October 21, 2005

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

GWEN IFILL, host: Shoes waiting to drop: Harriet Miers, Karl Rove and "Scooter" Libby. The future of democracy in Iraq. The White House is on pins and needles.

President GEORGE W. BUSH: There's some background noise here, a lot of chatter, a lot of speculation and opining, but the American people expect me to do my job and I'm going to.

IFILL: But is what the president calls background noise threatening to drown out everything else? On Capitol Hill, the president's Supreme Court nominee sparred with Republican senators, raising new questions about her qualifications and her views.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA, Chairman, Judiciary Committee): I think it's been a chaotic process, very candidly.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT, Ranking Member, Judiciary Committee): We'd actually like to know what the heck is going on.

IFILL: At federal court, all eyes were on prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as he closed in on possible indictments of the president's top men.

In Iraq, a low-key response to the much-herald constitutional election. And Saddam Hussein faces the first charges against him.

Is the White House changing course in Iraq?

Covering these stories this week: Gloria Borger of CBS News and US News; Richard Keil of Bloomberg News; Martha Raddatz of ABC News; and David Sanger of The New York Times.

Announcer: Here again is moderator Gwen Ifill.

IFILL: Good evening.

Analysis: Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court

GWEN IFILL, host: The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said this week he's never seen anything like it. Harriet Miers, the president's nominee to take Sandra Day O'Connor's place on the high court, seems to have hit every single pothole on the road to confirmation. Lawmakers say her standard Senate questionnaire was flawed and incomplete, her face-to-face meetings uninspired and her detractors dug their heels in deeper every day. The president's defense?

President GEORGE W. BUSH: (From October 20) ...Harriet for a lot of reasons. One reason was because she had never been a judge. I thought it made a lot of sense to bring a fresh outlook of somebody who's actually been a very successful attorney and not only a successful attorney but had been a pioneer for women lawyers in Texas.

IFILL: But none of that defense seems to be getting any traction. The Senate has now scheduled Miers' confirmation hearings to begin on November 7th but even that may not be really good news.

Is this whole thing falling apart, Gloria?

Ms. GLORIA BORGER (CBS News; US News & World Report): Well, Gwen, let's just say that Harriet Miers did not have a terrific week this week on Capitol Hill.

IFILL: Or last week or the week before.

Ms. BORGER: Or last week or the week before. I think if you step back for a moment, one of the big problems about Harriet Miers is that nobody really knows who she is save maybe for the president of the United States, who tells us he trusts her, she's a good friend, he's known her for 10 years. But nobody really knows the first thing about her. So everything we hear about her goes under the magnifying glass, takes on added significance and we want to know more about her.

So this week she started out the week by meeting with the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, nice meet and greet with Arlen Specter. Turns out their meeting is over. Lo' and behold, there seems to be a little bit of a disagreement about what she said about the right to privacy, which is, of course, a key thing that we need to know about Harriet Miers.

Secondly, the White House starts putting out some of her documents. 1989, she was running for the Dallas City Council. She filled out a questionnaire in which she said that she supported a constitutional amendment banning abortion and some conservatives said, `Oh, that's very good.' And then she met with another senator and said, `Well, don't read too much into that.' So what are you supposed to believe about that?

Then comes the questionnaire. The Senate Judiciary Committee sends her a questionnaire, `You need to fill out these things so we can flesh out your record.' It goes back to the Judiciary Committee a few days later. The--two days later, the chairman and ranking Democrat come out and say, `This is insufficient and even insulting to us.' And they have sent it back to her for a do-over.

IFILL: Can I just--I was curious that late in the week we began to hear Republicans start saying things like, `Well, you know, we need to see her White House communications,' which the White House they perfectly well know has said is off-limits. So what's that about?

Ms. BORGER: Well, that's very interesting, Gwen, largely because it comes from conservative Republicans--Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Sam Brownback, both of whom are on the Judiciary Committee, very conservative. With John Roberts, it was Democrats saying, `We need more documents.'

