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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Bill Pending in congress to Reform Whistleblower Law; U.s. Troops Find Huge Cache of Weapons in Falluja

Aired November 24, 2004 - 22:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again.
In truth, we suspect your head isn't exactly into the world and all its problems right now the night before Thanksgiving. There's cleaning to do, cooking to worry about.

It's probably not the best night to tell you a powerful Senator is demanding the Food and Drug Administration stop sliming the associate director of drug safety if, in fact, the agency is doing that and there is at least some evidence it is.

Dr. David Graham, who you met on the program last week, has been having a heck of a time since testifying before Congress on Vioxx and other drugs he believes are dangerous.

It seems the agency wasn't too thrilled with Dr. Graham's belief that the agency is, and these are my words but his sentiment, in the pocket of the big drug companies a bit too much. Dr. Graham finds himself in an uncomfortable spot on this night before Thanksgiving at the top of the news.

So, the whip begins with his story reported to us by CNN's Elizabeth Cohen, Elizabeth a headline.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Is someone trying to intimidate FDA whistleblower Dr. David Graham, if so, it doesn't appear to be working -- Aaron.

BROWN: Elizabeth, thank you.

On to a major chunk of the old Soviet Union and the election that's bringing a Cold War chill there tonight, CNN's Jill Dougherty with the story and a headline.

JILL DOUGHERTY, CNN MOSCOW BUREAU CHIEF: With thousands of opposition supporters in the streets of Kiev, the Central Election Commission of Ukraine issues its final report. The government-backed candidate for president has won. The western leaning opposition candidate has lost. Will Ukraine remain peaceful -- Aaron?

BROWN: Jill.

Finally to Washington, the budget and what many are calling a budget busting piece of legislation, Ed Henry on the Hill and the headline. ED HENRY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Congress has slapped together a bill full of questionable projects such as $1 million to study hog waste. Critics say the system is broken and needs to be fixed -- Aaron.

BROWN: Ed, thank you. We'll get back to you and the rest shortly.

Also tonight, even now new discoveries coming out of Falluja, this was a powder keg in every sense of the word.

And, a 60-yeara-old story of a slice of a horrible moment in time redeemed by a simple act of human kindness.

The rooster is off tonight but the turkey is glad to have the job. It certainly beats the alternative when you think about. Morning papers will get us into Thanksgiving, all that and more in the hour ahead.

We begin tonight with a dose of reality concerning the drugs you take. It comes from an FDA whistleblower, you may recall, as the central figure in the Vioxx affair. The allegation is simple even if, as we suspect, the issues it raises are not.

Simply put he says at his agency good science too often takes a back seat to big business and, in the end, to public safety. And instead of changing its ways, he argues the agency is going after the messenger.

We have two reports tonight, first CNN's Elizabeth Cohen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COHEN (voice-over): After 20 years at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. David Graham blew the whistle.

DR. DAVID GRAHAM, FDA WHISTLEBLOWER: The FDA as current configured is incapable of protecting America against another Vioxx. We are virtually defenseless.

COHEN: Graham, who monitors drug safety, says the FDA is more interested in protecting drug companies than the American public keeping medicines on the market long after it's clear they could be dangerous.

Graham appeared on ABC's "Nightline" last night.

GRAHAM: The circumstances in FDA I think forced me to become a whistleblower in this situation.

COHEN: He cites as an example Vioxx. When Graham did a study showing the blockbuster arthritis drug could cause heart attacks he says he didn't publicize it because he'd received a warning from his supervisor.

GRAHAM: I was pressured to change my conclusions and recommendations.

COHEN: The FDA denies Graham's allegations and now some charge the agency is going a step further by actively trying to discredit him. Someone from within the FDA called the Government Accountability Project, which legally represents Graham and other whistleblowers.

The caller, according to a report in the British Medical Journal, claimed to have been bullied by Graham and charge that Graham's Vioxx study could reflect scientific misconduct.

The FDA says it had no idea the employee was making the phone call but acknowledged the right of its employees to raise their concerns to oversight groups. And so where does all this leave Graham? Still at the FDA, still studying drugs, which are safe and which aren't.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COHEN: At the congressional hearings, Dr. Graham said that he thought the FDA needed to do a safety review of five other drugs currently on the market -- Aaron.

BROWN: One of those drugs you mentioned, if memory serves me, was Accutane, the acne drug and I think it was just yesterday the FDA strengthened the warning there.

COHEN: That's right, Aaron. That was one of the five drugs that he mentioned. And just yesterday the FDA did say that they were going to strengthen the warning that's on the label there.

Accutane, if you remember from previous years, there's been a lot of concern that women take it if they were to become pregnant that their child would be born with severe, severe deformities. Now, women are told not to become pregnant while taking it but some women have become pregnant and so the concerns are still there.

BROWN: Elizabeth, thank you, good to have you with us tonight.

COHEN: Thanks.

BROWN: In a moment, we'll talk at length with David Graham's lawyer.

First, the kind of life in store for the good doctor, with that here's CNN's Frank Buckley.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When the chief of the U.S. Park Police said publicly last year that extra protection going to Washington monuments and memorials left them short in other areas...

CHIEF THERESA CHAMBERS: We just don't have the resources to get it done.

BUCKLEY: ...Chief Theresa Chambers claims she was told by superiors to stop talking to the media and then she was fired.

CHAMBERS: To have my gun and badge taken away from me with armed agents standing nearby there was nothing more humiliating in the profession of law enforcement.

BUCKLEY: Chambers says she blew the whistle to protect the public.

CHAMBERS: Instead of the message being addressed the messenger is attacked and that's what happened in this case.

BUCKLEY: Minneapolis-based FBI Agent Coleen Rowley didn't lose her job but she did give up her anonymity. The career agent's critical memo to FBI headquarters about its failure to aggressively investigate alleged 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui dropped her into the middle of a political and media firestorm.

COLEEN ROWLEY, FBI AGENT: I'm sorry, I can't comment.

BUCKLEY: She couldn't catch a cab in Washington without walking into a news camera, her testimony before Congress front page news. It was disconcerting at the time but Rowley now believes it's the reason she didn't suffer any repercussions.

ROWLEY: It's really just the media and the publicity that oftentimes protects people.

BUCKLEY: Rowley was named a person of the year by "Time" magazine for her whistle-blowing. She's made it one of her missions as a private citizen to encourage others to come forward and to provide better protection for whistleblowers.

ROWLEY: How do you ever know of these things if you don't have protection for talking about them and surfacing the problems?

BUCKLEY: Since the Enron and WorldCom scandals, protections for corporate whistleblowers have increased.

(on camera): But watchdogs for government whistleblowers say virtually every case that's gone to court has gone against the person who has blown the whistle.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When you got a statistic of 95 losses, one win, something is terribly wrong.

BUCKLEY (voice-over): A bill is pending in Congress to reform the whistleblower law. Advocates say its passage would protect the public by better protecting people who blow the whistle.

Frank Buckley, CNN, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Thomas Devine is the legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a private organization that represents Dr. David Graham and other whistleblowers and we talked to Mr. Devine earlier this evening.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): Mr. Devine your client, Dr. Graham, says he's being intimidated at the agency. In what form is that intimidation? How is that happening?

THOMAS DEVINE, LEGAL DIR., GOVT. ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT: Actually it's been happening most of this year against Dr. Graham and other FDA scientists who are challenging unsafe drug approvals. They've been placed under criminal investigation, hopelessly illegal criminal investigations, but nonetheless ones that FDA can get away with because the employees don't have any viable legal rights under the Whistleblower Protection Act.

They've been denied permission to publish their papers, which is also kind of an official secrets act, which we don't have legally here but FDA is getting away with it because there's really no one to stop them.

The FDA contacted our group, camouflaged -- their management camouflaged themselves as whistleblowers who are trying to attack, file allegations against Dr. Graham as a bully. It turns out it was people who had the power over him.

They've been threatening to exile him and that could happen next week, put him out to pasture so that he can't actually work on dangerous drugs anymore and he'll be paid to fill up space in the commissioner's office.

