April 1, 2005

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

GWEN IFILL, host: The world waits for word on Pope John Paul II and gauges the fallout from the death of Terri Schiavo.

For Pope John Paul II, abortion, the death penalty and euthanasia are all the taking of life. With his health failing and the death in the US this week of Terri Schiavo, a cultural and religious debate rages. But the pope's beliefs and exhortations reverberated around the world as well. We take a look.

In Washington, a presidential commission says the Bush administration's prewar intelligence was dead wrong.

And now how far is the intelligence community willing to go to interrogate prisoners?

Covering these stories this week, John Harwood of The Wall Street Journal, Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times, David Sanger of The New York Times and Dana Priest of The Washington Post.

Announcer: Here again is moderator Gwen Ifill.

IFILL: Good evening.

Analysis: Effect of Pope John Paul II's pronouncements on domestic issues

GWEN IFILL, host: After 26 years as the leader of the world's Catholics, Pope John Paul II will leave a remarkable legacy. Tonight, after weeks of debate in this country on the culture of life and death, our job tonight is to assess how the pope's beliefs and edicts have affected public policy, how his pronouncements have fueled our most passionate debates on abortion and the death penalty and even Terri Schiavo.

There is a connection there, isn't there, John?

Mr. JOHN HARWOOD (The Wall Street Journal): Gwen, there's a strong connection. It's very interesting. This has been viewed as a conservative papacy for the last 27 years, I believe. Pope John Paul has been celebrated, like Ronald Reagan has, on the American right for helping speed the fall of communism, for advancing capitalism, upholding conservative social values at home. And lately we've seen "The Gospel of Life" that the pope articulated almost exactly 10 years ago this week has been elevated as central in the debate over Terri Schiavo.

We saw, as the Republican Party moved in the Congress to try to get that feeding tube reinserted, to create a federal cause of action that didn't exist before, the American public was not interested in that. Polls showed they were strongly against it. But the Vatican was cheering what the Republican Party was doing. This is a Republican Party fueled by social conservatives and that's been especially interested in getting the votes of devout Catholics who are part now of this Republican political base. And we're going to see this reverberate as we move forward from here as well.

IFILL: You wrote this week that there is a natural link between issues like abortion and the death penalty and euthanasia and even in some particular--some possible common ground among normally strange bedfellows on issues like this.

Mr. HARWOOD: Well, it's very interesting because "The Gospel of Life" is not only a conservative gospel. The pope is also opposed--in not all but almost all cases--to capital punishment. We've lately seen support among Catholics for capital punish--the death penalty dropping in this country, as has general public support. And some conservatives, who'd like to put a softer face on their movement, are talking about narrowing the range of crimes for which the death penalty might be applied.

IFILL: And the Supreme Court went along with them on ...(unintelligible). Yeah.

Mr. HARWOOD: Supreme Court ruled that the execution for crimes committed by juveniles is unconstitutional. At the same time, we've seen some Democrats, liberals, look to put a new face on their values message, people like Hillary Clinton talking about the tragedy of abortion, looking for common ground where we can reduce the number of abortions that occur in this country. So there is some potential that left and right could come together.

IFILL: Before we move on, I just want to make sure that our viewers understand that we're--this program is live on the East Coast at 8 PM, and the pope, as we tape this, is still alive, clinging to life, in grave condition, but that's the way we're having this conversation.

Ms. DANA PRIEST (The Washington Post): Well, John, do you think when the pope passes that the church itself is going to become any less conservative on the social issues, especially sex and gender issues? He was very traditional in that regard.

Mr. HARWOOD: Dana, it's hard to conceive, at a time when we're looking at a figure so large as Pope John Paul II, that his successor would take the church in a different direction. It's always possible. But I think the stamp and the fact that he has achieved such a huge status over the last half century as somebody who is a force in the world--it makes it less likely that that's going to happen. But we've clearly seen that the pope's doctrine, especially on matters related to sexual practices, sexual mores, is something that creates some distance between him and American Catholics. A majority of American Catholics, like a majority of Americans, support abortion rights at least in some circumstances. So it's not clear whether the successor to the pope is going to narrow that distance.

Mr. DAVID SANGER (The New York Times): John, that totally has made the president's trips to Rome to see the pope particularly fascinating, because he went there several times before the election, clearly with some political issues in the back of his mind. And yet he had to tread this very carefully. Tell us what you learned about the president from this relationship with the pope.