IFILL: Yeah.

Ms. BORGER: This time it's bipartisan. Why do they feel they need those documents? Well, she has been White House counsel. They know very little about how she feels about any area of constitutional law other than the fact that she says she will not legislate from the bench and she believes in humility from the bench which is what John Roberts said. So Republicans are saying now, `Air on the side of giving us more information about her.'

IFILL: We're trying to help you.

Ms. BORGER: Right, we're trying to help you. And, of course, the White House is going to claim executive privilege, no doubt, and that's going to set up a fight.

Ms. MARTHA RADDATZ (ABC News): What about the questionnaire, though, Gloria? What was so bad about them? I know there were a couple of monosyllabic answers...

Ms. BORGER: Aside from the fact that she...

Ms. RADDATZ: ...which is never good.

Ms. BORGER: ...that woman who's supposed to be meticulous forgot to pay her DC bar dues...

Ms. RADDATZ: Oops. Yeah.

IFILL: Over Texas bar dues, too, yeah.

Ms. BORGER: ...and overlooked it in Texas--bar dues and all that.

Ms. RADDATZ: Did we learn anything from this questionnaire?

Ms. BORGER: We learned not enough about case law. Arlen Specter, the chairman of the committee, said, `I've got a stack this thick of cases she's been involved in and she only talked a few of them. Why should I know more about her case law than she does?' number one.

Number two, again, it goes back to this issue of what she did as White House counsel. They went back to her and they said, `We need to know where you stood on certain issues that came before the White House.' What they're talking about really probably are issues regarding terrorism, are issues regarding torture, for example, and they have gotten absolutely nothing out of her. And that is why I think they felt a little bit insulted because they felt, `You come to us as a blank slate and we need to fill it in a little bit before you come before the committee.'

Mr. DAVID SANGER (The New York Times): Gloria, I'm a little bit confused about the Democrat's strategy here. They've had three weeks of sitting back and watching the Republican Party go to war with itself over this, but sooner or later, they're going to have to declare themselves. Which side do they take?

Ms. BORGER: Well, first of all, it's kind of stunning that they've been so united in their silence and it's actually the first united strategy we've seen out of the Democrats in some time. And they've obviously decided to sit back and--why get in the middle of a circular firing squad which they've decided not to do, but I do think in talking to Democrats on the Hill this week they have a decision to make: Do they go after Harriet Miers on either the abortion issue or do they go after Harriet Miers because she's unqualified or do they decide, `Gee, she is better than what might come next,' because if, for some reason, Harriet Miers withdraws or does not get approved or we vote against her and combine with conservatives to defeat her, what would we get next? And is that a fight we want to have politically--maybe it is--or would we rather have Harriet Miers on the bench and perhaps she could become something like a Justice Souter or a Justice Kennedy, should they take that chance?

Mr. RICHARD KEIL (Bloomberg News): I have a question about the questionnaire she filled out when running for local office in Dallas in 1989. When that came out, it seemed for a moment like the Republicans got some traction, and then she goes up to the Hill and is talking to people about it and conservatives start saying that she was waffling. You talk to people in the White House all the time about this. What was their reaction?

Ms. BORGER: Well, they thought it would please conservatives and they were very surprised that even that was not enough to convince conservatives she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Analysis: CIA leak investigation

GWEN IFILL, host: Well, if the Miers nomination was not confounding enough, the White House is also bracing for the legal firestorm that could break out if one or more senior White House aides are indicted in the CIA leak scandal. As often happens in Washington, the only information about the leak story has come from leaks and these seem to spell trouble for Bush adviser Karl Rove and Cheney adviser Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Richard Keil's been reporting non-stop on what the president called background noise and chatter.

So is that the way the White House really sees this?

Mr. RICHARD KEIL (Bloomberg News): Gwen, if they really think it's background chatter, they're wearing some of those noise cancelling headphones. Frankly, I talked to somebody at the White House today and said--I wasn't calling particularly on this subject--I said, `What's going on?' And the answer was, `Well, it's Friday. The grand jury is meeting. Nothing is going on here.'