BROWN: Mr. Devine, let me work with a couple of those if I can.

DEVINE: Sure.

BROWN: Can you give me -- in what sense has he been threatened with a criminal action?

DEVINE: All of the FDA scientists at the office of drug safety were placed under criminal investigation after the truth was leaked about the antidepressants that were about to be approved for teenage use despite a history of suicides that the government was covering up.

BROWN: What would the crime have been?

DEVINE: You know, I'm not sure what the crime would have been. The investigation itself was hopelessly illegal and they eventually called it off after a lot of pressure. Kind of what in the world do you think you people are trying to do?

BROWN: Yes.

DEVINE: There's not much respect for freedom of speech at this agency.

BROWN: Well, I want to get to that in a second. Just one more question on your laundry list of allegations. You believe that it was superiors to Dr. Graham who actually contacted the Office of Accountability or Government Accountability Office and said that he was a bully and essentially were trying to smear him that these were his bosses.

DEVINE: I'm under wraps because of a confidentiality commitment to say if they were his supervisors but I can say it was FDA management. We figured that out and confronted them.

BROWN: And what did they say to that?

DEVINE: They didn't deny it but they said I couldn't reveal their identities, so I'll keep my word.

BROWN: OK. Dr. Janet Woodcox (ph), who is a deputy commissioner of operations over there or acting, said last night I think it was that the FDA thrives on a culture of differences of scientific opinion and debate. I gather your client sees it quite differently.

DEVINE: Well, there's a real bureaucratic schizophrenia here. There's one position for public relations purposes and there's another reality for people who are actually getting in the way of the drug companies on the front lines at the FDA and they have nothing to do with each other. And, quite frankly, what Dr. Woodcox said were almost no overlap with reality for the scientists actually challenging unsafe drugs.

BROWN: Just one or two other things. You're the lawyer here. You're not the doctor. But I think that what Dr. Graham has been saying, if I can reduce it to a simple sentence, is that the drug approval process essentially is in the pocket of the drug companies that the FDA's business in this is to approve drugs rather than to rigorously test them and perhaps reject them. Am I fairly stating his view?

DEVINE: That's right. He is challenging a conflict of interest within the approval process. He's challenging a trend to shrink the scope and size of the drug approval studies and he's challenging cover-ups of the truth about dangerous drugs that are being concealed by the FDA from the American public. That's just the facts of life as he's been experiencing them for the last few years.

BROWN: And just as a final question and I'm getting back to something you said earlier your fear and his I guess is they can't outright fire him. I mean that would create a lot of problems. So, they're just going to put him in one of those offices where you don't really do anything and you just get paid to do nothing?

DEVINE: Yes, the offices where you get paid to fill up space or write a long term memo that eventually will be allowed to gather dust. FDA's attitude towards this seems to be never again, not that the public won't ever be irresponsibly endangered again but that whistleblowers won't be able to commit the truth and get away with it again.

BROWN: Mr. Devine, we appreciate your time. You expressed the position really well and clearly tonight. We appreciate that. Thank you, sir.

DEVINE: Thank you, sir.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: One other item concerning one of the five drugs that Dr. Graham warned about in his testimony before Congress last week, the cholesterol-lowering drug Crestor (ph). Today, the consumer protection group, Public Citizen, asked the FDA to squelch a new ad campaign for the drug. Public Citizen says the ads falsely claim there is no concern at FDA about Crestor.

Ahead on the program on this Thanksgiving eve, the secrets of Falluja and the realities of the battle to take it back.

Also tonight, disputed elections in a part of the world teetering between democracy and a devil of a future, a break first.

From New York this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: A State Department official died today in Iraq. James Mullin (ph) had spent a better part of a year helping rebuild the country's school systems. He was killed outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, circumstances still unclear.

Meantime to the south, American forces continue to carry out raids aimed at picking off insurgents, some of whom may have fled in advance of the battle of Falluja.

And, in Falluja itself, American forces have uncovered enough weapons they say to supply a nationwide rebellion. They've also had a rare moment to reflect on what they have been through and they have been through a lot, reporting for us tonight, CNN's Jane Arraf.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JANE ARRAF, CNN BAGHDAD BUREAU CHIEF (voice-over): Near Falluja, rare for combat...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I ask that you give these soldiers today the courage they have to do to accomplish this task.

ARRAF: These men have spent eight months fighting the insurgency north of Baghdad. They were told this battle would be the most intense and important to their lives.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you want to finish the fight up north, it starts here, throughout the home starts here, not just for us but for every U.S. soldier in Iraq.

ARRAF: Phone and Internet links to their families at home were cut for operational security. Soldiers knew that not everyone would make it back. Many of these men had bonded over the past eight months. Command Sergeant Major Steve Falkenburg (ph) was responsible for the enlisted men and non-commissioned officers. He thought these were some of the finest soldiers he'd seen.

With the Army's tanks, fighting vehicles and artillery, Task Force 22 led the assault on the city from the north clearing the way for thousands of Marine infantrymen. The Army's 1st Cavalry Division blocked insurgents from escaping to the south. Military officials say in the face of the combined assault the organized insurgency collapsed.

MAJOR JOHN REYNOLDS, U.S. ARMY: The integration of the Air Force capability, close air support, the indirect fire support that we brought with us internally and the ones that Marines offered to us just made it a combined arms fight and made the enemy, the insurgents shall we say have to look in two directions, three directions sometimes.

ARRAF: The battle started well before the troops hit the ground. Insurgents had rigged streets and buildings with explosives. Many of them went up in flames as the Army set off its own charges and fired hundreds of artillery rounds into the defense line. Civilians have left or been chased out of the city long ago.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're going around. It's just a little pocket right here.

ARRAF: But with hundreds of insurgents in pockets throughout their area, the Army infantrymen picked their way through the city very carefully. The Army fired almost 1,000 rounds of artillery, the most in any battle for a city since Vietnam. The sound of gunfire and explosions went on for days. The air was thick with the smell of cordite.

On this day, despite the tens of millions of dollars of armored equipment, the fight came down to this, gunmen hidden in buildings firing hundred dollar rocket-propelled grenades.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That last RPG round takes us down to three.

ARRAF: There were at least a dozen RPGs fired in this ambush. One of them hit a young officer, a man who tried to make flowers grow here, his buddy said. He wasn't the only casualty.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Command Sergeant Major Falkenburg, Captain Sims, Lieutenant Iwan (ph) and Staff Sergeant Madison (ph), may they rest in peace.

ARRAF: Out of the box, out of the battle zone, the loss to this scout platoon of their staff sergeant was just beginning to sink in.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This one's for my Matty (ph) in the club. The slow boat's trips to Austria will not be the same anymore. I love you Matty.

ARRAF: These men believe they did some good here. You can't see the gaps in this formation but Task Force 22 had four men killed and 42 wounded, leaving some very empty places here and back home.

Jane Arraf, CNN, near Falluja.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: A thousand rounds of artillery, to that we'll add this, reports that American forces uncovered a significant weapons cache every five blocks in Falluja, 60 of the 100 mosques were being used in the fighting.

In one sense, the numbers measure military success on the ground but they also speak to the war of persuasion being lost in parts of Iraq, not to mention in the larger Arab world. Today we learned of a report that (UNINTELLIGIBLE) the warning in that regard. It was prepared by a panel of advisers to the Defense Department.

With us to talk about some of the points made, David Rothkoff, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment. It's nice to see you. It's hard not to watch what Jane just reported and see how in one sense how effective the military has been in one aspect of this and then read the report and realize how ineffective the government has been at winning the hearts and minds.

DAVID ROTHKOFF, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT: Well, but think about it another way. Take your report and imagine that you're sitting in another part of Iraq or another part of the Middle East and you're looking at it.

They're not seeing smiling faces of people who look like brothers. They're looking at foreigners from thousands of miles away who've come in there. They don't see 1,000 rounds as a struggle for democracy. They see us pounding 1,000 rounds into a city in the region.

