June 13, 2003

Announcer: From our nation's capital, this is WASHINGTON WEEK. Here's moderator Gwen Ifill.

GWEN IFILL, host: The search for peace in the Middle East; the search for weapons in Iraq; Medicare lives; and Hillary writes.

Barely a week after yet another historic handshake, targeted assassination attempts and suicide bombs return to the Middle East as Israelis and Palestinians stare each other down. Where does that leave President Bush, the peacemaker?

And in Iraq where US soldiers are still being killed or wounded each day, what of the search for weapons of mass destruction? Some lawmakers want to know: Were Americans misled about why we went to war?

Also on Capitol Hill, Medicare reform springs back to life as Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate seize the political moment, all this as readers everywhere snap up copies of Hillary Clinton's new autobiography. But does it tell us anything we didn't know?

Covering these stories this week: David Sanger of The New York Times, Martha Raddatz of ABC News, Ceci Connolly of The Washington Post and Gloria Borger of US News and CNBC.

Announcer: Here again is moderator Gwen Ifill.

IFILL: Good evening.

Analysis: Latest prospects for peace in the Middle East

GWEN IFILL, host: Well, here we are again, only last week we were sitting around this table talking hopefully about the latest prospects for peace in the Middle East. But as has happened so many times before, things have gone violently off course again. Forty-seven people have died over five days, and neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians sound like they are willing to back down. So what does this mean for President Bush, who finally climbed out onto that Middle East peace limb last week? His national security adviser says nothing has changed.

Dr. CONDOLEEZZA RICE (National Security Adviser): (From Thursday) President Bush remains committed to the course set at Aqaba because it is the only course that will bring a durable peace and lasting security. This president keeps his promises. He expects all the parties to keep theirs.

IFILL: But as we have seen this week, those promises are more easily made than kept. David Sanger is with the president tonight in Kennebunkport, Maine, where the Bush family is gathering for a long Father's Day weekend.

David, was the White House shaken by this week's turn of events?

Mr. DAVID SANGER (The New York Times): Well, they were, Gwen. You know, the White House wrote this `road map' to peace, but it's the militants, particularly Hamas, that are laying the mines in the middle of the road. And while the White House knew that there would be interruptions and violence and so forth, the timing of this and the severity of this clearly suggests that the major elements of the road map that the president said had to--that there had to be progress on immediately, which is, of course, bringing security to the region first, may not happen. And if it doesn't, it allows both of the--of the leaders who he brought together in Jordan, Prime Minister Abbas and, of course, Prime Minister Sharon--it allows each one of them to retreat from the commitments. Prime Minister Sharon has already said that he was out to crush Hamas now, and Prime Minister Abbas is--appears to be hardly in a position to bring about the kind of cease-fire that everybody was discussing so optimistically.

And the tone has completely changed. A week ago when we were flying back from the Middle East, the president invited reporters up into his cabin, a very rare moment, and he was sort of brimming with optimism. And that optimism now looks, if not naive, then at least a bit premature.

IFILL: Now who, David, in the White House is banging his head against a wall saying, `I never wanted to do this anyway, and now here we are stuck'?

What's interesting now, though, is that he--it's entirely possible that the president is going to discover that you can't stay that aloof from it, that once you're--you're into this process, as Condoleezza Rice said in that--that clip that you showed before, you're in it to stay, and that may mean that you're in it very deeply. And he could find himself exactly where President Clinton was, which is: You have to get into the details if you're going to maintain the peace long enough to make any part of the road map work.

Ms. GLORIA BORGER (US News & World Report): David, in an interview today, Kofi Annan of the UN suggested some kind of a peacekeeping force to at least keep some kind of temporary peace between the Palestinians and the--and the Israelis. What does the administration say to that idea?

Mr. SANGER: They have not embraced any kind of peacekeeping force and certainly no kind of force that would have an American presence in it yet. Now there have been variations of this idea for a long time, and th--they basically call for the internationalization of the Gaza and--and the West Bank so that you have it under some kind of international control. The Israelis, obviously, have--have not been in favor of that, but this administration has not, either because they--they see this as sort of an unwinnable peacekeeping operation. There is no peace right now to keep.

