looks at this process knows what it was. The President of the United States made some judgments based on the best advice he received, and he went to the Congress, and the Congress received the information.

He went to the United Nations, and the United Nations had the same information, and he made a decision. And the process, I think, was transparent and -- and it is what it is.

RAY SUAREZ: But questions remain.

Just this week, the administration's handling of pre-war intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was at the center of a partisan dispute in the Senate.

Democrats claim the majority Republicans had delayed an investigation for over a year. After invoking a little-used rule to force a rare closed session, the Democrats got the Republicans to agree to speed up the inquiry.

For Wilkerson, pre-war intelligence on Iraq was particularly affected by what he viewed as the alternate decision-making process in the White House.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON (Ret.): I am coming to believe that the intelligence was politicized. I'm coming to believe that there was a band centered in the Pentagon that went about politicizing that intelligence. I don't doubt their sincerity. I don't doubt that they believed that they were take the nation to war for a good purpose -- removal of Saddam Hussein, whatever -- I don't doubt that most of them, if not all of them believed that he was a threat, whether it was an imminent threat or not, I don't know. That kind of hits the line of my belief factor. But I think they got to the point where the end justified the means.

RAY SUAREZ: But it wasn't just intelligence. Wilkerson says the Cheney and Rumsfeld teams strongly influenced the planning of the post-war occupation of Iraq and the handling of prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq. On the occupation:

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON (Ret.): Here's what the plan was: The plan devised principally in Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feif's office, and I have to believe, if Rumsfeld is the controller, the leader he says he is, that he was fully cognizant of this, and I don't think he would have been cognizant of it without the blessings of the vice president either.

The plan was to put Jay Garner, Gen. Jay Garner, in his organization on the ground in Iraq for maybe ninety to one hundred and twenty days, install Ahmed Chalabi and his INC colleagues, or some other look-alike, in control, and then leave, withdrawing most of the major military force in the process, if not all of it, in a very short period of time.

This is ineptitude and incompetence of the first order. Ever since that plan failed, we've been in a pickup game and now we've transmogrified the mission from imminent threat and WMD into spreading democracy.

RAY SUAREZ: On the treatment of prisoners, Wilkerson cited a 2002 presidential directive that set new rules for handling prisoners in Afghanistan.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON (Ret.): The president was saying in his memorandum that this was a different situation, and that detainees in the war on terror and prisoners of war in a conventional conflict, were different animals, so to speak, different categories.

Nonetheless, he ordered the armed forces of the United States to do all that they could to comply with the spirit of the Geneva Convention.

The Defense Department, however, under the protective eye of the vice president, took a totally different approach, and some of the atmosphere, the environment that was created, was created principally by two things, and these are very dangerous things if you're going to get on the slippery slope: One, the insinuation that you can do things different because this is a different environment, and then the pressure to do so.

RAY SUAREZ: This backing off of the Geneva Accords, Wilkerson says, led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON (Ret.): There's a fine line between the brutal behavior necessary to yield force -- wield force, for the state, and going over that line.

So one of the reasons you have these codes instilled in every soldier's heart, and you have this love of war and so forth, is not just it's American values, but you want to giver the leaders, the platoon leaders and the company commanders and the battalion commanders the tools to control this use of brute force for the state.

When you relax those rules, you're inviting real problems; you're inviting the kind of problems we had at Abu Ghraib. I have to go back to the vice president's office and hold it culpable, too, because one of the early-on, aggressive participants in this debate about whether or not America could, in fact, change 200 years of policy was David Addington. He's the person that's replacing Scooter Libby. He was the intellectual legal guru, if you will, behind the discussion about the commander in chief having the right in this new situation -- new situation being the war on terror -- to make exceptions.

RAY SUAREZ: Lewis Scooter' Libby resigned last week as Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser. He was indicted on five counts of obstructing justice, perjury, and lying in the CIA leak investigation. Libby entered a not guilty plea at his arraignment Thursday.

For his part, Wilkerson says he's just reporting what he saw in the run-up to the war, and still wonders if he should have spoken out at the time.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON (Ret.): My defense is one of loyalty to a man I'd known for 16 years. My defense is that I knew that he was one of the people in the administration who would argue for moderation, who would argue for diplomacy, who would argue for alliances, who would argue for working with the world instead of against the world, who would argue for magnanimity, humility, instead of arrogance and hubris.