Mr. HARWOOD: Well, the president, of course, has attempted to cultivate religious conservatives throughout his governorship in Texas and as a candidate for president. We should note that his brother, Jeb Bush, is a convert to Roman Catholicism. He was also a central player in the Schiavo case. Like any politician who has a powerful ally, he accepts advice when he likes it and rejects it when he doesn't. Remember, the pope also was against the Iraq War, as well as the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

So George W. Bush has tried to cultivate the pope. He's used the symbolism of those visits. And he succeeded--he won the Catholic vote against a Catholic nominee in the Democratic Party. George W. Bush got 52 percent of the Catholic vote in the last election.

Mr. DOYLE McMANUS (Los Angeles Times): And is it clear that some of that is because of the influence of this pope?

Mr. HARWOOD: Well, the pope has fostered, I think, the segmentation of the religious electorate which mirrors that not just of Catholics but of Americans generally speaking. If the vote for president took place only among those who don't go to church every week, John Kerry would have won. The same with Catholics who don't go to church every week. But those who attend church frequently, who are devout practitioners of their faith, sided strongly with George W. Bush, and that's where Republicans are focusing their energy.

IFILL: And that'll...

Mr. McMANUS: Whether...

IFILL: And that'll--go ahead.

Mr. McMANUS: Sorry. Whether Catholic or Protestant, you mean churchgoers--that the dividing line between churchgoers and non-churchgoers...

Mr. HARWOOD: Exactly. Catholic or Protestant, that's right.

Mr. McMANUS: Yeah.

IFILL: And that plays itself out in things like--we've heard Hillary Clinton, the senator from New York, starting to call abortion a national tragedy, even though she self-identifies as pro-choice. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out.

Analysis: Effect of Pope John Paul II's papacy on international issues

GWEN IFILL, host: But the pope's influence did not end with debates over when life begins and when it ends. He also weighed in throughout his papacy against war and in favor of human rights. And he traveled to the world to make his point, didn't he, Doyle?

Mr. DOYLE McMANUS (Los Angeles Times): He actually set a record that future popes are going to have a hard time meeting, 105 different foreign trips. And these were not one-day or two-day trips; he often did very long trips with lots of speaking. This was a pope with a foreign policy, and it was most obvious in Poland and Eastern Europe. Of course, he was Polish. His roots as a young priest were in Krakow, where he was politicized over time, became a bishop there.

When he became pope in 1978, one of his very first trips was back to Poland in 1979. It was an extraordinary event, 32 sermons in nine days. Millions of people turned out. And from that, the Polish opposition and eventually solidarity got an enormous boost. And it's possible to overestimate what this pope did. He was not the only actor who got that ball rolling downhill in Poland and Eastern Europe. But 10 years later, when the Berlin Wall came down, both General Jaruzelski, the Polish Communist president who ended up out, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, said the pope deserved a lot of credit for that.

IFILL: But as John just said, you know, the president and he agreed on things like stem-cell research, for instance, as well as abortion and the death penalty. But on certain human rights issues and on a lot of other--especially like the war, there was--they just--What?--agreed to disagree?

Mr. McMANUS: Well, this pope's foreign policy wasn't based on politics. It was based on his reading of Catholic doctrine. And one of his biographers put it, `His approach was culture first and human dignity first.' So let's take the example of the war. This pope opposed not only the Iraq War; he opposed the Persian Gulf War in 1991 because, as he said over and over, `War is not the answer.' He even tried to mediate. He sent one envoy to Saddam Hussein and one envoy to George W. Bush. So it's impossible to pigeonhole this pope in conventional political terms. But he was out making his own way.

Mr. DAVID SANGER (The New York Times): Doyle, I think you could argue that the president differed from the pope when it came to uses of state power. But if you listen carefully to his inaugural speech, the State of the Union, he's begun in this second term to strike many of the same themes that the pope has been striking for 20 years.

Mr. McMANUS: I would agree partway. Yes, President Bush in his inaugural address talked about freedom as the birthright of every human on Earth. That is a concept the pope would be comfortable with. He would phrase it a little differently. But President Bush goes on to say that he's arguing for democracy as a problem-solving tool. He's arguing for it because he says there'll be less terrorism if we do that. The pope would say, `I'm just dealing from the spiritual end.'

Mr. JOHN HARWOOD (The Wall Street Journal): Doyle, I've seen some analysts say that Pope John Paul II should be likened to Ronald Reagan in his effect on the Communist empire, his role in the fall of communism. Is that an overstatement?