Ms. MARTHA RADDATZ (ABC News): David, this is the same, but very different. As Gwen mentioned, we see this all the time, over and over, and it seems like whenever there's an effort towards peace, there's this huge setback. But this is very different. You have a new prime minister. Yasir Arafat is supposedly out of the picture. So how do they deal with that? That seems so much more serious. You can now say, `Well, maybe it wasn't all Yasir Arafau--fat's fault. Maybe no one can control this.'

Mr. SANGER: Well, Martha, you've got a very good point because the major difference that the administration talked about when we were on my last beach location which was Sharm el-Sheikh and--and then when we were in Jordan was that with Prime Minister Abbas, they have a new negotiating partner and one who explicitly rejected violence in all of its forms. The problem is that he has not been able to turn the police force of the Palestinian Authority into a force capable of fighting terrorism.

Now there are a couple of possible reasons for that. Dr. Rice suggested in a speech she gave on Thursday that this force has really never been aimed at--at terrorism and it would take a while to get them there. But the other possibility is that Prime Minister Abbas simply does not have that kind of authority and that this violence itself indicates that he may never get that authority. And this whole relationship between Arafat and Abbas is one that is still being worked out, and we really don't know in the end whether he will have the juice to get this done.

IFILL: Thank you, David.

Analysis: Intelligence gathering of the Iraqi war

GWEN IFILL, host: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not the only source of unanswerable questions this week. We'll take you back now to March 17th, 48 hours before the first US-led attacks in Iraq. President Bush went to the American people to make this case for intervention.

President GEORGE W. BUSH: (From March 17) Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

IFILL: But none of the types of weapons the president was talking about that day have been found. Meanwhile, new questions continue to surface about the quality of the intelligence used to justify pre-emptive action. Democrats are calling for an investigation; Republicans are resisting.

Senator PAT ROBERTS (Republican, Kansas): (From Wednesday) I don't think a formal, quote, "investigation," which is a pejorative, that you have--that there's something dreadfully wrong and that you're going to have to set things straight is the proper course of action at this time. Let's do our homework first.

IFILL: Homework. What kind of homework are we talking about, Martha?

Ms. MARTHA RADDATZ (ABC News): There--there's a lot of homework to be done here and a lot that happened this week, in particular. There was a Defense Intelligence Agency report, portions of which, about a page and a half, were declassified this week. It's an 80-page report. You heard the president say definitively that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now even UN inspectors won't argue with that, but the administration made a case that the threat was imminent. The Defense Intelligence Agency in this report that was classified last September--here, a couple of quotes: "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons." "Although we lack any direct information, Iraq probably"--this report is filled with probablys, possiblys. So there are a lot of questions about why the administration was saying so definitively this threat exists and why they have found no weapons of mass destruction.

Ms. CECI CONNOLLY (The Washington Post): Martha, the other image that I think has been seared in so many people's minds in that buildup to the war was Secretary of State Powell's appearance before the UN. It seemed to be such an authoritative, comprehensive, point-by-point, very compelling argument, much of it on this point of weapons of mass destruction. Where does this leave Secretary Powell, his reputation, his relationships?

Ms. RADDATZ: I think a lot of people have forgotten that one of the things in Secretary Powell's presentation--and it was a very powerful presentation--was that one of the things Secretary Powell said throughout this was, `Here are some satellite images. We're going to show you where we w--where we believe weapons were, but they were moved.' So it's hard to go back to that speech and say, `Aha, the weapons inspectors checked this--this area and there was nothing there.' Well, that's, frankly, what Secretary Powell said. So he has a little more wiggle room, but he did make the case that tons of--of missing chemicals, tons of missing biological weapons--and you had George Tenet sitting behind him backing him up on this. But Secretary Powell threw out a lot of the intelligence. He wouldn't take it. He said, `I--this--this isn't good enough for my speech.' There are things that Secretary Powell would not say that President Bush did say.

Ms. GLORIA BORGER (US News & World Report): But there are lots of Democrats now, Martha, saying that--that this was all a bunch of hype. Joe Biden has said that it was hype. Bob Graham of Florida is running for the presidency on this kind of a platform, saying that perhaps people were telling the president things that they knew that he wanted to hear and that they embellished the intelligence or they just, you know, edited it to the point where it looked like what the president wanted.