Looking back on it now, to be very direct in answering the question, there is a part of me that regrets I didn't resign.

JIM LEHRER: Margaret Warner takes the story from there.

MARGARET WARNER: For an assessment of former State Department official Larry Wilkerson's charges about the process that led to war, and in particular Vice President Cheney's role, we turn to: Randy Scheunemann, former president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and a former Iraq consultant to Office of the Secretary of Defense-- he's now a private consultant; and David Corn, the Washington editor for the weekly journal of opinion, the Nation.

We invited the vice president's office to participate in this discussion, but they declined. Welcome, gentlemen.

We've just heard Larry Wilkerson. David Corn, is he right? Was the whole process of going to war driven by -- what he calls a cabal, essentially headed by the vice president and defense secretary?

DAVID CORN: Cabal is a big word, but I think he's right in talking about how the process was perverted by the vice president's office and the White House.

I mean, ultimately, this was Bush's decision, and he wasn't forced; I don't believe he was a puppet driven to do this. But if you look at the flow of intelligence, if you look at the fact that in the Defense Department they set up the office of special plans, and sent intelligence to the vice president's office to make the case for war and going around the CIA procedures, you get to see a picture of people who are really devoted to this objective, and that they've cut out the State Department. They don't want to hear it. They tried to cut out some of the CIA analysts as well. So it was, I think, a rigged process, and they were trying to rig it in a way, and the question is how come there wasn't the honest and open debate that Larry Wilkerson thought there should be?

MARGARET WARNER: What's your view of the cabal idea, the end-run around the traditional the bureaucracy and the traditional decision-making process?

RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: Well, Wilkerson asserts several cabals, I was trying to keep them all straight -- the CIA and the vice president, the vice president -- Secretary of Defense Feif's office. And I think soon we're going to need a psychologist versed in dealing with paranoids to understand his theory.

What you've got is an unelected bureaucrat that is frustrated that his principal lost out in policy debates and he is complaining about the process, but his complaints have no basis in fact.

MARGARET WARNER: What about the substance, however, of his complaint? Why do you say there's no basis in fact -- the substance being that Cheney and Rumsfeld had an out-sized role in this that did cut out other parts of the decision-making apparatus?

RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: The Vice President of the United States ran in a national election twice. He was elected to be there, and the fact that he has some power I think reflects the fact that the president relies on his judgment.

The idea that the bureaucracy, as Wilkerson puts it, didn't have a seat at the table -- I'm sorry, they don't get a seat at the table. When the principals' committee meets it's the cabinet secretaries and it's the vice president. That's where decisions were made.

As for open debate, this country debated it for months; the Congress debated it, bipartisan basis; they voted to authorize the use of force.

DAVID CORN: I'll give you a good example of what you might call cabal-like activity. And that is there was this allegation that Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 ring leader, had met with an agent of Saddam Hussein's intelligence service in Prague.

After much examination, the CIA and the F.B.I. -- whose job it was to evaluate this -- said that they couldn't back it up; there was nothing to this report.

Dick Cheney, getting information from the office of special plans

MARGARET WARNER: This is the Doug Feif office in the secretary of defense's office.

DAVID CORN: He kept making public appearances after the CIA and after the F.B.I. had rebutted these charges and found there was nothing to them. He kept making public appearances and telling the public, well, we have this report.

So I think that is a -- you know in some ways, he's not sticking to his obligations to the people who elected him to be an honest broker, to look at information honestly, and if you're trying to cherry pick and end-run the CIA and then put it out there to make your case for war, that -- I don't know, I don't think you have to be paranoid to be worried about it.

RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: For the record, Czech intelligence stands by the claim.

MARGARET WARNER: Czech intelligence.

RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: Czech intelligence, because the meeting allegedly occurred in Prague; they stand by that claim; and the CIA and the F.B.I. never rebutted it. They said they could not prove it, but they certainly didn't disprove it.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let's take what I think everyone agrees was a massive intelligence failure, and that was on the question of whether WMD existed in Iraq.