Mr. McMANUS: I don't think that's an overstatement. The interesting question is: Did John Paul II have the same effect in other parts of the world? And if you go to Latin America, for example, an enormous Catholic continent, his influence was quite different. Why? Because there he decided not to endorse liberation theology, the left-leaning strain that had been active in the '70s and the '80s, but rather to pull the church back to its roots. So you can argue that in Latin America he slowed down the pace of change, which is a different trend from Eastern Europe.

Ms. DANA PRIEST (The Washington Post): But his focus on human rights, on peace and justice and avoiding war--do you sense that those are things that the church has now very much incorporated into their ideology and you'd expect that to continue, or is it totally personality-driven?

Mr. McMANUS: I think a lot of it continues. A lot of it is there in the record and in the encyclicals. Some of it was personality-driven because he had this enormous interest in traveling abroad. But, you know, his travels weren't for the politics. His travels were to reach out to Catholics. And one reason he did all that traveling was to reassert one Catholic doctrine in a lot of different countries at a time when Catholic churches all over the world were fragmenting, when the American church was going one way and the African churches were going another and the Latin Americans were going a third. That's an imperative that every pope is going to face.

And in a sense, one thing we're forgetting here is this pope was also the first television pope, the first CNN pope, the first 24-hour news cycle pope. It's going to be, I think, very difficult for later pontiffs to resist the temptation to use that enormous power.

IFILL: We're going to talk in a minute about what--the consequences of what happened after 9/11 in this world, in this country. And one of them, one of the things was Abu Ghraib and the revelations about what happened to prisoners who were held there. The pope was very outspoken about that. Was there any visible response in this administration to the pope's very direct criticism about what role US forces may have played in torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib?

Mr. McMANUS: I don't recall a direct response by the administration to the pope except to the degree that there were plenty of people in the administration privately troubled by what was going on at Abu Ghraib. But that was, in fact, characteristic of this pope's approach. The victims of American abuse at Abu Ghraib weren't Catholics, weren't Christians, weren't constituents of this pope. He was trying to extend his church's message in a universal sense. And one other piece of his legacy is going to be the unprecedented amount of outreach he did to Jews, to Muslims, to other areas.

Mr. HARWOOD: And there was a response from the American people at the time the pope was criticizing those abuses. That was the low point of George W. Bush's presidency...

Ms. PRIEST: Yeah.

IFILL: Right.

Mr. McMANUS: Right.

Mr. HARWOOD: ...in 2004.

IFILL: That's true.

Analysis: Implications of presidential commission's report on US intelligence failures

GWEN IFILL, host: OK, well, let's--we're going to leave Rome for now and go to Washington, where the presidential commission assigned to get to the bottom of US intelligence failures this week decided to do that by using unusually tough language. `We conclude,' they wrote, `that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destructions. This was a major intelligence failure.' On the surface, this conclusion may sound like something we've heard before, but there was more to this report than just a slap on the wrist.

Isn't that true, David?

Mr. DAVID SANGER (The New York Times): There was a lot more, Gwen. This was the fifth report, and, as you can see, it's...

IFILL: You have a handy show-and-tell copy.

Mr. SANGER: ...plenty thick, 601 pages, and another 91 pages that were classified, mostly about Iran, North Korea, covert action.

A few highlights of this--Senator Chuck Robb, former Senator Chuck Robb, who was the co-chairman, said to us yesterday that they concluded that after all these reports were out, the agencies, all of the intelligence agencies--remember, there are 15--have, quote, "an almost perfect record of resisting external recommendations." And they wrote a note to the president saying that the new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, should be prepared for the fact that the agencies will seek to run around or run over him.

IFILL: But let me stop you right there because here is this big, thick report--how do we know it doesn't end up on a bookcase somewhere gathering dust just as Chuck Robb has warned?

Mr. SANGER: I've got a pretty good bookcase in my home office of just these past reports out here now.

IFILL: We all do.

Mr. SANGER: And it well might. The president, of course, immediately embraced it, said that he was going to have Fran Townsend, who's the director of Homeland Security, make sure that elements of it are implemented. But there's only so much you can do from the White House when a big set of the issues is cultural change. And some of the cultural change issues actually are in the White House. One of the most fascinating parts of this new report dealt with the president's daily brief. Now this is the morning briefing the president gets. The commission made it sound like in the months leading up to the Iraq War, it had turned into sort of the tabloid newspaper of the White House. It said that it sought big headlines, that it was more alarmist and less nuanced than the national intelligence estimate. And it's that national intelligence estimate, the sort of gold-standard document, that they said was dead wrong.