Ms. RADDATZ: An--and that's the big question that the Democrats have especially...

Ms. BORGER: Right.

Ms. RADDATZ: ...`Were they cooking the books? Were--were the intelligence analysts--did they know that what the administration wanted to hear was this, that and the other'...

Ms. BORGER: Right.

Ms. RADDATZ: ...and that you analyze it perhaps not as carefully or you look at it in a different way. And in some ways, it's like being a journalist. You take all this information and you try to be objective about it. That's what an intelligence analyst does. But if they're getting political pressure, which some analysts have said they were getting, that's a different story altogether.

IFILL: David.

Mr. DAVID SANGER (The New York Times): Martha, one of the things that journalists also do is that at the end of the day we try to cross out all the things we don't believe. And yet in the president's State of the Union speech, there emerged this one large piece of misinformation, which was that the Iraqis had been trying to purchase yellow cake for nuclear material from--from Niger. How did this possibly get into the State of the Union?

Ms. RADDATZ: Another big question, another thing they can do their homework on. There was an ambassador--former ambassador who was sent to Niger in February of 2002, almost a full year before the State of the Union speech. He came back--he was sent there by the CIA. He came back and told the CIA that he thought the information was bogus, unrealistic. Now the CIA--a CIA official told me that a cable was sent out on March 9th that said, `We have some information. The--the officials in Niger say this is not true, it didn't happen; they didn't sell uranium. Condoleezza Rice, however, has said, `This must have just happened at a lower level. It never got to us.' So there's still questions about why that got in the speech. President Bush also used the British. He cited British intelligence, not US intelligence. If US intelligence was so great, why didn't they use the US intelligence in that speech?

IFILL: We only have a little bit of time here, but I'm curious about one thing which has now become kind of embraced by everyone as true, which is that Saddam Hussein is alive. We have heard everyone speaking about him as being the fomenter of all this opposition on the ground in Iraq. We have heard people say he is--Ahmed Chal--Chalabi, who's supposed to be the Pentagon's hand--handpicked leader, has said that he's alive and paying off people to at--assassinate US troops. What's the--what's the deal here? Is it--is it true? Are we just accepting that now?

Ms. RADDATZ: That he's alive?

IFILL: Yeah.

Ms. RADDATZ: Well, I think because they've found absolutely no solid evidence that he's dead, they do believe he's alive. I mean, they've gone to these sites that they bombed the first day of the war; no evidence that he was there. I mean, they still say he might have been taken away, he might have been injured, but it does seem like he is alive and probably well.

Analysis: Overhauling of the nation's Medicare system

GWEN IFILL, host: Well, while all these unanswered questions were being batted around in Washington, an amazing thing happened on Capitol Hill this week. Republicans and Democrats--get this--decided to do something about an issue that most Americans say they care about. They decided to do it quickly, and the White House signed on. So now Congress is actually on the verge of a long-promised overhaul of the nation's Medicare system, which will include, among other things, prescription drug coverage.

So the question becomes: What changed, Ceci, and what's it going to cost?

Ms. CECI CONNOLLY (The Washington Post): Well, it may not be so much what changed, but there is something of a tradition in Washington that if you sort of live with a problem and chew it over and debate it for three or four or five years, as we have on Medicare, people start sort of giving a little bit from their extreme positions and realizing we've got to get something done. Now this time around, the other big incentive was $400 billion over 10 years. That's a nice piece of change for this kind of a program, and it hasn't been on the table before. So I think that both Republicans, who felt the pressure to deliver on a campaign promise, especially the White House, and then Democrats, seeing that amount of money available, said, you know, `We've got--we've got to go for this.'

But just to put that $400 billion into a little bit of quick perspective. President Bush was proposing initially to spend $190 billion on Medicare prescription drugs--much less--but if you wanted to give every senior citizen in America the same prescription drug benefit that members of Congress have, it would probably cost $800 billion or $900 billion. So this is somewhere in between.

Ms. GLORIA BORGER (US News & World Report): But aren't conservatives--conservative Republicans a little upset with the president because of the cost of--of this plan? Four hundred billion may sound good to some Democrats but certainly not conservatives.