How much of that intelligence failure do you think, Randy Scheunemann, can be laid at the vice president's office or of that himself and his staff?

RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: I think for that I would look at the national commission, the Rob Silverman Commission that spent months look at this, as well as the bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they concluded it was a massive failure, and it was a failure principally in the CIA and the intelligence community, and furthermore, that there was no politicization of intelligence; there was no pressure on analysts; there was no pressure to change conclusions, and even Wilkerson admitted himself that every piece of intelligence that went into the secretary of state's presentation before the United Nations Security Council was cleared by him, Larry Wilkerson.

MARGARET WARNER: So he did use the word "politicization of intelligence." What's your view on that?

DAVID CORN: The key thing here is there are two parts of the intelligence failure. One was the intelligence that was produced by the CIA and the bureaucracy. The other was how it was stated --

MARGARET WARNER: In other words, how the consumers -- that is the elected officials, presented it to the public.

DAVID CORN: And the public is supposed to get the final word on whether there should be a war or not. And the president came out and he said there was no doubt in this intelligence. Dick Cheney came out and again and again stated as fact that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program -- which was the scariest part of the argument for war.

Yet, if you look at the national intelligence estimate, the major summation of the intelligence, it was full of disagreements on the aluminum tubes, the infamous aluminum tubes; Department of Energy analysts and State Department analysts disagreed with CIA analysts.

MARGARET WARNER: But then how do you explain that Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the U.N., made this case based on the weapons that Larry Wilkerson said he cleared it, and that in fact Powell himself cleared it?

DAVID CORN: Well, yes, I don't think they did their own investigation of the intelligence. They read the intelligence that came to them and thought whether it was sufficient or not, but they didn't see some of the footnotes the dissents as well -- maybe they should have looked at it more closely.

I mean, Powell says now that he feels like he was duped and he is quite angry about this. I find it fascinating that the White House has admitted that the president and Condoleezza Rice, who was national security adviser at the time, never even read the full national intelligence estimate before deciding to take this country to war.

MARGARET WARNER: Let's take one other thing that Larry Wilkerson talked about and he also laid at the foot of both the secretary of defense and the vice president what he calls the poor planning for the post-war situation. Now, how much of a role did the vice president have in that?

RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: Well, you know, I guess if the plan was to install Ahmed Chalabi immediately after the invasion, the cabal didn't prove to be very effective. I mean --

MARGARET WARNER: But that isn't the question. The question is: Were they responsible for that plan, which Larry Wilkerson said went completely awry, and they had no follow-up -- that's what he's saying, that we're now playing a pickup game.

RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: Well, clearly, if there was a plan to install Iraqis and to have a sovereign government right away, we would have been in a better situation. I think frankly it was the interagency fighting and the objections of the State Department and the CIA from doing that that turned us into an occupying power and lost us that critical first year when the insurgency blossomed.

DAVID CORN: But if I remember correctly, the State Department spent $5 million or more for planning after the invasion, economic, security, political transitions. And it was the Defense Department that said get out of here. We don't want your plans. We know what we're doing.

And the vice president and the White House obviously were aligned with that sort of thinking.

So I mean, Larry Wilkerson was on the losing end of these fights. I mean, that's clear, but we see now that -- the way they went about doing it, the Defense Department and the White House, they didn't do it the right way.

MARGARET WARNER: But do you think you can really see Vice President's Cheney's hand in that?

DAVID CORN: In that particular struggle, perhaps not; on things like torture, on things like pushing, you know, some of the WMD stuff, certainly.

MARGARET WARNER: So you do think on the prisoner abuse? What's the evidence on that?

DAVID CORN: Well, the key thing is the infamous torture memo that said, you know we had some right to do, this we didn't have to respect the Geneva Accords --

MARGARET WARNER: Because they weren't classic prisoners of war?

DAVID CORN: Right. Again, this was a fight between the State Department and the Defense Department, but the memo that was written was written by Dick Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, who he just promoted to chief of staff to replace Scooter Libby.

And even the past few weeks when John McCain passed this bill in the Senate ninety to nine against brutal treatment of detainees, it was Dick Cheney's office, Dick Cheney himself who has been the point person trying to beat that back.