IFILL: Hm.

Mr. KEIL: It is really hard to overstate the tension in that building. The atmosphere particularly in the vice president's office is said to be very, very, very tense. There are plenty of people and rumors about people who work for the vice president who are alleged to have begun cooperating with Patrick Fitzgerald about what Scooter Libby knew and when he knew it and what, if anything, he did with that information.

IFILL: What...

Mr. KEIL: The nervousness is reaching a crescendo.

IFILL: ...other signs that these--the ner--what is the nervousness predicated on? Are there signs coming from lawyers on either side of the case? Are there signs coming from Fitzgerald's investigation which tells them that indictments are inevitable?

Mr. KEIL: It's an educated guessing game for most parties involved, but there are an awful lot of criminal defense attorneys probably with--we tried to total it up earlier--we've probably got 120 years of experience prosecuting or defending people in cases like this. And I have not found one person who says that based on what they know about the law in general and Fitzgerald in particular that he is not preparing a very methodical case that's likely to result in indictments next week before the expiration of the grand jury a week from today.

Mr. DAVID SANGER (The New York Times): Dick, you and I were both covering the White House in its opening days, and they came in after the Clinton administration and made a lot of declarations about the most ethical administration that they want to run. Many administrations say that. What do they do if there are indictments?

Mr. KEIL: Well, that's an interesting question, David. They definitely campaigned on that. We all remember then Governor Bush talking about restoring honor and integrity to the White House. He's a very loyal person. We know that. We see that in the Harriet Miers nomination. No one has done more for him politically than Karl Rove. The president's own personal inclinations according to those who know him best would be to keep Karl on board should anything happen with him. But the political reality most people are acknowledging there is that that will be impossible. The expectation is that if either man is indicted, they will resign that day or almost immediately thereafter and the rhetoric will be the words to the effect of not wanting to be a distraction to the president or the administration and using all their time to fight what they will, no doubt, describe as spurious charges.

Ms. GLORIA BORGER (CBS News; US News & World Report): Should we all be shocked that in Washington two people in the White House were trying to discredit somebody who was trying to discredit them and that they went about doing that perhaps in a sort secretive way? Is that what's going to be prosecuted here or is what's going to be prosecuted perhaps trying to cover up what they did?

Mr. KEIL: Well, yes, I think you're right, Gloria. There seems to be based on the line of questioning these days that people are getting when they go back before the grand jury it's all about what they said about what they did with the information. There are an awful lot of inconsistencies in accounts offered by witnesses and they Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. We remember Karl Rove now has been four times before the grand jury. I talked to one prominent defense attorney this week and said, `Let's pretend we're not talking about this case. What if I told you about a guy who four times in a 20-month investigation had been hauled before the grand jury, including once in the last two weeks?' And he said, `If I'm representing that man, I'm preparing for indictments.'

Ms. MARTHA RADDATZ (ABC News): Dick, what's the strategy here? There are some people who have said, `I'm not a target.' There are other names mentioned. Is it confined to Karl Rove and Scooter Libby?

Mr. KEIL: Not necessarily. In fact, if you examine Fitzgerald's history and certainly the case he's prosecuted against the Ryan administration in Illinois, the scandal involving the governor's office, that started at a very low level and moved all the way up. No expectation that that's necessarily what's happening here, but the hallmark of Fitzgerald's career has been to indict anybody he can indict and see where that takes him.

IFILL: Is there any reason to believe that this is going to take him into the vice president's office to the vice president directly?

Mr. KEIL: There have been pointed questions to witnesses on that very subject. He quite clearly, as I reported earlier this week, is trying to learn essentially--to borrow the old phrase--what the vice president knew, when he knew it and what, if anything, he did with the information.

IFILL: But no target letters?