And so, I think what the report is talking about is that we're sending messages and these messages aren't necessarily helping us win this fight for democracy and we have also, and I think this was the thrust of the report, we also have sort of deconstructed the apparatus that we used to have in order to help advance those messages.

BROWN: USIA and...

ROTHKOFF: USIA. There was a part of the Defense Department that did this kind of thing and here we are the first information age super power and we've essentially unilaterally disarmed in terms of the information side of this particular conflict.

BROWN: Just one sentence if you can on the people who wrote the report because this is not some left wing think tank that wrote this up.

ROTHKOFF: No, no. No, no. These are a bunch of retired admirals and generals, people who worked at the Defense Department, people who worked in the intelligence community who sat down and looked at conflicts over the course of the past couple of decades and seen repeating problems on the stabilization and reconstruction and of all of the conflicts that we've been in.

BROWN: One of the things they say, it leads you to believe in some respects we are deluding ourselves in some respects. The president says this a lot. They hate our -- they hate us for our freedom.

The report says they don't hate our freedom. They hate our policies. That's the problem and that's a more complicated problem to solve because I assume we believe our policies, whether it's Israel and Palestine and the rest, are correct.

ROTHKOFF: Sure but if what we're trying to do is win hearts and minds, if what we're trying to do is change their attitude towards the way they should be running governments or the way they look at us, we need to start recognizing that there is a soft side to this war as well as the hard side to this war.

I mean look at the poll ratings. It was part of this report in these countries. And our allies, and the countries we're closest to like Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Egypt, we have single digit approval ratings for the United States right now and it's gone down over the past two years.

BROWN: So, in a minute, I'll show how fair I can be, in a minute how do we solve it?

ROTHKOFF: Well, we have to solve it in an organized way. I think that's what the report says we need but the report says let's set up something in the National Security Council, have some deputy national security adviser who coordinates all the tools at our disposal and goes about this with planning and with budget and using all the agencies of the Unites States government and working with the private sector in order to get this message out there but let's also recognize this is a multi-year contract.

BROWN: Is there a coherent message to get out that will win the hearts and minds? If it is our policies they object to, what does the message have to do with it?

ROTHKOFF: Well, the message and the policies are hard to -- I mean it's hard to sort of pull those two things apart. Our policy is to spread democracy. Democracy is to create open dialog. We must be part of that dialog or it's going to be all one-sided.

BROWN: It's complicated stuff.

ROTHKOFF: It's complicated stuff but we haven't paid enough attention to it.

BROWN: Nice to meet you finally.

ROTHKOFF: My pleasure.

BROWN: We've been trying to. Thank you very much.

In a moment, politics and pork and bill spending, a third of a trillion dollars of your money that your Congressmen probably never even read. It makes you feel good, doesn't it?

And later the 50-cent item we never fail to read, at least the front page, morning papers will wrap up the hour on this Thanksgiving eve from New York.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: When the Berlin Wall fell 15 months (sic) ago this month, democracy clearly did not just spring up overnight. Some of the countries freed that day are still in the throes of making their particular brand of democracy work.

Ukraine is one of them, lodged between Poland and Russia, and that's part of the difficulty. After an election this week, they now have, in effect, two presidents, one the declared winner, the other declaring election fraud.

From Kiev tonight, CNN's Jill Dougherty.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JILL DOUGHERTY, CNN MOSCOW BUREAU CHIEF (voice-over): Were for three days, two candidates for president claimed victory. But Wednesday, as supporters of prime minister Viktor Yanukovych and opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko faced off in the cold outside, Ukraine's Central Election Commission, in a shouting match of a session, delivered its final decision.

The government-backed Yanukovych had won with a three-point margin of victory. The Western-leaning opposition candidate, Yushchenko, claims the election was stolen with massive vote fraud and he is warning, Ukraine could descend into civil war. In an exclusive interview with CNN, he said it would be dangerous for the West to recognize the election results as legitimate.

VIKTOR YUSHCHENKO, OPPOSITION CANDIDATE (through translator): If President Kuchma and Prime Minister Yanukovych do not act according to the letter of the law, they'll be taking the first step towards the destabilization of the situation in this country.

DOUGHERTY: The United States is rejecting the Ukrainian government's verdict in the presidential election.

COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: We cannot accept this result as legitimate, because it does not meet international standards and because there has not been an investigation of the numerous and credible reports of fraud and abuse.

DOUGHERTY: The winner says he's ready for talks with the opposition and is looking for common ground. The opposition says, they'll take their case to the courts.

(on camera): The decision by the Central Election Commission doesn't seem to be having much of an effect on the position. Hours after it was announced, they were still in a festive mood and still calling their candidate president. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ukrainian people, they are very patient. They can forgive many things, but now I believe it's not time to forgive. It's time to stand up and peacefully say, we are people, we are nation, and we want to have the president that we elected.

DOUGHERTY (voice-over): As another day of demonstrations ends, the opposition is calling for a nationwide strike.

Jill Dougherty, CNN, Kiev, Ukraine.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Well, no civil war on the horizon, thankfully, in Washington state in the governor's race there, but definitely another recount. This one will be done by hand. Results of a machine recount today gave the nod to the Republican candidate, former state Senator Dino Rossi, by 42 votes over state Attorney General Christine Gregoire, 42 votes out of 2.8 million votes cast. Today, Ms. Gregoire said she'll ask for a second recount paid for her party, the Democrats, about $700,000. So look for a final tally some time around Christmas.

Now, think about this one for a minute. Would you rather spend more money on health care and education or on the Rock 'n' Roll Museum in Cleveland, Ohio? Really, this is a real question that your Congress took up.

And here is how the Congress decided it, reported by Ed Henry.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ED HENRY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In time for Thanksgiving, Congress produced what critics are calling a turkey, an over 3,000-page omnibus stuffed with goodies which lawmakers didn't bother to read before voting on it.

REP. DAVID OBEY (D), WISCONSIN: The Congress has egg on its face.

HENRY: The bill cuts education and health, but shells out money for the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame and over a million bucks to archive the papers of retiring Congressman Richard Gephardt.

TOM SCHATZ, PRESIDENT, CITIZENS AGAINST GOVERNMENT WASTE: There's $1.5 million for a demonstration project to transport naturally chilled water from Lake Ontario to Lake Onondaga. Now, the last time that we looked, both those lakes already had naturally chilled water.

HENRY: Over $200,000 for blueberry research, nearly $500,000 to develop baby food containing salmon, and over $200,000 to study catfish genomes. This legislative turkey was cooked up in just a few hours. That led to a staffer slipping in a provision giving lawmakers broad access to Americans' tax returns.

SEN. CHARLES GRASSLEY (R), IOWA: It's a very troubling position that will potentially take away American taxpayers' rights to privacy.

HENRY: Leaders vow they'll fix that. But experts say it's the system that's broken.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: This is such a dangerous way to do business, to do the public's business.

HENRY: Amid the chaos, one lawmaker has found a silver lining.

REP. BARNEY FRANK (D), MASSACHUSETTS: I have to say, there's at least one good side to the fact that they put it all in one thing. That is, there's a certain utility to it, because I've been sitting on it.

HENRY (on camera): Officials refuse to name the staffer who inserted the tax-snooping provision. Critics say that is adding even less accountability to the budget process.

Ed Henry, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still to come on the program tonight, a reunion 60 years in the making, a Holocaust survivor reunited with a woman, then a young girl, who helped him survive the Nazis.

A break first. Around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: This is 60-year-old story. At least it began 60 years ago. It isn't a big story, I suppose. It's really just a story about what friends do for friends. In this case, one set of friends saved the lives of the other. It's really that simple. They risked their own lives to save someone else's, for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. Would you do that? Do you think you would? Would you risk your life? Sixty years ago in Poland, a family did. And, today, 60 years later, they were thanked.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't think that anybody that wasn't there would ever understand it, the kind of cruelty that existed in Poland during the war and perhaps throughout all conquered Europe by the Nazis is beyond imagination.