MARGARET WARNER: What about that on the prisoner abuse?

RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: Look, the McCain amendment has huge bipartisan, bicameral support. It is going to become law of the land. I hope it becomes law of the land with support of the administration.

MARGARET WARNER: Okay. And what about before, in other words, what about Vice President Cheney's office's role in the policy that has prevailed up till now?

RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: There is no doubt that David Addington, who I have known for many years, has a very strong view on executive power, and there's no doubt there's been debate inside the administration.

But I have got to add this almost McCarthy-ite smear campaign against David Addington and John Hannah is outrageous and it is not based on fact. They are capable public servants doing their job.

DAVID CORN: They are just policy criticisms; I don't think anyone is smearing them. If David Addington wrote that torture memo, then you can criticize; the White House had to pull it back.

MARGARET WARNER: I have a very last final question, very brief to both of you: Where was the national security adviser, then Condoleezza Rice, who is supposed to be the honest broker in this?

RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: Well, I'll tell you where she is now --

MARGARET WARNER: No. Excuse me, where she was then?

RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: She was chairing the National Security Council meetings where they had innumerable debates at the deputy's level, at the principals' level on Iraq.

But she's at the State Department now, and I think what Wilkerson makes clear is there is precious little support in the State Department for the president's policies.

DAVID CORN: I think you hit it on the nose. Her job was to make sure there was an honest debate, and if Dick Cheney was out there saying we have the evidence; we have evidence that Atta was in Prague, when it wasn't clear, if the other agencies didn't agree with that, she should have been the one reining him in and saying we have to coordinate this, and anything that gets out there has my seal of approval. And she didn't do that with the Niger allegations either in the state of the union speech.

MARGARET WARNER: David Corn, Randy Scheunemann, thank you, both.

DAVID CORN: Thank you.

RANDY SCHEUNEMANN: Thank you.

FOCUS SHIELDS & BROOKS

JIM LEHRER: Now, the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks. David what, do you think ever this debate over the war, in light of the new developments, the Libby indictment, the drop in the polls of the president, Iraq, with the Iraq issue being one of them, is this something that's going to go on and on and even intensify?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, certainly the Iraq debate will. There are a whole bunch of issues in the Iraq debate. One is did the administration plan well after the war? And they're guilty of planning horribly.

I say now in the past three weeks, really, they really have begun to have a good anti-insurgency strategy. I think now in Zal Khalilzad we have a good ambassador; now we're beginning to get our act together.

But certainly there were two years wasted, and they're guilty there. Are they guilty of manipulating intelligence on WMD? That, I think, is the thing they are least guilty of. I think Randy Scheunemann mentioned the Robb report, which showed there was no political pressure

JIM LEHRER: This was a commission that looked at the specific issue --

DAVID BROOKS: And there was a Senate intelligence report; there was a Butler report. There were all of these reports. None of them found manipulation of intelligence.

If you go back and look at what Clinton administration was saying about WMD during those years and what the Bush administration was saying, it was very similar.

The Clinton administration thought that Saddam was about five years away from having nuclear weapons, the Germans thought three years. Everybody thought he had WMD', like biological weapons. So on that charge, which insanely the Democrats are focusing on, I think that's where they're the least vulnerable. They're most vulnerable on the post-war planning where they are guilty of real malfeasance.

JIM LEHRER: Mark, how do you see this debate?

MARK SHIELDS: I disagree wholeheartedly with David on this. I mean, we have now reached a point -- first of all, George W. Bush won the White House in 2000 largely on the pledge not that he would take the nation in a different direction -- because by a two to one margin voters felt the country in 2000 was headed in the right direction. He said, I will restore dignity, integrity and honor to the White House.

Today, by a nearly three to one margin, they believe that the White House under George Bush and his administration is less ethical and less honest than it was under --

JIM LEHRER: New polls that came out.

MARK SHIELDS: New polls. A big majority of people believe that the administration deliberately misled the American people. It makes no difference to any American whether Bill Clinton thought they had weapons or whether the French did or the Israelis or the Germans or anybody else. There was one man who made the decision to go to war.