Mr. KEIL: No target letters, but I know someone who has worked very closely with Fitzgerald who says that the absence of target letters is not necessarily indicative of anybody having a clean bill of legal health.

IFILL: So we expect something to happen this week?

Mr. KEIL: Well, the grand jury expires next Friday. It's been extended once. Under federal guidelines, it can't be extended again. For those of you on the edge of your seats, you might actually be able to stay there a little while longer because if he really thinks he isn't finished, he could impanel a new grand jury and reintroduce all the evidence he believes to be pertinent and continue from there.

IFILL: Oh, joy. Thanks a lot, Dick.

Analysis: Week's developments in Iraq

GWEN IFILL, host: Now to Iraq. This was supposed to be another one of those corner-turning moments--a successful constitutional referendum, the prosecution of Saddam, or at least the beginning of it. Martha Raddatz is just back--36 hours on the plane--from witnessing all of this on the ground in Iraq.

Was it the definitive week the administration was hoping for, Martha?

Ms. MARTHA RADDATZ (ABC News): Oh, it certainly wasn't, particularly with the constitution. I think that last weekend it seemed like such a definitive time. There were so many people out voting. I was in a Sunni neighborhood, and to see these people streaming into this neighborhood to vote for the first time--I was in the Abu Ghraib neighborhood of the infamous prison, but it's a Sunni-dominated area--you had people there never before voted, coming forward, holding up the finger proudly and all saying, `No, no, no, we didn't vote for the constitution.' What's hard here, however, is we still do not know the definitive results. It was supposed to be out in a couple of days, but there are some irregularities and I can tell you right now I witnessed them. When we went into the polling places--and it was interesting, the first polling place wouldn't let cameras in. The second one was, `Come on in, come on in.' I thought, `This'll change under democracy. We'll come back in four years. This'll never happen again.' We were behind the voting booth. My cameraman was back there and there was a man who took seven ballots, at least, because we have it on camera and marked yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes...

IFILL: One guy?

Ms. RADDATZ: One guy and he wasn't the only one. And as my cameraman pointed out, we were only in there 20 minutes and we saw a variety of people...

Ms. GLORIA BORGER (CBS News; US News & World Report): He was from Chicago.

Ms. RADDATZ: Anyway--that's what we all said. Chicago, there we go.

Mr. RICHARD KEIL (Bloomberg News): County. Right.

Ms. RADDATZ: Yeah. And folded up those ballots and handed them to the man who was taking the ballots and he happily stuffed them in there. But...

IFILL: First, I want to apologize the viewers in Chicago, but go ahead.

Ms. RADDATZ: Gloria doesn't, but you go ahead.

Ms. BORGER: I do.

Mr. KEIL: But Patrick Fitzgerald is there so...

IFILL: Yeah, so who's responsible?

Ms. RADDATZ: That's right. So those kind of irregularities and there were some neighborhoods where, I believe, up in Irbil or somewhere up north there was 99 percent voted yes. When you get over 90 percent, you start thinking something might be up. So that's going to take a while. And the hard part here as well is once the election commission comes out and says, `This is how it was. There were or were not irregularities,' whether that sticks with the populations--again, especially the Sunnis and the Sunni Arabs have been largely responsible for the insurgency and felt this disaffected by this--if it passes, there are these irregularities, they see our film, that's going to be trouble.

IFILL: Well--and here's the other part of the story, the Bush administration in the person of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was straining to put the best face on what they were seeing on the ground this week.

Secretary CONDOLEEZZA RICE (US State Department): (From October 19) There's a great deal at stake. A free Iraq will be at the heart of a different kind of Middle East. We must defeat the ideology of hatred, the ideology that forms the roots of the extremist threat that we face. Iraq's struggle, the region's struggle is to show that there is a better way, a freer way to lasting peace.

IFILL: Now I'm going to ask you, David, to parse those statements because it sounds like the administration--Secretary Rice, the president especially--their rhetoric is beginning to reflect the changed reality that Martha saw on the ground.