And finally, buried inside this is the great tale of `Curve Ball,' the wonderfully named single Iraqi defector who became the source of the information about the mobile biological labs the president and the vice president talked about. They didn't exist. Not only did people not tell Secretary of State Powell that Curve Ball was a single source and that he was unreliable, but when the CIA sent somebody to Germany to interview him for the first time in 2002, the German agent who was supposed to take him to him said, `You don't want to see this guy. He's crazy.'

Ms. DANA PRIEST (The Washington Post): You know, getting back to Gwen's question, even though it deals with the intelligence community, it's a warning to the president that if the president doesn't take responsibility and really give some power to this new position, you know, as you said, the agencies will pull it out from under him. So do you see in the White House any strong commitment to doing things differently, to making sure that John Negroponte fires people if they don't get along? Any change of attitude there?

Mr. SANGER: You know, so much of this has to do with the relationship between this new DNI and the president himself. Now, with George Tenet, who comes out of this report not terribly well, the president had a pretty good bond. And Tenet was in his office every morning giving that daily brief. Interestingly, the report suggests that Negroponte not do that because, if he does, he will spend his entire time worrying about the day's headlines instead of looking at the broader problems. It's unclear to me right now whether this White House is really dedicated to giving that new director the kind of broad-reaching authority that this report clearly says he needs.

Mr. JOHN HARWOOD (The Wall Street Journal): David, let me ask you about George Tenet, who presided over a lot of these failures, who comes in for a lot of criticism in this report, but, we should note, was also given a Medal of Freedom by President Bush after leaving his job. He said this week that really what happened was we took a tremendous blow in terms of the budget-cutting process in the 1990s, and the commission should have given us more credit for what we rebuilt as opposed to what we failed to do. Is that a fair objection to the report?

Mr. SANGER: Well, it may well be a fair objection to the report. But at the same time, the core of this report is that people in place, including Mr. Tenet, failed to listen to the dissent within their own system; that it wasn't a question of budget, it wasn't a question that they didn't hear what was going wrong; it was that they didn't let that bubble up.

Now, interestingly, the commission stopped short of saying that they were taking political signals from an administration that clearly wanted to take on Saddam Hussein. But if you read it carefully, there are little incidents in it that make you wonder why people would stop from challenging the accepted wisdom.

Mr. DOYLE McMANUS (Los Angeles Times): Well, that was my question. Why didn't they listen to the dissents? Do we have any greater sense here of whether it was because they could hear the signals they were getting from on high, it was something short of pressure, or because that was the case they wanted to present?

Mr. SANGER: You have to see this in little vignettes in this report because the commission stopped well short of coming to a conclusion on that. Instead, they give you little incidents where people said, `I really didn't want to step forward and make a big deal of this.'

IFILL: OK. Thank you, David.

Analysis: Questions and concerns about the US intelligence community's practice of rendition

GWEN IFILL, host: Other questions also remain about the nation's intelligence community, namely how far will it go to get answers to questions. One tactic known as rendition involves sending terrorism suspects off to other countries for interrogation. But what happens then? Torture, perhaps? This is what CIA director Porter Goss told Congress.

Mr. PORTER GOSS (Director, CIA): (From March 17) I can assure you that I know of no instances where the intelligence community is outside the law on this where they've complied. As I said publicly before and I know for a fact, that torture is not productive.

IFILL: OK, let's parse that statement. Torture is not productive, and he knows of no instance in which the intelligence community is outside of the law. There are so many ways to go with that. Is that the end of the questions we're being asked?

Ms. DANA PRIEST (The Washington Post): It's just the beginning.

IFILL: Yeah.

Ms. PRIEST: He opened it up for a lot more questions. And, you know, renditions are supposed to be secret. They use the word, but we're not supposed to know what they do. And yet now, a year after we have sort of cracked this nut a little bit, Congress, the CIA's own inspector general, and three countries--Germany, Sweden and Italy--are all investigating CIA renditions. And what a rendition is, is a way that the CIA, working with the Foreign Intelligence Service, kidnaps, snatches--they don't actually arrest them, but it's like an arrest--and then takes them on an airplane usually in the dead of night to some other country without informing anybody--not the family, not the country's political leaders, nobody. And usually that person disappears. And what has happened in the last year is, we have found out about a number of cases in which, for some reason, the individual pops back out and is able to talk about their trips a little bit.