None of them said we're taking this nation to war. That is the most awesome decision any president can make. And the idea that Silverman-Robb report looked at it, nobody has seen the 48-page memo that Scooter Libby prepared for Colin Powell when he made the most important speech of that whole debate, the most important speech of his life, which he now says is the biggest mistake of his life at the U.N., that persuaded this nation to go to war, and he rejected just enormous parts of that report.

JIM LEHRER: David?

DAVID BROOKS: If you want to judge President Bush wrong for making a bad mistake about going to war that's fine. If you want to say he lied us into war, this really is Joe McCarthy territory. This really is accusing a man of lying and killing people. This is the most heinous charge that you can make. You had better have firm evidence about that. There is no evidence that he lied.

Larry Wilkerson himself said that everything that was in Colin Powell's speech, he believed, the French believed, the Germans believed, the British believed. These were things that were believed. Did they turn out to be true? No. But it was not a lie campaign to somehow get us into war. This is really Oliver Stone territory to say that he lied us into war; to say we conducted the war badly, that's true. But to invent a conspiracy is insane.

MARK SHIELDS: I don't think there's any question that the decision had been made long before there was any evidence to go to war. I mean, we have it on Sept. 11; we have it in Paul O'Neil; we have it in Trent Lott's book now, in the summer of 2002, being told that we were going to go to war against Iraq.

They had made a decision and then they started cherry picking, looking for reasons and whether they wanted to believe it, whether they convinced themselves, they were selective in that information, and why aren't they forthcoming?

Jim, during the Clinton years, we had Republican oversight. We had hearings on everything from double parking to lost library cards, to land deals and Buddhist temples and travel records at the White House. The Republican Congress and shame on them -- they have not had a single hearing on the war that has cost this nation $200 billion, that has killed thousands of Iraqis, left more than 16,000 Americans crippled and more than 2,000 dead -- not a single hearing.

DAVID BROOKS: Bill Clinton said Saddam has weapons. If we don't keep the pressure on him, he's going to use them. Secretary of defense, secretary of state, everybody in that administration said that he had weapons of mass destruction. We had a 98-0 vote in the Senate to get rid of Saddam because of the belief that he was a menace to the world. Now, what changed? Sept. 11 changed. Sept. 11 said, okay, now -- the change in attitude was we now can't sit back and wait for him to use it. The threshold of tolerance changed.

And so we had a big national debate. We were all here for it. A lot of Democrats supported it. Almost every single senior member of the Clinton administration supported the resolution to go to war. A lot of people like Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton voted. It was a big national debate. They all saw the same evidence.

JIM LEHRER: Speaking of evidence, how do you interpret the still-falling polling numbers of the president? How much of that do you think is Iraq? How much of it do you think is the integrity issue and all these other things? Are they all woven together?

DAVID BROOKS: I think it's all woven together. You know, I think the falling credibility of the administration is just a big deal, and the White House has a mentality, we're in a valley, we'll get out of it. That's wrong. If they don't do anything to change, they're not going to get out of it.

And it's a reflection the war in Iraq has not gone the way the people thought it was. But I don't think it's the WMD; I think it's the fact that people were being killed that we have to go into Fallujah six times because we can't fight the war credibly.

I also think it's Katrina; it's oil prices; it's a whole series of failures of institutions, and really a sense that the country is not in control, that we have fiscal chaos; we have chaos in Iraq; we have chaos in the Gulf; we have chaos in energy. There's a sense that things are not in control.

JIM LEHRER: What would you add to that, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: I'd say, Jim, that right now, three out of five American voters doubt and question George Bush's integrity and his honesty. Brace Harlow, one of the great Republican wise men in Washington who worked starting with President Roosevelt all the way through President Eisenhower, President Nixon, President Ford, and counseled Democrats as well, and a great patriot, said something that's so profoundly true: Trust is the coin of the realm. Once you lose trust, whether in relations with the Congress, in relation to the American people, you've lost your chance. You've lost your ability to communicate and lead.

And I just -- I just think that has happened to the president. I mean, we used to kid in 2000 about three great American presidents: George Washington, who never told a lie; Richard Nixon who never told the truth, and Bill Clinton who couldn't tell the difference. I mean, that was a big line.