Mr. DAVID SANGER (The New York Times): It is, Gwen. You saw this happen even before the Iraqis went to the polls. At one point in her testimony, Dr. Rice was pressing the question of: How long could we be there? Could we be there 10 years? She wouldn't exclude that possibility. A few days before that, you had the president himself giving a speech about terrorism where he completely melded the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq, something he's done before, but then said that what this was about was stopping the establishment of a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.

IFILL: Right.

Mr. SANGER: He's discussing a conflict of Cold War proportions and the Cold War took 40 years for us to win. Now nobody's coming right out and saying, `Look, we're going to be there for a long time,' but the discussion a year or a year and a half ago was once they're on the road here, they've met all of these landmarks, they've got their constitution, they've had their elections, and the elections are supposed to be in December, then we're on a glide path on the way out.

IFILL: In fact, I remember at the time of the elections, I guess, in January that the rhetoric was very much, `Here we are. We have done it. Democracy has been achieved because of what we did in Iraq.' And they're not saying that this time.

Mr. SANGER: They certainly aren't and they know they have a problem, and, like the Harriet Miers case, a lot of the problem is in their own party. They've got Republicans who are getting ready to head into the midterm elections. When they go into those midterm elections, they want to be able to go home and say, `Look, we've still got troops there, but we're on the downward slope.' And there's not a whole lot of evidence right now that, in fact, we would be able to get out without letting more chaos reign.

Ms. RADDATZ: One key thing here, and you see this on the ground--you mentioned January--in January, we bring democracy...

IFILL: Right.

Ms. RADDATZ: ...everything'll be great because they were looking at it as this homegrown insurgency which they felt was a way to defeat it. In May, suddenly the intelligence really starting shifting and they started realizing the bigger problem was Zarqawi and it was that radical element, it was terrorism. It became a global war on terrorism. You had the administration originally denying--Don Rumsfeld--that it was even a guerrilla war. They finally realized it was a guerrilla war and an insurgency. They started fighting that and then you had this new war on terrorism and that's why this is tough. This isn't a group that cares about democracy.

Ms. BORGER: But doesn't anyone get any credit here 'cause the violence didn't happen this time that we really anticipated? We thought we were se...

Ms. RADDATZ: Well, basically they locked down the entire country.

Ms. BORGER: Right.

Ms. RADDATZ: There was no traffic on the roads. They had the no-roll rule. I mean, it's remarkable to look at and I looked at it from a Black Hawk helicopter on election evening to see all the roads closed, playing soccer. The military did an amazing job setting this up.

Ms. BORGER: Right.

Ms. RADDATZ: All the ballots were out, everything was peaceful. But you can also say, `What was the matter with the intelligence?' The week I was there prior to this, all they were talking about was suicide vest bombers. There wasn't a single one and they're still scratching their heads about that--What happened?--and bracing themselves in case it does happen.

Mr. KEIL: Is there a concern because there have been times in the past, other milestone moments, that have passed with less violence than we had anticipated. Is this a case of us doing a few things differently and better--and you've been there nine or 10 times, so perhaps you can measure the difference--or are they really just bracing for whatever the insurgency is going to do next?

Ms. RADDATZ: Well, I think they did exactly what they did in January, which was basically shut down the country. They didn't have as much violence in January as they thought. They didn't have as much violence in this, but I think they are still scratching their heads in many ways about how you fight this insurgency, this global insurgency, this global terrorist network that has plunked itself down solidly in Iraq.

IFILL: Flashback for a moment to when we first started this enterprise of trying to bring democracy to Iraq. The comparisons were to post-World War II Tokyo, to post-World War II Germany. We were going to bring in a Marshall Plan. We were going to bring in something that was going to set everybody right and you don't hear that anymore.

Mr. SANGER: You sure don't. You know, I remember sitting in the West Wing for these briefings about what post-Saddam Iraq would look like before the invasion happened. And during those briefings they not only used the Germany and Japan comparison but one of the reasons they liked it was that our forces at that time were welcomed.