Ms. CONNOLLY: Yes, that's absolutely the case, Gloria. And you saw a couple of them in that Senate Finance Committee, namely Senator Nickles and Senator Trent Lott, vote no in the Finance Committee, in part, because of the cost of this. Now in the case of Senator Trent Lott, there's a little bit of sour grapes and sort of bitterness over losing his majority leader post and--and...

Ms. BORGER: Bill Frist.

Ms. CONNOLLY: ...working with--against Bill Frist. So, of course, you know, with the Senate, there are always some great personal behind-the-scenes dynamics, but you are going to see over in the House version of the bill something that is a bit more conservative, a bit more market-orientated, closer to the White House philosophically.

Ms. MARTHA RADDATZ (ABC News): And what would really change for seniors here? There's been some debate about whether or not seniors might overuse prescription drugs?

Ms. CONNOLLY: Well, that's an interesting argument, and we heard it specifically from Senator Nickles in the Finance Committee debate, and he went on to say, `If you offer this, seniors are going to use and overuse drugs and then that's going to jack up the price.' Interestingly, what you currently have with senior citizens are a lot of people who are cutting pills and making other kinds of medication mistakes. I think what you really need to see ideally in this sort of a program is some decent management, some help from physicians so that people know which drugs to take and how they interact. It's very complicated.

For the average Medicare recipient--again, to kind of put this in some context--probably the first $1,000 that comes out of a senior citizen's pocket, they lose that investment. That's--that's their cost. So you think, `Well, gee, I have to spend $1,000 before I get any kind of benefit from the government.' That sounded pretty high to me until I found out that the average Medicare recipient spends about $2,300 a year on prescription drugs.

IFILL: David, did you have a question?

Mr. DAVID SANGER (The New York Times): I do. Ceci, i--maybe it's the salt air out here, but I think I smell the--the faint whiff of Karl Rove's intervention, and I'm wondering whether or not the president, to--to what you can see in what's happening on the Hill, is actually interested in the amount this is going to cost in the structure of it or if it's just more important at this point to s--go out on the campaign trail and say, `We got this done. Forget what the costs--forget the contribution to the deficit.'

Ms. CONNOLLY: Well, David, I--I'm sure you know this even better than--than me, but I think that we've seen a pattern with this president and this White House of being less concerned with the details. You were talking about it in foreign policy, but we've certainly seen it in education reform and some other domestic issues, and more of the ability of simply being able to say, `I delivered on a promise.' And that's what this is about. I think that some of the president's critics would say, `How concerned is he about the deficit? It's already blowing up. What's another couple of hundred billion here?' So I don't think that's a--a big concern.

IFILL: Wasn't the White House asking...

Mr. SANGER: The calculation is...

IFILL: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. What, David?

Mr. SANGER: I said the calculation is that the deficit doesn't pay--no voters pay attention to it at this point.

Ms. CONNOLLY: Absolutely, David.

IFILL: But there was a tradeoff at some point about this that the White House had in mind, which is managed care in exchange for continued benefit coverage--prescription benefit coverage.

Ms. CONNOLLY: Right.

IFILL: Has that just gone away?

Ms. CONNOLLY: Just about, and that's where the Democrats, namely Ted Kennedy, who has had a lot to do with corralling the other Democrats in the party and saying, `Let's get on board with this.' He's saying, `Declare victory because we stopped them from privatizing Medicare.' You can argue about that term. It's a bit of a loaded term, but in terms of forcing senior citizens into HMOs, it wouldn't happen.

Analysis: Hillary Clinton's new book, "Living History"

GWEN IFILL, host: Well, Ceci, one more big story of the week: an $8 million book advance and years of intrigue later, we now have in hand Hillary Clinton's version of events. Her book, "Living History," hit the shelves this week, sold 200,000 copies in a single day and stirred up a hornet's nest of new speculation about the former first lady's future in politics. Gloria Borger read the whole thing this week and has been assigned the class book review.

Ms. GLORIA BORGER (US News & World Report): Oh, my God.

IFILL: So what did you think?