And George Bush was to be this pillar of integrity. He is now seen as morally and ethically inferior to Bill Clinton.

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, but it's not irreversible. I mean, Clinton was much lower than Bush is now. Reagan was lower in Iran-Contra --

MARK SHIELDS: Not in the job rating.

DAVID BROOKS: They were in the 20s. But the point is, you have got to make some changes. When you go back and read about the Reagan administration, you realize how fluid it was. They really did make big changes.

JIM LEHRER: They had people coming and going all the time. This guy made a mistake he's gone.

DAVID BROOKS: There is a war over who was really responsible for saving the administration. But the point is you look at this administration; it's built in cement. And there's an attitude that if we just ride this thing out, it will be fine.

JIM LEHRER: Let's be specific, the president said today -- he was asked about Karl Rove, and he wouldn't even discuss it. How long can he continue to do that?

MARK SHIELDS: I think Karl Rove I mean, first of all, this is the most tight-lipped administration I've ever been around certainly since World War II. And yesterday, front page of the Washington Post, above the fold, lead story, quoting high White House sources -- read either Andy Card or Dan Bartlett giving a green light to those quotes, whether they made them or not --

JIM LEHRER: You believe it goes that far up?

MARK SHIELDS: No question. I don't think the editors of the Washington Post --

JIM LEHRER: Would have put it above the top of the fold the top of the page --

MARK SHIELDS: To lead the paper unless they had from their reporters assurance who these people were, and maybe even George Bush's, not giving it a red light, that Karl Rove had become a liability and might very well have to leave.

I think when you have got a three to one margin, voters thinking you're less ethical, it's less ethical under you than it was under Bill Clinton, and less honest, that Karl Rove really becomes really the story.

I think what you could see yesterday was the brilliant Rove strategy at work; it just exactly how Rove would have handled Rove, which was, first of all, you get daylight between yourself and him and then second you smear him. It was the Rove treatment of Rove.

JIM LEHRER: What do you think, should Rove get out of there?

DAVID BROOKS: Frankly, it's hard for me to imagine because Rove is involved in everything. It's like tearing the guts out of things. I don't know.

JIM LEHRER: Does it matter that much?

DAVID BROOKS: You know, the essential problem is deeper than that. The core thing that people forget is the core Republican strategy in the second term was Social Security reform. That was built on the entire philosophy of how you should use government in the second term. When that failed --

JIM LEHRER: And to make the tax cuts permanent.

DAVID BROOKS: Right. Okay, when those things failed, they lost an agenda, and now it's a question of rediscovering an agenda. If Rove could come up with a new agenda, I'd be fine for keeping him. But the question is are they going to come up with a new agenda, a new approach — something that --

MARK SHIELDS: Jim for the president to reclaim his integrity, the president said during the 2000 campaign. We'll do not only what is legal; we'll do what is right. And then when the Victoria Plame thing came out he said anyone involved in this, the leaking of the CIA agent's identity, would no longer be in this administration.

He's laying down the predicate and premise as to what the standards will be -- as long as Karl Rove, having been involved in open discussion, talking to reporters about Joe Wilson's wife, then you can't say he was uninvolved. And so George Bush is reneging on his high moral principals.

JIM LEHRER: Where does the Sam Alito Supreme Court nomination fit into all this right now, if at all?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think there are actually some bits of good news for the administration. The Bernanke key appointment was a good one; Roberts

JIM LEHRER: Bernanke is head of the Federal Reserve to replace Alan Greenspan.

DAVID BROOKS: So you know they're not totally collapsing. That's good news. And so I think this was a good appointment. And I think he's in --.

JIM LEHRER: You're talking about Alito.

DAVID BROOKS: Alito. He's a mainstream conservative. I've read a bunch of his opinions, they're kind of boring but they're responsible. And so I think he's in decent shape. Is this enough to reverse the decline of the administration? So far, from the Washington Post poll today, no. But....

JIM LEHRER: What about Alito, are the Democrats going to filibuster this? Are they going to make a big fight, or is it just the interest groups are going to have a fight?