BROWN: That is how Andre Novotski (ph) remembers his childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland. That he remembers it at all is due in large part to this woman, now long dead, Yahina Kafiachinska (ph), who risking her own death, hid Andre and his mother in her family's apartment in Warsaw.

For two years in the city and later in the country, Andre found safety and a childhood thanks to Yahina's daughters, especially young Hannah (ph). She's the one there on the right. They last saw each other 60 years ago. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I was extremely lucky. It's an emotional thing. I don't know how to describe it. We're going back in time.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Andre.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And this is for you, my dear.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: For me?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, please.

Please meet Hannah. Hannah Muravytska (ph), my little sister.

BROWN: She said that she could have recognized him by his wonderful ears. Andre said she looked fantastic. And then, in Polish, the past spilled out. She said they used to fight look cats in dogs, in part, she said because she was afraid.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She was the person, probably the only person that was afraid that the Gestapo should show up.

BROWN: Not so afraid, it turns out. She was smart enough to teach young Jewish Andre how to cross himself, taught him words to a few Christian prayers, survival skills should the Nazis show up.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right now, she's in this stage where she practically does not see well. It's a kind of euphoria that she does not recognize.

BROWN: Their story is a reminder that heroes are created by circumstance. And Hannah and her family were clearly heroes. Long ago, Hannah's family gave Andre a letter. "Be sure to find us after the war. Take out ads. Stand in the streets of Warsaw and scream, where are you?"

Sixty years and thousands of miles later, the answer finally came.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: OK, this is an absolutely true story. I was cooking dinner on Saturday night. I found this recipe in a food magazine. I wanted to try it. So I shopped and chopped and braised and seasoned.

And when it was done, I put it on a platter and, in a moment of total disbelief said, hey, it looks just like the picture. They never look like the picture. I've always wondered why they never looked like the picture in the food magazines. Chicken never looks like the picture. Stews don't. Gumbos, not even close. And, tonight, I finally know why.

Our Thanksgiving story comes from the people at "Bon Appetit" magazine, not the cooks, the people who make the cooks look good.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WILLIAM SMITH, FOOD STYLIST: It's kind of a southern Thanksgiving roast turkey with andouille cornbread dressing, black- eyed succotash, pecan pie and a sweet potato cheesecake. Sounds good.

I'm a food stylist hired by "Bon Appetit" to cook and style each recipe for the story. There's a lot of misconceptions about food styling. It's all just good cooking and taking the extra time to make things look their very best.

Do you want to put this piece down a little bit?

TANYA STEEL, NEW YORK EDITOR, "BON APPETIT": What we have here is one of the menus that's going to be in the November issue of "Bon Appetit."

SMITH: Are you going to dab those? That looks nice, actually, when they're a little wet.

STEEL: The photo shoots are so important, because it really brings the look and the flavor of the recipes to life in our pages. And, really, we want all of these pictures to be drool-worthy, to really make our readers salivate and say, oh, my God, I've got to make that.

SMITH: There are just a couple spots on the bird that I just want to make a little nicer looking for the camera.

This is actually a little gravy mix. I'm just going to see if I can't get this to take just a little bit of color, just a finishing touch.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's great. It gives it a lot of color.

SMITH: What I like about food is, it's there. You have to work quickly and very precise and then it's gone. Everything's going to die in a matter of 20 or 30 minutes. So you have to be quite fast with everything. And that's what I like about it. I enjoy that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It seems fine to me.

SMITH: I think it looks great.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's good. So why don't we shoot it.

SMITH: Super.

A great food photograph for me is where the food is really the center of interest. When you see it, that's what stands out and it makes you hungry. It makes you feel like you want to be there. You want to eat that food. It's like a moment caught in time.

I like that coming up, breaking that. Is that all right with you? UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's beautiful.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Now, incredibly, the turkey was dry. They're all dry. Yours is going to be dry tomorrow. So is mine.

We'll preview our Thanksgiving program, which isn't dry, after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: That's Columbus Circle outside our building. The city will start to get packed with Christmas shoppers tomorrow. And tomorrow is a big parade downtown or through town around Central Park. So, if you're in town, come see the parade. Not too many people will be there.

Having dispensed with the turkey, we move on now to the appetizer, the appetizer, we hope, for the program tomorrow night. It comes to you through the magic of television and the very real hard work of the best staff in this business. We've put together a collection of the people we've encountered this year who, for one reason or another, stuck with us.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): On the third straight Thanksgiving with the country at war, we'll see some of the tireless people who care for the wounded, and we'll hear again from soldiers, soldiers with some of the most complex of all war wounds, burns.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are a lot of things I can't do, like tie shoe.

BROWN: We'll hear again the extraordinary story of Rachel Zelon, who went to Iraq to rescue, rescue, the few remaining Jews who lived there.

RACHEL ZELON, AID WORKER: We went and saw Sasson and sat down with him in his little room. And I said, would you like to go to Israel?

BROWN: We'll be reminded of what scene the Statue of Liberty meant to the newly arriving immigrant.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And I couldn't believe that that's the Statue of Liberty. I couldn't believe it, that we going to have a life here.

BROWN: There will be a repeat performance by an opera singer named Caruso and another man with a beautiful voice and a beast of a role on Broadway. We'll take you again to the Truck Museum.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This one, I got for 50 bucks. But you can't find one for $50 today. BROWN: And we'll go back to the drag races.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What is unique about me and what I do in drag racing, I have no sight at all. I am totally blind.

BROWN: And we'll hear again from some modern-day homesteaders.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We came out and this place was a dump.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was walking around and I could just see it as a little town.

BROWN: A few of the many people we are so grateful to have met this year.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: At its best, OK, at its best, the program is a program about people and the program -- I don't do hype and you know that -- the program tomorrow is terrific. So, if you're still awake after all that turkey, join us.

We'll take a look at morning papers after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: Okeydoke, time to check morning papers from around the country, around the world, lots of good ones and some new ones as well.

We'll start with "The Christian Science Monitor." This is a perennial. "Retailers Glow With the Hope For a Holiday Boost. Job Market Is Better, Oil Prices Down." Down from what? Come on. "Improving Holiday Shopping Outlook." Well, we hope so. Yes, I think we do hope so.

"Washington Times" down here. Boy, after much deliberation and a lot of thought here, "Rumsfeld Supports Scouts Meeting On Military Bases, Sends Endorsement Letter to the House Speaker." "The Times' loves this story. I actually love it, too. There's a dispute over whether the Boy Scouts should be able to meet on a military bases.

"Stars & Stripes." It's a very good headline and story. "Giving Thanks in Iraq. Close Calls Leave Troops Counting Their Blessings." The quote up in the corner, "I'm thankful for having all my fingers and toes." I hope you make it, you guys. Hang in there.

"Cincinnati Enquirer" leads with Thanksgiving. "Our Enduring Thanksgiving Traditions, From Fasting" -- really, people fast on Thanksgiving? -- "to Family Football." And they tell a bunch of stories about that. So good for them. That sounds like fun. "Ready, Get Set, Shop" is also on the front page. A few stores open today. Friday madness awaits. I always wondered about people who stand in line waiting to be the first one in. "The Spokesman-Review" in Spokane, Washington, the capital of the "Inland Empire," leads political. "Rossi Wins By 42 votes. Democrats will Likely Want Another Recount." Well, yes, I think so, 42 votes.

"Oregonian" also leads that way down in Portland. "It's Rossi By Just 42 Votes." That's the Washington governor's race. We told you about that. "Reaping What He Sowed. A Dependable Wheat Farmer Gets a Return Dose of Kindness From Neighbors After He Is Injured."

"The Chicago Sun-Times." The weather tomorrow in Chicago probably will be...

(TURKEY GOBBLING)

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: Well, wasn't that cute?

The weather tomorrow in Chicago is "cool-whipped." Get it?

We're actually off, but the program is here. It's great. Join us, 10:00 Eastern time.