And now these three countries are actually, because all of the people and some of the political leaders are outraged that the intelligence services might have cooperated, are investigating and thinking in Italy in particular about bringing charges against US agents.

IFILL: So the theory is, you take someone who's suspected away from US laws and US rules, you take them to a country which maybe has a more liberal understanding of what torture is, and let them do the investigating?

Ms. PRIEST: That's part of it. It started out actually as a way, and certainly is still being used as a way, to get people off the streets who the agency believes are bad people, but there's no way they can bring them to court because they don't have the sort of evidence that you would need to do that. So it's both warehousing people somewhere where they'll never get out and they won't ever stand trial, but it has also become a way after 9/11 where they send people that they no longer believe they can get information out of to countries--and, by coincidence, a lot of these countries have bad human rights records as stated in the State Department's human rights report--and then the allegation is that they have been using tactics that are illegal in the United States.

Mr. DOYLE McMANUS (Los Angeles Times): Now, Dana, what Porter Goss seemed to be saying in that clip was torture is illegal and torture doesn't work, and I'm confident that these folks aren't being tortured. Have I understood the rules right? And how can he be confident that these people aren't being tortured in countries that do torture some of their own people?

Ms. PRIEST: Well, it is illegal for the United States to send anybody to a country where they believe that person is more likely than not to be tortured. And the only thing that makes renditions legal, other than that the president says they can be done, is that they get a human rights assurance, the word of the country, before they send them there.

So, in one case, they'll get the--Egypt will say--Egypt, which has a very bad record of human rights and detentions in particular, will say to them, to the station chief overseas, `We agree to treat them humanely,' or whatever kind of wording they use. Well, I've talked to case officers who've been involved in this and other people who have overseen this, and there is no way that you can make sure those assurances are carried out. They're ineffective. And you couldn't even monitor them if you wanted to.

Mr. JOHN HARWOOD (The Wall Street Journal): Well, Dana, here's a related question. We just heard Director Goss say, as Doyle said, that torture doesn't work. Is there evidence that this rendition process has worked, that it's yielded information that's very valuable to us?

Ms. PRIEST: If there is, we don't know about it yet. And even defenders of it have not said that that is why it's working. Defenders of it--the agency, the White House, and others--say it does get people off the streets, and that's our primary motive. We don't intend for these people to be tortured. And, of course, the torture is what has focused all of our attention on it.

Mr. DAVID SANGER (The New York Times): Dana, we've tried asking the president about every different way we know...

Ms. PRIEST: Yeah.

Mr. SANGER: ...about why he does this, and he always comes back and says, `We don't torture people.' But could you foresee a situation in which the United States is forced either to bring these people to the US or to have much stricter supervision when they are abroad?

Ms. PRIEST: You could not have much stricter supervision because you are giving them to a sovereign country. So what they're doing instead is thinking through this in a longer term. This was something that developed before 9/11, but certainly blossomed after 9/11. And now they have a long-term problem, which is what do you do with people you think are terrorists but can't bring them to court? Do you let them go or do you incarcerate them somewhere for their lifetimes? And that's really the larger question. And I think that there is discussion inside the White House and at the agency about what you do here because this is an untenable and unsupportable, and it's certainly not remained secret. I mean, we and other reporters, other newspapers have found out about the planes that they have used and the front companies that they created.

IFILL: Luxury jets, I might add.

Ms. PRIEST: Well, Gulfstream 5 and 1Ks to transport these people. And now there's a whole industry of plane spotters who have a hobby of spotting planes, like radio ham operators, but they are spotting these planes because we know some of their tail numbers and reporting them to the media all over the world. So even though we don't talk about them...

IFILL: So is Congress weighing in--briefly, is Congress weighing in or are courts weighing in on this?

Ms. PRIEST: Congress is weighing in only behind closed doors. Predictably, the Democrats want to investigate this. And the Republicans so far, except John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the two Republicans who think that this is something that's worth looking into precisely because of the tactics being alleged to be used.

IFILL: OK. Thank you.

GWEN IFILL, host: And thank you, everybody, as always, and thank you for watching. As always, keep track of daily developments on "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer." And we'll see right here around the table next week on WASHINGTON WEEK. Good night.

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