MARK SHIELDS: I think the interest groups are ginning up the Democrats to do it but I think a lot of the wind went out of the sails this week when two of the Gang of 14, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mike DeWine of Ohio, two Republicans, said they couldn't imagine a filibuster in this case. So I think Alito's had a good first week. I think he's an appealing figure with a compelling personal story. Yes, he's conservative. Hey, George Bush won the election. He wasn't going to nominate Barney Frank. I mean, let's be very blunt about it.

JIM LEHRER: So you don't think the Democrats are going to make a major effort to --

MARK SHIELDS: I think some will, Jim. You know, I think, I said, when they talk about no litmus test, I mean, Karl Rove called Jim Dobson to assure him that Harriet Miers was good on abortion. The Democrats say that, you know there's no litmus test. Abortion is the litmus test. Let's be very frank about it and that's the central divide between the two parties.

JIM LEHRER: David, should too much be read -- should a lot be read into the fact that Leahy and Specter said the president wanted this thing resolved -- the Alito thing resolved before Christmas and they're not going to even have the hearings until January? What does that say?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, senators are not shrinking violets and they think they are an equal branch of government, which they are on this thing, and I think one of the things that was interesting when Miers resigned was Specter was really angry that it was his show; how come he wasn't running the show? He's going to run the show.

MARK SHIELDS: And I think it's interesting, Jim, that the president said when he nominated Harriet Miers, that she was the most qualified person he could find, so I guess Sam Alito is second or third most qualified.

JIM LEHRER: Okay, I think we'll leave it there. Thank you both very much.

CONVERSATION

JIM LEHRER: And finally tonight, Jeffrey Brown has a new book conversation about the tragedy of AIDS in South Africa.

JEFFREY BROWN: In 1986, Edwin Cameron, a South African human rights lawyer, learned he was HIV positive. Eleven years later, now Judge Cameron, he went public about his condition, thrusting himself into the midst of a national debate over the AIDS crisis that has affected millions of South African lives.

In 2000, Cameron was appoint to the Supreme Court of Appeal, the highest appeals coward in South Africa. He's written his story in a new book "Witness to AIDS." The book has a forward by Nelson Mandela, who calls Justice Cameron one of South Africa's new heroes. Edwin Cameron joins me now. And, welcome to you.

EDWIN CAMERON: Thank you, Jeff.

JEFFREY BROWN: You were an openly gay man as a lawyer, and then as a judge. What made you decide to go public about having AIDS?

EDWIN CAMERON: I've been involved in the AIDS policy formulation as a lawyer, but I'd been keeping this deathly secret, which I'd been ashamed of in the early years.

I was infected in the 1980's as a gay man. I thought my shame was from my homosexual exposure. I discovered that in Africa, where the epidemic is overwhelmingly heterosexual, that heterosexual women feel the same sort of shame, and I decided that I had to speak out eventually to try to unite the two capacities -- the public figure involved in AIDS, who was also a judge, and the private figure who was keeping the secret. So I decided to speak out in 1999.

JEFFREY BROWN: You write, in fact, a great deal about the stigma attached to AIDS in Africa and South Africa. You tell the story of a man who used to work in your garden as one way of exemplifying that. Tell us that.

EDWIN CAMERON: I saw him falling ill in about 2000, and I tried to reach out to him. I spoke to him. He knew that I had gone public; he knew that I could help him with access to treatment.

And I tried to persuade him to talk to me about his condition. He came from Zimbabwe, and he left; he stopped working in my garden, he went back to Zimbabwe and he died. And I'm pretty sure that he died of AIDS, and I'm pretty sure that that's happening across Southern Africa, people for whom treatment is in reach but for them the stigma is too much to take it.

I think it's changing, Jeff. I think that increasingly as treatment becomes available across South African and it is -- my government is providing it in the public sector. In Botswana, there's an extensive public treatment program -- I think it is changing, but I think the stigma is still very intense.

JEFFREY BROWN: And is the stigma attached, do you think, to the sexual nature of the disease?

EDWIN CAMERON: That's the core of it -- the idea that because you have a virus that was sexually transmitted that there's some shame that attaches to it. And that is what we have got to address if we're going to make sure that those people for whom treatment is accessible are going to take it up.