Have a wonderful holiday. And good night for all of us at NEWSNIGHT.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com


Aired November 24, 2004 - 22:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again.
In truth, we suspect your head isn't exactly into the world and all its problems right now the night before Thanksgiving. There's cleaning to do, cooking to worry about.

It's probably not the best night to tell you a powerful Senator is demanding the Food and Drug Administration stop sliming the associate director of drug safety if, in fact, the agency is doing that and there is at least some evidence it is.

Dr. David Graham, who you met on the program last week, has been having a heck of a time since testifying before Congress on Vioxx and other drugs he believes are dangerous.

It seems the agency wasn't too thrilled with Dr. Graham's belief that the agency is, and these are my words but his sentiment, in the pocket of the big drug companies a bit too much. Dr. Graham finds himself in an uncomfortable spot on this night before Thanksgiving at the top of the news.

So, the whip begins with his story reported to us by CNN's Elizabeth Cohen, Elizabeth a headline.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Is someone trying to intimidate FDA whistleblower Dr. David Graham, if so, it doesn't appear to be working -- Aaron.

BROWN: Elizabeth, thank you.

On to a major chunk of the old Soviet Union and the election that's bringing a Cold War chill there tonight, CNN's Jill Dougherty with the story and a headline.

JILL DOUGHERTY, CNN MOSCOW BUREAU CHIEF: With thousands of opposition supporters in the streets of Kiev, the Central Election Commission of Ukraine issues its final report. The government-backed candidate for president has won. The western leaning opposition candidate has lost. Will Ukraine remain peaceful -- Aaron?

BROWN: Jill.

Finally to Washington, the budget and what many are calling a budget busting piece of legislation, Ed Henry on the Hill and the headline. ED HENRY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Congress has slapped together a bill full of questionable projects such as $1 million to study hog waste. Critics say the system is broken and needs to be fixed -- Aaron.

BROWN: Ed, thank you. We'll get back to you and the rest shortly.

Also tonight, even now new discoveries coming out of Falluja, this was a powder keg in every sense of the word.

And, a 60-yeara-old story of a slice of a horrible moment in time redeemed by a simple act of human kindness.

The rooster is off tonight but the turkey is glad to have the job. It certainly beats the alternative when you think about. Morning papers will get us into Thanksgiving, all that and more in the hour ahead.

We begin tonight with a dose of reality concerning the drugs you take. It comes from an FDA whistleblower, you may recall, as the central figure in the Vioxx affair. The allegation is simple even if, as we suspect, the issues it raises are not.

Simply put he says at his agency good science too often takes a back seat to big business and, in the end, to public safety. And instead of changing its ways, he argues the agency is going after the messenger.

We have two reports tonight, first CNN's Elizabeth Cohen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COHEN (voice-over): After 20 years at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. David Graham blew the whistle.

DR. DAVID GRAHAM, FDA WHISTLEBLOWER: The FDA as current configured is incapable of protecting America against another Vioxx. We are virtually defenseless.

COHEN: Graham, who monitors drug safety, says the FDA is more interested in protecting drug companies than the American public keeping medicines on the market long after it's clear they could be dangerous.

Graham appeared on ABC's "Nightline" last night.

GRAHAM: The circumstances in FDA I think forced me to become a whistleblower in this situation.

COHEN: He cites as an example Vioxx. When Graham did a study showing the blockbuster arthritis drug could cause heart attacks he says he didn't publicize it because he'd received a warning from his supervisor.

GRAHAM: I was pressured to change my conclusions and recommendations.

COHEN: The FDA denies Graham's allegations and now some charge the agency is going a step further by actively trying to discredit him. Someone from within the FDA called the Government Accountability Project, which legally represents Graham and other whistleblowers.

The caller, according to a report in the British Medical Journal, claimed to have been bullied by Graham and charge that Graham's Vioxx study could reflect scientific misconduct.

The FDA says it had no idea the employee was making the phone call but acknowledged the right of its employees to raise their concerns to oversight groups. And so where does all this leave Graham? Still at the FDA, still studying drugs, which are safe and which aren't.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COHEN: At the congressional hearings, Dr. Graham said that he thought the FDA needed to do a safety review of five other drugs currently on the market -- Aaron.

BROWN: One of those drugs you mentioned, if memory serves me, was Accutane, the acne drug and I think it was just yesterday the FDA strengthened the warning there.

COHEN: That's right, Aaron. That was one of the five drugs that he mentioned. And just yesterday the FDA did say that they were going to strengthen the warning that's on the label there.

Accutane, if you remember from previous years, there's been a lot of concern that women take it if they were to become pregnant that their child would be born with severe, severe deformities. Now, women are told not to become pregnant while taking it but some women have become pregnant and so the concerns are still there.

BROWN: Elizabeth, thank you, good to have you with us tonight.

COHEN: Thanks.

BROWN: In a moment, we'll talk at length with David Graham's lawyer.

First, the kind of life in store for the good doctor, with that here's CNN's Frank Buckley.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When the chief of the U.S. Park Police said publicly last year that extra protection going to Washington monuments and memorials left them short in other areas...

CHIEF THERESA CHAMBERS: We just don't have the resources to get it done.

BUCKLEY: ...Chief Theresa Chambers claims she was told by superiors to stop talking to the media and then she was fired.

CHAMBERS: To have my gun and badge taken away from me with armed agents standing nearby there was nothing more humiliating in the profession of law enforcement.

BUCKLEY: Chambers says she blew the whistle to protect the public.

CHAMBERS: Instead of the message being addressed the messenger is attacked and that's what happened in this case.

BUCKLEY: Minneapolis-based FBI Agent Coleen Rowley didn't lose her job but she did give up her anonymity. The career agent's critical memo to FBI headquarters about its failure to aggressively investigate alleged 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui dropped her into the middle of a political and media firestorm.

COLEEN ROWLEY, FBI AGENT: I'm sorry, I can't comment.

BUCKLEY: She couldn't catch a cab in Washington without walking into a news camera, her testimony before Congress front page news. It was disconcerting at the time but Rowley now believes it's the reason she didn't suffer any repercussions.

ROWLEY: It's really just the media and the publicity that oftentimes protects people.

BUCKLEY: Rowley was named a person of the year by "Time" magazine for her whistle-blowing. She's made it one of her missions as a private citizen to encourage others to come forward and to provide better protection for whistleblowers.

ROWLEY: How do you ever know of these things if you don't have protection for talking about them and surfacing the problems?

BUCKLEY: Since the Enron and WorldCom scandals, protections for corporate whistleblowers have increased.

(on camera): But watchdogs for government whistleblowers say virtually every case that's gone to court has gone against the person who has blown the whistle.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When you got a statistic of 95 losses, one win, something is terribly wrong.

BUCKLEY (voice-over): A bill is pending in Congress to reform the whistleblower law. Advocates say its passage would protect the public by better protecting people who blow the whistle.

Frank Buckley, CNN, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Thomas Devine is the legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a private organization that represents Dr. David Graham and other whistleblowers and we talked to Mr. Devine earlier this evening.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): Mr. Devine your client, Dr. Graham, says he's being intimidated at the agency. In what form is that intimidation? How is that happening?

THOMAS DEVINE, LEGAL DIR., GOVT. ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT: Actually it's been happening most of this year against Dr. Graham and other FDA scientists who are challenging unsafe drug approvals. They've been placed under criminal investigation, hopelessly illegal criminal investigations, but nonetheless ones that FDA can get away with because the employees don't have any viable legal rights under the Whistleblower Protection Act.

They've been denied permission to publish their papers, which is also kind of an official secrets act, which we don't have legally here but FDA is getting away with it because there's really no one to stop them.

The FDA contacted our group, camouflaged -- their management camouflaged themselves as whistleblowers who are trying to attack, file allegations against Dr. Graham as a bully. It turns out it was people who had the power over him.

They've been threatening to exile him and that could happen next week, put him out to pasture so that he can't actually work on dangerous drugs anymore and he'll be paid to fill up space in the commissioner's office.