IFILL: Mm-hmm.

Mr. SANGER: And then we drafted constitutions, or at least helped along that process, and they were on the road. The fact of the matter is that by this stage in the Japan and Germany occupations, there was barely a shot being fired. In fact, the countries had been, in large part, disarmed. And there was no suggestion of somebody moving in to fill the vacuum as Martha just described. So now they are almost completely without a historical model. The closest one that some can come up with of a successful insurgency that was finally defeated was in Malaysia and that took 10 years.

IFILL: Mm-hmm.

Mr. SANGER: Insurgencies may not be that big. In this case, it's maybe 20 percent of the population that is even sympathetic with the insurgents.

Ms. RADDATZ: But again, it's those two separate insurgencies.

Mr. SANGER: That's right.

Ms. RADDATZ: It's the big global insurgency and terrorism and the homegrown terrorists. And I would say reconstruction, democracy--that can help defeat that insurgency but the wider one is what's very, very different.

Ms. BORGER: And what about the possibility now that this war expands--and I should say very real possibility that this war expands or is already expanding into Syria?

Mr. SANGER: That is a very real possibility. We had a story last week about a fire fight that took place between American and Syrian forces right on the border. There's been a lot of discussion in the White House about whether the president should sign a finding that would allow them to go in and attack the insurgents as they meet in gathering points in Syria.

IFILL: And the president went out of his way today to endorse a United Nations report--not that he's usually a fan of the United Nations--which was very critical of the Syrian leadership and their possible involvement in the death of the Lebanese prime minister.

Mr. SANGER: That's right, but it's a little bit of a dangerous game because if the regime of President Assad fails, it's unclear who would replace him or whether it would be an improvement. And they're not really sure they want chaos on an Iraqi border either.

Mr. KEIL: Well, let's do a nuts-and-bolts numbers question. Should they decide that the right thing to do is to engage militarily across the border into Syria, realistically do we have enough troops to do that?

Ms. RADDATZ: No. No. No. I mean, I--they are so stretched now. In spring of 2006, all of the active duty US Army divisions will have deployed to Iraq twice, many of the Marines, three times. That--you can't do that year after year after year, which is one of the reasons they really need to start drawing down.

IFILL: Martha, I want to ask you about something else you witnessed this week, which was the beginning of the trial of Saddam Hussein. You were standing outside the courtroom for part of it. It was kind of a remarkable shadow puppetry of democracy or whatever was going on in that courtroom with Saddam Hussein not giving his name and challenging the veracity of the judge.

Ms. RADDATZ: You know what the best moment was, though, was the judge pointing at Saddam Hussein, `sit down' and he had that voting--the ink on his finger.

IFILL: Oh, he did?

Ms. BORGER: Oh, he did? Really?

Ms. RADDATZ: Yeah, that was an incredible thing to watch. And--I watched it on television by the way. I was outside of the courtroom. The--it was remarkable for Iraqis, and all over Baghdad, all over Iraq, people were watching it because it really was--and I've heard this a million times--but people never thought this would happen. They never thought this day would come, unfortunate in many ways that it ended about three hours later, and it'll be put off until the end of November. But the judge I thought at first letting Saddam Hussein talk the way he did seemed a bit out of control, but the more you watched the judge, he seemed amused by Saddam Hussein and sort of putting him in his place with his manner.

IFILL: On the other hand, one of the lawyers...

Ms. RADDATZ: One of the lawyers was assassinated, yes.

IFILL: ...was assassinated the next day. So this is a rocky road and we'll be...

Ms. RADDATZ: Yes, it is.

IFILL: ...following it. Thank you. I'm glad you're back safe.

Ms. RADDATZ: Thank you.

IFILL: Thanks again for telling us all about it. Thanks everybody else as well.

GWEN IFILL, host: Obviously, everything in Washington is shifting as we speak. We'll be watching it all.

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