JEFFREY BROWN: You write in the book, AIDS is an epidemic is enmeshed with sex and death; in Africa, the epidemic is enmeshed with the politics of race and sex and death. What did you mean by that?

EDWIN CAMERON: We've had difficulties in South Africa. We've grappled with a president who questioned whether HIV caused AIDS, and that stems from our racial and colonial past where white ideas, as they've seen, have been impressed on Africa, which have insulted and demeaned Africans, and our president seemed to ask the question whether the conventional biomedical model of AIDS, which sees AIDS as a sexually transmitted disease, wasn't insulting African sexual habits; that was a profound mistake. And of course the biomedical model doesn't imply a moral condemnation of Africans, but it came from our racist past and it was one of the most tragic after effects of our racist and colonial past.

JEFFREY BROWN: One of the most striking things is that this epidemic came just as South Africa was entering a new era, a new era of democracy. Has it put pressure on the new institutions of the new South Africa? In what ways has it done so?

EDWIN CAMERON: It has, and the good news -- the bad news was that AIDS denialism delayed a rational and unambiguous response to the disease. The government has now committed itself to treatment provision in the public sector after a lot of ambivalence. The good news is that our democratic institutions came out quite exceedingly well.

We had intense debate in -- amongst civil society organizations. The media were intensely critical of the president's stance. The constitutional court delivered a unanimous judgment, setting out the medical cause of AIDS and requiring the government to provide treatment to pregnant mothers who wanted it. And the president himself was persuaded eventually to adopt a national treatment policy despite what many people thought was still his views.

So the democratic institutions were protested profoundly, and they passed in the way that I as a South African feel very proud of.

JEFFREY BROWN: So where do things stand with this treatment program now? How many people are receiving it? How is it going?

EDWIN CAMERON: It's going quite well, Jeff. About 60,000 people -- poor people -- are receiving anti-retroviral medication through the public sector. It's not as much as they ought to be.

We estimate that approximately 600,000 South Africans are at present falling ill with AIDS, which means that there ought to be 600,000 on treatment. So we're only getting to about 10 percent of them, but the number is steadily increasing, and that's what's optimistic about the epidemic.

JEFFREY BROWN: So in going back and writing about your experience, you've written both a personal story, and, of course, a national tale. What lessons do you take from what has happened over the last, say, 10 years in South Africa with the AIDS experience?

EDWIN CAMERON: The most important lessons, I think, are profoundly optimistic lessons. I'm here tonight talking with you because I've survived on treatment -- I've been on treatment for eight years.

And the fact is that there's so much fear and stigma and ignorance and dismay in Africa, and yet the fundamental factors that AIDS can now be medically managed -- it's medically managed for most people, though not all, in North America and Western Europe. And that can also be the case for Africa and the lessons over the last eight years is we've turned around our approach to the management of the disease, and that we can now bring treatment to those who need it.

JEFFREY BROWN: And let me end on the personal. How is your own health?

EDWIN CAMERON: I'm in wonderful health. I've been undetectable for many years. My virus is being repressed by the medication. I'm on a very simple regimen, and I have huge energy and the huge privilege of being alive.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, the book is "Witness to AIDS," Justice Edwin Cameron, thank you very much.

EDWIN CAMERON: Thank you.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major developments of this day: There were violent protests in Argentina as President Bush and other leaders opened the Summit of the Americas. And the U.S. unemployment rate dipped a tenth of a point in October, to 5 percent.

JIM LEHRER: And to our honor roll of American service personnel killed in Iraq. We add them as their deaths are made official and photographs become available. Here, in silence, are eight more.

JIM LEHRER: Washington Week can be seen on most PBS stations later this evening. We'll see you online and again here Monday evening, which brings me to a bit of NewsHour family business to report. When our closing credits roll in a moment, you will see, as always, "Lester M. Crystal, executive producer." As of tonight, Les is moving on to run MacNeil-Lehrer productions.

So on Monday, that credit will read, "Linda Winslow, executive producer." She has been the deputy to Les for the last 22 years. It is definitely no exaggeration to say that without Les and Linda there would be no Monday or any other evenings for this program. Join us, please, in thanking them both, as you have a nice weekend. I'm Jim Lehrer, thank you and good night.