BROWN: Mr. Devine, let me work with a couple of those if I can.

DEVINE: Sure.

BROWN: Can you give me -- in what sense has he been threatened with a criminal action?

DEVINE: All of the FDA scientists at the office of drug safety were placed under criminal investigation after the truth was leaked about the antidepressants that were about to be approved for teenage use despite a history of suicides that the government was covering up.

BROWN: What would the crime have been?

DEVINE: You know, I'm not sure what the crime would have been. The investigation itself was hopelessly illegal and they eventually called it off after a lot of pressure. Kind of what in the world do you think you people are trying to do?

BROWN: Yes.

DEVINE: There's not much respect for freedom of speech at this agency.

BROWN: Well, I want to get to that in a second. Just one more question on your laundry list of allegations. You believe that it was superiors to Dr. Graham who actually contacted the Office of Accountability or Government Accountability Office and said that he was a bully and essentially were trying to smear him that these were his bosses.

DEVINE: I'm under wraps because of a confidentiality commitment to say if they were his supervisors but I can say it was FDA management. We figured that out and confronted them.

BROWN: And what did they say to that?

DEVINE: They didn't deny it but they said I couldn't reveal their identities, so I'll keep my word.

BROWN: OK. Dr. Janet Woodcox (ph), who is a deputy commissioner of operations over there or acting, said last night I think it was that the FDA thrives on a culture of differences of scientific opinion and debate. I gather your client sees it quite differently.

DEVINE: Well, there's a real bureaucratic schizophrenia here. There's one position for public relations purposes and there's another reality for people who are actually getting in the way of the drug companies on the front lines at the FDA and they have nothing to do with each other. And, quite frankly, what Dr. Woodcox said were almost no overlap with reality for the scientists actually challenging unsafe drugs.

BROWN: Just one or two other things. You're the lawyer here. You're not the doctor. But I think that what Dr. Graham has been saying, if I can reduce it to a simple sentence, is that the drug approval process essentially is in the pocket of the drug companies that the FDA's business in this is to approve drugs rather than to rigorously test them and perhaps reject them. Am I fairly stating his view?

DEVINE: That's right. He is challenging a conflict of interest within the approval process. He's challenging a trend to shrink the scope and size of the drug approval studies and he's challenging cover-ups of the truth about dangerous drugs that are being concealed by the FDA from the American public. That's just the facts of life as he's been experiencing them for the last few years.

BROWN: And just as a final question and I'm getting back to something you said earlier your fear and his I guess is they can't outright fire him. I mean that would create a lot of problems. So, they're just going to put him in one of those offices where you don't really do anything and you just get paid to do nothing?

DEVINE: Yes, the offices where you get paid to fill up space or write a long term memo that eventually will be allowed to gather dust. FDA's attitude towards this seems to be never again, not that the public won't ever be irresponsibly endangered again but that whistleblowers won't be able to commit the truth and get away with it again.

BROWN: Mr. Devine, we appreciate your time. You expressed the position really well and clearly tonight. We appreciate that. Thank you, sir.

DEVINE: Thank you, sir.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: One other item concerning one of the five drugs that Dr. Graham warned about in his testimony before Congress last week, the cholesterol-lowering drug Crestor (ph). Today, the consumer protection group, Public Citizen, asked the FDA to squelch a new ad campaign for the drug. Public Citizen says the ads falsely claim there is no concern at FDA about Crestor.

Ahead on the program on this Thanksgiving eve, the secrets of Falluja and the realities of the battle to take it back.

Also tonight, disputed elections in a part of the world teetering between democracy and a devil of a future, a break first.

From New York this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: A State Department official died today in Iraq. James Mullin (ph) had spent a better part of a year helping rebuild the country's school systems. He was killed outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, circumstances still unclear.

Meantime to the south, American forces continue to carry out raids aimed at picking off insurgents, some of whom may have fled in advance of the battle of Falluja.

And, in Falluja itself, American forces have uncovered enough weapons they say to supply a nationwide rebellion. They've also had a rare moment to reflect on what they have been through and they have been through a lot, reporting for us tonight, CNN's Jane Arraf.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JANE ARRAF, CNN BAGHDAD BUREAU CHIEF (voice-over): Near Falluja, rare for combat...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I ask that you give these soldiers today the courage they have to do to accomplish this task.

ARRAF: These men have spent eight months fighting the insurgency north of Baghdad. They were told this battle would be the most intense and important to their lives.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you want to finish the fight up north, it starts here, throughout the home starts here, not just for us but for every U.S. soldier in Iraq.

ARRAF: Phone and Internet links to their families at home were cut for operational security. Soldiers knew that not everyone would make it back. Many of these men had bonded over the past eight months. Command Sergeant Major Steve Falkenburg (ph) was responsible for the enlisted men and non-commissioned officers. He thought these were some of the finest soldiers he'd seen.

With the Army's tanks, fighting vehicles and artillery, Task Force 22 led the assault on the city from the north clearing the way for thousands of Marine infantrymen. The Army's 1st Cavalry Division blocked insurgents from escaping to the south. Military officials say in the face of the combined assault the organized insurgency collapsed.

MAJOR JOHN REYNOLDS, U.S. ARMY: The integration of the Air Force capability, close air support, the indirect fire support that we brought with us internally and the ones that Marines offered to us just made it a combined arms fight and made the enemy, the insurgents shall we say have to look in two directions, three directions sometimes.

ARRAF: The battle started well before the troops hit the ground. Insurgents had rigged streets and buildings with explosives. Many of them went up in flames as the Army set off its own charges and fired hundreds of artillery rounds into the defense line. Civilians have left or been chased out of the city long ago.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're going around. It's just a little pocket right here.

ARRAF: But with hundreds of insurgents in pockets throughout their area, the Army infantrymen picked their way through the city very carefully. The Army fired almost 1,000 rounds of artillery, the most in any battle for a city since Vietnam. The sound of gunfire and explosions went on for days. The air was thick with the smell of cordite.

On this day, despite the tens of millions of dollars of armored equipment, the fight came down to this, gunmen hidden in buildings firing hundred dollar rocket-propelled grenades.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That last RPG round takes us down to three.

ARRAF: There were at least a dozen RPGs fired in this ambush. One of them hit a young officer, a man who tried to make flowers grow here, his buddy said. He wasn't the only casualty.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Command Sergeant Major Falkenburg, Captain Sims, Lieutenant Iwan (ph) and Staff Sergeant Madison (ph), may they rest in peace.

ARRAF: Out of the box, out of the battle zone, the loss to this scout platoon of their staff sergeant was just beginning to sink in.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This one's for my Matty (ph) in the club. The slow boat's trips to Austria will not be the same anymore. I love you Matty.

ARRAF: These men believe they did some good here. You can't see the gaps in this formation but Task Force 22 had four men killed and 42 wounded, leaving some very empty places here and back home.

Jane Arraf, CNN, near Falluja.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: A thousand rounds of artillery, to that we'll add this, reports that American forces uncovered a significant weapons cache every five blocks in Falluja, 60 of the 100 mosques were being used in the fighting.

In one sense, the numbers measure military success on the ground but they also speak to the war of persuasion being lost in parts of Iraq, not to mention in the larger Arab world. Today we learned of a report that (UNINTELLIGIBLE) the warning in that regard. It was prepared by a panel of advisers to the Defense Department.

With us to talk about some of the points made, David Rothkoff, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment. It's nice to see you. It's hard not to watch what Jane just reported and see how in one sense how effective the military has been in one aspect of this and then read the report and realize how ineffective the government has been at winning the hearts and minds.

DAVID ROTHKOFF, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT: Well, but think about it another way. Take your report and imagine that you're sitting in another part of Iraq or another part of the Middle East and you're looking at it.

They're not seeing smiling faces of people who look like brothers. They're looking at foreigners from thousands of miles away who've come in there. They don't see 1,000 rounds as a struggle for democracy. They see us pounding 1,000 rounds into a city in the region.