Ms. BORGER: Well, I didn't really learn anything new in it, Gwen. There was nothing really surprising in it. And why should there be? This is a campaign book. This is a c--this is a book about the 2008 presidential campaign. It's really a lot of policy wrapped in the cotton candy because when you get $8 million to dish a little bit, you'd better dish. And there--and there is a little bit of that in this book, talking about the Monica Lewinsky affair, etc., etc.. But there are mentions of Travelgate, Whitewater and all the rest, and--and that's what you do in a campaign book. Somebody asks you--we're all journalists here. Somebody asks you a question, oh, you know, `What did you think about--what--what happened to the Rose Law Firm billing records?' or whatever. You know, you can just sh--go to page 200, `Oh, I dealt with that. I've de--I've dealt with that before.'

IFILL: She doesn't go into--she doesn't go into detail in those kinds of...

Ms. BORGER: Well--well, that's what's kind of interesting. You know, she does have a chapter on the failed health-care reform, but she doesn't dwell on managed competition which was her--her big thing then. She does talk about Travelgate and all the rest, but it's--it's kind of in a--in an interesting and--and dismissive way.

But the book, though, may be unintentionally revealing, Gwen, because it--it really confirms something that I--I remember a source of mine at the White House told me when they were in the White House about Bill and Hillary Clinton, which was one of the things that joined them together and that kept them together was a mutual distrust and hatred of their enemies. And what this book has a lot of in it is a lot of discussion about the enemies of Bill and Hillary Clinton, most notably, of course, Ken Starr and the now-famous right-wing conspiracy.

Ms. CECI CONNOLLY (The Washington Post): Does that include the press?

Ms. BORGER: Well, it's--it's interesting. The--the press doesn't come out for a lot of public pillorying by Hillary here, and that's what also convinces me that this is a campaign book.

Ms. MARTHA RADDATZ (ABC News): Probably don't want to do that in a campaign book, right? Yeah.

Ms. BORGER: You don't want to do that if you're going to run for the presidency in 2008. So I think--you know, this was a very interesting way and very smart way of getting a lot of--kind of things on the record from her point of view, being human about her feelings about the Lewinsky affair and--and Bill Clinton but not telling us anything we didn't already know.

Ms. RADDATZ: And where does this leave the eventual Bill Clinton book?

Ms. BORGER: Well, that's--that's what's really so interesting about this and--because, you know, Bill Clinton has his book coming out. And, you know, the Democrats are upset that she's sucking all of the oxygen out of the room with this book. His book is going to come out right before the 2004 election, maybe at the time of the convention or maybe afterwards. But in her book, here's what she says. It's kind of interesting. She's talking about Bill Clinton, and she said, `Why he felt he had to deceive me and others is his own story and he needs to tell it in his own way.' So...

IFILL: Scoop it right up.

Ms. RADDATZ: Yes.

Ms. BORGER: ..."Jaws 2." You know, she sort of tees it up for him. She's kind of doing the boo--you've got to read the sequel, right?

IFILL: M--Mr. Sanger.

Mr. DAVID SANGER (The New York Times): Well, Gloria, I may be a policy wonk, but I couldn't resist when I picked up the book going right to the middle section where President Clinton tells his wife that really things with Monica Lewinsky were a little more complicated than he had first described. But she describes the scene in which she's deeply shocked by this. And my memory is that my newspaper and some others, the day before, had described how the president was going to change his testimony in front of the grand jury. It made me wonder: How much of the--the events in here have been reinterpreted or whitewashed to your m--to your mind?

Ms. BORGER: Well, you know, I don't think it's any surprise that Hillary Clinton didn't change her story, David. She has always said she didn't know, and maybe she just will--would say to you, `You know, I stopped reading the newspapers because it was so awful and it was so terrible.' She says in this she never read the Starr Report. So maybe she didn't. But it's her story. She's sticking to it. She's not going to change it. And now it's in a book, and we shouldn't ask her about it if she runs for president.

IFILL: Well, thank you, Gloria, for doing all that speed reading for us. We really appreciate it.

And thanks, everybody else. Thank you, David, up there in Maine. Have some lobster for us.

Ms. RADDATZ: Oh, yeah.

Mr. SANGER: It's not such rough duty.

IFILL: As we go tonight, we send our condolences to the family of David Brinkley, a journalist's journalist, standard setter and an all-around industry icon. We should all be so good at what we do as he was.

Thank you for watching. You can keep up with daily events every night on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," and we'll see you again right here next week on WASHINGTON WEEK. Good night.

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