And so, I think what the report is talking about is that we're sending messages and these messages aren't necessarily helping us win this fight for democracy and we have also, and I think this was the thrust of the report, we also have sort of deconstructed the apparatus that we used to have in order to help advance those messages.

BROWN: USIA and...

ROTHKOFF: USIA. There was a part of the Defense Department that did this kind of thing and here we are the first information age super power and we've essentially unilaterally disarmed in terms of the information side of this particular conflict.

BROWN: Just one sentence if you can on the people who wrote the report because this is not some left wing think tank that wrote this up.

ROTHKOFF: No, no. No, no. These are a bunch of retired admirals and generals, people who worked at the Defense Department, people who worked in the intelligence community who sat down and looked at conflicts over the course of the past couple of decades and seen repeating problems on the stabilization and reconstruction and of all of the conflicts that we've been in.

BROWN: One of the things they say, it leads you to believe in some respects we are deluding ourselves in some respects. The president says this a lot. They hate our -- they hate us for our freedom.

The report says they don't hate our freedom. They hate our policies. That's the problem and that's a more complicated problem to solve because I assume we believe our policies, whether it's Israel and Palestine and the rest, are correct.

ROTHKOFF: Sure but if what we're trying to do is win hearts and minds, if what we're trying to do is change their attitude towards the way they should be running governments or the way they look at us, we need to start recognizing that there is a soft side to this war as well as the hard side to this war.

I mean look at the poll ratings. It was part of this report in these countries. And our allies, and the countries we're closest to like Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Egypt, we have single digit approval ratings for the United States right now and it's gone down over the past two years.

BROWN: So, in a minute, I'll show how fair I can be, in a minute how do we solve it?

ROTHKOFF: Well, we have to solve it in an organized way. I think that's what the report says we need but the report says let's set up something in the National Security Council, have some deputy national security adviser who coordinates all the tools at our disposal and goes about this with planning and with budget and using all the agencies of the Unites States government and working with the private sector in order to get this message out there but let's also recognize this is a multi-year contract.

BROWN: Is there a coherent message to get out that will win the hearts and minds? If it is our policies they object to, what does the message have to do with it?

ROTHKOFF: Well, the message and the policies are hard to -- I mean it's hard to sort of pull those two things apart. Our policy is to spread democracy. Democracy is to create open dialog. We must be part of that dialog or it's going to be all one-sided.

BROWN: It's complicated stuff.

ROTHKOFF: It's complicated stuff but we haven't paid enough attention to it.

BROWN: Nice to meet you finally.

ROTHKOFF: My pleasure.

BROWN: We've been trying to. Thank you very much.

In a moment, politics and pork and bill spending, a third of a trillion dollars of your money that your Congressmen probably never even read. It makes you feel good, doesn't it?

And later the 50-cent item we never fail to read, at least the front page, morning papers will wrap up the hour on this Thanksgiving eve from New York.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: When the Berlin Wall fell 15 months (sic) ago this month, democracy clearly did not just spring up overnight. Some of the countries freed that day are still in the throes of making their particular brand of democracy work.

Ukraine is one of them, lodged between Poland and Russia, and that's part of the difficulty. After an election this week, they now have, in effect, two presidents, one the declared winner, the other declaring election fraud.

From Kiev tonight, CNN's Jill Dougherty.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JILL DOUGHERTY, CNN MOSCOW BUREAU CHIEF (voice-over): Were for three days, two candidates for president claimed victory. But Wednesday, as supporters of prime minister Viktor Yanukovych and opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko faced off in the cold outside, Ukraine's Central Election Commission, in a shouting match of a session, delivered its final decision.

The government-backed Yanukovych had won with a three-point margin of victory. The Western-leaning opposition candidate, Yushchenko, claims the election was stolen with massive vote fraud and he is warning, Ukraine could descend into civil war. In an exclusive interview with CNN, he said it would be dangerous for the West to recognize the election results as legitimate.

VIKTOR YUSHCHENKO, OPPOSITION CANDIDATE (through translator): If President Kuchma and Prime Minister Yanukovych do not act according to the letter of the law, they'll be taking the first step towards the destabilization of the situation in this country.

DOUGHERTY: The United States is rejecting the Ukrainian government's verdict in the presidential election.

COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: We cannot accept this result as legitimate, because it does not meet international standards and because there has not been an investigation of the numerous and credible reports of fraud and abuse.

DOUGHERTY: The winner says he's ready for talks with the opposition and is looking for common ground. The opposition says, they'll take their case to the courts.

(on camera): The decision by the Central Election Commission doesn't seem to be having much of an effect on the position. Hours after it was announced, they were still in a festive mood and still calling their candidate president. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ukrainian people, they are very patient. They can forgive many things, but now I believe it's not time to forgive. It's time to stand up and peacefully say, we are people, we are nation, and we want to have the president that we elected.

DOUGHERTY (voice-over): As another day of demonstrations ends, the opposition is calling for a nationwide strike.

Jill Dougherty, CNN, Kiev, Ukraine.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Well, no civil war on the horizon, thankfully, in Washington state in the governor's race there, but definitely another recount. This one will be done by hand. Results of a machine recount today gave the nod to the Republican candidate, former state Senator Dino Rossi, by 42 votes over state Attorney General Christine Gregoire, 42 votes out of 2.8 million votes cast. Today, Ms. Gregoire said she'll ask for a second recount paid for her party, the Democrats, about $700,000. So look for a final tally some time around Christmas.

Now, think about this one for a minute. Would you rather spend more money on health care and education or on the Rock 'n' Roll Museum in Cleveland, Ohio? Really, this is a real question that your Congress took up.

And here is how the Congress decided it, reported by Ed Henry.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ED HENRY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In time for Thanksgiving, Congress produced what critics are calling a turkey, an over 3,000-page omnibus stuffed with goodies which lawmakers didn't bother to read before voting on it.

REP. DAVID OBEY (D), WISCONSIN: The Congress has egg on its face.

HENRY: The bill cuts education and health, but shells out money for the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame and over a million bucks to archive the papers of retiring Congressman Richard Gephardt.

TOM SCHATZ, PRESIDENT, CITIZENS AGAINST GOVERNMENT WASTE: There's $1.5 million for a demonstration project to transport naturally chilled water from Lake Ontario to Lake Onondaga. Now, the last time that we looked, both those lakes already had naturally chilled water.

HENRY: Over $200,000 for blueberry research, nearly $500,000 to develop baby food containing salmon, and over $200,000 to study catfish genomes. This legislative turkey was cooked up in just a few hours. That led to a staffer slipping in a provision giving lawmakers broad access to Americans' tax returns.

SEN. CHARLES GRASSLEY (R), IOWA: It's a very troubling position that will potentially take away American taxpayers' rights to privacy.

HENRY: Leaders vow they'll fix that. But experts say it's the system that's broken.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: This is such a dangerous way to do business, to do the public's business.

HENRY: Amid the chaos, one lawmaker has found a silver lining.

REP. BARNEY FRANK (D), MASSACHUSETTS: I have to say, there's at least one good side to the fact that they put it all in one thing. That is, there's a certain utility to it, because I've been sitting on it.

HENRY (on camera): Officials refuse to name the staffer who inserted the tax-snooping provision. Critics say that is adding even less accountability to the budget process.

Ed Henry, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still to come on the program tonight, a reunion 60 years in the making, a Holocaust survivor reunited with a woman, then a young girl, who helped him survive the Nazis.

A break first. Around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: This is 60-year-old story. At least it began 60 years ago. It isn't a big story, I suppose. It's really just a story about what friends do for friends. In this case, one set of friends saved the lives of the other. It's really that simple. They risked their own lives to save someone else's, for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. Would you do that? Do you think you would? Would you risk your life? Sixty years ago in Poland, a family did. And, today, 60 years later, they were thanked.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't think that anybody that wasn't there would ever understand it, the kind of cruelty that existed in Poland during the war and perhaps throughout all conquered Europe by the Nazis is beyond imagination.

BROWN: That is how Andre Novotski (ph) remembers his childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland. That he remembers it at all is due in large part to this woman, now long dead, Yahina Kafiachinska (ph), who risking her own death, hid Andre and his mother in her family's apartment in Warsaw.

For two years in the city and later in the country, Andre found safety and a childhood thanks to Yahina's daughters, especially young Hannah (ph). She's the one there on the right. They last saw each other 60 years ago. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I was extremely lucky. It's an emotional thing. I don't know how to describe it. We're going back in time.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Andre.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And this is for you, my dear.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: For me?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, please.

Please meet Hannah. Hannah Muravytska (ph), my little sister.

BROWN: She said that she could have recognized him by his wonderful ears. Andre said she looked fantastic. And then, in Polish, the past spilled out. She said they used to fight look cats in dogs, in part, she said because she was afraid.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She was the person, probably the only person that was afraid that the Gestapo should show up.

BROWN: Not so afraid, it turns out. She was smart enough to teach young Jewish Andre how to cross himself, taught him words to a few Christian prayers, survival skills should the Nazis show up.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right now, she's in this stage where she practically does not see well. It's a kind of euphoria that she does not recognize.

BROWN: Their story is a reminder that heroes are created by circumstance. And Hannah and her family were clearly heroes. Long ago, Hannah's family gave Andre a letter. "Be sure to find us after the war. Take out ads. Stand in the streets of Warsaw and scream, where are you?"

Sixty years and thousands of miles later, the answer finally came.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: OK, this is an absolutely true story. I was cooking dinner on Saturday night. I found this recipe in a food magazine. I wanted to try it. So I shopped and chopped and braised and seasoned.

And when it was done, I put it on a platter and, in a moment of total disbelief said, hey, it looks just like the picture. They never look like the picture. I've always wondered why they never looked like the picture in the food magazines. Chicken never looks like the picture. Stews don't. Gumbos, not even close. And, tonight, I finally know why.

Our Thanksgiving story comes from the people at "Bon Appetit" magazine, not the cooks, the people who make the cooks look good.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WILLIAM SMITH, FOOD STYLIST: It's kind of a southern Thanksgiving roast turkey with andouille cornbread dressing, black- eyed succotash, pecan pie and a sweet potato cheesecake. Sounds good.

I'm a food stylist hired by "Bon Appetit" to cook and style each recipe for the story. There's a lot of misconceptions about food styling. It's all just good cooking and taking the extra time to make things look their very best.

Do you want to put this piece down a little bit?

TANYA STEEL, NEW YORK EDITOR, "BON APPETIT": What we have here is one of the menus that's going to be in the November issue of "Bon Appetit."

SMITH: Are you going to dab those? That looks nice, actually, when they're a little wet.

STEEL: The photo shoots are so important, because it really brings the look and the flavor of the recipes to life in our pages. And, really, we want all of these pictures to be drool-worthy, to really make our readers salivate and say, oh, my God, I've got to make that.

SMITH: There are just a couple spots on the bird that I just want to make a little nicer looking for the camera.

This is actually a little gravy mix. I'm just going to see if I can't get this to take just a little bit of color, just a finishing touch.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's great. It gives it a lot of color.

SMITH: What I like about food is, it's there. You have to work quickly and very precise and then it's gone. Everything's going to die in a matter of 20 or 30 minutes. So you have to be quite fast with everything. And that's what I like about it. I enjoy that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It seems fine to me.

SMITH: I think it looks great.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's good. So why don't we shoot it.

SMITH: Super.

A great food photograph for me is where the food is really the center of interest. When you see it, that's what stands out and it makes you hungry. It makes you feel like you want to be there. You want to eat that food. It's like a moment caught in time.

I like that coming up, breaking that. Is that all right with you? UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's beautiful.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Now, incredibly, the turkey was dry. They're all dry. Yours is going to be dry tomorrow. So is mine.

We'll preview our Thanksgiving program, which isn't dry, after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: That's Columbus Circle outside our building. The city will start to get packed with Christmas shoppers tomorrow. And tomorrow is a big parade downtown or through town around Central Park. So, if you're in town, come see the parade. Not too many people will be there.

Having dispensed with the turkey, we move on now to the appetizer, the appetizer, we hope, for the program tomorrow night. It comes to you through the magic of television and the very real hard work of the best staff in this business. We've put together a collection of the people we've encountered this year who, for one reason or another, stuck with us.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): On the third straight Thanksgiving with the country at war, we'll see some of the tireless people who care for the wounded, and we'll hear again from soldiers, soldiers with some of the most complex of all war wounds, burns.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are a lot of things I can't do, like tie shoe.

BROWN: We'll hear again the extraordinary story of Rachel Zelon, who went to Iraq to rescue, rescue, the few remaining Jews who lived there.

RACHEL ZELON, AID WORKER: We went and saw Sasson and sat down with him in his little room. And I said, would you like to go to Israel?

BROWN: We'll be reminded of what scene the Statue of Liberty meant to the newly arriving immigrant.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And I couldn't believe that that's the Statue of Liberty. I couldn't believe it, that we going to have a life here.

BROWN: There will be a repeat performance by an opera singer named Caruso and another man with a beautiful voice and a beast of a role on Broadway. We'll take you again to the Truck Museum.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This one, I got for 50 bucks. But you can't find one for $50 today. BROWN: And we'll go back to the drag races.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What is unique about me and what I do in drag racing, I have no sight at all. I am totally blind.

BROWN: And we'll hear again from some modern-day homesteaders.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We came out and this place was a dump.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was walking around and I could just see it as a little town.

BROWN: A few of the many people we are so grateful to have met this year.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: At its best, OK, at its best, the program is a program about people and the program -- I don't do hype and you know that -- the program tomorrow is terrific. So, if you're still awake after all that turkey, join us.

We'll take a look at morning papers after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: Okeydoke, time to check morning papers from around the country, around the world, lots of good ones and some new ones as well.

We'll start with "The Christian Science Monitor." This is a perennial. "Retailers Glow With the Hope For a Holiday Boost. Job Market Is Better, Oil Prices Down." Down from what? Come on. "Improving Holiday Shopping Outlook." Well, we hope so. Yes, I think we do hope so.

"Washington Times" down here. Boy, after much deliberation and a lot of thought here, "Rumsfeld Supports Scouts Meeting On Military Bases, Sends Endorsement Letter to the House Speaker." "The Times' loves this story. I actually love it, too. There's a dispute over whether the Boy Scouts should be able to meet on a military bases.

"Stars & Stripes." It's a very good headline and story. "Giving Thanks in Iraq. Close Calls Leave Troops Counting Their Blessings." The quote up in the corner, "I'm thankful for having all my fingers and toes." I hope you make it, you guys. Hang in there.

"Cincinnati Enquirer" leads with Thanksgiving. "Our Enduring Thanksgiving Traditions, From Fasting" -- really, people fast on Thanksgiving? -- "to Family Football." And they tell a bunch of stories about that. So good for them. That sounds like fun. "Ready, Get Set, Shop" is also on the front page. A few stores open today. Friday madness awaits. I always wondered about people who stand in line waiting to be the first one in. "The Spokesman-Review" in Spokane, Washington, the capital of the "Inland Empire," leads political. "Rossi Wins By 42 votes. Democrats will Likely Want Another Recount." Well, yes, I think so, 42 votes.

"Oregonian" also leads that way down in Portland. "It's Rossi By Just 42 Votes." That's the Washington governor's race. We told you about that. "Reaping What He Sowed. A Dependable Wheat Farmer Gets a Return Dose of Kindness From Neighbors After He Is Injured."

"The Chicago Sun-Times." The weather tomorrow in Chicago probably will be...

(TURKEY GOBBLING)

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: Well, wasn't that cute?

The weather tomorrow in Chicago is "cool-whipped." Get it?

We're actually off, but the program is here. It's great. Join us, 10:00 Eastern time.

Have a wonderful holiday. And good night for all of us at NEWSNIGHT.

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